The transcendental science, the absolute science is assuredly Magic, though the affirmation may seem utterly paradoxical to those who have never questioned the infallibility of Voltaire—that marvellous smatterer who thought that he knew so much because he never missed an opportunity for laughter instead of learning. Magic was the science of Abraham and Orpheus, of Confucius and Zoroaster, and it was magical doctrines which were graven on tables of stone by Enoch and by Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled them—this being the sense of the word reveal. The new disguise which he gave them was that of the Holy Kabalah—that exclusive heritage of Israel and inviolable secret of its priests.[1] The mysteries of Eleusis and of Thebes preserved among the Gentiles some of its symbols, but in a debased form, and the mystic key was lost amidst the apparatus of an ever-increasing superstition. Jerusalem, murderer of its prophets and prostituted over and over again to false Assyrian and Babylonian gods, ended by losing in its turn the Sacred Word, when a Saviour, declared to the magi by the holy star of initiation, came to rend the threadbare veil of the old temple, to endow the Church with a new network of legends and symbols—ever concealing from the profane and always preserving for the elect that truth which is the same for ever. It is this that the erudite and ill-starred Dupuis should have found on Indian planispheres and in tables of Denderah; he would not have ended by rejecting the truly catholic or universal and eternal religion in the presence of the unanimous affirmation of all Nature, as well as all monuments of science throughout the ages.[2] It was the memory of this scientific and religious absolute, of this doctrine summarised in a word, of this word alternately lost and recovered, which was transmitted to the elect of all antique initiations. Whether preserved or profaned in the celebrated Order of the Temple, it was this same memory handed on to secret associations of Rosicrucians, Illuminati and Freemasons which gave a meaning to their strange rites, to their less or more conventional signs, and a justification above all to their devotion in common, as well as a clue to their power. That profanation has befallen the doctrines and mysteries of Magic we have no intention to deny; repeated from age to age, the misuse itself has been a great and terrible lesson for those who made secret things unwisely known. The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be prohibited by Christians, and the official sanctuary was closed to high initiation. The hierarchy of knowledge was thus compromised by the intervention of usurping ignorance, while the disorders within the sanctuary were reproduced in the state, for, willingly or otherwise, the king always depends from the priest, and it is towards the eternal _adytum_ of divine instruction that earthly powers will ever look for consecration and for energy to insure their permanence.