It does not follow that, because the Occultists believe in and defend Ancient Wisdom and Science, even though winged saurians are called “flying camels” in the translations of the _Zohar_, we therefore as readily believe in all the stories which the Middle Ages give us of such dragons. Pterodactyls and Plesiosauri ceased to exist with the bulk of the Third Race. When, therefore, we are gravely asked by Roman Catholic writers to credit Christopher Scherer’s and Father Kircher’s cock‐and‐bull stories of their having seen with their own eyes living fiery and flying dragons, respectively in 1619 and 1669, we may be allowed to regard their assertions as either dreams or fibs.(468) Nor shall we regard otherwise than as a “poetical license” the story told of Petrarch, who, while following one day his Laura in the woods and passing near a cave, is credited with having found a dragon, whom he forthwith stabbed with his dagger and killed, thus preventing the monster from devouring the lady of his heart.(469) We would willingly believe the story had Petrarch lived in the days of Atlantis, when such antediluvian monsters may still have existed. We deny their existence in our present era. The sea‐serpent is one thing, the dragon quite another. The former is denied by the majority because it lives in the very depths of the ocean, is very scarce, and rises to the surface only when compelled, perhaps, by hunger. Thus keeping invisible, it may exist and still be denied. But if there was such a thing as a dragon of the above description, how could it have ever escaped detection? It is a creature contemporary with the earliest Fifth Race, and exists no more. The reader may enquire why we speak of dragons at all? We answer: firstly, because the knowledge of such animals is a proof of the enormous antiquity of the human race; and, secondly, to show the difference between the real zoological meaning of the words “Dragon,” “Nâga,” and “Serpent,” and the metaphorical meaning, when used symbolically. The profane reader, who knows nothing of the mystery language, is likely, whenever he finds one of these words mentioned, to accept it literally. Hence, the _quidproquos_ and unjust accusations. A couple of instances will suffice. “Sed et Serpens?” Aye: but what was the nature of the serpent? Mystics intuitionally see in the serpent of _Genesis_ an animal emblem and a high spiritual essence: a cosmic force, superintelligent, a “great fallen light,” a spirit, sidereal, aërial and tellurian at the same time, “whose influence circumambulates the globe” (_qui circumambulat terram_), as De Mirville,(470) a Christian fanatic of the dead‐letter, has it, and which only “manifested itself under the physical emblem which agreed the better with its moral and intellectual _coils_”—_i.e._, under the ophidian form.