There was in every ancient country having claims to civilisation, an Esoteric Doctrine, a system which was designated WISDOM,(95) and those who were devoted to its prosecution were first denominated sages, or wise men.... Pythagoras termed this system ἡ γνῶσις τῶν ὅντων, the Gnosis or Knowledge of things that are. Under the noble designation of WISDOM, the ancient teachers, the sages of India, the magians of Persia and Babylon, the seers and prophets of Israel, the hierophants of Egypt and Arabia, and the philosophers of Greece and the West, included all knowledge which they considered as essentially divine; classifying a part as esoteric and the remainder as exterior. The Rabbis called the exterior and secular series the _Mercavah_, as being the body or vehicle which contained the higher knowledge.(96) Later on, we shall speak of the law of the silence imposed on Eastern chelâs. SECTION V. SOME REASONS FOR SECRESY. The fact that the Occult Sciences have been withheld from the world at large, and denied by the Initiates to Humanity, has often been made matter of complaint. It has been alleged that the Guardians of the Secret Lore were selfish in withholding the “treasures” of Archaic Wisdom; that it was positively criminal to keep back such knowledge—“if any”—from the men of Science, etc. Yet there must have been some very good reasons for it, since from the very dawn of History such has been the policy of every Hierophant and “Master.” Pythagoras, the first Adept and real Scientist in pre‐Christian Europe, is accused of having taught in public the immobility of the earth, and the rotatory motion of the stars around it, while he was declaring to his privileged Adepts his belief in the motion of the Earth as a planet, and in the heliocentric system. The reasons for such secresy, however, are many and were never made a mystery of. The chief cause was given in _Isis Unveiled_. It may now be repeated.