The anathema, however, has not made the public any the wiser in the Mysteries of the Occult Sciences. In some respects the world is all the better for such ignorance. The secrets of Nature generally cut both ways, and in the hands of the undeserving they are more than likely to become murderous. Who in our modern day knows anything of the real significance of, and the powers contained in, certain characters and signs—talismans—whether for beneficent or evil purposes? Fragments of the Runes and the writing of the Kischuph, found scattered in old mediæval libraries; copies from the Ephesian and Milesian letters or characters; the thrice famous _Book of Thoth_, and the terrible treatises (still preserved) of Targes, the Chaldæan, and his disciple Tarchon, the Etruscan—who flourished long before the Trojan War—are so many names and appellations void of sense (though met with in classical literature) for the educated modern scholar. Who, in the nineteenth century, believes in the art, described in such treatises as those of Targes, of evoking and directing thunder‐bolts? Yet the same is described in the Brâhmanical literature, and Targes copied his “thunder‐bolts” from the Astra,(193) those terrible engines of destruction known to the Mahâbhâratan Âryans. A whole arsenal of dynamite bombs would pale before this art—if it ever becomes understood by the Westerns. It is from an old fragment that was translated to him, that the late Lord Bulwer Lytton got his idea of Vril. It is a lucky thing, indeed, that, in the face of the virtues and philanthropy that grace our age of iniquitous wars, of anarchists and dynamiters, the secrets contained in the books discovered in Numa’s tomb should have been burnt. But the science of Circe and Medea is not lost. One can discover it in the apparent gibberish of the Tântrika Sûtras, the _Kuku‐ma_ of the Bhûtânî and the Sikhim Dugpas and “Red‐caps” of Tibet, and even in the sorcery of the Nîlgiri Mula Kurumbas. Very luckily few outside the high practitioners of the Left Path and of the Adepts of the Right—in whose hands the weird secrets of the real meaning are safe—understand the “black” evocations. Otherwise the Western as much as the Eastern Dugpas might make short work of their enemies. The name of the latter is legion, for the direct descendants of the antediluvian sorcerers hate all those who are not with them, arguing that, therefore, they are against them.