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367 sacred did they hold those secrets that many members of the sacerdotal order were not admitted to a partici- pation of them, and those alone were selected for initiation who had proved themselves virtuous and deserving of the honour—a fact satisfactorily proved by the evidence of Clement of Alexandria, who says: ‘The Egyptians neither entrusted their secrets to every- one nor degraded the secrets of Divine matters by disclosing them to the profane, reserving them for the heir-apparent to the throne and for such of the priests as excelled in virtue and wisdom.’ “From all we can learn of the subject it appears that the Mysteries consisted of degrees denominated the Greater and the Less, and in order to become qualified for admission into the higher class it was necessary to have passed through those of the inferior degrees, and each of them was probably divided into ten different grades. It was necessary that the character of the candidate for initiation should be pure and unsullied ; and the novitiates were commanded to study those lessons which tended to purify the mind and to encour- age morality. The honour of ascending from the less to the greater Mysteries was as highly esteemed as it was difficult to obtain. No ordinary qualification recommended the aspirant to this important privilege ; and independent of enjoying an acknowledged reputa- tion for learning and morality, he was required to undergo the most severe ordeal and to show the greatest moral resignation ; but the ceremony of passing under the knife of the Hierophant was merely emblematic of the regeneration of the neophyte. 368 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. “That no one except the priests was privileged to instruction into the greater Mysteries is evident from the fact that a prince, even the heir-apparent and of the military order, not being made partaker of these important secrets nor instructed in them until his accession to the throne, when in virtue of his kingly office he became a member of the priesthood and the head of the religion. It is not, however, less certain that at a later period many besides the priests, and even some Greeks, were admitted into the lesser Mysteries; yet in these cases also their advancement through the different grades must have depended on a strict conformance to prescribed rules.”’ The law which prescribed reticence in respect to exalted spiritual science in ancient times was fortified in the Middle Ages by an entirely new consideration. As the exoteric Christian Church grew into a more and more powerful engine of secular tyranny, the teacher who might too rashly proclaim the higher wisdom embodied in the secrets of initiation ran the risk not only of unduly augmenting the moral responsibility of those who might listen to him, but of being burned himself at the stake. With this peril in their way, it is not surprising that the medieval occultists were careful in the extreme to veil any statements they ventured to make in the disguise of an almost inpenetrable symbol- ism. But again with the light of modern Theosophic teaching to show us the solution of their riddle, we may easily recognise the philosophy of the ancient Mysteries reappearing in that of the much-talked-of and much- misunderstood fraternity of the Rosicrucians. THE THEOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 369 CHAPTER XIII. THE THEOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. STUDENTS of esoteric wisdom are familiar with the assertion that the principles of spiritual evolution, which it is their chief purpose to penetrate and com- prehend, have been recognised by the illuminated mystics of all countries in all ages of the world. The great science which these principles constitute has not been the invention of modern Theosophists ; nor has it been the peculiar inheritance of any small body of_ Adepts, jealously kept back from the wider circle of philosophers at large. The manner in which a sudden outburst of information relating to the natural laws embraced by occult science seems to have been thrown forward into modern thought within the last few years, is calculated to suggest that idea at first, but the more we come to understand occult teachings, the more we are able to discern them cropping out at the surface of earlier philosophical and religious literature. disguised in one kind of symbolism or another, but evidently the same knowledge as regards the root ideas and the inner significance of the words in which they are expressed. A good deal has already been written—though still probably a good deal more might be written with advantage—to show the identity of gnostic Christianity AA 370 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. with all points of esoteric science on which that pre- sentation of the truth laid stress. And the manner in which the conceptions of gnostic ‘Christianity were obscured by the harsher and narrower dogmas which it became the interest of state churches to endorse, is in itself an interesting study, throwing much light on the processes of degradation to which popular religious beliefs are subject. But in proportion as Christian esotericism became obscured by the development of the power of the Church in the Middle Ages, and perhaps because of that process of obscuration, the essential doctrines, which no persecution could shut out from the appreciation of enlightened minds, sought other channels of expression. In these they altogether withdrew themselves from popular observation. The genuine philosophy of religion separating itself entirely from the debased caricature assumed a disguise which was really impenetrable by all but the initiated few,— which the Church itself was no less incapable of seeing through than the ignorant laity. This disguise was the much misunderstood research, science, or theory known as Alchemy, of which some of the Rosicrucian writers were leading exponents. Ignorantly derided to this day by a materialistic generation, that persists in falling again and again into the mistake of reading symbolical expositions of interior truth in their mere literal sense, alchemy was, nevertheless, the crypto- graphic expression of a profound spiritual wisdom. This view of the subject is not a conjectural theory developed to suit any assumed necessity of finding esoteric teaching somewhere in the literature of the THE THEOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 371 Middle Ages, but one which is as certainly the correct view as the interpretation of an ordinary cryptogram is certainly the correct one when it makes sense. For example, if we see an apparently meaningless assem- blage of groups of letters in one of the mysterious advertisements, by means of which some people, who find that system amusing, correspond with one another, and if we find that by reading b for a all through, and c for 6, and so on, the message translates itself into straightforward English, we know with entire certainty that the original framer of the cryptogram had that intention in his mind. So with the seemingly non- sensical symbology of alchemy, when you try the right key in the attempt to unlock its meaning, it all resolves itself into perfectly coherent sense. We have now got the right key in the shape of that plain information given to the world at large of recent. years in Theoso- phical teachings. The mist clears away from the otherwise hopelessly obscure verbiage of the alchemical books, as we read them with minds attuned to esoteric thinking and on the watch for meanings relating not to the physical transmutation of lead or antimony into gold, but to the process of cultivating the growth of the Higher Self, by the exaltation of the lower, which is occult progress. The transmutation, in fact, of the normal physical consciousness of man into the divine consciousness was the magnum opus on which the true alchemists were engaged, and much that is grotesque imbecility in the directions and recipes they have left behind, if we read it simply as nineteenth-century chemists, becomes beautiful spiritual philosophy in 372 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. strictest harmony with the laws governing human spiritual evolution, when we put a symbolical construc- tion on the quaintly expressed formule relating to coctions and distillations and the mercury of the wise and fiery waters and ferments. It will be easy to take from: alchemical books a sufficient number of extracts to show that the writers evidently had a spiritual meaning in their minds as they wrote; it will be equally simple to indicate lines of reading which will enable anybody who likes to take the trouble to arrive at a thorough and exhaustive certainty on the subject, that will never again be dis- turbed by the silly sneers at alchemy so often met with in the pseudo-scientific literature of nineteenth- century conceit. But before going on to make and elucidate a few quotations that may open up and define the proper method of the investigation it will be well to show in broad outline the indirect consequences of the discovery we are dealing with. That which has been said so far is the main truth concerning alchemy. ‘The real alcheinists were spiritual philosophers concerned with the all-important task of developing the Divine possibilities of their latent human nature. ‘hey were students of true religion in the highest sense of the term—men whose intelligence had emancipated them from the more or less fantastic creeds of the exoteric Church, but who sought to go behind the blunders of a self-seeking, worldly-minded priesthood, and associate themselves with the will of God, in the best sense of that expression: that is to say, to identify themselves with the purpose of Nature, THE THEOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 373 with the law of spiritual evolution, with the principle of good in the universe.