LET THERE BE LIGHT --
ON GENESIS. AB kHUN
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Among those revered and cherished repositories of ancient arcane wisdom which have transmitted the enlightenment of demi-gods from age to age the myth of Genesis holds an important place. And no less certainly can it be asserted that the loss of its true esoteric meaning, along with that of other similarly cryptic oracles of truth and wisdom, has been the cause of a vast befuddlement of the mind of western nations for some fifteen centuries. When, about the third century, the early Christian movement revolted viciously against the whole ancient system of imparting truth and knowledge in secret to disciplined recipients only, in the Arcane Brotherhoods and Mystery Schools, and discarded in consequence the allegorical interpretation of the myths, substituting a purely literal rendering and turning the figures of a spiritual drama into "historical" characters, the great ancient light of knowledge passed under an eclipse from which it has not by any means emerged even now. Except in the marvelous development of mechanics, we are still under the cloud of the Dark Ages. Philosophically, spiritually, we have not recovered what was once known - and lost. And perhaps the sorriest feature of the situation is that the mass of people, and even the leaders of orthodox religionism are neither aware of our having lost precious truth, nor can they be told convincingly that it is so.
None but a close student of comparative religion, who is also enlightened with a knowledge of the hidden keys needed to interpret all ancient scriptural documents, can be made sensible of the full extent to which the modern mind, particularly in the West, has been turned aside from truth to folly by that abortion of the sage wisdom of antiquity in the fatal third century. Loss of occult truth has left a world to grope ahead without the guidance of transcendent knowledge that it should have had. And worse than that - the quiver of false notions that were put forth in place of a profound and true rendering of vital constructions, operating upon the mind of generations, has finally sunk the general level of philosophical intelligence in our boasted modern age to a stage that can hardly be ranked much above that of so-called primitives. The net deposit of organic and traditionalized religion has been a badly warped philosophical vision. There is such a thing as a hypnotism by ideas; and it is under such a paralysis of intelligence by stereotyped and conventionalized ideas that the Occidental mind has lain, or groped as in a spell for some fifteen centuries. During some twelve centuries the mind of Europe was not
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free to think. It was effectively repressed by ecclesiasticism. A