preserved in the vast rock
temples that are found in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Sicily, and the
Apennine peninsula, in Greece, France, and on the Rhine, and these vaults,
which in part also served the early Christians as places of worship, show
in their images and records and in their architectural form so close a
resemblance that they must be acknowledged as the characteristic of a
great religious cult extending over many lands, which has had consistent
traditions for the use of such symbols and for the production of these
structures.

Many of these symbols, it should be noted in passing, are borrowed from
those tokens and implements of the building corporations, which were
necessary to the completion of their buildings (Keller, l. c., p. 4). An
important part was played even in the early Christian symbolism by the
sacred numbers and the figures corresponding to them, a group of
educational symbols which we find likewise in the pythagorean and platonic
schools. It is known that the symbolical language of the subterranean rock
temples, some of which were used by the earliest Christians for their
religious worship, are closely connected with the pythagorean and platonic
doctrines. From the year 325 A. D. on, every departure from the beliefs of
the state church was considered a state offense. So those Christians who
retained connection with the ancient philosophic schools were persecuted.
In the religious symbol language of the church, the sacred numbers
naturally began to disappear from that time. In the writings of Augustine
begins the war on the symbolic language, whose use he declared a
characteristic of the gnostics. In spite of the suppression the doctrines
of the sacred numbers continued through all the centuries in religious
use, in quiet but strong currents which flowed beside the state church.
The sect names, which were invented by polemic theology for the purpose of
characterizing methods that were regarded as imitations of the gnostics,
are of the most varied kinds; it may be enough to remember that in all
those spiritual currents, that like the old German mysticism, the earlier
humanism, the so-called natural philosophy, etc., show a strong influence
of platonic thinking, the doctrines of the sacred numbers recur, in a more
or less disguised form, but yet clearly recognizable. (Keller, Heil.
Zahl., p. 2.)

As the old number symbolism constitutes a part of the hieroglyphics of
alchemy, I shall pause a moment t