s brought against them. It seems at least to
be tolerably certain that during their long residence in the East they
had acquired the Oriental secrets of initiation into societies which
taught the old serpent-lore of _eritis sicut Deus_, and positive
knowledge; the ultimate secret, being the absolute nothingness of all
faith, creeds, laws, ties, or rules to him who is capable of rising
above them and of drawing from Nature by an 'enlightened' study of her
laws the principles of action, of harmony with fellow men, and of
unlimited earthly enjoyment. Such had been for ages the last lessons of
all the 'mysteries' of the East--mysteries which it was the peculiar
destiny of the Hebrew race to resist through ages of struggle. It was
through the teaching of such mysteries of pantheistic naturalism that,
as the unflinching Jewish deists and anthropomorphists believed, man
fell, and their belief was set forth in their very first religious
tradition--the history of the apple, the serpent, and the Fall. And it
is to the very extraordinary nature of the Hebrew race, by which they
presented for the first time in history the spectacle of a people
resisting nature-worship, that they owe their claim to be a peculiar
people.

The Templars, under the glowing skies of the East, among its thousand
temptations, those of superior knowledge not being the least; in an age
when the absurdities of the Roman church were, to an enlightened mind,
at their absurdest pitch, fell readily into 'illumination.' Whether they
literally _worshipped_ the Oriental Baphomet, a figure with two heads,
male and female, girt with a serpent, typifying the completest
abnegation of all moral relations, and the rights of knowledge, no one
can say now--it is, however, significant that this symbol, which they
undoubtedly used, actually found its way under the freemasons into the
Christian churches of the West, as a type of 'prudence' among the
representations of Christian virtues. When we remember that the Gnostics
taught that _prudence_ alone was virtue,[11] we have here a coincidence
which sufficiently explains the meaning of this emblem of 'the baptism
of mind.'

Nothing is more likely than that a portion of the Knights Templars were
initiated in the mysteries of such Oriental sects as those of the _House
of Wisdom_ of Al Hakem, the seventh and last degree of which at first
'inculcated the vanity of all religion, and the indifference of actions
which are neither vis