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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
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