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can speak), to justify Merlin at once, and to astonish and bewilder, by the long-delayed evolvement of the centuries in which at last the realisation and the misfortune become simultaneously apparent : for which, and for the possibilities of which, we will terminate in the adjuration of the sublime Romans, those masters in the art of augury and of divination, "Absit omen!" But thus much we have chosen to explain about the colour white, in justification of the ideas of the Rosicrucians as to the supernatural power of colours; and as to the magical qualities of those occult influences which they determined, in their philosophical vocabularies, strangely and mysteriously to call the "signatures of things."

Various Foliated Curves of the Lotus.

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD.

THE BELIEFS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS MEANING OF LIGHTS AND OF COMMEMORATIVE FLAMBEAUX IN ALL WORSHIP.

ROM the name of the Temple, now Stonehenge, comes the name of Ambresbury, which stands a few miles from it. This is called the "Ambres of the Abiri." It is two words, and means the "Ambres of the Dii Potentes," or of the ", or "Cabiri," -for they are the same.

The star of the Légion d'Honneur bears the inscription -“Napoléon, Empereur des Français." This order was instituted by the Emperor Napoleon the First, after the discovery and dissolution of the Secret Society, or Brotherhood, of which General Pichegru, Georges Cadoudal, the famous Moreau, and other noted revolutionary men, were members. This order possessed, it is stated, a talisman, or mystic head, which served as a recognitive mark, and was supposed to be a sort of bond to the brotherhood. After their death, their secret insignia were discovered; and it has been stated that the Emperor Napoleon, whose attention was instantaneously arrested by great and unusual ideas or supernatural suggestions, in suppressing this mystic symbol or head, adopted it in another form, and substituted his own

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head, in profile, as the palladium, or talisman, for his new order of the "Legion of Honour."

The saffron robe of Hymen is of the colour of the Flame of Fire. The Bride, in ancient days, was covered with a veil called the "Flammeum;" unless made under this, no vow was considered sacred. The ancients swore, not by the altar, but by the flame of fire which was upon the altar. Yellow, or flame-colour, was the colour of the Ghebers, or Guebres, or Fire-Worshippers. The Persian lilies are yellow; and here will be remarked a connection between this fact of the yellow of the Persian lilies and the mystic symbols in various parts of our book. Mystic rites, and the symbolical lights, which mean the Divinity of Fire, abound at Candlemas-day (February 2d), or the Feast of the Purification; in the torches borne at weddings, and in the typical flame-brandishing at marriage over almost all the world; in the illuminations at feasts; in the lights on, and set about, the Christian altar; at the festival of the Holy Nativity; in the ceremonies at preliminary espousals; in the Bale, or Baal, fires on the summits of the mountains; in the watchlights, or votive sanctuary-lights, in the hermitage in the lowest valley; in the chapelle ardente, in the Romish funereal observances, with its abundance of silent, touching lights around the splendid catafalque, or twinkling, pale and ineffectual, singly at the side of the death-bed in the cottage of the peasant. Starry lights and innumerable torches at the stately funeral, or at any pompous celebration, mean the same. In short, light all over the world, when applied to religious rites, and to ceremonial, whether in the ancient or in the modern times, bespeaks the same origin, and struggles to express the same meaning, which is Parseeism, Perseism, or the worship of the deified FIRE, disguised in many theological or theosophic fcrms. It will, we trust, never be supposed that we mean, in this, real fire, but only the inexpressible something of which real fire, or rather its flower or glory (bright light), is the farthest off-because, in being visible at all, it is the grossest and most inadequate image.

All this strange, dreamy, ethereal view of a vital, accessible something, entirely separate from the suggestions of mere sensation, is Gnosticism, or Bhuddism, in its own profoundest depth. It follows on similarly to the "intoxication," or suffusion with the very certainty of the presence of God, which, in the poetic sense, was said to fill the mind of even the supposed arch-atheist Spinoza.

The Rosicrucians, through the revelations concerning them of their celebrated English representative, Robertus de Fluctibus, or Robert Fludd, declare, in accordance with the Mosaic account of creation,-which, they maintain, is in no instance to be taken literally, but metaphorically,that two original principles, in the beginning, proceeded from the Divine Father. These are Light and Darkness,— or form or idea, and matter or plasticity. Matter, downwards, becomes fivefold, as it works in its forms, according to the various operations of the first informing light; it extends four-square, according to the points of the celestial compass, with the divine creative effluence in the centre. The worlds spiritual and temporal, being rendered subject to the operation of the original Type, or Idea, became, in their imitation of this Invisible Ideal, first intelligible, and then endowed with reciprocal meaning outwards from themselves. This produced the being (or thought) to whom, or to which, creation was disclosed. This is properly the "Son," or Second Ineffable Person of the Divine Trinity. Thus that which we understand as a human mind" be

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came a possibility. This second great, only intelligible world, the Rosicrucians call "Macrocosmos." They distribute it as into three regions or spheres; which, as they lie near-to, or dilate the farthest from, the earliest-opening divine "Brightness," they denominate the Empyræum, the Ætheræum, and the Elementary Region, each filled and determinate and forceful with less and less of the First Celestial Fire. These regions contain innumerable invisible nations, or angels, of a nature appropriate to each. Through these immortal regions, Light, diffusing in the emanations of the cabalistic Sephiroth, becomes the blackness, sediment,

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or ashes, which is the second fiery, real world. This power, or vigour, uniting with the Ethereal Spirit, constitutes. strictly the "Soul of the World." It becomes the only means of the earthly intelligence, or man, knowing it. It is the Angel-Conqueror, Guide, Saviour born of "Woman," or Great Deep," the Gnostic Sophia, the "Word made flesh" of St. John. The Empyræum is properly the flower, or glory (effluent in its abundance), of the divine Latent Fire. It is penetrated with miracle and holy magic. The Rosicrucian system teaches that there are three ascending hierarchies of beneficent Angels (the purer portion of the First Fire, or Light), divided into nine orders. These threefold angelic hierarchies are the Teraphim, the Seraphim, and the Cherubim. This religion, which is the religion of the Parsees, teaches that, on the Dark Side, there are also three counterbalancing resultant divisions of operative intelligences, divided again into nine spheres, or inimical regions, populated with splendidly endowed adverse angels, who boast still the relics of their lost, or eclipsed, or changed, light. The elementary world, or lowest world, in which man and his belongings, and the lower creatures, are produced, is the flux, subsidence, residuum, ashes, or deposit, of the Ethereal Fire. Man is the microcosm, or "indescribably small copy," of the whole great world. Dilatation and compression, expansion and contraction, magnetic sympathy, gravitation-to, or flight-from, is the bond which holds all imaginable things together. The connection is intimate between the higher and the lower, because all is a perpetual aspiration, or continuous descent: one long, immortal chain, whose sequence is never-ending, reaches by impact with that immediately above, and by contact with that immediately below, from the very lowest to the very highest. "So true is it that God loves to retire into His clouded Throne; and, thickening the Darkness that encompasses His most awful Majesty, He inhabits an Inaccessible Light, and lets none into His Truths but the poor in spirit." The Rosicrucians contended that these so