C.W.King - The Gnostics and Their Remains.pdf - Dokumenty - rhea137

C ERAUNIA OF G REEN J ADE , CONVERTED INTO A G NOSTIC T ALISMAN .

( See page 197.)

THE GNOSTICS

AND

THEIR REMAINS,

ANCIENT AND MEDIÆVAL

C. W. KING, M.A.

“ Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcis

In tenebris metuunt, sic not in luce timemus

Interdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quam

Quæ pueri in tenebris pavitant, finguntque futura.”

SECOND EDITION

LONDON:

DAVID NUTT, 270, STRAND.

1887

LONDON:

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,

STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS .

PREFACE

W HEN this work first appeared, three-and-twenty years ago, it

became at once an object of unmerited abuse, and of equally

unmerited praise. Small divines mistaking it for an insidious

attempt to overthrow opinions “as by law established,” spurted

at it with pens dipped in the milk of the Gospel; whilst, under

the very same hallucination, “Friends of Light” lauded it to

the skies—either party equally ignorant both of the subject,

and of the purpose of my labours. One noted Zoilus (whose

recollections of Homer would seem to be of the same deeply-

marked nature as Ensign Blifil’s) is disgusted at my citing

“Aidoneus” as a title of the God of the Shades; another is

astonished at my ignorance in called Bardanes a Persian ,

whereas he was a native of Pontus; not understanding that

my argument was equally valid in spite of the mistake—Pontus

being originally a province of the empire of Darius, and what is

more to the purposse, the actual focus whence Mithraism

diffused itself over the Roman world.

A still great cause of outcry against the book was my

presuming to lay presumptuous hands upon the Sacred Ark of

Masonry, and openly express my opinion that the “Free and

Accepted” of these times have no more real connexion with the

ancient Craft , out of whose terms and forms, like fig-leaves, they

have stitched together aprons , wherewith to cover the real

nakedness of their pretension, than the Italian Carbonari of

Murat’s day had with the trade of charcoal burners , whose

baskets were borrowed for the President’s throne. King

Hiram’s skull gnashed his teeth with rage within the cista

mystical; and one realist young Levite of the course of Abia,

C.W.King - The Gnostics and Their Remains.pdf

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