History

A look into the mysterious 96th degree of Freemasonry, that many Masons have failed to study.

A collection and treasure house of works in one volume by Alvin Boyd Kuhn. The modern world is awakening slowly to the fact that in the day we call ancient, though it was but a few thousand years ago in the run of millions, advanced men fully worthy of the name of sages were deeply versed in the profundities of recondite philosophy and possessed knowledge of things both human and divine, and well comprehended the great sciences of both cosmology and anthropology.

I am only sounding brass; with the aid of your attention, I will speak marvels. Do you see this passing whirlwind called SOCIETY, from which burst forth, with startling brilliancy, lightnings, thunders, and voices? I wish to cause you to place your finger on the hidden springs which move it; but to that end you must reduce yourself at my command to a state of pure intelligence. The eyes of love and pleasure are powerless to recognize beauty in a skeleton, harmony in naked viscera, life in dark and coagulated blood: consequently the secrets of the social organism are a sealed letter to the man whose brain is beclouded by passion and prejudice. Such sublimities are unattainable except by cold and silent contemplation.

This work contains a collection of the customs, usages, and ceremonies current among gypsies, as regards fortune-telling, witch-doctoring, love-philtering, and other sorcery, illustrated by many anecdotes and instances, taken either from works as yet very little known to the English reader or from personal experiences.

Ever since entering Great Britain, about the year 1506, the Gipsies have been drawing into their body the blood of the ordinary inhabitants and conforming to their ways; and so prolific has the race been, that there cannot be less than 250,000 Gipsies of all castes, colours, characters, occupations, degrees of education, culture, and position in life, in the British Isles alone, and possibly double that number.

One of the most widely disseminated systems of Indian thought, Buddhism, grounds its basic view of life on its thesis that the cause of all of man's wretchedness on the earth is his craving for life. Somehow, it is asserted, there was generated in him the desire to experience sensation and the feeling and consciousness of existence, to enjoy the concrete sense of being. And it was this yearning after the awareness of existence that directed him out of a condition of absolute and unconditioned being and precipitated him into the realm of limitation and painfully conditioned experience.

Mexico, superfluous to say, is not part of South America. But it is part of that vast Spanish-speaking New World whose development holds much of interest; and which may occupy a more important part in coming years than is generally thought of at present.