Unexplained

To those who wish to understand the reason of this steady recurrence of mystic tradition in every century, these studies may be of some use. They will serve as literary landmarks to guide the seeker to those distant sources whence flow faint echoes of divine truths--the heritage of the divine human race; truths that bring dim memories to the soul which are its highest impulse, and give the clue that guides it to the inner "science of the soul"--the mystic quest of all the saints, and the hidden truth that all religions have tried to teach, and which only a few in each religion have ever realized.

In one of his tales concerning vampires, St.Germain mentioned in an offhand way that he possessed the wand or staff with which Moses brought water from the rock, adding that it had been presented to him at Babylon during the reign of Cyrus the Great.

THE papers here collected are written solely for members of the Masonic Order, constituted under the United Grand Lodge of England. To all such they are offered in the best spirit of fraternity and goodwill and with the wish to render to the Order some small return for the profit the author has received from his association with it extending over thirty-two years. They have been written with a view to promoting the deeper understanding of the meaning of Masonry; to providing the explanation of it that one constantly hears called for and that becomes all the more necessary in view of the unprecedented increase of interest in, and membership of, the Order at the present day.

IN all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire, a pariah even among demons. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest. Even to-day in certain quarters of the world, in remoter districts of Europe itself, Transylvania, Slavonia, the isles and mountains of Greece, the peasant will take the law into his own bands and utterly destroy the carrion who--as it is yet firmly believed--at night will issue from his unhallowed grave to spread the infection of vampirism throughout the countryside.

People hooted and jeered when, some few years ago, I wrote in The Third Eye that I had flown in kites. One would have thought that I had committed a great crime in saying that. But now-well, we look about and we can see people flying in kites. Some of them are high above the water being towed by a speed boat. Yet others are kites with a man aboard, he stands on the edge of a cliff or high piece of ground, and then he jumps off and he is actually flying in a kite. Nobody says now that Lobsang Rampa was right, but they certainly did hoot when I wrote about kite flying.

Even the most diehard believer in the notion that UFOs are interplanetary spacecraft and nothing else will have to admit that by now the odds are stacked against this theory. For more than fifty years, since the dawn of the modem era of "flying saucer" sightings, millions of strange, luminous "things" have been buzzing about as well as being chased and interacted with on all levels all over the globe.