posted February 02, 2009 07:47 AM              

I hesitated on responding, because sometimes on here especially, I see something, that should stand alone, and not be picked apart. It is splendid as a whole. This is a shining example of this concept.

The entire paper is readable, and worthy of praise in its entirety.

posted February 04, 2009 06:02 PM            

At the very moment when we raised the sheild of intellectual struggle against materialism, at the moment when all adepts of this doctrine, scattered through the Faculties of medicine, through the Press, through the highest and lowest levels of society, considered us as 'dilettanti', clerics or fools, the president of the National League Againist Atheism came forward, braving all sarcasm, to protect us with the inarguable authority of a profound philosopher and ardent defender of spiritualism...

Alongside the official line of religious or secular Universities, of scientific Academies and the Laboratories of Higher Learning, there has always existed an independent line, generally little known and therefore looked down upon, made up of researchers sometimes too steeped in philosophy, sometimes too taken with mysticism, but how interesting to study:

These adepts of Gnosis, these Alchemists, these disciples of Jacob Boehme, of Martinez Paschalis or of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, are the only ones, however, never to have neglected the study of the Qabalah... You may say to me that these authors are 'mystics', writers whose erudition is not always what one might wish; but it is also a 'mystic' who requests that they be read more fully and with greater care, if only to better understand the various evolutions of the human mind.

~ Papus