foreword
xiii
truths. The ancients did not share the modern belief that knowledge should be available to all; they didn’t write books for dummies or complete idiots, as we do. They wrote for those who were willing to make an effort to understand and had the patience and intelligence to look past surface forms to grasp the underlying meaning. The skills needed to interpret symbolism, fable, and analogy had dropped out of common use in Papus’s time, and so he devotes many pages to instructing readers in those skills and walking them through the process of extracting meaning from the symbolic legacies of the past. Since the symbolic mode of thinking remains just as unfashionable in our time as it was in his, this is among the most useful aspects of this book, a course of instruction in the skills needed to extract wisdom from the whole panoply of ancient myth, medieval legend, and esoteric symbolism. The third primary theme of the book is somewhat less relevant to modern conditions, and it includes ideas that will raise many readers’ hackles. When Papus wrote, scientists across the Western world took it for granted that the human species was divided into four races marked by different skin colors—white, black, red, and yellow, in the usual classification of the time—and insisted that these were not just convenient categories for a diversity of ethnic groups but actual biological realities. We now know that there is no such thing as a “white race,” or for that matter any of the others. It’s as absurd to use skin color as a basic human division as it would be to postulate a “white breed” of dog that lumps together Great Pyrenees with teacup poodles and to insist that the “white breed” has certain essential characteristics that set its members apart from black dogs, brown dogs, and so on. In Papus’s time, though, the science of genetics was in its infancy and anthropology wasn’t much past its toddler years. The research that would send the theory of separate human races into the dustbin of abandoned theories hadn’t yet been done. Furthermore, powerful cultural and economic interests in the Western countries defended racial theories as a way to justify European colonial projects; in hindsight, it’s easy to see that this was propaganda, but that level of clarity about the assumptions of a culture and an age is hard to achieve from within. Plenty of ideas we treat as self-evident will seem just as absurd to our descendants. Be that as it may, Papus wrote at a time when the idea of distinct human races with different essential characteristics was all but universally accepted by scientists and laypersons alike. What’s more, these ideas were just as widespread in the occultism of his time as they were in the broader culture. H. P. Blavatsky’s vast writings on occultism framed her system of Theosophy in an alternative history of the world in which the rise and fall of a series of “root races” played a central role. Racial ideas also have an important role in Thomas Burgoyne’s The Light of Egypt, Max Heindel’s The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, and many other occult textbooks of the time. In an important sense, though, Papus stands apart from the occult mainstream of his time. While many other late nineteenth-century occultists brought the conventional racial notions of their time into their teachings, he stood those notions on their heads. In his version of the hidden history of the world, white