opponents confess to ignorance of the source whence the
Phoenicians themselves got their alphabet.

III.--It can be proved that before the final division and classification
of languages, there existed two languages in every nation: (a) the
profane or popular language of the masses; (b) the sacerdotal or secret
language of the initiates of the temples and mysteries--the latter being
one and universal. Or, in other, words, every great people had, like
the Egyptians, its Demotic and its Hieratic writing and language, which
had resulted first in a pictorial writing or the hieroglyphics, and
later on in a phonetic alphabet. Now it requires a stretch of
prejudice, indeed, to assert upon no evidence whatever that the Brahman
Aryans--mystics and metaphysicians above everything--were the only ones
who had never had any knowledge of either the sacerdotal language or the
characters in which it was recorded. To contradict this gratuitous
assumption, we can furnish a whole array of proofs. It can be
demonstrated that the Aryans no more borrowed their writing from the
Hellenes, or from the Phoenicians, than they were indebted to the
influence of the former for all their arts and sciences. (Even if we
accept Mr. Cunningham's "Indo-Grecian Period," for it lasted only from
250-57 B.C., as he states it.) The direct progenitor of the Vedic
Sanskrit was the sacerdotal language (which has a distinct name among
the initiates). The Vach--its alter ego or the "mystic self," the
sacerdotal speech of the initiated Brahman--became in time the mystery
language of the inner temple, studied by the initiates of Egypt and
Chaldea; of the Phoenicians and the Etruscans; of the Pelasgi and
Palanquans; in short, of the whole globe. The appellation DEVANAGARI
is the synonym of, and identical with, the Hermetic and Hieratic
NETER-KHARI (divine speech) of the Egyptians.

As the discussion divides naturally into two parts as to treatment--
though a general synthesis must be the final result--we will proceed to
examine the first part--namely, the charge that the Sanskrit alphabet is
derived from the Phoenicians. When a Western philologer asserts that
writing did not exist before a certain period, we assume that he has
some approximate certitude as to its real invention. But so far is this
from the truth, that admittedly no one knows whence the Phoenicians
learned the characters, now alleged (by Gesenius first) to be the source
from which modern