Occult Hierarchy which
governs the world, submitting to its laws, and acting in harmony with
its plans. This was the golden age of the Toltec race. The government
was just and beneficent; the arts and sciences were cultivated--indeed
the workers in these fields, guided as they were by occult knowledge,
achieved tremendous results; religious belief and ritual was still
comparatively pure--in fact the civilization of Atlantis had by this
time reached its height.

After about 100,000 years of this golden age the degeneracy and decay
of the race set in. Many of the tributary kings, and large numbers of
the priests and people ceased to use their faculties and powers in
accordance with the laws made by their Divine rulers, whose precepts
and advice were now disregarded. Their connection with the Occult
Hierarchy was broken. Personal aggrandisement, the attainment of
wealth and authority, the humiliation and ruin of their enemies became
more and more the objects towards which their occult powers were
directed: and thus turned from their lawful use, and practised for all
sorts of selfish and malevolent purposes, they inevitably led to what
we must call by the name of sorcery.

Surrounded as this word is with the odium which credulity on the one
hand and imposture on the other have during many centuries of
superstition and ignorance gradually caused it to be associated, let
us consider for a moment its real meaning, and the terrible effects
which its practice is ever destined to bring on the world.

Partly through their psychic faculties, which were not yet quenched in
the depths of materiality to which the race afterwards descended, and
partly through their scientific attainments during this culmination of
Atlantean civilization, the most intellectual and energetic members of
the race gradually obtained more and more insight into the working of
Nature's laws, and more and more control over some of her hidden
forces. Now the desecration of this knowledge and its use for selfish
ends is what constitutes sorcery. The awful effects, too, of such
desecration are well enough exemplified in the terrible catastrophes
that overtook the race. For when once the black practice was
inaugurated it was destined to spread in ever widening circles. The
higher spiritual guidance being thus withdrawn, the Kamic principle,
which being the fourth, naturally reached its zenith during the Fourth
Root Race, asserted itself more and more in humanit