ts of the said godly mysteries, we
must first avoid all churches and places of worshipping as unclean"; he
then bound his initiate by a very strong oath and proceeded to tell him
that he must steal a Hebrew Bible from a Protestant and also procure
"one pound of blood out of the veins of an honest Protestant." The
initiate thereupon robbed a Protestant of all his effects, but had
himself bled of about three-quarters of a pound of blood, which he gave
to the magician. He thus describes the ceremony that took place:

Then the next night about 11 o'clock, we both went into the garden
of my own, and the cabalist put a cross, tainted with my blood, in
each corner of the garden, and in the middle of the garden a
threefold circle ... in the first circle were written all the names
of God in Hebrew; in the second all the names of the angels; and in
the third the first chapter of the holy Gospel of St. John, and it
was all written with my blood.

The cruelties then performed by the Cabalist on a he-goat are too
loathsome to transcribe. The whole story, indeed, appears a farrago of
nonsense and would not be worth quoting but for the fact that it appears
to be taken seriously by Dr. Adler as a description of the great Ba'al
Shem.

The death of Falk took place on April 17, 1782, and the epitaph on his
grave in the cemetery at Globe Road, Mile End, "bears witness to his
excellencies and orthodoxy": "Here is interred ... the aged and
honourable man, a great personage who came from the East, an
accomplished sage, an adept in Cabbalah.... His name was known to the
ends of the earth and distant isles," etc.

This then is surely the portrait of a most remarkable personage, a man
known for his powers in England, France, and Germany, visited by a royal
prince in search of the philosopher's stone, and acclaimed by one of his
own race as standing alone in his generation by reason of his knowledge,
yet whilst Saint-Germain and Cagliostro figure in every account of
eighteenth-century magicians, it is only in exclusively Judaic or
masonic works, not intended for the general public, that we shall find
any reference to Falk. Have we not here striking evidence of the truth
of M. Andre Baron's dictum: "Remember that the constant rule of the
secret societies is that the real authors never show themselves"?

It will now be asked: what proof is there that Falk is connected with
any masonic or secret societies? Tru