Society is not a
study group, but essentially a propagandist society which aims at
substituting for the pure and simple teaching of Christianity the
amazing compound of Eastern superstition, Cabalism, and
eighteenth-century charlatanism which Mrs. Besant and her coadjutors
have devised. Yet even were the doctrines of Mrs. Besant those of true
Buddhism or of Brahmanism, to what extent are they likely to benefit
Western civilization? Setting the question of Christianity aside,
experience shows that the attempt to orientalize Occidentals may prove
no less disastrous than the attempt to occidentalize Orientals, and that
to transport Eastern mysticism to the West is to vulgarize it and to
produce a debased form of occultism that frequently ends in moral
deterioration or mental derangement.[721] I attribute the scandals that
have taken place amongst Theosophists directly to this cause.

But it is time to turn to another society in which this debased
occultism plays a still more important part.

Rosicrucianism

At the present time, as in the eighteenth century, the term
"Rosicrucianism" is used to cover a number of associations differing in
their aims and doctrines.

The first of these societies to be founded in England was the _Societas
Rosicruciana in Anglia_, founded in 1867 by Robert Wentworth Little on
instructions received from abroad. Only Master Masons are admitted--a
procedure not condemned by Grand Lodge of England, which regards the
S.R.I.A. as a perfectly innocuous body. Although neither polical nor
anti-Christian, but, on the contrary, containing distinctly Christian
elements and claiming to descend from Christian Rosenkreutz--a claim
which must be dismissed as an absurdity--the S.R.I.A. is nevertheless
largely Cabalistic,[722] dealing with the forces of Nature, alchemy,
etc. If its progenitors are really to be traced further back than the
Rosicrucians of the nineteenth century--Ragon, Eliphas Levi, and Kenneth
Mackenzie--they must be sought amongst certain esoteric Masons in
Hungary and also amongst the French Martinistes, whose rituals doubtless
derived from a kindred source. It will be remembered that Marlines
Pasqually bequeathed to his disciples a large number of Jewish
manuscripts which were presumably preserved in the archives of the
Martiniste Lodge at Lyons. The Order of Martinistes has never ceased to
exist, and the President of the Supreme Conseil, Dr. Gerard Encausse,
well known as "Papus,"