an avowed Cabalist, only died in 1916. To these
archives another famous Cabalist, the renegade Abbe, Alphonse Louis
Constant, who assumed the name of Eliphas Levi, may well have had
access. It is said that one of Eliphas Levi's most distinguished
disciples, the occultist Baron Spedalieri of Marseilles, was a member of
the "Grand Lodge of Solitary Brethren of the Mountain," an "Illumined
Brother of the Ancient Restored Order of Manicheans," a high member of
the Grand Orient, and also a "High Illuminate of the Martinistes."
Before his death in 1875 Eliphas Levi announced that in 1879 a new
political and religious "universal Kingdom" would be established, and
that it would be possessed by "him who would have the keys of the East."
The manuscript containing this prophecy was passed on by Baron
Spedalieri to Edward Maitland, who in his turn gave it to a leading
member of S.R.I.A., by whom it was published in English.[723]

But, as we have already seen, the principal centre of Cabalism was in
Eastern Europe, whilst Germany was the principal home of Rosicrucianism,
and it was from these directions that, a few years later, a new
Rosicrucian Order in England derived its inspiration. It is curious to
notice that the eighties of the last century were marked by a
simultaneous recrudescence of secret societies and of Socialist
organizations. In 1880 Leopold Engel reorganized Weishaupt's Order of
Illuminati, which, according to M. Guenon, played thenceforth "an
extremely suspect political role," and soon after this in 1884 it is
said that a strange incident took place in London. The Rev. A.F.A.
Woodford, a F.'. M.'., happened to be turning over the contents of a
second-hand bookstall in Farringdon Street when he came upon some cypher
MSS., attached to which was a letter in German saying that if the finder
were to communicate with Sapiens Dominabatur Astris, c/o Fraulein Anna
Sprengel, in Germany, he would receive further interesting information.

This, at any rate, is the story told to initiates of the Order which
came to be founded according to the instructions given in the cypher.
But when we remember that precisely the same story was told by
Cagliostro concerning his discovery of a MS. in London by the mysterious
George Cofton on which he had founded his Egyptian rite, we begin to
wonder whether the placing of a MS. in a spot where it is certain to be
discovered by precisely the people qualified to decipher it forms one of
the t