so,
it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science
and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe,
Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of
the geographical nature of this previous world seems to me most
interesting. In the period which geologists call the Glacial Period,
the waters of the earth must have been gathered up in a vast body on
the higher places of our globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds
of to-day must have been comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose up
mountainous from the plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes,
and the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty from
the marvelous great continent of the Pacific.

In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete
correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from
Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to
America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was
universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day.

Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The
refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of
America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated
naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some
retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the
South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some,
like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese,
refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its
half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge:
remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.

And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And so
it is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world
when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country
and every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so it
is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse
towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent.
And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic
graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents,
mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance
is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or
divining.

If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all ri