your heart:  winged Aeons on Aeons, ring above ring,—­mystery emanating mystery, beauty, beauty, from here up to the Throne of the Lonely All-Beautiful.—­ What growth there had been in Roman Europe, to prepare the way for the spread of Neo-Platonism, I cannot say; but imagine Gnosticism had something to do with it; and that Gnosticism was a graft on the parent stem of Christianity set there by some real Teacher who came later than Jesus.  If we knew more of the realities about Simon Magus on the one hand, and Paul of Tarsus on the other, we might have clearer light on the whole problem; at present must be content with saying this much:—­that Gnosticism, with its deep mystical truths, emerges into the light of well-founded history about neck and neck with orthodox Christianity; was considered a branch of the same movement, equally Christian; but was at least tinged with esoteric truth, and deeply Hellenized, and perhaps Persianized;—­whereas the orthodox branch was the legitimate heir of exoteric Judaism.  How much of real vision there may have been in Gnosticism; how much of mere speculation, which is but a step towards vision,—­I am not prepared to guess; but have little doubt that Gnostic activities made ready the ground for Neo-Platonism; so that when the latter’s Manasaputric light incarnated, it found fit rupas to inhabit.

This was the Lodge’s most important effort to sow truth in Europe since Pythagoras.  Says even the Enyclopaedia Britannica (without help from Esotericism): 

“Neo-Platonism is in one aspect ... the consummation of ancient philosophy.  Never before in Greek or Roman speculation had the consciousness of man’s dignity and superiority to Nature received such adequate expression....  From the religious and moral point of view, it must be admitted that the ethical ‘mood’ which Neo-Platonisni endeavored to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity....  It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated not in materialism but in the highest idealism.”

It asserted the Gods, the great stars and luminaries of the Inner World; it asserted the Divinity of Man,—­superior, truly, as the Encyclopaedia says to (the lower) Nature, but of the Higher, one part or factor in the whole.  It came into Europe trailing clouds of splendor and opening the heavens of Vision.  The huge menace and perils of the age, the multiplying disasters, were driving men to seek spiritual refuge of some kind; and there were, in the main, two camps that offered it:—­this of Neo-Platonism, proclaiming Human Divinity and strong effort upward in the name of that; and that other which proclaimed human helplessness, and that man is a poor worm and weakling, originally sinful, and with nothing to hope from his own efforts, but all from the grace, help, or mercy of Extracosmic Intervention.  It was