Secret Societies and Subversive Movements | Page 7

the soul and the nature of God, who was represented under the
conception of a Universal Mind diffused through all things. It is,
however, as the precursor of secret societies formed later in the West of
Europe that the sect of Pythagoras enters into the scope of this book.
Early masonic tradition traces Freemasonry partly to Pythagoras, who
is said to have travelled in England, and there is certainly some reason
to believe that his geometrical ideas entered into the system of the
operative guilds of masons.

The Jewish Cabala[15]
According to Fabre d'Olivet, Moses, who "was learned in all the
wisdom of the Egyptians," drew from the Egyptian Mysteries a part of
the oral tradition which was handed down through the leaders of the

Israelites.[16] That such an oral tradition, distinct from the written
word embodied in the Pentateuch, did descend from Moses and that it
was later committed to writing in the Talmud and the Cabala is the
opinion of many Jewish writers.[17]
The first form of the Talmud, called the Mischna, appeared in about the
second or third century A.D.; a little later a commentary was added
under the name of the Gemara. These two works compose the
Jerusalem Talmud, which was revised in the third to the fifth centry[A].
This later edition was named the Babylonian Talmud and is the one
now in use.
The Talmud relates mainly to the affairs of everyday life--the laws of
buying and selling, of making contracts--also to external religious
observances, on all of which the most meticulous details are given. As
a Jewish writer has expressed it:
... the oddest rabbinical conceits are elaborated through many volumes
with the finest dialectic, and the most absurd questions are discussed
with the highest efforts of intellectual power; for example, how many
white hairs may a red cow have, and yet remain a red cow; what sort of
scabs require this or that purification; whether a louse or a flea may be
killed on the Sabbath--the first being allowed, while the second is a
deadly sin; whether the slaughter of an animal ought to be executed at
the neck or the tail; whether the high priest put on his shirt or his hose
first; whether the Jabam, that is, the brother of a man who died
childless, being required by law to marry the widow, is relieved from
his obligation if he falls off a roof and sticks in the mire.[18]
But it is in the Cabala, a Hebrew word signifying "reception," that is to
say "a doctrine orally received," that the speculative and philosophical
or rather the theosophical doctrines of Israel are to be found. These are
contained in two books, the Sepher Yetzirah and the Zohar.
The Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of the Creation, is described by
Edersheim as "a monologue on the part of Abraham, in which, by the
contemplation of all that is around him, he ultimately arrives at the
conclusion of the unity of God"[19]; but since this process is

accomplished by an arrangement of the Divine Emanations under the
name of the Ten Sephiroths, and in the permutation of numerals and of
the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, it would certainly convey no such
idea--nor probably indeed any idea at all--to the mind uninitiated into
Cabalistic systems. The Sepher Yetzirah is in fact admittedly a work of
extraordinary obscurity[20] and almost certainly of extreme antiquity.
Monsieur Paul Vulliaud, in his exhaustive work on the Cabala recently
published,[21] says that its date has been placed as early as the sixth
century before Christ and as late as the tenth century A.D., but that it is
at any rate older than the Talmud is shown by the fact that in the
Talmud the Rabbis are described as studying it for magical
purposes.[22] The Sepher Yetzirah is also said to be the work referred
to in the Koran under the name of the "Book of Abraham."[23]
The immense compilation known as the Sepher-Ha-Zohar, or Book of
Light, is, however, of greater importance to the study of Cabalistic
philosophy. According to the Zohar itself, the "Mysteries of Wisdom"
were imparted to Adam by God whilst he was still in the Garden of
Eden, in the form of a book delivered by the angel Razael. From Adam
the book passed on to Seth, then to Enoch, to Noah, to Abraham, and
later to Moses, one of its principal exponents.[24] Other Jewish writers
declare, however, that Moses received it for the first time on Mount
Sinai and communicated it to the Seventy Elders, by whom it was
handed down to David and Solomon, then to Ezra and Nehemiah, and
finally to the Rabbis of the early Christian era.[25]
Until this date the Zohar had remained a purely oral tradition, but now
for the first