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*** According to the same tradition the now desolate regions of the waterless land of Tarim -- a true wilderness in the heart of Turkestan -- were in the days of old covered with flourishing and wealthy cities. At present, hardly a few verdant oases relieve its dead solitude. One such, sprung on the sepulchre of a vast city swallowed by and buried under the sandy soil of the desert, belongs to no one, but is often visited by Mongolians and Buddhists. The same tradition speaks of immense subterranean abodes, of large corridors filled with tiles and cylinders. It may be an idle rumour, and it may be an actual fact. [[Vol. 1, Page]] xxv INTRODUCTORY. the reader rejects the truthfulness of the reports, let him pause and reflect over the following well known facts. The collective researches of the Orientalists, and especially the labours of late years of the students of comparative Philology and the Science of Religions have led them to ascertain as follows: An immense, incalculable number of MSS ., and even printed works known to have existed , are now to be found no more. They have disappeared without leaving the slightest trace behind them. Were they works of no importance they might, in the natural course of time, have been left to perish, and their very names would have been obliterated from human memory. But it is not so; for, as now ascertained, most of them contained the true keys to works still extant, and entirely incomprehensible, for the greater portion of their readers, without those additional volumes of Commentaries and explanations. Such are, for instance, the works of Lao-tse, the predecessor of Confucius.* He is said to have written 930 books on Ethics and religions, and seventy on magic, one thousand in all. His great work, however, the heart of his doctrine, the "Tao-te-King," or the sacred scriptures of the Taosse, has in it, as Stanislas Julien shows, only "about 5,000 words" ( Tao-te-King, p. xxvii.), hardly a dozen of pages, yet Professor Max Muller finds that "the text is unintelligible without commentaries, so that Mr. Julien had to consult more than sixty commentators for the purpose of his translation," the earliest going back as far as the year 163 B.C ., not earlier, as we see. During the four centuries and a half that preceded this earliest of the commentators there was ample time to veil the true Lao-tse doctrine from all but his initiated priests. The Japanese, among whom are now to be found the most learned of the priests and followers of Lao-tse, simply laugh at the blunders and hypotheses of the European Chinese scholars; and tradition affirms that the commentaries to which our Western Sinologues have access are not the real occult records, but intentional veils, and that the true commentaries, as well as almost all the texts, have long since disappeared from the eyes of the profane. [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * "If we turn to China, we find that the religion of Confucius is founded on the Five King and the Four Shu -books, in themselves of considerable extent and surrounded by voluminous Commentaries, without which even the most learned scholars would not venture to fathom the depth of their sacred canon. " ( Lectures on the " Science of Religion, " p. 185. Max Muller.) But they have not fathomed it -- and this is the complaint of the Confucianists, as a very learned member of that body, in Paris, complained in 1881. [[Vol. 1, Page]] xxvi INTRODUCTORY. If one turns to the ancient literature of the Semitic religions, to the Chaldean Scriptures, the elder sister and instructress, if not the fountain-head of the Mosaic Bible, the basis and starting-point of Christianity, what do the scholars find? To perpetuate the memory of the ancient religions of Babylon; to record the vast cycle of astronomical observations of the Chaldean Magi; to justify the tradition of their splendid and eminently occult literature, what now remains? -- only a few fragments, said to be by Berosus. These, however, are almost valueless, even as a clue to the character of what has disappeared. For they passed through the hands of his Reverence the Bishop of Caesarea -- that self-constituted censor and editor of the sacred records of other men's religions -- and they doubtless bear to this day the mark of his eminently veracious and trustworthy hand. For what is the history of this treatise on the once grand religion of Babylon? Written in Greek by Berosus, a priest of the temple of Belus, for Alexander the Great, from the astronomical and chronological records preserved by the priests of that temple, and covering a period of 200,000 years, it is now lost. In the first century B.C . Alexander Polyhistor made a series of extracts from it -- also lost. Eusebius used these extracts in writing his Chronicon (270-340 A.D .). The points of resemblance -- almost of identity -- between the Jewish and the Chaldean Scriptures,* made the latter most dangerous to Eusebius, in his role of defender and champion of the new faith which had adopted the Jewish Scriptures, and with them an absurd chronology. It is pretty certain that Eusebius did not spare the Egyptian Synchronistic tables of Manetho -- so much so that Bunsen** charges him with mutilating history most unscrupulously. And Socrates, a historian of the fifth century, and Syncellus, vice-patriarch of Constantinople (eighth century), both denounce him as the most daring and desperate forger. Is it likely, then, that he dealt more tenderly with the Chaldean records, which were already menacing the new religion, so rashly accepted? [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Found out and proven only now, through the discoveries made by George Smith ( vide his "Chaldean account of Genesis"), and which, thanks to this Armenian forger, have misled all the civilized nations for over 1,500 years into accepting Jewish derivations for direct Divine Revelation! ** Bunsen's " Egypt ' s Place in History, " vol. i. p. 200 [[Vol. 1, Page]] xxvii INTRODUCTORY. So that, with the exception of these more than doubtful fragments, the entire Chaldean sacred literature has disappeared from the eyes of the profane as completely as the lost Atlantis. A few facts that were contained in the Berosian History are given in Part II. of Vol. II., and may throw a great light on the true origin of the Fallen Angels, personified by Bel and the Dragon.