Le Tarot des Bohémiens

CULTS

While secret societies were intended to transmit, through their symbolism, the scientific side of primitive initiation, religious sects were intended to develop primarily the philosophical and metaphysical side of the teaching.

Every priest of an ancient cult was an initiate; that is to say, he knew perfectly well that there was only one religion, and that the various cults only served to translate this religion to different peoples according to their specific temperament. An important consequence followed from this: a priest, of whichever god he served, was received with honor in all the temples of all the gods and was admitted to offer a sacrifice to them. Let no one think, however, that this was due to polytheism. The Jewish high priest in Jerusalem received an initiate, Alexander the Great, into the temple and led him into the Holy of Holies to offer a sacrifice.

Our religious quarrels over the supremacy of one cult over another would have made an ancient initiate priest laugh, as he would have been unable to conceive that intelligent men could ignore the unity of all cults within a single religion.

This sectarianism, supported by two cults blind in their errors—the Christian and the Muslim—was the cause of the total loss of the secret teaching that provided the key to the synthetic Unity.

It requires even greater labor to recover the synthesis in our Western religions than to find it in Freemasonry.

Only the Jews possess, if not the spirit, then the letter of their oral tradition, or Kabbalah. The Bible, written in Hebrew, is, from this point of view, a marvel. It contains all