Charles William King - The Gnostics and Their Remains (2007), wordperfector

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C
ERAUNIA OF
G
REEN
J
ADE
,
CONVERTED INTO A
G
NOSTIC
T
ALISMAN
.
(
See page
197.)
THE GNOSTICS
AND
THEIR REMAINS,
ANCIENT AND MEDIÆVAL
BY
C. W. KING, M.A.
“ Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia cæcis
In tenebris metuunt, sic not in luce timemus
Interdum nilo quæ sunt metuenda magis quam
Quæ pueri in tenebris pavitant, finguntque futura.”
SECOND EDITION
LONDON:
DAVID NUTT, 270, STRAND.
1887
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS
.
[
All rights reserved.
]
PREFACE
W
HEN
this work first appeared, three-and-twenty years ago, it
became at once an object of unmerited abuse, and of equally
unmerited praise. Small divines mistaking it for an insidious
attempt to overthrow opinions “as by law established,”
spurted
at it with pens dipped in the milk of the Gospel; whilst, under
the very same hallucination, “Friends of Light” lauded it to
the skies—either party equally ignorant both of the subject,
and of the purpose of my labours. One noted
Zoilus
(whose
recollections of Homer would seem to be of the same
deeply-
marked
nature as Ensign Blifil’s) is disgusted at my citing
“Aidoneus” as a title of the God of the Shades; another is
astonished at my ignorance in called Bardanes a
Persian
,
whereas he was a native of
Pontus;
not understanding that
my argument was equally valid in spite of the mistake—Pontus
being originally a province of the empire of Darius, and what is
more to the purposse, the actual focus whence Mithraism
diffused itself over the Roman world.
A still great cause of outcry against the book was my
presuming to lay presumptuous hands upon the Sacred Ark of
Masonry, and openly express my opinion that the “Free and
Accepted” of these times have no more real connexion with the
ancient
Craft
, out of whose terms and forms, like fig-leaves, they
have stitched together
aprons
, wherewith to cover the real
nakedness of their pretension, than the Italian
Carbonari
of
Murat’s day had with the trade of
charcoal burners
, whose
baskets were borrowed for the President’s throne. King
Hiram’s skull gnashed his teeth with rage within the
cista
mystical;
and one
realist
young Levite of the course of Abia,
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Charles William King - The Gnostics and Their Remains (2007), wordperfector

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