Hidden Knowledge

The real teaching, on this view, was never written in the open; it was kept back for those who came looking. The Hermetic writings, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek name for the Egyptian god Thoth, are works of revelation. The Gnostics taught that the elect are saved by gnosis, waking to the knowledge of their own divine origin. The Rosicrucians claimed a secret wisdom handed down from ancient times, and the Freemasons built the instinct into lodges and degrees, each with its rite of initiation.

The secret was a method, not a fact: a discipline of study, ritual and contemplation that no exposé can hand over.

The shelf holds primary texts in translation, histories of the societies and their rituals, studies of initiation, and the scholarship that tests what the orders claimed about their origins against the record. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon dated the Corpus Hermeticum to the first centuries of the Christian era, and that same year Wilhelm Wessel of Kassel printed the first Rosicrucian manifesto.