“A work of Apollonides, surnamed Orapios, is mentioned by Theophilus, patriarch of Antioch, entitled the Divine Book, and giving the secret biography and origin of all the gods of Egypt; and Ammianus Marcellinus speaks of a secret work in which was noted the precise age of the bull Apis – a key to many a mystery and cyclic calculation. What has become of all these books, and who knows the treasures of learning they may have contained?
We know but one thing for a certainty, and that is, that Pagan and Christian Vandals destroyed such literary treasures wherever they could find them; and that the emperor Alexander Severus went all over Egypt to collect the sacred books on mysticism and mythology, pillaging every temple; and that the Ethiopians – old as were the Egyptians in arts and sciences – claimed a priority of antiquity as well as of learning over them; as well they might, for they were known in India at the earliest dawn of history.
We also know that Plato learned more secrets in Egypt than he was allowed to mention; and that, according to Champollion, all that is really good and scientific in Aristotle’s works – so prized in our day by our modern inductionists – is due to his divine Master; and that, as a logical sequence, Plato having imparted the profound secrets he had learned from the priests of Egypt to his initiated disciples orally – who in their turn passed it from one generation to another of adepts – the latter know more of the occult powers of nature than our philosophers of the present day.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 