“The greatest mistake of the age was to attempt a comparison of the relative merits of all the ancient religions, and scoff at the doctrines of the Kabala and other superstitions. But truth is stranger than fiction; and this world-old adage finds its application in the case in hand. The “wisdom” of the archaic ages or the “secret doctrine” embodied in the Oriental Kabala, of which, as we have said, the Rabbinical is but an abridgment, did not die out with the Philaletheans of the last Eclectic school. The Gnosis lingers still on earth, and its votaries are many, albeit unknown. Such secret brotherhoods have been mentioned before Mackensie’s time, by more than one great author. If they have been regarded as mere fictions of the novelist, that fact has only helped the “brother-adepts” to keep their incognito the more easily.
We have personally known several of them who, to their great merriment, had had the story of their lodges, the communities in which they lived, and the wondrous powers which they had exercised for many long years, laughed at, and denied by unsuspecting skeptics to their very faces. Some of these brothers belong to the small groups of “travelers”. Until the close of the happy Louis-Philippian reign, they were pompously termed by the Parisian garcon and trader, the nobles étrangers, and as innocently believed to be “Boyards”, Valachian “Gospodars”, Indian “Nabobs”, and Hungarian “Margraves”, who had gathered at the capital of the civilized world to admire its monuments and partake of its dissipations.
There are, however, some insane enough to connect the presence of certain of these mysterious guests in Paris with the great political events that subsequently took place. Such recall at least as very remarkable coincidences, the breaking out of the Revolution of ’93, and the earlier explosion of the South Sea Bubble, soon after the appearance of “noble foreigners”, who had convulsed all Paris for more or less longer periods, by either their mystical doctrines or “supernatural gifts.” The Saint Germains and Cagliostros of this century, having learned bitter lessons from the vilifications and persecutions of the past, pursue different tactics nowadays.
But there are numbers of these mystic brotherhoods which have naught to do with “civilized” countries; and it is in their unknown communities that are concealed the skeletons of the past. These “adepts” could, if they chose, lay claim to strange ancestry, and exhibit verifiable documents that would explain many a mysterious page in both sacred and profane history. Had the keys to the hieratic writings, and the secret of Egyptian and Hindu symbolism been known to the Christian Fathers, they would not have allowed a single monument of old to stand unmutilated. And yet, if we were well-informed – and we think we are – there was not one such in all Egypt, but the secret records of its hieroglyphics were carefully registered by the sacerdotal caste. These records still exist, though “not extant” for the general public, though perhaps the monuments may have passed away forever out of human sight.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 