Category: Isis Unveiled, Volume II: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"It will not be found without interest to see what Mr. John Yarker, Jr., has to say on some modern secret societies among the Orientals. "The nearest resemblance to the Brahmanical Mysteries, is probably found in the very ancient 'Paths' of the Dervishes, which are usually governed by twelve officers, the oldest ‘Court’ superintending the [...]

“The Druzes remain, even more than the Jews, a peculiar people”, says Colonel Churchill, one of the few fair and strictly impartial writers. "They marry within their own race; they are rarely, if ever converted; they adhere tenaciously to their traditions, and they baffle all efforts to discover their cherished secrets. The bad name of [...]

(continued) ““There is no infidelity, idolatry, or other real bad feature in the system. They have the relics of what was once a grand form of nature worship, which has been contracted under a despotism into a secret order, hidden from the light of day, and exposed only in the smoky glare of a few [...]

“Professor Rawson, with the true devotion of a man of science, noted down every important discovery he made in the Palestinian libraries, and every precious fact orally communicated to him by the mystics he encountered, and some day they will see the light. He has most obligingly sent us the following communication, which, as the [...]

“The morality of the Druzes is strict and uncompromising. Nothing can tempt one of these Lebanon Unitarians to go astray from what he is taught to consider his duty. Their ritual being unknown to outsiders, their would-be historians have hitherto denied them one. Their “Thursday meetings” are open to all, but no interloper has ever [...]

“They have seven great commandments which are imparted equally to all the uninitiated; and yet, even these well-known articles of faith have been so mixed up in the accounts of outside writers, that, in one of the best Cyclopaedias of America (Appleton’s), they are garbled after the fashion that may be seen in the comparative [...]

“That their religion exhibits traces of Magianism and Gnosticism is natural, as the whole of the Ophite esoteric philosophy is at the bottom of it. But the characteristic dogma of the Druzes is the absolute unity of God. He is the essence of life, and although incomprehensible and invisible, is to be known through occasional [...]

“Whoever desires to assure himself that there now exists a religion which has baffled, for centuries, the impudent inquisitiveness of missionaries, and the persevering inquiry of science, let him violate, if he can, the seclusion of the Syrian Druzes. He will find them numbering over 80,000 warriors, scattered from the plain east of Damascus to [...]

“It must not be inferred, on that account, that such a mysterious brotherhood is but a fiction, not even a name, though it remains unknown to this day. Whether its affiliates are called by an Egyptian, Hindu, or Persian name, it matters not. Persons belonging to one of these sub-brotherhoods have been met by trustworthy, [...]

“The Koinobi lived in Egypt, where Jesus passed his early youth. They were usually confounded with the Therapeutae, who were a branch of this widely spread society. Such is the opinion of Godfrey Higgins and De Rebold. After the downfall of the principal sanctuaries, which had already begun in the days of Plato, the many [...]