THE REVIVAL OF SPIRITUAL WISDOM
Although the sages predicted that their spiritual science would be lost, they also predicted that eventually it would be rediscovered. Toward this end, they wrote their sacred texts, mapped out their sacred lands, and designed their sacred monuments for posterity—for the sake of a future generation that might be more worthy to receive them.
For example, the Hermetic sages prayed: “Ye holy books, which have been written by my perishable hands, but have been anointed with the drug of imperishability by Him who is the master over all, remain ye undecaying through all the ages, and be ye unseen and undiscovered by all men who go to and fro on the plains of this land, until the time when Heaven, grown old, shall beget beings worthy of you.”7Over the course of the last three centuries, many ancient texts, sites, and monuments, which were previously lost and forgotten, have been rediscovered. For the first time in history, we now have access to ancient sacred texts from all around the world. These were once the exclusive province of the elite classes and secretive cults and are largely written in a highly symbolic code language unique to the cultures from which the texts originate. Our goal here is to crack the code of the ancient spiritual science so that the science possessed by different cultures can be compared and evaluated in the light of modern empirical science. To accomplish this we must adopt a heuristic approach.