Caduceus

The Greek poets and mythologists took the idea of the Caduceus of Mercury from the Egyptians. The Caduceus is found as two serpents twisted round a rod, on Egyptian monuments built before Osiris. The Greeks altered this. We find it again in the hands of ./Esculapius assuming a different form to the wand of ]\Iercurius or Hermes. It is a cosmic, sidereal or astronomical, as well as a spiritual and even physiological symbol, its significance changing with its application. ^Metaphysically, the Caduceus represents the fall of primeval and primordial matter into gross terrestrial matter, the one Reality becoming Illusion. (See Sect. Doct. I. 550.) Astronomically, the head and tail represent the points of the ecliptic where the planets and even the sun and moon meet in close embrace. Physiologically, it is the symbol of the restoration of the equilibrium lost between Life, as a unit, and the currents of life performing various functions in the human body. Caesar. A far-famed astrologer and "professor of magic", i.e., an Occultist, during the reign of Henry IV. of France. "He was reputed to have been strangled by the devil in 1611," as Brother Kenneth Mackenzie tells us. Cagliostro. .1 fdnious Adept, whose real iiaiiie is claimed (by liis enemies) to have been Joseph Balsanio. lie was a native of Palermo, and studied under some mysterious foreifjner of whom little has bt-eii ascertained. His accepted history is too well known to need repetition, and his real iiistory has never been told. Ilis fate was that of every human being who proves that he knows more than do his fellow-creatures; he was "stoned to death'' by per.secutions, lies, and infamous accusations, and yet he was the friend and adviser of the highest and mightiest of every land he visited. He was finally tried and .sentenced in Rome as a iieretic, and was said to have died during his confinement in a State prison. (See "^lesmer".) Yet his end was not utterly undeserved, as he had been untrue to his vows in some