[Devil-Worship in France by Arthur Edward Waite]@TWC D-Link bookDevil-Worship in France CHAPTER XIII 16/32
To prove that her reputed ancestor was alive after the accepted date of Thomas Vaughan's death, she triumphantly observes that in the year 1668 he published his experiments on the preparation of Sophic Mercury and _Tractatus Tres_.
But the latter volume was a piracy, for in his preface to "Ripley Revived" the author expressly laments that two of its three treatises had passed out of his hands, and he feared lest they should get into print, because they were imperfect works preceding the period of solid knowledge which produced the "Open Entrance." Again, so little was he consulted over the appearance of the "Sophic Mercury" that the printer represents it as the work of an American philosopher, whence it has been fathered upon George Starkey. Eirenaeus Philalethes was undoubtedly a great traveller and he visited America, but there is no ground for supposing that he was ever in Italy, and that either he or Thomas Vaughan edited the works of Socinus is an ignorant fiction, for which even Miss Vaughan can find no better warrant than the evasive place of publication which figures on the title-page of the _Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum_, namely, Eirenaeopolis.
In like manner she erroneously credits him with the authorship of the _Medulla Alchemiae_, which is the work of Eirenaeus Philoponos Philalethes, otherwise George Starkey. These facts fully establish the fraudulent nature of Miss Vaughan's family history, by whomsoever it has been devised, and seeing that where it is possible to check it, it breaks down at every point, we need have no hesitation in rejecting the information which it provides in those cases where it cannot be brought to book.
The connection of Faustus Socinus with the Rosicrucian Fraternity, as founder, is one instance; this is merely an extension of the imposture of Abbe Lefranc in his "Veil Raised for the Curious," and it rests, like its original, on no evidence which can be traced.
Another is the Rosicrucian Imperatorship of Andreae, and yet another the initiation of Robert Fludd.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|