Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. IN the following pages I have sought to satisfy a request, often made to me, to give a short but comprehensive view of the whole fabric of the Arcane mysteries, and affinity with the Masonic System; and I here take the opportunity of recording my protest against the sceptical tendencies of the present generation of the Moderns who are Masons, and against the efforts that are made, in season and out of season, to underrate the indubitable antiquity of the Masonic ceremonies. These efforts, which tend to lower the prestige of our ancient Craft, are not altogether without good results, as they have led to a more careful examination of our Masonic legends and of ancient documents, and I have therefore added, to a general History of the Arcane Schools, a view, sufficiently explicit, of the ancient rites of the Masons, leaving the intelligent Freemason of our day to trace the relative bearing of these. Those who obstinately deny the existence of anything which is outside their own comprehension are fully as credulous as those who accept everything without discrimination. There are certain intellects which lack intuition and the ability to take in and assimilate abstruse truths, just as much as there are people who are colour-blind, or deaf to the more delicate notes of music; this was well known to the ancient theologians and mystics, and the reasons which they assigned for the mental incapacity will appear in the following pages.
About the Author: John Yarker (17 April 1833 - 20 March 1913) was an English Freemason, author, and occultist. He was born in Swindale, Shap, Westmorland in the north of England. He moved with his parents to Lancashire and on to Manchester in 1849. he was descended form Reinhold Yarker de Laybourne who flourished in the mid seventeenth century. He was made a freemason at the age of 21 in the Lodge of Integrity, No. 189, Manchester, on the 25 October, 1854, becoming a Master Mason at the beginning of 1855. Seven years later, in 1862, he demitted (resigned) from Freemasonry. In 1872 Yarker established the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry for England and Ireland under the authority of a Patent issued by the American Grand Master of that organization, Harry Seymour. According to Gnostic Bishop Stephan A. Hoeller, Yarker also got involved with the Ordo Templi Orientis and is attributed as the link between this organization and regular Freemasonry. According to Hoeller, Yarker was bestowed with the authority to confer degrees of the Scottish Rite as well as the Rite of Memphis-Misraim.