And though to many the young man laboring over ancient tomes might have seemed just one more eccentric who passed daily through the library’s great doors, the book he was preparing would become one of the most unusual and accomplished studies of esoteric lore and literature in modern history. Rather, the amateur scholar and sometime banking clerk was on a mission: to save the ancient wisdom teachings from obscurity in a world that he believed was going ethically illiterate. It was the mid-1920s, the era of big money, bootlegged gin, and the Charleston-pleasures for which the precocious twenty-five-year-old cared little. Day by day he sat silently, combing through curious volumes with clockwork precision. Each day he entered the cavernous reading room of the New York Public Library and requested books that few others did: old works of esoteric lore, Hebrew Kabala, Hellenic mythology, Pythagorean mathematics, papyrus transcriptions, and the like. Reference librarians had gotten accustomed to the hulking young man with the penetrating eyes and unstylishly long hair. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery. I opened it with apathy the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa.
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May 2023
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