The Secret Work of the Hermetic Philosophy

3They labour to assault the obscure principles of this most hidden science with arguments piled in heaps, and to overturn its concealed foundations with engines brought against them. Yet those foundations become known only to people experienced in and familiar with so lofty a philosophy, and remain hidden from outsiders. These sharp-eyed censors fail to notice that, while they maliciously pull apart another’s reputation, they freely expose their own. Let them examine themselves: do they understand what they attack? What author of acknowledged standing has published the elements of the secret science, the cycles of its operations, and finally its entire process? What Oedipus has faithfully explained its figures and the writers’ tangled riddles to them? Under what auspices, with what Sibyl as guide, have they been led into the sanctuary of the sacred science? How, at last, has everything about it been disclosed so fully that nothing remains hidden? I suspect that they can answer only by confessing either that they have penetrated everything through the exquisite sharpness of their own intelligence, or that some passing mountebank has instructed—or rather misled—them, winning their trust behind the borrowed mask of a philosopher.