The Secret Teachings of All Ages · 213 of 236

The Lost Libraries of Alexandria

Prior to the Christian Era seven hundred thousand of the most valuable books, written upon parchment, papyrus, vellum, and wax, and also tablets of stone, terra cotta, and wood, were gathered from all parts of the ancient world and housed in Alexandria, in buildings specially prepared for the purpose. This magnificent repository of knowledge was destroyed by a series of three fires. The parts that escaped the conflagration lighted by Cæsar to destroy the fleet in the harbor were destroyed about A.D. 389 by the Christians in obedience to the edict of Theodosius, who had ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, a building sacred to Serapis in which the volumes were kept. This conflagration is supposed to have destroyed the library that Marcus Antonius had presented to Cleopatra to compensate in part for that burned in the fire of the year 51.

Insight

The ‘seven hundred thousand books’ figure for the Library of Alexandria comes from late antique sources (Aulus Gellius, John Tzetzes) and is almost certainly inflated — modern estimates put the holdings at perhaps 40,000-400,000 scrolls at peak. The destruction was not a single event but a long erosion: the fire during Caesar’s Alexandrian War in 48 BCE damaged but did not destroy the main library; the burning under Aurelian in 273 CE took out the Mouseion quarter; the destruction of the Serapeum in 391 CE under Theophilus ended the daughter library; the Arab conquest of 642 CE may have destroyed whatever remained of the smaller collections. The Blavatsky quotation Hall uses, that the truly esoteric works were withdrawn before the destructions, is a Theosophical interpretation that mirrors what was actually said in late-antique sources about the Hermetic books being preserved in Egyptian temples.

Concerning this, H. P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled, has written: “They [the Rabbis of Palestine and the wise men] say that not all the rolls and manuscripts, reported in history to have been burned by Cæsar, by the Christian mob, in 389, and by the Arab General Amru, perished as it is commonly believed; and the story they tell is the following: At the time of the contest for the throne, in 51 B. C., between Cleopatra and her brother Dionysius Ptolemy, the Bruckion, which contained over seven hundred thousand rolls all bound in wood and fire-proof parchment, was undergoing repairs and a great portion of the original manuscripts, considered among the most precious, and which were not duplicated, were stored away in the house of one of the librarians. * * *Several hours passed between the burning of the fleet, set on fire by Cæsar’s order, and the moment when the first buildings situated near the harbor caught fire in their turn; and * * * the librarians, aided by several hundred slaves attached to the museum, succeeded in saving the most precious of the rolls.” In all probability, the books which were saved lie buried either in Egypt or in India, and until they are discovered the modern world must remain in ignorance concerning many great philosophical and mystical truths. The ancient world more clearly understood these missing links—the continuity of the pagan Mysteries in Christianity.

In his article on the Cross and Crucifixion in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Thomas Macall Fallow casts much light on the antiquity of this ideograph. “The use of the cross as a religious symbol in pre-Christian times, and among non-Christian peoples, may