I have always been an energetic student of psychic matters, drawn thereto by the posses sion of certain unusual gifts with which Nature has endowed me. (throughout the history of mankind there have always been a certain num ber of individuals who have kept alive the sacred fire and held the secret keys of many mysteries, and from time to time an advance in general human knowledge or in an applied art or science has revealed to the vulgar some small part of the outer mysteries that have always been known to the initiates. These disclosures are hailed as discoveries and set in their ordered place in the catalogue of human knowledge.)