While today, we might say that such awful efforts were in vain. For hundreds of years, multitudes of Christians learned from the bitter school of experience, that the Roman Government and their new handmaidens served themselves at the expense of the average Christian as a lot are still doing.

AMONG the Jews, there sprang up a teaching known as "Cabbalah." Cabbalists teach that Moses received a sacred and secret mystical interpretation of the law which he committed to Joshua, and he in turn to the Seventy Elders, who in their turn passed it on down through a select circle of Jews from generation to generation. Like the Gnostics they demanded that their followers were thoughtful and compassionate in both word and deed.

Cabbalist students were required to study a wide range of teachings and thus became known as cultured thinkers in their day. Many became doctors who taught hygienic surgery, and positive thinking. They were so popular that the Spanish Inquisition directed quite a bit of energy toward hunting them down and murdering them.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, in the early part of the seventeenth century wrote a treatise on their principles, entitled, "De Occulta Philosophia," which argued for a syncretic vision of magic whereby the natural world combined with the celestial and the divine, a reprint of which it was my pleasure to see not long since; followed by "Declamatio de nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus" (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex) which pronounced the theological and moral superiority of women. Needless to say, Cornelius Agrippa's "feminist" philosophy did not make him popular with the Roman Catholic Church.

This work led to his being denounced by the Franciscan prior Jean Catilinet as a "heretic." The story of his career reads like romance for fascination and his heroic courage.

As we witness women suffer for the sake of Suffrage throughout the world, is it not time to recognize our sisters as equal partners in our quest to build a better world? Let those men of courage who recognize the noble truth, stand with Pankhurst in England, and Anthony in America?

The history of psychic healing is replete with instances of healing wrought through the potent power of belief. The little town of Lourdes in southern France leaped into world-wide notoriety a half a century ago through the cures wrought there by the waters that flow from a grotto, once sacred to the Celts, near the place. The renewal of sacred esteem for these waters occured through the fabled visit of the Virgin.

Soon the spring, whose healing reputation had once been denigrated as "Pagan superstition" brought cures which, while they were fully certified as to their occurrence and extraordinary character by France's most acute and learned scientists and physicians, none of whom were glad to make their findings, still filled the world with utter amazement.

While history has often failed to document the ancients, one finds their trace in carved figures such as the Venus of Willendorf and carves runes still undeciphered. Even the more recent instances of St. Patrick's cures, of St. Bernard's, of those wrought by means of Catholic relics, many of which are far from legendary in their character have been forgotten, though recipients were grateful in their time. Suffice it to say that all of them were wrought through mental healing.

Even as the ancient days witnessed the ebb and flow of psychic healing, so likewise have our modern times. Amulets and fetiches are used in all parts of the world, along with crystals and carvings of all types, mind you;