Mysterious Manuscripts

Sumerian and Egyptian myths both relate how a god taught the art of writing and the knowledge of science to mankind. Thoth, the Egyptian God of Wisdom was most likely derived from even earlier Sumerian sources. Thoth was the god who supposedly sent a flood to punish humankind for wickedness.

Three accounts of an ancient store of wisdom hidden in pillars which may reflect a common tradition based on Thoth:
1.) A Hebrew tradition states that Enoch (the father of Methuselah) erected several columns before the flood and that a bronze one, which held a depository of the great philosophical and religious truths unknown to the world at large, survived.
2.) A third century AD Neoplatonic work, Corpus Hermeticum, tells how an Egyptian priest Manetho discovered the secrets of ancient rites that had been hidden in pillars, buried in a deep vault before the Deluge. (The Greeks equated their god Hermes with Thoth.)
3.) The "old ritual" of Freemasonry relates that the two great pillars placed in front of the Temple of Solomon had been hollow. Inside them had been stored the "ancient records" and the "valuable writings" pertaining to the past of the Jewish people.

The documents below are ascribed to esoteric traditions of revealed secrets of the ancients. Some are authentic, others forgeries, and still others inspired by "trance writing". All have provided considerable grist for speculation about the true identities and real intentions of their authors.

"The more one studies the best of these mystical sermons, casting aside all prejudices, and trying to feel and think with the writers, the more one is conscious of approaching the threshold of what my well be believed to have been the true adytum of the best in the mystery traditions of antiquity. Innumerable are the hints of the greatness and immensities lying beyond that threshold - among precious things the vision of the key to Egypt's wisdom..."

- G. R. S. Meade

Do these works represent a revealed wisdom for an initiated elite, or are they products of self-delusion with no factual basis in reality? You be the judge.