traces its roots back to Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar's time. Now, if you remember, what we're dealing with here is nothing more than spiritualism that began in the days of Nimrod, and history tells us that when the children of Israel were taken captive into Babylon for the 70 years, that many of them chose to remain in Babylon when the call came for them to leave Babylon, and that they incorporated into their lifestyle the religion of Babel, the religion of Babylon. And little by little, when they migrated back to Israel through time or visited former relatives, this religion of Babylon migrated into the Jewish economy, and it became known as Kabbalism. And Kabbalism, however you want to pronounce it, primarily found its strength in taking the spiritual exercises from the religion of Babylon and applying them to the Old Testament, the holy book of the Jews, and they would take the passages of the Old Testament and spiritualize them in the technique that was used by the religion of Babel. Now, Albert Pike says that he traces masonry back to this Kabbalism, but he also traces it back to the Gnostics, and the Gnostics was a religious sect that also sprung up in the Palestine, in the Jewish part of the world, during the New Testament time period, a little bit before, a little bit after. And Gnosticism did the same thing that Kabbalism did, except that it included in its spiritualizing of the Bible, not simply the Old Testament, but the New Testament. It was the more modern manifestation of this same spiritual technique that comes right out of Nimrod's religion, and it applied it to the Bible, where you, as we see in New Ageism today, where you make Jesus nothing more than a holy man, a guru for a certain millennium of time. This is the spiritual technique that was applied by the Gnostics to the New Testament. Now, as Albert Pike traces his religion all the way back to Nimrod, we pick this story up in the time of the Gnostics, and in his book on page 248, he says the Gnostics derived their leading doctrines and ideas from Plato and Philo, the Zen Avesta and the Kabbalah, and the sacred books of India and Egypt, and thus introduced into the bosom of Christianity the cosmological and theosophical speculations which had formed the larger portion of the ancient religions of the world.