Search

This group of esotericists has its origins not in Avignon but in Berlin, probably in 1778. Its first members were Prince Henry of Prussia (the brother of king Frederick the Great), Jacques Pernety (older brother of → Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety), and

Pernety, Dom Antoine-Joseph, * 13 Feb 1716 (Roanne), † 16 Jan 1796 (Paris) Little is known about Pernety's early life. In 1732 he entered the Benedictine Order, and from 1746 onwards he lived in the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. His first publication, a translation of a German book on mathematics, appeared in 1743. It was followed shortly after by some pious treatises, including a Manuel bénédictin (1755, containing a.o. a commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict), and a Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, de sculpture et de gravure (Portable Dictionary of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts; 1757). His interests began to shift after he had found in the library of his monastery a work on → alchemy: the Histoire de la philosophie hermétique, published in 1742 by Abbot Lenglet-Dufresnoy, which inspired him to write his two most famous works, Fables égyptiennes et grecques dévoilées et réduites au même principe (Egyptian and Greek Fables Unveiled and Reduced …

The Essenes were a distinct group of Jews which, until the 20th century, was known only from a few descriptions in Greek and Latin texts. They are described by Philo in Hypothetica (11.1-18) and Every Good Man Is Free (12.75-13.91). Josephus writes of the Essenes in passages of several of his books. The most detailed description is found in The Jewish War (2.119-161). A shorter passage on them is included in Jewish Antiquities (18.18-22). Pliny the Elder wrote briefly about the Essenes in his Natural History (5.73). Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947, the group associated with the scrolls was for the next five decades generally assumed to be the Essene community described by these Greek and Roman authors. This assumption has again been increasingly questioned during the 1990s (Boccaccini 1998). Philo and Josephus describe the Essenes as an all-…