The wretched Race an End of woes would find.
And yet be bold, O Man, Divine thou art,
And of the Gods Celestial Essence Part.
Nor sacred Nature is from thee conceal’d,
But to thy Race her mystick Rules reveal’d.
These if to know thou happily attain,
Soon shalt thou perfect be in all that I ordain.
Thy wounded Soul to Health thou shalt restore,
And free from ev’ry Pain she felt before.
Abstain, I warn, from Meats unclean and foul,
So keep thy Body pure, so free thy Soul;
So rightly judge; thy Reason, so maintain;
Reason which Heav’n did for thy Guide ordain,
Let that best Reason ever hold the Rein.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
It was all unraveling, but it all felt so wrong all of a sudden. Passages from the text swirled over and over in my mind, and I found myself repeating snippets from S’s account.
The One uses him as a puppet, a vessel, but not an equal. The One speaks in the old language.
And a memory, a thought, asomething, pushed to the surface, as though long buried.
“So be it,” whispered an ancient voice, as deep as the earth.
With every moment, I became more aware of the thread of Magic tightening around me, as if just waiting for me to work it all out. It was that same feeling I felt when I was around Dani, that pull of deep, deep water.
Was it dragging me under, too?
I still had so many more questions, and I needed more from S than what he could give me. So I went back to the Dawn Underground.
Once again, I ended up on the author’s page. I hovered over the link on the Order of Autumn.
A pagan mystery school of the Hellenistic period. Thought by some to be the original authors of the Book of Autumn.
A mystery school with strong political leanings that had to scatter and hide after their headquarters were burned. There was an entire section of the forum devoted to them, folders full of old newspaper clippings and from old scholarly journals. In his bookAlchemical Foundations for the Digital Age, Elphabius Hobbs included a brutal recollection of their beheadings in the streets, of the ditches running red from their blood.
Then there was this essay from a philosophy textbook.
There is not much written about them. What we do have are fragments referenced in the works of later scholars, specifically in reference to “autumnus,” while having no connection to nature or the seasons. In Iamblichus’s textOn the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians,there is reference to the “… virtus dei autumnus.”* The context of the passage discusses how people “marveled at their capacity for silence.” The fragment is believed to be one of the most definitive references to the group, though symbols of them are decidedly more frequent, referenced by the number 191. The findings have given rise to the theory that the Order of Autumn were Pythagoreans who didn’t disband as previously thought after the attack (it is unknown if Pythagoras survived the attack on his followers; some suggest he fled to Metapontum), but instead continued on in secret throughout the ages, their thoughts and beliefs evolving as the world did. It is believed they worshipped numbers as Pythagoras did, that they believed God himself was the number of numbers. Aristotle is said to have referenced the group in his two-book treatise on the Pythagoreans, though unfortunately those writings are lost to us.†
Later, in an interview by the same author—
“If the Book of Autumn does in fact exist—and I’m not saying it does—that would make it perhaps one of the only surviving and legitimate accounts of the followers of Pythagoras or his teachings, as Pythagoras didn’t write any of his teachings down because they were meant to be kept secret. It would be quite the discovery, an accounting of Pythagoras, one of the most controversial figures in history, a man whose legacy has ballooned through history to one of mythic proportions. The teachings are nearly impossible to separate from Platonic philosophy, for Plato was much influenced by the Pythagoreans, as evidenced in his dialoguesPhaedoandTimaeus, which are decidedly of Pythagorean philosophy. The only teaching we know for certain belongs to Pythagoras was on the belief of the immortality of the soul, and of a soul’s transmigration to a new body upon the death of the old.”
Apparently, there was even a resurgence in 1993. The headline was ANCIENTGREEKMYSTERYSCHOOLPROVOKESINTRIGUE, OBSESSION.
