The Thirteenth Stone (Second Edition) by Reginald Lewis

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History tells us that this transition in Britain was remarkably quick and easy. And let us also remember that even Christianity must be divided in two. We have first of all the primitive or gnostic version, which much later became what we might term Romanized Paulism. If we confuse what the Church believes today with what was taught by the first Christians (messianists) to reach Rome, we have little hope of understanding its history at all. Nearly fifty years after the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the name by which the Qumran Christians were known is still a matter for debate among scholars.

It is also sometimes the net cast for the fish that brings mercurial wisdom. It was in fact a device from which hung a word or series of musical harmonies which men claimed they could use to call up the dead, or 24 THE THIRTEENTH STONE enter a realm where time present, past and future are one — a mechanism by which it might be possible to see events to come. It is most commonly found in Hebrew cabalistic literature, in which it represents the microcosm and macrocosm. It is both a man and the universe — the universe without and within.

During the Victorian era it was for a time a fad to investigate what was termed 'the numerics of Scripture', which apparently was evidence of the divine inspiration of these writings. But how does it work? The ancient sacred alphabets of the magi did not use separate symbols for numbers and letters.