Gold changed the destiny of a nation. Its accident discovery in 1848 by a moody, not-too-bright carpenter set off the most frenzied gold rush in the history of the world, and the greatest mass migration of human beings ever known. It turned California — until then a sparsely populated, largely unknown region — into a household word throughout the world.

Nothing in the human story is more striking than the persistent, passionate, profound protest of man against death. Even in the earliest time we see him daring to stand erect at the gates of the grave, disputing its verdict, refusing to let it have the last word, and making an argument on behalf of his soul.

Tarot is defined as one of a set of figured playing cards used in Italy as early as the fourteenth century; also a game played with such cards in which 22 Tarots (the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet), all being trumps, and called the “Major Arcana,” are added to a set of 56 cards of usual Italian suits called the “Minor Arcana.”

As geometers, equipped only with compasses and straight-edge, we enter the two-dimensional world of the representation of form. A link is forged between the most concrete (form and measure) and the most abstract realms of thought.

The all-seeing eye is perhaps the Renaissance’s most notable contribution to Christian iconography. This symbol’s journey extended over more than two thousand years.

Sun-worship played a prominent part in the religion of the ancients and was introduced into the mysteries, says [Bro. Albert] Mackey, not as a material idolatry, but as a means of expressing an idea of restoration to life from death, drawn from the daily reappearance in the East of the solar orb after its nightly disappearance in the West.

Alchemy is generally understood as an art whose end is the transmutation of metals such as lead into gold, by means of a substance called the Philosopher’s Stone; but even from a purely physical standpoint, this is a somewhat superficial view.