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Throughout history, man's search for knowledge has revealed strange truths. The arcane wisdom developed in ancient Mediterranean civilizations has been preserved and held sacred over centuries; but in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, these ideas re-emerged with extraordinary power, and have fascinated us ever since. This book explores the allure and history of esoteric religious beliefs, and investigates how these societies have come to gain a powerful hold upon the popular imagination: the Knights Templar, the quest for the Holy Grail, the Hermetic Philosophers, Rosicrucians, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as the present-day secrets of the Freemasons, and darker groups such as the KKK, P2, and the Mafia. A brilliant, balanced history of our desire for secret knowledge and of the societies that preserve it.
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