Now Christmas is even closer and you may be counting the dollar bills left in your rapidly thinning wallet to see if you use cash or plastic to buy gas. Don’t use all your dollar bills. Take one home and examine it with care. It’s full of secrets. Some of them are here. Others you can find by contemplation along the lines indicated.

There is an inspired, possibly divinely inspired set of writings that have brought civilization, culture, activity of thought, and receptiveness to humane feeling whenever and wherever they have surfaced throughout history.

This set of writings has been difficult to find recently except in scholarly treatises with more footnotes than main content. And the footnotes are usually by people who have little idea of what they are dealing with. I speak of the set of writings known as the Hermetica, since the Greeks gave them that name in the 2^nd century C.E.

In the past few decades the orthodox views of ancient history have been presented with newly discovered, newly translated, or newly emphasized data that just don’t fit it with the tidy schemes and time lines of the academic world.

Since to many academics changing their minds is the equivalent of dying, the new data has been ignored or sneered at because the people who noticed what the experts hadn’t noticed don’t have degrees in the disciplines involved. That always happens. When Fulton built his steam ship the experts stood on the bank shouting in chorus, "It’ll never start." When it took off down stream they ran down the bank shouting, "It’ll never stop."