Description

Count Stefan Colonna Walewski's outer life was that of a well-known collector and dealer in oriental art and antiquities and in anthropological curios. His shop, Esoterica, was not only a famous New York connoisseur's landmark but the gateway to another world, in which magic, demons and talismans were as real as subways and neon signs. The Count firmly believed that he attracted these strange objects to him by a sort of higher magnetism of which he knew the workings; and his unrivalled collection seemed to prove his point.

Few knew, however, that behind Count Walewski's constant kindnesses to his fellow man and his expert knowledge -- the two main facets of his external life -- there lay an intense inner life and search for life's most hidden secrets. Few knew that before the 1920s, in the Caucasus mountains (between the Black and Caspian seas, on the border between Turkey and Russia) he had been vouchsafed some of those secrets by two initiates of a rarely encountered secret society, which combined indigenous doctrines and those of yoga with those stemming from a mystical tradition of ancient Zoroastrianism. Walewski never saw his teachers again, and he himself assumed no personal credit for their teachings, which were merely handed on to him under oath not to reveal the source. Their instructions, received in Persian and Russian, were transcribed in a manuscript notebook from his own notes by the Count, when he later arrived in America, coming first with a Polish diplomatic commission. The English of the transcription is halting and the orthography often incorrect as Count Walewski possessed but an imperfect knowledge of English at that time.

However, we have considered it best to give the reader the manuscript in facsimile rather than any 'improvement' on it, which will destroy or at least vitiate its unique character. There was all the more reason so to present the work when, shortly after releasing it for publication and disposing of the manuscript to a private collector, Count Walewski passed on, leaving no one who could possibly answer all the enigmas connected with the system of development discussed in it. Neither the publisher or editor can assume any responsibility for the views hereinafter expressed nor necessarily endorse them. They are presented solely as shedding light on a little known island of ancient views preserved in the border regions between East and West and as a documentary contribution to a special field of religio-magical manuscript literature.