The metaphysics of the Western world was not born in a classroom, it was born in texts attributed to a man who, in all likelihood, never existed. Hermes Trismegistus gave his name to Hermetic Philosophy, and philologists hasten to inform us, in the manner of those who always spoil the party, that the Hermetic texts were written in Hellenistic Egypt and not at the dawn of the world. They are right, and it changes nothing. An idea does not become wiser because it is old, nor cheaper because it is recent, and whoever has read the first volume already knows how dearly we pay for the worship of the date.

From there begins the familiar relay race, the one so beloved by screenwriters and conspiracy theorists. Hermeticism hands the baton to the Templars, the Templars to the Rosicrucians, the Rosicrucians to the Freemasons, and the list goes on with emblems, degrees, and oaths of silence, as if it were some secret adventure script that someone must eventually decode in a cave. The image is flattering to those who tell it, and it is half true, because what was passed from hand to hand was not always knowledge, it was often the safekeeping of knowledge, the case together with the ritual of its handing down, and the two are not the same thing. A case can travel whole centuries empty, without anyone noticing, so long as it is well made.

For a time, however, the exclusivity was real. Knowledge lay in their hands because there was nowhere else for it to lie. The interesting part happens in the seventeenth century, when a group of natural philosophers in England begins meeting in what they themselves called the Invisible College, a forerunner of the Royal Society, and a few years later Paris acquires its own Academy of Sciences. That is exactly where the course of science outside the bosom of metaphysics begins, and note the detail that the school narrative diligently keeps silent about, that these men were not enemies of esotericism, they were its children. Robert Boyle, the father of chemistry, worked with passion on the transmutation of metals. Newton left behind more pages of alchemy and theology than of physics, and when his papers went up for auction in the twentieth century, the economist Keynes bought them, read them, and wrote the phrase that was destined to embarrass generations of school textbooks, that Newton was not the first man of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians. Science did not invade metaphysics from outside. It came out from within it, still wearing its mother’s clothes.

The word itself confesses it. Metaphysics means where Physics has not yet arrived, and this is not diminishing for either of the two. One opens the path by hand, the other comes from behind, clears it, widens it, paves it. Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest, proposed the idea of a primeval atom from which the universe began, and Fred Hoyle mocked him publicly, calling it “mere theology.” Today the same idea is taught in high school as the Big Bang. The metaphysical proposition of one generation becomes the schoolbook of the next, and the reverse has never happened.

The question, then, is not why science advanced. It is why the guardians stopped running. Every time Physics conquered ground, the lodges had two choices, to move further ahead or to stay guarding a plot of land that had already been built upon by others. They chose, as a rule, the second. They kept the symbols after the meaning had migrated, and continued devoutly performing initiations into truths that had meanwhile become chapters of biology. The relay race did not stop because the road ended. It stopped because the runner preferred to pose, holding the baton high, for the photographs.

So we arrive at today, where Metaphysics no longer has any official body. No lodge, no brotherhood, no university department issues a certificate. It sounds like bankruptcy and is exactly the opposite, because the last runner did not throw the baton to the ground in resignation. He left it open to whoever can pick it up. The criterion ceased to be membership and became ability, the ability to communicate with the higher consciousness and to discern the lawfulness of creation, that consistency which runs through all things and makes no exceptions for anyone’s sake, not even for the sake of those who still wear the apron and the degree.

Metaphysics, moreover, was not left alone in the dark. Science today stands at borders that it itself admits it cannot cross. Ninety-five percent of the universe is called dark matter and dark energy, meaning it is called dark because we have no idea what it is. The “hard problem” of consciousness, as the philosopher Chalmers named it, remains untouched, since no description of neural activity explains why this activity is accompanied by experience and does not simply happen in the dark, like a clock ticking with no one to hear it. The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is still there, patient and troublesome. Physics has reached the edge of its own map and faces the same ocean that Hermeticism faced two thousand years ago. It simply now has better instruments to measure how deep it is, without that meaning it can touch bottom.

We find ourselves, probably, at the most critical turning point in the history of the human spirit, and not for the reasons usually put forward. For the first time, knowledge is guarded by no one, costs no oath, requires no recommendation from any great teacher. The danger has changed nature, it is no longer secrecy, it is noise. Never has so much esoteric material circulated, and never has so little real esotericism been practiced. The lodges have been replaced by platforms, the initiates by recommendation algorithms, and the degree of initiation is now measured in saved videos that no one ever watches again.

Whatever follows, then, is not going to be written by any institution. It will be written by people who will not even call it initiation, people who in their silence let the Divine Spark finally take the reins and then return to their everyday lives without necklaces and without titles to display to anyone. There will be no ceremony. There will be no witness. There will be no certification. There will be only the difference between someone who truly saw and someone who merely read that someone else saw.

This second volume starts here, without an heir and without a successor scheme, exactly as befits a treatise that does not aspire to found anything. The baton is on the ground, in front of you, and no one is going to call you to pick it up.