A curious and interesting feature about these communities is the presence of men and women of a physical type unknown to us outside. They are the survival of vanished races. For in such Communities are to be found those “Adepts” around whose occasional active participation in national crises has grown so much mystery, and those others who were associated with the inception of the Theosophical movement and whose connection with it has been a matter of persistent controversy. There were more than one of these Supermen in London and Paris during the late war!

The Communities live under conditions difficult perhaps to accept as a mere statement. Some it would be rash to tell to an incredulous public. They may be said, in short, to have solved in perfection the problems of age, health, food, education, and procreation. As I have written elsewhere, Initiates who have reached the Third Stage are not subject to any reincarnation. When the time comes for the Highest Initiates to sever connection with the physical world, the physical body has long been etherialized and transmutation is completed. Initiates of the First and Second Orders are not independent of death. Their lives may be prolonged to an incredible age, but if they are, for some reason, unwilling to undergo the ordeal which precedes the Third Stage, they abandon the body at a chosen moment and are immediately reincarnated under carefully controlled conditions favourable for their object. But the First and Second Stages must be repeated.

Marriage within these Communities, or at any rate physical union, is recognized. It is no bar to the earlier Initiations, which are open to both men and women. The women may, and do, bear children. Here, however, enters a distinction from the customs of the outer world. The mere indulgence of an animal instinct has no place in