Fragmentary drafts for the first, second, fifth, seventh, eighth, and tenth images

REINECKE: One should not want to set oneself up as the guide of the future. It is our business to enjoy the fruits that humanity's past endeavors have provided us with for the present. Things have always gone badly for those who, in secret brotherhoods of the mind, wanted to guide the destiny of humanity and bring the chosen few to special initiation. I have learned from many older writings about the enticements that such brotherhoods offered to people who were plagued by curiosity. They were accepted and given low degrees, in which they were led to believe that only in higher degrees could they grasp the meaning of all the strange formulas that they had received in the lower degrees as worthless symbolic nonsense. In the higher degrees, the deceived then learned that nothing of value had been handed down to them, and in the highest degrees, they finally realized that the spiritual leaders themselves knew nothing and were either deceiving themselves or others. It seems to me that I could become a strange benefactor of humanity through some of the things I know, by revealing the nature of the confreres, which is a mixture of folly and deception.