Essenes. A hellenized word, from the Hebrew Asa, a “healer”. A mysteri — Essenes

"The Essenes, who are worth discussing a little because of the connections or links that, in the minds of some, connect them to modern Freemasonry, were already famous as an institution almost two centuries before the spread of Christianity. As Josephus states, the Essenes were direct and legitimate children of the Jewish religion and probably the most select part of Phariseeism, because they did not limit themselves to the dry interpretation of the scriptures, but derived the rules of life from them, so that they were not a school, but an institution intended primarily to bring men together, moralizing them through work."

"They did not marry, but adopted the children of others, whom they brought up in the institutions of their sect. They despised riches, and had all things in common, and never changed their clothes till they were entirely worn out."

"(H.P.) Dunlap (in SOD: The Son Of The Man, 1861), whose personal researches seem to have been quite successful... traces the Essenes, Nazarenes, Dositheans, and some other sects as having all existed before Christ: "They rejected pleasures, despised riches, loved one another, and more than other sects, neglected wedlock, deeming the conquest of the passions to be virtuous,"* he says. These are all virtues preached by Jesus; and if we are to take the gospels as a standard of truth, Christ was a metempsychosist "or re-incarnationist" — again like these same Essenes, whom we see were Pythagoreans in all their doctrine and habits... In his discourses and sermons, Jesus always spoke in parables and used metaphors with his audience. This habit was again that of the Essenians and the Nazarenes; the Galileans who dwelt in cities and villages were never known to use such allegorical language."

"It is evident that Philos Therapeutes are a branch of the Essenes. Their name indicates it — Essaioc, Asaya, physician. Hence, the contradictions, forgeries, and other desperate expedients to reconcile the prophecies of the Jewish canon with the Galilean nativity and god-ship... Both Jesus and St. John the Baptist preached the end of the Age; which proves their knowledge of the secret computation of the priests and kabalists, who with the chiefs of the Essene communities alone had the secret of the duration of the cycles. The latter were kabalists and theurgists... they had their mystic books, and predicted future events..."

"I told her in detail how [...] I had been welcomed by the Essenes, mostly Israelites, who, through music and ancient Hebrew songs, had grown plants in half an hour."

"They are trained in piety, holiness, justice, domestic and civil conduct, knowledge of what is truly good, or evil, or indifferent, and how to choose what they should and avoid the opposite, taking for their defining standards these three: love of God, love of virtue, love of men."