Magicians were the first attendants our Saviour met withal in this world, and the only philosophers who acknowledged Him in the flesh before that He … - Thomas Vaughan

Now God defend: what will become of me? I have neither consulted the stars nor their urinals, the Almanacks. A fine fellow to neglect the prophets who are read in England every day. They shall pardon me for this oversight. There is a mystery in their profession they have not so much as heard of... a new heaven fancied on the old earth. Here the twelve apostles have surprised the zodiac and all the saints are ranged on their North and South sides. It were a pretty vanity to preach when St Paul is ascendant, and would not a papist smile to have his pope elected under St Peter? Reader, if I studied these things I would think myself worse employed than the Roman Chaucer was in his Troilus (To the reader)

Great is their number who perhaps had attained to perfection, had they not already thought themselves perfect.

The long confusion of Eugenius Philalethes — otherwise Thomas Vaughan — with the anonymous cosmopolite adept, Eirenaeus Philalethes, who is said to have accomplished the Magnum Opus at the age of twenty-two, and to have subsequently wandered over a large portion of the habitable globe, performing astounding transmutations under various names and disguises, has cast so much doubt upon the history and identity of the Welsh initiate, that it will be best to present the reader with certain verbatim citations from the chief authority concerning him, which is the Athena of Anthony k Wood.