The Highest Symbolic Degree of True Magic

On the 28th of June, 1774, my father handed me a sealed package with the following inscription:

My son, do not open this package before the 33rd year of your age, on your birthday. I charge you to do this by the obedience you owe me. If you were to open it against my will sooner, all my good intentions for you, in handing you these papers, would be thwarted. But if you are obedient and fulfill my command, God will bless you, and my intention will be achieved.

Take this package, therefore, and lock it in the iron casket I gave you, and place inside the herbs of which I told you. Bury this casket by the great oak in the forest, not far from the church on the hill where we often rested. Bury it 3 feet deep, and check it every year to place fresh herbs known to you with the paper, so that it does not rot.

I command you this so that these papers might not fall into the hands of an unworthy person. Such a person would not understand the secrets, because he does not know the Chifre cipher/code, but it is better if that does not happen at all.

Take this gift, dear son, from me for your 22nd birthday. If I should no longer live to see the hour to wish you happiness on your 33rd birthday, then open the package and accept my blessing, conveyed then by an invisible hand.

In the year 1785, on the 28th of June, I fetched my casket, which I visited annually, opened it, and found therein, next to another sealed package, the following writing:

My son! You are now at the age of a man, and if you have been faithful to the teachings I gave you in your youth, you will be worthy of the great secrets I am about to teach you. From your youth, you have taken joy in strange and wondrous things, but you were not yet at an age ripe enough to acquaint yourself with the higher secrets of nature. I therefore had to lock my teaching deep within your inner being, and I handed you these papers so that if I were no longer living, they would instruct you.

Beside this package that you are now opening, you will find another that is sealed. Do not open it before you have first read everything that is written here. I implore you, for it would [be your ruin.]