George Robert Stow Mead (1863-1933) is a key figure in the revival and interpretation of Gnosticism and indeed the entire western esoteric tradition. He joined the Theosophical Society after graduating from Cambridge in 1884, and five years later became the private secretary of the Society's founder, H. P. Blavatsky, editing most of her published works and her magazine 'Lucifer'. He also followed his own lines of research, resulting in books such as 'Plotinus', 'Pistis Sophia' and the present work, each of them scholarly, comprehensive in scope, and eminently readable. Mead shows 'The Chaldean Oracles' to be the remains of a mystery-poem forming part of the inner initiation of a School or Order, and with painstaking scholarship he interprets the fragments into a cohesive pattern.