From the remote ages of antiquity a remarkable teaching has existed which is universal in its application and ageless in its wisdom. Fragments of it are found in Sumerian hieroglyphs and on tiles and stones dating back some eight or ten thousand years. Some of the symbols, such as for the sun, moon, air, water and other natural forces, are from an even earlier age preceding the cataclysm that ended the Pleistocene period. How many thousands of years previous to that the teaching existed is unknown.

These teachings permeated the stream of traditions to which the Hebrew people were exposed in the Babylonian prison, dating from the Gilgamesh Epics to the Zend Avesta of Zarathustra. Echoes of it were also found in the stream of traditions flowing with poetical majesty through the Old and New Testaments, dating from the ageless Enoch and the other Patriarchs, through the Prophets and on to the mysterious Essene Brotherhood, which flourished during the last two or three centuries B.C. and the first century of the Christian era at the Dead Sea in Palestine and at Lake Mareotis in Egypt.

In the buried library of the Essene Brotherhood at the Dead Sea, where the greatest number of scrolls were found, the texts of these two streams of traditions were very much interwoven. They follow each other in a strange succession: the powerful cubistic simplicity of the first juxtaposed with the majestic, expressionist poetry of the second.

In the Art of Asha, with its drama of light and darkness, the interplay of forces of good and evil, we experience the power of the Avestic tradition. In the Essene Tree of Life, with the branches of man reaching toward the Heavenly Father, and the roots of man sunk deep into the Earthly Mother, the symbolism of the Biblical Patriarchs is revealed. Both the Art of Asha and the Essene Tree of Life are reflections of the same truth: in his quest for perfection, man is always guided by the visible forces of nature and the invisible forces of the cosmos.