The First Letter of the Count Saint-Germain to the Prince of Sansevero
Place Unknown, January the 3rd, 1770
Your Grace is a host of sublime kindness and rare culture, and the pen is a wholly inadequate instrument for rendering the full extent of my gratitude. You must know, Your Excellency, that the days I spent in Naples have strengthened within me the awareness of just how powerful the arcane magic of our ancient masters is in the fertile soils of Vesuvius. We humble apprentices must be grateful to God Almighty for having given us the privilege of learning even a tiny fraction of those secrets, thanks to your enlightened spirit.
I shall, however, waste no further time in presenting to Your Excellency my dutiful homage, and will come straight to the point of my letter, picking up once again the thread of that conversation of ours which was interrupted so rudely by my departure. Your Grace will certainly be aware of the details of my early studies – what we have agreed to call the Septemplex Solis Rota – and it is with a soul brimming with doubt, though also with pleasant surprise, that I permit myself to present for your perusal the following facts.
The circumstances of the discovery, in the Middle Ages, of that prodigious and secret mystery of the Egyptians, precisely as your Grace described it to me, has accompanied my investigations just as the moon acts as a guiding glow in the darkness of the night. I became convinced that only an enlightened mind which was familiar with the arcane sciences – a mind such as yours – would know how to harness its power.
It was with these thoughts and this determination in mind that I embarked upon the return journey from Naples, making a detour south before going back to the cold of the northern mists and abandoning the sweetness of Campania Felix. I went to the place that Your Excellency had indicated to me and I found it to be in a very miserable condition. Nevertheless, it is certainly where the Stupor Mundi must have hidden the clues to aid in finding the Egyptian secret. Being, of course, a place designed to give shelter to an arcane science, the innermost secrets of which escape us, the function of the Sancta Maria de Monte fortress was, no doubt, not military but one of study. Yet today it is reduced to a sorry state and is used as a jail or as a shelter for goatherds.
And in actuality, it was one of these last – a rough and simple man, though one of refined intelligence – who directed me to the monastery not far from the fortress which your Grace had indicated to me, whence dwell monks who are well learned in the occult. A strange thing indeed for men of the Church, but they do in fact possess uncommon arcane knowledge.
Thus, I went to the monastery and, daring to use your name, so well known not only in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, I asked to be received by the librarian. I was welcomed by this aged man possessed of a vigilant and penetrating gaze who consented to give me the gift of his precious confidence, begging in exchange that I extend to Your Grace his most heartfelt greetings. This friar – who, for convenience, we will call Brother Anfibolo – told me that in the times before the de Monte fortress found itself in its current state of disrepair, there was a bas-relief which, when struck by a ray of sunshine on the day of the 8th of April, revealed a particular path which was to be followed in order to discover an arcane secret. That indication was a revelation for me, and great was my surprise when the friar hinted at its being an artefact of pagan origin, feared even by popes and cardinals.
I sensed that the friar knew more than he was revealing and, through the use of all my faculties, was successful in convincing him of my absolute honesty and thus to show me an exceptional document. I had not hoped for so much, your Grace! The monk possessed an extremely well-made reproduction of how the relief I mentioned above would have appeared when it was revealed by the sun’s rays. He told me that the parchment had been in possession of the monastery for over three hundred years, brought there by a rider fleeing northward.
The bas-relief, as it appeared on the reproduction, showed, without the slightest doubt, what I recognized as the most mysterious symbol man has ever created, and which your Grace knows well. So that you may realise the importance of my discovery, I shall draw below what I saw.
IMAGINE
Your Grace will certainly have immediately recognised what it is and will be amazed, just as I was when the monk showed me the drawing. But this is not all. Again thanks to the rays of the sun, under the bas-relief there also appeared a phrase. I asked Brother Anfibolo whether it had truly been present upon the original, and he said that everything which that knight had seen in the de Monte fortress had been faithfully reproduced by him. This was what was written:
SERPENTIS HIC IACET CAPUT
Your Grace, you know well the importance of this discovery. Your assumptions, and my own, seem to be confirmed. And there is no doubt that the doctrine which the place has hidden for millennia has been known at least since the time of the Crusades and perhaps even before; there is no doubt that Svevo knew of it. He must have, leaving this clue in order to help find the caput serpentis and indicating precisely the place where it is hidden. I assume that the relief had already been deliberately deleted in ancient times, perhaps in the Middle Ages, when, after Svevo’s death, wise men feared that the path to finding that holy place where the ancient wisdom lies was too exposed.
I shall add no more. I await your Grace’s rapid response in the usual manner, with suggestions as to how I should proceed. Together we initiated this undertaking, and together shall we proceed.
Your humble servant and Brother,
The Count of St Germain.