FIVE

ADEPTS AND IMPOSTERS

After the great sixteenth century, there is a falling off in the quality of magic. The reason is anybody’s guess. All things go in cycles. There are great ages of poetry, of painting, of music, of science. In the year Cornelius Agrippa was born, there appeared a book called The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum) by two Dominicans, Jakob Sprenger (1436–1495) and Heinrich Kramer (1430–1505), which Rossell Hope Robbins calls ‘the most important and most sinister work on demonology ever written’. The authors were, respectively, dean of Cologne University and prior of a monastery. The book went into sixteen German editions, eleven French, two Italian and at least six English. Dr. Faust, who became such an interesting hero of legend, lived at the beginning of the century, for Trithemius mentions him contemptuously in a letter written in 1507. Faust was to replace Theophilus in the public imagination; but where Theophilus had been a poor creature who sold his soul to the Devil in a fit of despair, Faust was the satanic hero, twisting his moustaches and committing mischievous villainies. Theophilus captured the imagination of six centuries because the idea of traffic with the Devil was so terrifying. The sixteenth century found it rather piquant, rather exciting; Faust aroused a kind of secret admiration.

What was happening – as we can now see, in retrospect – was that the Church was losing its grip. The human imagination was growing up; the age of science was approaching. An intelligent, cultured country gentleman named Reginald Scot wrote The Discovery of Witchcraft in the 1580s; he took the point of view of a thoroughgoing sceptic who declared that ‘all spiritualistic manifestations were artful impostures’ and that witches were an invention of the Inquisition. Some of his anecdotes are ribald and delightful – as, for example, the story of a young man who was unfortunate enough to lose his sexual member while fornicating. He went to a witch, who told him she knew of a tree in which there was a nest full of spare penises. ‘And being in the top of the tree, he took out a mighty great one and showed the same to her, asking her if he might have the same. Nay, quoth she, that is our parish priest’s tool, but take any other thou wilt …’ The nest, apparently, contained twenty or thirty tools, lying in provender – undoubtedly oats – upon which they fed. ‘These are no jests,’ Scot says seriously, ‘for they be written by … judges.’ King James I called the book ‘damnable’, and wrote his Demonologie to refute it; but even with a king’s name to recommend it, the book never achieved the popularity of Scot’s work.

Scot was mistaken in his belief that all spiritualistic manifestations are due to fraud or to mental disturbance on the part of the witnesses. But after so many centuries of total credulity, it was a healthy sign. As to King James, he had been converted to a belief in witches by the North Berwick case, in which a young girl who possessed natural gifts for ‘spiritual healing’ was tortured by her master until she confessed that she was aided by the Devil; under further torture she implicated a number of other people. Those she named were so respectable – a school-teacher, John Fian; a cultured, elderly lady, Agnes Sampson; two other women of sound reputation, Euphemia Maclean and Barbara Napier – that it seems likely she chose them because she hoped they would quickly show the absurdity of the charges. But the only way to stop inhuman tortures was to invent tales of witch’s sabbaths, and implicate more innocent people. This they all did, until seventy people stood trial. King James himself supervised some of the torture, especially when Agnes Sampson invented a wild story about sailing to sea in a sieve to try to wreck the king’s ship. Most of the seventy were burned, some without the usual mercy of being strangled beforehand. James wrote his Demonologie as a consequence of this experience. It is an ironical twist that James’s passion for interrogating witches finally led him to agree with Reginald Scot that it was mostly fraud and illusion; in the last years of his reign, witchcraft trials almost ceased. It may be said in extenuation of James I that he was a neurotic homosexual of weak character whose Scottish common sense finally triumphed over his superstitious credulity.

The life of Dr. John Dee, one of the most sympathetic (if not remarkable) figures in the history of magic, spanned five reigns: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and James I. Dee is almost unique among ‘magicians’ in possessing absolutely no occult faculties – he said so repeatedly himself. He was a kind of mystic, although not of a particularly high order. For his obsession was knowledge, scholarship, learning. He was like some earlier H. G. Wells, consumed by a thirst to know everything. Like all true poets and magicians, he was driven by a vision of a reality quite different from the commonplace world in which we live out our lives. Paracelsus and Agrippa were doctors who studied magic because it was a part of their profession; both had a streak of charlatanism. Dee studied magic because he was a poet, for whom it seemed to offer a key to another form of existence; there was nothing of the charlatan about him.

Dee’s father, a Welshman, was a minor official at the court of Henry VIII; Dee was born in London on July 13, 1527. Cornelius Agrippa was an embittered wanderer around Europe at the time; Paracelsus was about to be driven out of Basel by his enemies; Nostradamus was a young doctor, without a degree, who also travelled through Europe, fighting the plague. In due course Dee himself would become something of a wanderer, although never homeless.

Dee attended the Chantry School at Chelmsford. It was a peaceful little market town surrounded by green meadows, with a brown, slow-moving river. Dee loved browsing through books and manuscripts. He was charmed by the Catholic ritual (for England was by no means all Protestant). And his appetite for knowledge was kept sharp by the narrowness of the school curriculum. At that time, and for another century, even the universities were thoroughly unambitious. Instead of reading, writing and ’rithmetic, they taught grammar, logic and rhetoric. Latin was taught, but hardly any Greek. Students were in the charge of a tutor, who was so much in loco parentis that he could beat them if necessary. Academic standards were low in England; there was little to prevent a student spending his seven years drinking and womanising; after all, no English gentleman could really find much use for Latin and logic, or even geography and mathematics, when he took over the family estates.

So when Dee went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, at the age of fifteen, he had no reason to feel that he had found his spiritual home – as Bertrand Russell did in the 1890s. But at least the opportunities were there if he wanted them. He did, intensely. He allowed himself only four hours a night for sleep. He even studied Greek. The university authorities soon became aware that they had a prodigy among them, and at the age of nineteen, Dee was made a fellow of Trinity, and an under-reader (assistant professor) in Greek. He was already an enthusiastic astronomer.

The atmosphere of Cambridge stifled him; at the first opportunity, he went to the University of Louvain, one of the best in Europe, where Cornelius Agrippa had been. Inevitably, Dee read Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, and was excited and impressed by the notion that magic and alchemy were not merely diabolic studies, but a practical aid in the mystical quest for God. Magic was in bad repute in England, a suburban backwater as far as culture was concerned; but on the Continent it aroused intelligent interest. It must be remembered that magic and science were closely linked at that time; even mathematics was regarded as a ‘magical’ study, with Pythagoras as its prophet. Magic meant for Dee what science meant for H. G. Wells three centuries later. It was what he had always dreamed of: a magnificent, wide field of study, with no visible limits. He quickly gained a reputation to match Cornelius Agrippa’s.

When he went to Paris in 1550, his reputation preceded him, and at Rheims he gave a course of lectures on Euclid that were free for anyone to attend. He was so popular that he was offered a professorship; but he felt that more exciting things awaited him, and returned to England, where the ten-year-old Edward VI had succeeded Henry VIII. He was granted a pension by the King, and immediately sold it for two rectorships.

In 1552 he met the occultist Jerome Cardan, who was a ‘witch’ in the precise sense of the word: that is, he possessed a high degree of second sight and other occult faculties. There seems to be no reason to suspect Cardan of lying, when he declares (in his memoirs) that he could project his spirit outside his body. He also makes the interesting assertion that he could, from childhood on, ‘see’ imaginary things with a sense of total reality. As a child, he says, he could not control this faculty, but later he learned how to select things he wanted to ‘see’. All this conforms to the picture we have already built up of the natural visionary, a man with some kind of chemical imbalance that has the effect of a dose of a psychedelic drug on his nervous system. All this was accompanied by a semi-hysterical lack of self-control, so that he would argue for the sake of arguing, whether he believed what he said or not, and find himself compelled to speak of things that he knew would offend people. He believed himself to be accompanied by a familiar spirit, and was an unusually talented astrologer and prophet. He certainly qualifies as one of the most remarkable psychological curiosities of all time.

Cardan was a major influence on Dee, who began to think in terms of spirits who might be contacted to aid him with his researches. His problem now, and for the rest of his life, was money. He was convinced that if he could try his own approach to alchemy – the use of spirit-forces – he would soon solve the problem of the Philosopher’s Stone. But alchemy cost money. His hopes of royal preferment were dashed when Edward VI died at the age of sixteen, and the country was plunged into political crisis. Edward named Lady Jane Grey as his successor to the throne, and Dee’s patron, the Earl of Northumberland, proclaimed her queen. She was the granddaughter of Henry VII; Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, Mary, had other ideas, and Northumberland and Lady Jane Grey lost their heads. The following year, Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of the poet, led a rebellion to protest against Queen Mary’s proposed marriage to Philip of Spain; he wanted to put her younger sister, Elizabeth, on the throne instead. He also failed and was executed, and Elizabeth was placed under arrest.

Having married the heir to the Spanish throne, Mary earned herself the nickname of Bloody Mary by burning large numbers of Protestants. As far as Dee was concerned, the only thing that could be said in favour of all this burning was that while people thought about burning Protestants they forgot about burning witches. He was called upon to cast Queen Mary’s horoscope. Perhaps his foreknowledge of her early death gave him the idea of contacting her younger sister, who would be the next queen, and who was then a captive at Woodstock. He visited Elizabeth and cast her horoscope too. He also showed her the horoscope of her elder sister; for after all, was not Mary’s fate entangled with Elizabeth’s? But Mary’s spies took the view that this was a little too like political plotting. Dee was arrested and thrown into jail, charged with treason. He had the upsetting experience of seeing a fellow prisoner, Barthlet Green, burned for heresy, although he seemed a harmless, gentle soul. It was lucky for Dee that Mary was fond of her younger sister; otherwise he might have paid the penalty of coming between the present and future queens. Dee was released in 1555. But it had been a near thing.

Mary died three years later, and Elizabeth became queen. The first thing she did was to ask Dee to calculate the most favourable day for the coronation, and Dee suggested January 14, 1559. Now it looked as if Dee was firmly established at last; he was more or less the royal astrologer. It was unfortunate that Queen Elizabeth I was tight-fisted, and Dee’s finances failed to improve. He became a kind of general errand boy, travelling to the Continent on missions for the Queen, and for her minister Burleigh and Sir Francis Walsingham, head of the Queen’s spy system. Like Agrippa, Dee found himself hurled into intrigue. For a bookish, peace-loving scholar, it must have been a considerable strain. In Amsterdam in 1563 he discovered a book called Stenographia by Trithemius, a work on magic, alchemy and the meaning of numbers; it influenced Dee’s own work on magic, Monas Hieroglyphica, which he finished in twelve days after reading Trithemius. Commentators have been puzzled by the remark of Lord Burleigh, the secretary of state, that it was ‘of the utmost importance for the security of the realm’. Why? It deals in ciphers, which might have been valuable in spying; and Dee was already obsessed by the idea of discovering buried treasure by means of the spirits – which would certainly have benefited the realm. The only other possibility is that Dee thought he had a certain method of forestalling the plans of England’s enemies through astrology. If so, no one believed in it enough to finance it; Dee remained the errand boy and occasional consultant on magical affairs.

After various Continental wanderings, Dee returned to England in 1564, and moved to his mother’s house at the Thameside village of Mortlake, where he returned to his magical studies. In 1574, when he was forty-seven, he married, but his wife died a year later. That he was still in royal favour is shown by the fact that the Queen paid an informal call on the day of his wife’s death; she wanted to see his ‘magic glass’, which seems to have been nothing but a convex mirror. When she heard there was a death in the house, she refused to come in, but examined the glass in a nearby field.

Two years later, Dee married Jane Fromond, lady in waiting to Lady Howard of Effingham, some years his junior. They settled in his mother’s house at Mortlake, and she soon produced the first of the eight children she would bear him. When his mother died in 1580, she had already given him the house. For a few years, Dee’s life was idyllic. He cast horoscopes to eke out his income. He made maps for the Queen, had a great deal to do with plans for naval defence (so that he must be given some of the credit for the defeat of the Armada in 1588) and made calculations for a new calendar. His interest in occult matters never slackened, and in his Spiritual Diary he records dreams, and tales of spirit rappings and other manifestations. But his new obsession was crystal gazing – the idea that long gazing into any kind of clear depth can induce a semi-trancelike state, in which the future can be foreseen and spirits reveal themselves.

Dee’s chief trouble was that his mind was too discursive and active for the kind of serene contemplation necessary. What he needed was someone with occult faculties – a ‘scryer’ (or descryer). In 1581 Dee had a brief experience of seeing something in the crystal, but he does not specify what it was. In 1582 he found a youth named Barnabas Saul, who became his scryer for a few months; however, Barnabas got into trouble with the law, for reasons that are not recorded, and was questioned about his occult activities. He preferred to denounce Dee rather than face the prospect of further entanglement with the law – which had stringent statutes against witchcraft – so Dee lost his natural seer.

Two days later, Dee was visited by a swarthy, good-looking young Irishman named Edward Kelley, who talked about occult matters, and mentioned that he was a natural scryer. There is no reason to disbelieve him, although he seems to have been an objectionable young man in many ways; he was an apothecary’s apprentice turned forger and coiner – for which he had lost his ears. (Occult faculties often seem to be accompanied by instability of character.) Dee explained that he was not a magician, since the word ‘magic’ held evil associations for him. Before his sessions of crystal gazing, he always prayed for divine help. Kelley agreed; he fell on his knees and prayed solemnly. Then he peered into the crystal. In less than a quarter of an hour, he was describing to Dee the figure of a cherub that he could see in its depths. Dee instantly identified it, from his kabbalistic knowledge, as Uriel, the angel of light. The angel could not communicate, being imprisoned in the crystal, so to speak. But Dee felt this was the beginning of a new epoch in his life: the Philosopher’s Stone was already within reach. He immediately invited Kelley to move into the house. Dee’s wife, on being introduced to the ear-less Irishman, was less enthusiastic; she had an intuition that things would not go well. And she never took to Kelley thereafter. But, as an obedient wife, she accepted him. Not long afterwards, Kelley decided to marry a local girl; for now that his wanderings were temporarily at an end, he experienced the need for someone to share his bed. The evidence seems to show that he always had a secret hankering after Jane Dee, who was closer to his own age than to her husband’s. But she regarded him with mistrust.

It is a pity that there is no detailed record of what happened in the Dee household after Kelley’s arrival in 1582. All we know is that Kelley, in spite of a touch of charlatanism, possessed the Irish gift of second sight, and that very soon he was seeing and hearing spirits every day. Since he could hear them now, it must be assumed that they spoke in audible voices. Reading Dee’s own account, in the light of our more detailed knowledge of such things, it is almost certain that Kelley went into a light trance and contacted spirits like any modern medium. There were various ‘guides’; one was called Medicina. These guides brought along other spirits. Dee, with no experience to guide him in these matters, assumed that all were angels. One woman asked Dee if he thought she was a jeweller’s wife, because she wore jewellery; Dee replied that he was certain she was a messenger of Jesus, because Jesus had purchased ‘the jewell of eternal life with the jewell of his precious blood’. The spirits must have found him a tiresome old crank. However, like most of the spirits who appear at modern séances, they seemed to have nothing very profound or useful to impart. After many months, Dee was as far as ever from the Philosopher’s Stone or the secret of divining buried treasure. And Kelley found the quiet, scholarly household a strain after his adventurous life, and was subject to fits of violent rage, which the gentle Dee put up with. Kelley also complained that the spirits addressed him in foreign languages. He sneaked off whenever he could, on the pretext of seeking treasure, and no doubt found the brothels and ale houses of London more congenial than the Mortlake house. The spirits knew what he was up to, and often denounced him – in his presence, of course – to Dr. Dee, calling him ‘a youngling, but old sinner’, and telling Dee that his own ‘sight’ was perfecter than Kelley’s, because purer.

In November 1582, Dee had a vision of a child-angel floating outside the window, holding a crystal egg. He identified this with Uriel. Then the Archangel Michael appeared and told Dee not to be afraid of it, but to pick it up. Since this crystal ball is now in the British Museum, there is presumably something behind the story, although I know of no precedent in occult history for spirits actually making gifts of ‘spiritual’ objects.

In 1583 a Polish nobleman, Count Adalbert Laski, was introduced to Dee. He was a servant of Henry III of France – whom we have already met in connection with Nostradamus – and he wanted Dee to foretell the king’s future. He also thought Dee might give him advice, through the spirits, about his own claim to the Polish crown, vacated by Henry of Anjou when he became Henry III of France. Laski became such a regular visitor at Dee’s house that Dee, who was always in debt, had to apply to the Queen for money to entertain him. Laski was so impressed by Dee and Kelley that he urged them to accompany him to Prague, to visit the king of Germany, the occult student Rudolph II. Dee disliked the idea, but Kelley cheered up at the prospect of travel, and even stopped having tantrums for a while. In 1585, Dee and Kelley, accompanied by their wives, and Dee’s three children, set out on a Continental journey which was to last four years.

On the whole, it was a frustrating four years. Kelley was getting above himself; he had picked up magical jargon from Dee, and was now inclined to represent himself as the master. He claimed to be the owner of a rare alchemical manuscript and a ‘powder of projection’ (i.e. a powder for changing base metals to gold), which he had found at Glastonbury, the legendary home of Merlin and King Arthur.

They continued to converse with spirits and see visions, and Jane Dee produced more babies. Dee was kindly received by the great King Stephen Bathory of Poland at Cracow, but ordered out of Prague by King Rudolph, who explained that the Pope had accused him of necromancy. Count Wilhelm Rosenberg, viceroy of Bohemia, invited them to his castle at Tribau, and there Dee spent a peaceful eighteen months, although Kelley again became quarrelsome. When Kelley decided that he had had enough of descrying spirits in the crystal, Dee tried his eight-year-old son Arthur, but the boy saw nothing. Kelley agreed to try again, and this time had an amazing message. The guide Madimi had ordered him and Dee to share their wives in common. Jane Dee had hysterics, then became furious. When the child-angel Uriel confirmed the counsel, Dee added his persuasions, and wrote: ‘There is no other remedy, but as hath been said of our cross-matching, so it must needs be done … She showed herself prettily resolved to be content for God his sake and his secret purposes to obey the admonishment.’ This sounds clear enough. although Dee’s biographers all seem intent on preserving decency by insisting that the scandalous episode never took place, or at least, never reached the carnal stage.

Kelley now decided that nothing further was to be got by prolonging the partnership, and he and Dee finally separated. Dee returned to England; Kelley achieved some sucess as an alchemist and scryer, but seems to have died in prison not many years later.

Dee returned to England in 1589, and he was to live until 1608, to the age of eighty-one. But the remaining years of his life were, on the whole, disappointing. In his absence, his house had been broken into, and many of his books and instruments destroyed. The Queen finally granted him the wardenship of Christ’s College at Manchester, then little more than a village, but he found it a frustrating post, and altogether less of a sinecure than he had hoped. His wife died of the plague there. He continued to write – his unpublished writing would occupy many volumes – and wrote about his dreams in his Diary. When the Queen died in 1603, Dee knew that his hopes of further preferment were at an end; James I had no use for a reputed sorcerer. The best he could hope for was to be left in peace.

His new scryer, Bartholomew Hickman, had visions of the angel Raphael, who uttered comforting messages and foretold that Dee would finally discover the secrets he had spent his life searching for. But the vision was probably inspired by Dee’s own wishful thinking, for he died at Mortlake in 1608, still no nearer to the object of his life’s quest. As his biographer G. M. Hort remarks, he cannot claim to rank among the world’s successes. His main significance is that he was one of the first great occultists to make constant use of spirit communication; he was the founder of modern psychical research, two hundred years before his time.

By 1600, the age of magic was over. The voice of sane scepticism was making itself heard: in Rabelais, in Montaigne, in Ben Jonson. Montaigne was revolted by the burning of witches, and remarked: ‘A brilliant and sharp clarity is needed to be able to kill people; our life is too real and substantial for supernatural, fantastic incidents.’ No one, I think, not even an occultist, would disagree with him. The problem here is simply what human consciousness is aware of. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, contrasts the ‘sick soul’, who is always too aware of the misery and suffering in the world, and the clear-eyed optimist, whose temperament rejects misery instinctively. The same thing applies to matters of the occult. A busy, energetic sort of person has no time for the supernatural, and his temperamental rejection of it makes him feel that his world of practical clear-cut issues is the only real one. It is a healthy instinct. We should bear in mind that nearly all children dislike the supernatural, except in ghost stories. This is not necessarily fear, but an instinctive need to confront a clear, simple world in which they can make decisions and shape their lives. Anyone who has ever learned to love science can understand this. There is something cold, hard and exhilarating about science, like a snowball fight on a frosty day; it seems to open up vistas of control and conquest. By comparison, the world of the occult is misty and damp, reminding man of his ignorance and encouraging him to adopt a passive attitude towards his existence.

With the age of Rabelais and Shakespeare, then of Newton and Milton, the human intellect reached a new stage in its evolution. There was a sense of potentialities, of exciting horizons. The discovery of America in 1492 was a symbol of this change. The Roman church was tottering under the blows dealt it by Luther and Henry VIII. It is true that Galileo was forced to recant the view he expressed in 1632, that the earth went around the sun, but in the year of his death (1642) Newton was born, and it no longer mattered greatly what the Pope and his cardinals said. With the publication of the Principia in 1687, science had taken a greater step forward than magic had taken since its birth in ancient Egypt and Chaldea. When one considers the involved absurdities of Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee and Trithemius, then turns to this magnificent, complex structure of ideas in which everything is true, it becomes possible to see why magic had ceased to be important.

The truth is that the rise of science was in no way a blow against occultism. On the contrary: it meant that occultism could free itself from the pseudo-science of Agrippa and Paracelsus and concentrate upon its real concerns.

The greatest occultist of the eighteenth century, although he belongs to the history of religion rather than magic, was born in the year after Newton published the Principia. Emanuel Swedenborg was a natural medium, although his powers developed late in life. In his early years he studied science and mathematics; at twenty-eight, he became assessor of the Swedish Board of Mines, and wrote a work on the smelting of metals. He studied astronomy and physiology. But he was an intensely frustrated man. Soon after he became an assessor, he fell in love with a Miss Pelhem, and was accepted by her; but she decided she did not care for Swedenborg after all, and broke off the engagement. Swedenborg was highly sexed, and it must have been a blow on every level: of pride, of emotion and of purely masculine sexuality. (In his book on Conjugal Love he shocked his followers by stating that concubinage and the keeping of mistresses are excusable under certain circumstances – a remarkable statement for the son of a bishop.) He was equally frustrated intellectually, for his scientific views, many of which were far ahead of his time, were ignored by Sweden’s academies. He escaped his frustrations through hard work. In 1713, at about the time of his disappointment in love, Charles XII asked him to solve the problem of transporting five ships across fifteen miles of dry land (he was besieging the Danes in the fortress of Fredrikshald); Swedenborg did it in seven weeks. He was later involved in building the docks at Karlskrona and in building the canal that was to connect the North Sea to the Baltic (and which had to be abandoned when Charles XII was killed in battle). Swedenborg’s energy was enormous; he wrote books on algebra, astronomy, minerals, economics, the tides, salt mining and on anatomy.

All this practical work starved the religious side of his nature, and in 1744 this burst out like a torrent. It began with a dream in which he heard a roaring wind that seemed to pick him up and fling him on his face. He began to pray, and then saw Jesus in front of him. After a cryptic conversation, which ended with Jesus saying, ‘Well, then, so,’ he woke up. This was only one of a series of strange dreams and hallucinations (or visions). He began having ecstatic trances, and the perpetual sexual itch suddenly ceased to trouble him. There followed visions in which he paid visits to heaven and hell. He announced in his books that the after-world is very much like this one in all basic particulars, and that people remain much as they were when they were alive. But since it is less substantial than this world, their states of mind are far more important, and heaven and hell are these states of mind. In such works as The True Christian Religion, Heaven and Hell, The Divine Love and Wisdom, he describes circumstantially conversations with angels, devils and people who have ‘passed over’. And this leads us to the heart of the Swedenborg problem. Most of his contemporaries dismissed him as a madman or a liar. And his twentieth-century critics – E. J. Dingwall, for example – have been inclined to take a Freudian view and to regard his ‘visions’ as eruption of his repressed sexuality. There is a good case for this view. In 1748, when he was sixty, he woke up believing that his hair was full of small snakes, and attributed this to the departed spirits of certain Quakers. His view of the Quakers suggests a definite touch of paranoia; against all the evidence, he asserted repeatedly that their worship was vile and indecent, and that they practised wife-swopping. This seems to indicate a capacity for self-delusion and a sexual obsession.

On the other hand, when one turns to his writings, it becomes difficult to take this ‘reductionist’ view. His obsession with Biblical exegesis may bore the modern reader, and as far as style goes, he is certainly no Pascal or Newman; but it is all sane and lucid enough – refreshingly so. There are no flashes of genius in his work, but there is a balanced and deeply serious mind. When challenged by sceptics about his views, he remained calm and serious, never losing his temper, or even his sense of humour.

And although these views seemed wild and strange to his own contemporaries, they have received a great deal of support since then. Spiritualism did not exist in the eighteenth century; it came into existence in the 1850s. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a considerable body of literature that purported to have been dictated by ‘spirits’ (such as the Spirit Teachings of Stainton Moses), and these have continued to swell ever since.* The general tone of much of this literature is nauseatingly pietistic; but it must be admitted that it has a remarkable inner consistency; when one considers how easily religious sects develop their own doctrines and dogmas, this agreement is surprising. Its descriptions of ‘the other world’ correspond closely to Swedenborg’s. Sceptics may take the view that this is because Swedenborg influenced the spiritualists. Spiritualists deny this on the ground that the sheer variety and quantity of spirit writings – in many languages, and written over a century – disprove it. The only other logical explanation is the Jungian one that Swedenborg’s visions were explorations of the racial psyche, expressions of archetypal symbols, and that the same is true of modern spiritualism. Without taking sides, we can only point out that the evidence in Swedenborg’s favour is stronger today than it was in his own time.

On the other hand, what can one say about his book Earths in the Universe, in which he states that most of the planets have inhabitants, and then goes on to describe them in a way that suggests a painting by Hieronymus Bosch? The atmosphere of the moon is different from that of the earth so that moon-men speak from their stomachs instead of their lungs, with an effect like belching; the Martians have faces that are half black and half tawny; they live on fruit and dress in fibres made from tree bark. If Swedenborg was a medium, we can only assume the spirits were pulling his leg. Or, what is more likely, his imagination was so highly developed that he mixed up his dreams and fantasies with his authentic insights.

The Freudian, or reductionist, explanation cannot be entirely dismissed. Swedenborg was sexually frustrated; some of his religious experiences can be paralleled in any textbook of abnormal psychology. He was in his late fifties when his explosive psychological forces finally achieved a certain balance. But this recognition should not blind us to his genuine religious inspiration and the importance of his basic ideas. There was nothing of the charlatan about him, and his life does not show the parabolic rise and fall that seems characteristic of ‘magicians’. Of the genuineness of his occult powers there can be little doubt. Count Höpken, one of his contemporaries, tells the best known of these:

Swedenborg was one day at a court reception. Her majesty asked him about different things in the other life, and lastly, whether he had seen or talked with her brother, the Prince Royal of Prussia. He answered no. Her majesty then requested him to ask after him, and give him her greeting, which Swedenborg promised to do. I doubt whether the Queen meant this seriously. At the next reception, Swedenborg again appeared at court; and while the Queen was … surrounded by her ladies of honour, he came boldly forward and approached her majesty … Swedenborg not only greeted her from her brother, but also gave her his apologies for not having answered her last letter; he also wished to do so now through Swedenborg; which he accordingly did. The Queen was greatly overcome, and said: ‘No one but God knows this secret.’

On July 19, 1759, a great fire took place in Stockholm. Swedenborg was three hundred miles away at the time, in Gothenburg, a guest at a party. At six in the evening he told the guests that the fire had just broken out; two hours later, he told them that it had been extinguished only three doors from his home. This was confirmed two days later when a messenger arrived from Stockholm, verifying every detail of Swedenborg’s description.

In 1761, Mme. de Marteville, the widow of the Dutch ambassador, asked Swedenborg for his help. A silversmith was demanding payment for a silver tea service, and she was certain her husband had paid for it before his death. However. she could not find the receipt. She asked Swedenborg if he could ‘contact’ her husband. Swedenborg said he would try. A few days later he told Mme. de Marteville that he had spoken to her husband, who said that the tea service had been paid for, seven months before his death, and that the receipt would be found in the bureau drawer. Mme. de Marteville replied that the bureau in question had been thoroughly searched. Swedenborg then described a secret compartment in the bureau that contained some private correspondence and the receipt. Both receipt and correspondence were found where Swedenborg had described them.

E. J. Dingwall, in a penetrating article on Swedenborg,* points out that the evidence for these three incidents, and for certain others of a similar nature, is confused and conflicting. This may well be so, but unless we intend to dismiss all these stories as fabrications or, at least, exaggerations, there is no point in dwelling on minor differences between versions written by different witnesses at different times. There have been many other mediums who have performed similar marvels. If the basic proposition of this book is correct – that the occult faculty is latent in everyone, and can be developed by anyone who really wants to – then it is likely enough that the three stories are fundamentally accurate. Swedenborg had the first important qualification for acquiring second sight and/or mediumship: lack of self-division, a wholehearted obsession with ‘things spiritual’. But, like any other medium, Swedenborg was far from infallible, as his curious words about the Quakers demonstrate. When Swedenborg was asked by a friend if he could foretell the future, he replied flatly that only God knew the future. If he meant this as a general proposition, and not merely as a denial of his own powers, then he was again mistaken. The evidence for pre-vision is as abundant as for other forms of mediumship. Dingwall points out that another visionary named Humphrey Smith prophesied the Fire of London six years before it happened. So, for that matter, did the astrologer William Lilly, who was actually summoned before a committee investigating the Great Fire on suspicion of knowing more about it than he should because he had foreseen both the fire and the plague – and published his prediction – the previous year.

The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn’t need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. This feeling of breezy health is the basic reason for its enduring popularity. Its founder may not have been a great occultist, but he was a great man.

The new spirit of science meant, in effect, that a Paracelsus or John Dee could no longer exist. If Paracelsus had been born two centuries later, he would have been an eminent doctor and scientist, not a magician. As to the occultists themselves, they could no longer claim that science was on their side. Which meant, in effect, that they had to lay claim to extra-scientific knowledge. They had a choice: charlatanism or mysticism. And from the year 1700 onward, there is no ‘magician’ who lacks a streak of charlatanism.

This certainly applies to one of the most interesting transitional figures, Franz Anton Mesmer, who is falsely credited with having invented hypnotism (with which ‘mesmerism’ has become synonymous). His is one of the most curious stories in the history of occultism.

Mesmer’s life should have been comfortable and uneventful. His parents were well-off; he was born in Switzerland on May 23, 1734, and took a degree at the University of Vienna at the age of thirty-two. The subject of his dissertation seems a throw-back to the age of Paracelsus: The Influence of the Planets on the Human Body, written, of course, in Latin. He was a man of compelling personality. A rich patient, some years his senior, fell in love with him, and he married her and moved into her fine palace on the outskirts of Vienna. He also owned a luxurious townhouse at 261 Landstrasse.

The theory advanced by Mesmer in his thesis is of considerable interest. He believed in a kind of psychic ‘ether’ that pervades all space, and that the heavenly bodies cause tides in this fluid. These ever-moving tides produce health. If something checks their action in individuals, the result is sickness. In other words, health is man’s natural condition; sickness is a kind of blockage. Man must rely on ‘instinct’ rather than reason, an instinctive oneness with nature. If a ‘blockage’ has occurred in a patient, the best way to cure it is to bring on a crisis which will sweep it away.

These theories interested a Jesuit named Professor Maximilian Hehl. He had been consulted by a wealthy English lady, who was passing through Vienna in 1774, because she had stomach cramps, and believed that a magnet could cure them; she had left hers at home. Hehl made her the magnet, which she laid on her stomach; her cramps vanished. Was it possible that the magnet was moving Mesmer’s ‘etheric fluid’ around the body? He made this suggestion to Mesmer, who began trying the effect of magnets on his patients. Amazingly, they seemed to work. So the body did possess ‘tides’.

Not long afterwards, Mesmer was bleeding a patient. (In those days it was the common cure for most ailments.) He observed that the flow of blood increased when he approached, and lessened when he moved away. The conclusion was clear; his own body must be a kind of magnet. Man possesses ‘animal magnetism’. In 1775 Mesmer published a pamphlet about his discoveries. The medical profession was sceptical, but patients were anxious to try the new treatment, and Mesmer’s practice increased. He would lay magnets on the patients, or simply his hands, and the pains would vanish.

What happened is clear enough. Mesmer believed that the magnets – and his hands – moved the stagnating ‘magnetic fluid’ in his sick patients: his patients also believed it. So when they felt relief, Mesmer had reason to believe that he had produced it. And, like Colonel Olcott, he began to develop healing gifts, the latent healing gifts that every human being possesses.

Mesmer’s fame increased suddenly through an accident. A hypochondriac baron, Haresky de Horka, suffered from ‘spasms’ that doctors were unable to cure; finally, one tired and sarcastic doctor told him that he should try Mesmer, meaning, no doubt, to intimate that since the baron’s troubles were imaginary, a quack could do them no harm.

Mesmer went to the baron’s estate at Rokow. He had slipped several large magnets between his clothes to ‘re-charge’ himself, for he believed that animal magnetism and the metallic kind are one and the same. For several days, the baron failed to respond to treatment, and the spasms continued. Mesmer, certain of his powers, persisted, and on the sixth day, the results began; as the baron writhed in asthmatic paroxysms, Mesmer held the baron’s foot. The paroxysms abated. He held his hand; they started again. Clearly, Mesmer had finally got the measure of the baron’s etheric fluids and was learning to make them flow back and forth as he wanted. After an hour of this, the baron felt fine. The cure became the gossip of Vienna, and the medical profession cursed their sarcastic colleague who had helped establish a charlatan.

Mesmer devised an apparatus to distribute the magnetism; a number of jars of ‘magnetised water’, with magnets immersed in it, were connected with steel bands, and the whole arrangement placed in a wooden tub half full of iron filings and water. A metal nozzle could be used to spray the magnetic power round the room. Trees in the garden were magnetised; so was the fountain. Patients lay around in the garden by the dozens, holding hands, and receiving the waves of magnetic power. The results continued to be remarkable.

Mesmer’s downfall in Vienna came through a young blind pianist named Maria Theresia Paradies, a protegee of the Empress. Mesmer, unaware that her blindness was purely physical in origin – due to a detached retina – offered to cure her if she could come and live in his house. The Empress gave permission. The girl was naturally enthusiastic. And after a few weeks, she became convinced that she could see dimly. All Vienna discussed the case. But there were doubters, who pointed out that when Mesmer treated women patients they dressed in a loose smock and his hands carefully kneaded their breasts and thighs. Why were his resident patients all pretty girls? Why did he neglect his ailing and elderly wife? A Professor Barth was appointed to examine Maria Paradies, and he pronounced emphatically that she was still blind. The girl’s father was influenced by Barth and the Jesuit Hehl, now an enemy of Mesmer’s, to go and drag her away from the house of sin. The girl refused to go, even when her mother slapped her into a state of exhaustion. Finally, the Imperial Morality Police intervened, and Mesmer decided to flee Vienna before he was arrested. The girl returned to her parents. It is said that Mesmer had, in fact, helped improve her condition, and that Barth admitted this privately to Mesmer. However, the blindness certainly returned when the treatment was discontinued.

Mesmer went to Paris, and immediately became a craze. A century before Freud, he had discovered the importance of the sexual element in hysterical illnesses. He would enter his treatment room in a lilac silk dressing gown, carrying a long magnet, which he would point at patients as he passed. He would go into the next room and begin to play a magnetised piano. The patients would form a chain – men alternating with women – and press their thighs to increase the magnetism. Soon people would have convulsions, and collapse on the floor. Since magnetism was performed with hands, and the thighs were a sensitive area, they had every opportunity of trying out their animal magnetism on one another, all in the cause of medical science. Assistants would take away some of the more violently affected to the Crisis Room, where further animal magnetism was applied to bring on a climactic convulsion. Everyone believed totally in Mesmer’s theories, for only ardent belief could justify these orgiastic activities. It was a delightful way of loosing repressions, and the treatment was understandably successful. Mesmer’s fame spread throughout France. He instructed pupils in his methods, and established centres in many major cities. When conflict with the authorities began, it was Mesmer who was in the strong position. The king, Louis XVI, offered Mesmer a pension for life if he would promise to remain in France, but pointed out that he ought to allow a medical commission to examine proofs of his claims before a contract was signed. Mesmer declined to furnish proofs, and refused to sign a contract. He asked for a guaranteed half million francs for research, and threatened to leave France if it was not provided without strings attached. His aristocratic patients begged the king to give way, but Louis dug in his heels. On the day his ultimatum fell due, Mesmer left France – this was on September 18, 1780. His followers immediately started a fund, each contributing a hundred louis d’or for the privilege of being a shareholder in a new magnetic company. When the fund reached 350,000 louis d’or, far more than he had demanded, Mesmer agreed to return to France, and his activities continued as triumphantly as ever.

The King was understandably irritated by this behaviour, and finally succumbed to the demands of his Medical College to set up an independent commission of enquiry. In 1784 several doctors observed with fascination the violent convulsions of the patients, and concluded that although Mesmer certainly possessed strong powers of suggestion, there was no evidence of a magnetic fluid.

For Mesmer, this was the end of the boom. His fortunes declined gently. He was satirised and jeered at. A doctor went to him with a fake story of illness, allowed Mesmer to ‘cure’ him, then published an account of it all, claiming that it revealed Mesmer’s inability to diagnose illness. Since the tide was against Mesmer, no one pointed out that most doctors could be taken in by the same methods. A concert given by Maria Paradies did nothing to improve the situation; she was as blind as ever. Mesmer had the courage to attend, and to ignore the whispers and comments of the audience, who all knew the story.

He stayed in Paris throughout the Revolution, but finally felt that his life was in danger and fled. He lost all his money. An attempt to set up practice in Vienna was foiled again by the police, who promptly banished him over the border. He was nearly sixty; he was tired, and the attacks had lowered the self-confidence that was the basis of his type of healing. He managed to live comfortably – a man with such a reputation could never lack for wealthy patients – and finally retired near Constance. He declined an offer from the King of Prussia to set up a Mesmer Institute in Berlin, whereupon the King sent a doctor to learn his secret, and the doctor was appointed professor of mesmerism at the Berlin academy and placed in charge of a hospital devoted to its methods. His last years were peaceful, and he died in 1815, just before his seventy-ninth birthday.

It may be felt that he was of no significance in the history of occultism. But this is not true. In important respects, he might almost be a reincarnation of Paracelsus. He recognised the importance of the spirit, the imagination, and felt that the universe is pervaded by meaningful influences. Most of his results can be explained in terms of hysteria, release of repression, auto-suggestion and so on. But what is important is that he understood that illness is not natural, but some kind of blockage of natural forces – a kind of mental stagnation. His instinctive desire was to set the vital forces in motion again. If the treatment had been entirely a matter of imagination, it would not have worked as well as it did. He did not understand the forces he was using, but he recognised their existence.

The discovery that he should have made, and is generally credited with having made, was stumbled upon by one of his disciples, the Marquis of Puységur, who was one day trying to ‘magnetise’ a shepherd boy by stroking his head when he observed that the young man had fallen asleep. Shaken, the boy remained insensible. The Marquis shouted ‘Stand up,’ and to his surprise, the boy stood up, without opening his eyes. When asked questions, he replied. When told to walk or sit down, he did so. Finally, when he woke up, he had no memory of what had happened. Puységur called the phenomenon ‘spasmodic sleep’, and it was for an Englishman, James Braid, to call it hypnotism in 1843. Braid realised that hypnotism is basically due to a narrowing of the attention until the mind is in a state of what he called mono-ideism (single-idea-ism). That is to say, the hypnotic trance is the reverse of what I have called Faculty X. It follows that since we are so seldom in that ‘awakened’ state when the mind is somehow aware of the reality of other times and other places, we are nearly always in a state of consciousness approximating the hypnotic trance.

If the fifteenth century is the century of magic, the eighteenth is the least magical of all. Magic reached its lowest point, and its three most noted practitioners – Cagliostro, Saint-Germain and Casanova – were adventurers rather than occultists.

To include Casanova among the ‘magicians’ may cause surprise; but he was, in fact, a serious student of the Kabbalah and astrology; and although he thought of himself as an imposter, his powers of prophecy often surprised and worried him. His Memoirs, besides being the world’s greatest autobiography and the most complete picture of Europe in the eighteenth century, are also the best possible introduction to the forms taken by occultism in the ‘age of reason’.

Giovanni Jacopo Casanova, who later added the spurious title Chevalier de Seingalt, was born in Venice in April 1725, son of an actor of Spanish descent and the beautiful daughter of a shoemaker, with whom he eloped. Young Giovanni was so sickly that he was not expected to live. A nosebleed continued so long that he was taken by his grandmother to a witch, who locked him in a box while she performed noisy incantations. The bleeding stopped. The witch burned drugs, gathered the smoke in a sheet and wrapped it around him. Finally, she told him that a beautiful lady would visit him that night. In the night, Casanova saw a beautiful fairy come out of the fireplace into his room – fire-grates were large in those days – who rubbed ointment on his head, speaking in a foreign language. His symptoms vanished during the next month, and he became a healthy and precocious boy.

Before we dismiss this story as evidence of Casanova’s fecund imagination, it is worth bearing in mind that, like Cellini, he often sounds less truthful than he actually is; where it has been possible to check his stories against other sources, they have proved to be remarkably accurate. The witch was probably genuine, even if the fairy was a dream resulting from her suggestion.

In his teens Casanova became an abbé, but his enthusiasm for the opposite sex was his downfall; he was thrown out of the house of his patron, a senator, when he was caught with the senator’s ward ‘looking into the difference in conformation between a boy and a girl’. After more similar indiscretions, he left the Church for the army, then became a fiddler in a theatre and joined a band of daredevils who spent their nights looking for trouble.

One evening, he made the acquaintance of a senator named Bragadin, who suffered an apoplectic fit on the way home in a gondola. Casanova installed himself as a nurse; when the senator’s two closest friends told Casanova he might go home if he wanted to, Casanova replied, with his natural theatrical instinct: ‘If I go he will die; if I stay, he will get well.’ Strangely enough, the prophecy proved accurate; in the night, Bragadin almost succumbed to a mercury poultice that his physician had put on his chest; Casanova removed it and washed his chest, whereupon the invalid fell into a peaceful slumber. The following day, the doctor resigned the case and left his patient in the charge of Casanova, who proceeded to quote medical authorities he had never read, and prescribed the correct treatment – rest and diet – by instinct.

Then came the fateful day: ‘M. de Bragadin, who had the weakness to believe in the occult sciences, told me one day that, for a young man of my age, he thought my learning too extensive, and that he was certain I was the possessor of some supernatural endowment: Casanova, never one to fly in the face of providence, admitted that he was a Kabbalist and possessed the Key of Solomon. He found them easy to deceive. They asked him incomprehensible questions, and his ‘oracle’ gave incomprehensible answers, which they professed to find enlightening. ‘I saw how easy it must have been for the ancient heathen priests to impose upon ignorant and therefore credulous mankind.’

He was given a generous allowance and treated like a son of the house. He took to gambling – his chief source of income throughout his life – and soon after, engaged in his first major deception as a magician. The motive seems to have been pure vanity and the spirit of mischief. In Mantua a young man persuaded him to go and look at the collection of antiquities owned by his father, among which was a knife, said to be the one with which St. Peter cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant. (Luke states that it is a sword.) Casanova, amused by the credulous old gentleman, assured him that he was possessed of a fortune, since the knife had magical powers – it could be used to locate all the buried treasure in the Pope’s dominions. However, its sheath was also needed, and fortunately Casanova knew the man who owned the sheath. He manufactured a sheath out of an old boot, which he showed to the antiquarian. He now offered himself as the magician who could unearth the treasure for them. The son had a letter from a man who thought there was treasure on his land, which was part of the papal estates. As he brought out the letter, Casanova managed to glimpse the name of the village – Cesena. He set up his ‘oracle’ – numbered cards made into ‘pyramids’ – and extracted the answer that the treasure in question was buried somewhere near the Rubicon. A map was consulted, and it was found that the Rubicon ran through Cesena. The old man and his son admitted the identity of the village, totally convinced they were dealing with a magician.

In Cesena, Casanova was introduced into the household of a wealthy peasant, George Franzia. The eldest daughter, a girl of fourteen named Javotte, was pretty, which was what Casanova had hoped. An adventure without sexual involvement would not have been to his taste.

He was a master in the art of obtaining confidence by various means. He told the old man that they must observe strict secrecy, for fear of the Inquisition. When he asked why it was that the inquisitors were more powerful than a magician, Casanova explained that it was because monks had more devils under their command.

He told them that Javotte would be their means of obtaining the treasure, because a pure virgin was necessary. Then, on successive days, he instituted a ritual bathing of members of the family: first the father, then the brother, and then – the whole point of the proceedings – Javotte. He explains that he did not expect to make her fall in love with him: ‘but one finds a compensation in the complete control obtained over a woman’. He bathed her himself, and she responded to his caresses until ‘her ardent fire was at last quenched by the natural result of that excitement’. On drying her, Casanova came close to destroying the virginity that was essential to his magic, but fortunately his own excitement also reached a harmless climax before he succumbed. The following morning, it was the girl’s turn to bathe him, and she proved as expert at caresses as Casanova himself. She slept in his room, and from that night onward they slept together, although he continued to ‘respect the essential point’. He decided that her virginity could remain intact until the night after the incantations.

He mentions passing a part of the following night observing some of the strange signs that had made Franzia certain the treasure was buried on his land. Heavy blows came from under the ground at intervals, and the cellar door opened and closed regularly, as if by invisible hands. He admits that he was unable to explain this, but concludes that ‘there was some unknown roguery at work’.

When the hour came, he says: ‘I throw off all profane garments. I clothe myself in the long white robe, the work of a virgin’s innocent hands. I allow my long hair to fall loosely. I place the extraordinary crown on my head, the circle maximus on my shoulders, and, seizing the sceptre with one hand, the wonderful knife with the other, I go down into the yard. There I spread my circle on the ground, uttering the most barbarous words, and after going round it three times I jump into the middle.’ A thunderstorm began to brew up, and Casanova experienced a fleeting regret that he had not thought of predicting that something of the sort might take place. But as the sky was split with lightning, he suddenly began to wonder if there wasn’t something supernatural going on after all. And as the storm increased, he became convinced that if he was to escape with his life. he must remain in the magic circle.

The amusing consequence is that Casanova ended by being convinced that the innocence of the virgin was under the special protection of God, and that if he dared to violate it, ‘the most rapid and terrible death would be my punishment’. And so he explained to Franzia that the seven spirits guarding the treasure had made him agree to delay digging it up, and gave him a long document describing the location and extent of the treasure. It is typical of Casanova that he later returned to present Javotte with a pair of expensive bracelets. In spite of his rogueries, he was fundamentally a good man.

There would be no point in relating his other exploits as a ‘magician’. The ancient and gullible Madame D’Urfé believed in him implicitly, and he explains typically that ‘if I had thought it possible to lead back Madame D’Urfé to the right use of her senses I would have made the attempt, but I felt sure her disease was without remedy, and the only course before me seemed to abet her in her ravings and profit by them’. He accordingly took part in remarkable ceremonies whose aim was to cause Madame D’Urfé’s soul to pass into the body of a baby, so she could live all over again. The passage describing the ceremony is inimitably funny, and affords some insight into the kind of charlatanism employed by other ‘magicians’ besides Casanova; but it is too long to quote here.

On falling in love with a beautiful Englishwoman, Justiniana Wynne (whom he calls Mlle. X. C. V.), he made use of the name of Paracelsus to produce the desired result. She was pregnant by a lover who had deserted her, and told Casanova that she had a recipe for an ‘aroph’ that would terminate her condition; it was ‘a kind of unguent composed of several drugs, such as saffron, myrrh, etc. compounded with virgin honey’. Casanova, whose advances had already been rejected, immediately added that the preparation became infallible if it was mixed with fresh male semen, and offering himself as the means of introducing the aroph into the mouth of the womb. ‘We looked – I like a medical student about to perform an operation, and she like a patient, with this difference, that it was the patient who arranged the dressing. When she was ready – that is, when she had placed the aroph as neatly as a skull-cap fits a parson, she put herself in the proper position for the preparation to mix with the semen.’ It is sad to relate that, in spite of dozens of applications of the aroph to the mouth of the womb, Paracelsus’s recipe failed, and Miss Wynne eventually had the baby in a convent.

Casanova possessed a natural ‘occult faculty’. When some of his absurder prophecies came true, he would experience for a moment the superstitious awe he felt in the thunderstorm; once, when he made a careless slip in consulting the pyramid-oracle, the answer obtained struck him as utterly wild; but it proved to be correct. In Dux, where he spent his declining years, he stated that a certain cat would have six black kittens, and the cat had precisely that number.

His occult faculty accounted for his amazing luck during his first forty years; a ‘sixth sense’ made him say or do the right thing, as when he found himself announcing that if he stayed with Bragadin, he would live. The same thing applies to his relations with women. If the Memoirs were a novel, it would explain why there is an odd similarity about his sexual exploits; the author would be recording his own fantasies. Some commentators have questioned Casanova’s veracity on precisely these grounds: that the same type of girl, the same type of situation, keep recurring. For readers with more insight, and sympathy, this is precisely what assured his basic veracity. In real life, the same type of thing does keep happening to people with a definite personality. Casanova, with his punctilious good manners and his genuine protectiveness and generosity towards women, was always meeting a type of impressionable girl who, within days or even hours, was saying, ‘Do what you like with me, I am yours.’ It is typical that his own daughter fell in love with him – without, of course, knowing his identity.

This curious psychic radar began to fail him in his late thirties, when his passion for a beautiful courtesan, La Charpillon, led him to commit various follies, none of which brought him any closer to his goal. She was one of his few total failures; she set out to humiliate him, and succeeded. The superb confidence that had for years brought him the luck of a sleepwalker was cracked. And from now on, although he still had his triumphs ahead of him, he was on the downhill slope of defeat. It is interesting to reflect that precisely the same thing happened to Mesmer during his later Paris period. The confidence went; and what is a mesmerist without confidence? Casanova lived to be seventy-three, dying two years before the end of the century he had dramatised so brilliantly; but something of the essential Casanova died in London with his passion for La Charpillon.

In the long-drawn-out frustration of his last days, Casanova kept his soul alive by writing his Memoirs; but when Count Marcolini at Dresden refused to allow even the first volume to be printed, he lost heart and broke off the writing at the point where he had reached his fiftieth year. How great is the loss may be a matter of some dispute, for the remaining years of his life might have left the reader with a bitter taste in his mouth. But there is one cause of regret for all students of the occult: that Casanova did not describe his second meeting with one of the most baffling men of the age, the ‘Count Cagliostro’; he might have cleared up a mystery that must now remain unsolved. Everyone has heard the name of Cagliostro; for most people, it has sinister and dubious associations, rather like that of Rasputin. Few people, even among the well-informed, knew very much about him, for even the basic facts of his life are in doubt. The only thing we know with any certainty is that he died tragically in the prisons of the Inquisition in 1795, probably strangled by his jailer. Opinions as to his powers and abilities cover the whole spectrum, from Carlyle’s ‘King of Liars’ and ‘Great Quack Face’ to Lewis Spence’s ‘One of the great occult figures of all time’.

Even his identity is still a matter for argument. In her book on the Diamond Necklace affair, Frances Mossiker remarks: ‘Those who consult the encyclopedias will find it stated as categorical fact that Count Alessandro di Cagliostro was “Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo”. It is enough to shake one’s faith in reference books, in view of the fact that the basis for such identification must rest for eternity on the evidence of an anonymous letter to the Paris police …’ But Miss Mossiker ends by more or less acknowledging that Cagliostro and Balsamo are probably the same person. W. R. H. Trowbridge denied it emphatically in his book on Cagliostro, asserting that although Casanova met Balsamo, whom he describes unflatteringly, he never met Cagliostro. F. Ribadeau Dumas, the author of Cagliostro, Scoundrel or Saint? has the highest possible opinion of Cagliostro, but accepts that he was Balsamo. Goethe was sufficiently fascinated by Cagliostro to pay a visit to Balsamo’s family when he was in Palermo – a full account of the visit can be found in Funck-Brentano’s Cagliostro and Company – but he portrays him as a swindler in his play The Grand Copht.

But Goethe’s interest in Cagliostro is a clue to the truth that probably lies behind all these contradictions. It was not, I think, the interest of the artist in the scoundrel – the interest that made Thomas Mann write a book about a confidence man. It was a recognition of a fundamental similarity between the two of them. Shaw remarked that no man is at home in society until he has found his natural place, either above or below the one he is born to. Cagliostro and Goethe were both born far below their natural places; both ended up hobnobbing with princes and cardinals, and gaining universal respect on the strength of inborn genius. And there was a natural genius, a natural strength in Cagliostro, that made itself felt. A hostile witness, the Baroness D’Oberkirch, met him at Cardinal Rohan’s at Saverne, and describes him: ‘While not actually handsome, his face was the most remarkable I have ever seen. His eyes, above all. They were indescribable, with supernatural depths – all fire and yet all ice. It seemed to me that if any two artists sketched him, the two portraits, while having some slight resemblance, might yet well be totally dissimilar. Ambivalent, he at once attracted and repelled you; he frightened you and at the same time inspired you with insurmountable curiosity.’ Casanova had described him about ten years earlier as ‘short and badly hung, and his face bore all the indications of daring, impudence, sarcasm and imposture’. But this sounds like hindsight sharpened by jealousy. Baroness D’Oberkirch says: ‘Cagliostro was possessed of a demonic power; he enthralled the mind, paralysed the will.’ This is no vulgar adventurer; it is a man of real force.

When Cagliostro was in the hands of the Inquisition, his biography was written by one of its hirelings. Naturally, it portrays him simply as a scoundrel and cheat; Carlyle and all other hostile commentators have followed this Inquisition biography, whose avowed aim is to cut its subject down to size. The obvious question arises: If Cagliostro was such a contemptible rogue, how did he achieve such influence over so many people? Carlyle replies: Because he was one of the greatest cheats that ever lived. And this crude and simplistic view simply denies the remarkable power to which so many people have testified.

If it is accepted that Cagliostro was, in his way, a man of genius – that is, of an intelligent vitality far above the average – the contradictions begin to vanish, and the story of his life takes on a shape and direction that is absent from Casanova’s.

It is fairly certain that he was born Giuseppe Balsamo, son of a poor family of Palermo, in 1743. Goethe describes the family as simple but warm-hearted peasants, living in a single room. His father died when he was young, and since his disposition was naturally explosive, he soon became ungovernable. He was sent to the seminary school of San Rocco, but ran away several times; he was then enrolled as a novice in the Benfratelli of Cartegirone. One day, in a burst of anticlerical exuberance, he shocked the brothers by improvising freely on the sacred text he was supposed to be reading aloud at supper, substituting the names of notorious prostitutes for those of the saints. This achieved the effect he had been aiming for: he was thrown out. He now took lessons in drawing, for which he showed unusual talent. His skill with the pen and brush extended to copying letters, theatre tickets and anything else that would bring a profit.

He was naturally attracted to the occult, and to alchemy and astrology. It is not certain where he acquired his basic knowledge. But Sicily has always had a strong tradition of witchcraft and occultism, and no doubt instruction was easy to come by. He possessed a natural degree of second sight. This is evidenced by the story told by Baroness D’Oberkirch, who describes how Cagliostro, immediately after seeing her for the first time, suddenly announced: ‘You lost your mother a long time ago. You hardly remember her. You were an only child. You have one daughter, and she will be an only child. You will have no more children.’ Pressed to answer by Cardinal Rohan, the offended Baroness, who objected to being addressed so familiarly, finally admitted that he was right about herself. His prediction about her daughter also came true.

The stories of his rascalities at this period all stem from his Inquisition biographer, and may therefore be suspect. The most famous of them states that he gained the confidence of a miserly goldsmith, and convinced him that he could make gold. The incantations took place in a remote field at midnight, and at the crucial moment, ruffians dressed as demons rushed out and knocked the goldsmith insensible. When he recovered his senses, Balsamo managed to convince him that the demons had made off with the large amount of gold they had brought with them for purposes of magical conjuration. The same source adds that Balsamo was himself robbed by two accomplices in Calabria, and reached Rome, at the age of seventeen, completely destitute. He managed to live by his artistic talents. Goethe tells a story of how Balsamo forged some documents at the request of the Sicilian marquis, and was thrown into prison in consequence. The enraged marquis went to see the judge, and met the prosecuting counsel in his anteroom. He ended by knocking him down and jumping on him. The judge was so impressed by this display of conviction that he freed Balsamo on the spot.

Whether the forgery story is true or not, it is certain that he continued to study occultism, and became the laboratory assistant of a Greek named Altotas, who, among other things, had discovered a process for giving flax fibres the glossy feeling of silk. They travelled in Egypt, and called at Malta, where they made the acquaintance of the grand master of the Knights of Malta, a man named Pinta. Pinta was an enthusiastic amateur of alchemy, and welcomed the two adepts. Balsamo so impressed him that he later gave him letters of introduction to distinguished men in Rome and Naples. In Rome, as a dashing young artist of twenty-six, Balsamo was fascinated by a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl, daughter of a copper smelter who lived in an alley named after the local church of the Trinita de Pellegrini, in a slum quarter. Lorenza Feliciani was illiterate but dazzling, and in spite of some opposition from her father, she married Balsamo.

It was in the following year that Casanova met them at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. He says that they were assumed to be people of rank because they had distributed alms generously on entering the town. They had made a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella in Italy, and then to Our Lady of Pilar in Spain, and were now going back to Rome. Lorenza, who impressed Casanova as modest, devoted and honest, said that the alms they had given were the excess from the money they had received at the last town, where they had begged them. Balsamo asked Casanova to take up a collection for them at the table d’hôte, and Lorenza asked him to give them a letter of introduction for Avignon. Later, Balsamo proved his skill as a forger by making such an exact copy of the letter that Casanova himself swore that the copy was his original letter. He warned Balsamo to be careful, or his talent might cost him his life.

From this story, it is clear that Balsamo had found a jewel in his wife. With her gentle beauty, she made a far more favourable impression than Balsamo could have created alone.

Whether the pilgrimage was undertaken for religious reasons is a different matter. Balsamo was a man who had something inside him that wanted to get out. He could not have settled down to copper smelting in Rome. He felt the world held something important in store for him, and he meant to keep moving until he found it.

They seem to have returned to Spain, for Lorenza later recounted how the viceroy in Barcelona tried to seduce her, and then, when she repulsed him, tried to get her arrested as an unmarried woman living in sin. In Madrid, Balsamo worked for the Duke of Alva. In the following year they came to London, and Balsamo worked as a painter and decorator for a while with a fellow Italian. And there is a story that he extorted a hundred pounds from a Quaker who fell in love with his wife and was caught by him in a compromising position. It is certain that he went to prison for debt, having failed in a lawsuit against someone who owed him for pen drawings. Lorenza persuaded a philanthropist named Sir Edward Hales (whom she later called ‘Sir Dehels’) to get her husband out of jail. He did more than this; he gave Balsamo a job decorating the ceiling at his home near Canterbury. Balsamo was not used to this kind of work, and when the ceiling was ruined, they left for France.

Lorenza describes an acquaintance they made on the boat. ‘On the passage to France we made the acquaintance of M. Duplessis, the Steward of the Marquis de Prie, who showed us all kind of civilities. And when M. Balsamo showed him some of his works, he appeared surprised. “You will make your fortune in Paris,” he said. “I am an advocate at the Parliament, and I know many lords; don’t distress yourself, I’ll present you to the king. You won’t have to go on your travels again. Your wife is very pleasant, very pretty, very charming. I’ll do all I can to set you up in Paris.”’

Balsamo must have guessed that Duplessis was more interested in Lorenza than himself, but the prospect of finally settling down to a prosperous existence no doubt made him prefer to ignore the danger and hope for the best.

They were destitute when they arrived in Calais, but M. Duplessis offered Lorenza a seat in his carriage.

‘“And what of my husband?” I [she] said.

‘“Can’t he wait a little at Calais? He will come on later.”’

She declined. So Duplessis offered Balsamo the use of a horse. The long ride to Paris must have been hard on his seat. Meanwhile, M. Duplessis was whispering declarations of love in Lorenza’s ear. ‘Thus tormented against my will, I was several times tempted to stop and leave M. Duplessis, in order to escape the solicitations and actual violence he showed me … but knowing the irritable and fiery nature of my husband, I feared to inform him of what was going on …’ In Paris, M. Duplessis let them stay at the house of the Marquis de Prie. Balsamo was naturally more tired than his wife and retired to bed, while she went to an opera with M. Duplessis. This continued for two months, and it seems that Lorenza finally ceded her virtue one night when her husband went to visit an apothecary. But having made Lorenza his mistress, Duplessis now wanted her to separate from her husband. She was won over to the extent of moving into apartments in the Rue St. Honoré. Balsamo went mad with jealousy and rage – a reaction that throws doubt on the story of his deliberate complicity in his wife’s seduction. He applied to the king for redress. It was granted, and in February 1773 Lorenza went into the women’s gaol of Sainte Pélagie, where she made the statement that has been quoted. She spent nearly a year in prison, while her repentant husband tried to get her out. When she was released in December. his fortunes had taken a turn for the better. A skin lotion containing borax had made him money, and he had become instructor in alchemy to two amateurs of the subject. They decided to return to Italy, this time in style. Balsamo now called himself the Marchese Pellegrini – taking the name of the church near his wife’s home. They visited Balsamo’s family in Palermo, and he rented a house there for a time. Unfortunately the goldsmith he had swindled was still alive, and had Balsamo imprisoned. W. R. H. Trowbridge asserts that Goethe’s story of the Sicilian marquis, who effected Balsamo’s release by jumping on the prosecuting attorney, belongs to this period rather than to his early Wanderjahre.

In 1776, Balsamo returned to London and changed his name to Cagliostro, which happened to be the name of an uncle in Palermo. Two important events took place on this second visit to England. He was admitted to the Lodge of Freemasons. And he was fleeced by confidence tricksters who thought he had a manuscript containing an infallible system for predicting the winning numbers in a lottery. The story is obscure, although it seems fairly well authenticated. Cagliostro may have predicted certain winning numbers through his power of second sight, but he did not want to continue doing it. There were lawsuits involving a necklace, and, as Carlyle puts it, ‘the most accomplished swindler of the swindling eighteenth century was … hobbled, duped and despoiled by the aid of the masterly fictions of English law’. It is impossible to know how far Cagliostro was to blame.

Altogether more important, from the point of view of his future, was his admission to the Esperance Lodge of Freemasons, at the rooms of the King’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, on April 12, 1777. He called himself ‘Joseph Cagliostro, Colonel of the 3rd Regiment of Brandenburg’, and his wife also became a mason.

The freemasons are a ‘secret society’ of a religious nature, whose basic tenet is the brotherhood of man. Originally a society of stone-workers who travelled around Europe wherever great buildings were being erected, with a system of secret signs for recognising one another, it became the home of occultists, alchemists, astrologers and so on. Readers of War and Peace will remember Peter Bezukhov’s encounter with the freemasons when he is in a state of pessimism and exhaustion. Although Tolstoy was not himself a mason, he states their aims with clarity and sympathy. First, the notion of brotherhood: ‘No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the co-operation of all [my italics] by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.’ This notion of a long secret tradition is of fundamental importance: ‘The first and chief object of our Order, the foundation on which it rests and which no human power can destroy, is the preservation and handing on to posterity of a certain important mystery, which has come down to us from the remotest ages, even from the first man – a mystery on which perhaps the fate of mankind depends. But since this mystery is of such a nature that nobody can know or use it unless he be prepared by long and diligent self-purification, not everyone can hope to attain it quickly. Hence we have a secondary aim: that of preparing our members as much as possible to reform their hearts, to purify and enlighten their minds, by means handed on to us by tradition …’ He goes on to describe their third aim: the regeneration of mankind. (This is the one that appeals most to Peter.) Then he details the ‘seven steps of Solomon’s temple’. (There is a close connection between the idea of masons and temples, inevitably.) They are discretion, obedience, morality, love of mankind, courage, generosity, love of death. Peter is enjoined to meditate continually on death, and he finds this the most difficult proposition to swallow.

Tolstoy’s description of the initiation rites should also be read by anyone who wants to understand the attraction of freemasonry. To a non-mason, these are bound to sound absurd; the aspirant wears a slipper on one foot and a boot on the other, and is led blindfolded through passages, led along certain carpets to the accompaniment of knockings with mallets and swords, made to hold a pair of compasses against his breast, confronted by men in robes pointing swords at him, made to kneel ‘at the gates of the temple’ and so on. At one point, Peter suddenly wonders if it is all a practical joke. Frank King, in his book Cagliostro, the Last of the Sorcerers, summarises Cagliostro’s initiation briefly:

The ceremony was very similar to that which is performed in Masonic Lodges today with the addition of several harmless but undignified scenes which were intended to impress the candidate. Thus Joseph was hauled up to the ceiling by a rope and allowed to dangle, signifying his helplessness without divine aid. He was stabbed with a dagger, the blade of which collapsed into its handle, to emphasise the fate which would be his should he betray the secrets of the Order. He had to kneel, divested of his clothing, to show his subservience to the Master of the Lodge.

It can be seen that the freemasons are direct descendants of the Orphics and Pythagoreans. The aim of the initiation is to produce an immense sense of significance and reverence. It is not surprising that, at the end of it all, Tolstoy’s hero ‘felt as if he had returned from a long journey on which he had spent dozens of years, had become completely changed, and had quite left behind him his former habits and way of life’.

This also makes it clear why the freemasons have always been persecuted, particularly in Catholic countries. The Church may feel that Protestantism and its various sects are bastard offshoots of the parent tree, weak imitations that can never be a real challenge because they cannot offer a real alternative to the immense apparatus of Catholicism. The freemasons were virtually setting up an alternative church that claimed far greater antiquity than Catholicism. The man who joined it felt himself a member of the fundamental Secret Society, guarding the most ancient mystery. The problem of any organised religion is always the same: how to imbue its followers with such a profound sense of purpose that old habits and personality patterns are permanently remoulded. The freemasons did this by using the techniques of the Mysteries of ancient Greece. The initiate would emerge from all this with a sense of being in a neat and orderly universe, where his aims and purposes are suddenly quite definite. A tradition dating back to Adam stands behind him. The notion of the brotherhood of man gives him a new sense of belonging to the human race. What is more, the world is full of brother masons – actively benevolent brothers who will not allow him to sink. This is, of course, an extremely important part of the attraction of any religion, for the craving for security and ‘territory’ is deeper even than the religious instinct; at least, it demands to be satisfied first in most people. The real power of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages lay in monasteries, where the monks were given this basic ‘security of tenure’, so to speak.

I have discussed freemasonry at such length because it is impossible to explain the remainder of Cagliostro’s life without it. Up to now, he had remained an adventurer on much the same level as Casanova, an artist driven from pillar to post by adversity, by a fate that seemed to take pleasure in tormenting him and kicking his feet from under him. The wandering life produces a sense of pointlessness and contingency, a slow erosion of self-respect. Cagliostro was thirty-four; he had been wandering for nearly twenty years; the life of adventure had lost its charm. This was like coming home. Its emotional effect was as profound as on Peter Bezukhov. The transformation was total. He had been thrown a lifeline, and he lost no time in scrambling ashore. From then on, freemasonry was his life’s work.

Moreover, since he himself was a born magician, was he not naturally one of the priests of this religion? His business was not to be a simple follower, like the valet and the ageing alchemist who had been received into the London lodge at the same time as himself. He was a grand master by right. If he had joined the Catholic Church he would have set out to become pope, feeling that was his natural position. And his fellow Catholics would have found his pushiness hard to tolerate. The masons didn’t mind it in the least. There could be no doubt about the genuineness of his conversion; he would obviously be a powerful proselytiser. Just as Italy was the original home of Catholicism, so England was the parent country of freemasonry, for although it had not been its original home, it had been the source of the great revival of freemasonry in the sixteenth century. And where was the original home of freemasonry? Cagliostro knew the answer: almost certainly, Egypt. What is the world’s earliest great architectural monument? The pyramids. Is not the Great Pyramid of Cheops full of secret measurements embodying arcane secrets? Masons later built the Temple of Solomon, but that was long after, a whole two millennia later (Cheops was about 2900 B.C.; Solomon belongs to the tenth century B.C.)

Cagliostro claimed that on his visit to London he picked up at a bookstall a manuscript on the subject of Egyptian magic and masonry by one George Gaston. Whether this is true or not is unimportant. Cagliostro either discovered or invented ‘the Egyptian rite’, an even more ancient and solemn rite than that of the modern masons. He devoted the remainder of his life to establishing the Egyptian rite. This was by no means an alternative to already established rites of freemasonry; it was a higher order, and only freemasons could qualify for it. As far as freemasonry was concerned, the idea was a good one. A still higher order of adepts could only broaden their base and extend their influence.

The founders of Egyptian masonry were the prophets Elijah and Enoch; the latter was known as the Grand Copt, or Copht. In due course, Cagliostro promoted himself from agent of the Grand Copt to the Grand Copt himself. He also added some impressive mystifications to his claims. The pupils of the prophets never die; like Elijah, they are eventually transported bodily into heaven. They have twelve lives, and after each, rise up from their ashes like the phoenix. Cagliostro began to drop hints that he was thousands of years old. His wife, although she continued to look twenty even in her thirties, dropped hints about an officer son serving in the army. There can be no doubt that Cagliostro continued to be something of a confidence man. But his aims were no longer personal. He saw freemasonry as the supreme good for the world; it was his task to spread the word. The rites of freemasonry are symbolic, like the Catholic mass. Cagliostro’s claims about the prophet Enoch and the phoenix were simply an extension of this symbolic truth; their aim was to create the right frame of mind, to raise men above their old selves. The absurd miracles of the saints and martyrs are intended to have the same effect.

What is more important, the psychological change that took place in Cagliostro, and the new lack of self-division, had the effect on his ‘occult powers’ that we might expect. They increased suddenly. There are few stories about Balsamo’s power of second sight or healing; there are dozens about Cagliostro’s. He had a remarkable faculty of clairvoyance, and was inclined to use young children as mediums. He would breathe upon the child’s chin and forehead, and then make mystic symbols on his forehead and hand. The five-year-old son of Marshal von Medem was made to stare at his hand, and his father asked him what his sister was doing. The Countess von der Recke describes what happened in her memoirs: ‘… he described her as placing ‘her hand on her heart as though in pain. A moment later, he exclaimed: “Now she is kissing my brother. who has just come home.” On the Marshal declaring this to be impossible, as this brother was leagues away, Cagliostro terminated the séance, and with an air of the greatest confidence ordered the doubting parent to “verify the vision”. This the Marshal immediately proceeded to do; and learnt that his son, whom he believed so far away, had unexpectedly returned home, and that shortly before her brother’s arrival his daughter had had an attack of palpitation of the heart.’

Cagliostro now had a mission – and a way of making a living. Now, when he entered a European city, he made for the Masonic Lodge, made speeches about the Egyptian rite and initiated members into it. He seems to have gone to Venice, Berlin, Nuremberg and Leipzig. In Leipzig, at a banquet given in his honour, he prophesied that if the lodge failed to adopt the Egyptian rite, its master would feel the weight of the hand of God before the end of the month. When the master, a man named Scieffort, committed suicide not long afterwards, the masons of Leipzig followed Cagliostro’s advice. His tour of Europe became a triumphal procession from lodge to lodge as his reputation preceded him. Trowbridge, his warmest defender, admits that ‘he did not hesitate to recruit his followers by imposture when without it he would have failed to attract them’, but adds, with undoubted accuracy, that there is not a single authenticated instance in which he derived personal profit by imposture. The impostures seem to have been mostly in the matter of clairvoyance. The solemn Egyptian rite of initiation, which included long speeches in foreign languages by the Grand Copt, ended with a ceremony in which a young boy or girl (called pupilles or colombes) practised clairvoyance by gazing into a bowl of water. It appears that Cagliostro was not above bribing the pupille or colombe in advance. On one embarrassing occasion, after a highly successful séance, the colombe announced that it had all been fixed in advance, and Cagliostro had to brazen his way out of it.

His stay in Courland seems to have been typical of what happened in most places. The head of the lodge, Marshal von Medem, and the marshal’s eldest daughter, Countess von der Recke, were deeply impressed by the Grand Copt. His exhibition of clairvoyance through the five-year-old son, mentioned above, was successful. So were séances where invisible angels kissed the child medium – the kisses all being clearly audible. At séances Cagliostro also gave remarkable performances of thought-reading; he possessed the same kind of power that Gilbert Murray later displayed. He correctly foretold that the countess had recovered from an illness, and would be found at a certain hour writing at her desk. However, the countess was a mystic with Swedenborgian leanings, and all this spiritualism struck her as morbid. When Cagliostro, like Casanova, began to speak of how to recover buried treasure with the aid of spirits, her faith in him began to collapse, and he decided it was time to move on.

The next stop was St. Petersburg. But here his luck ran out. It was here that his colombe suddenly betrayed him after a successful séance. His wife also, it seems, betrayed him with the Empress Catherine’s lover, Potemkin, which pleased neither the magician nor the Empress. Her doctors, two Scotsmen named Rogerson and Mouncey, also prejudiced her mind against him. Licking his wounds, he moved on to Strasbourg.

It was here that his fortunes took a steep turn for the better. He was already a rich man, and he entered Strasbourg on September 19, 1780, preceded by six liveried servants on black horses, and driving in his black japanned coach covered with magic symbols. Crowds lined the route; they had been waiting all day. He did not move to a luxury hotel, but to a small room over a tobacconist’s in a poor quarter, where he proceeded to distribute alms and cure the sick. There can be no doubt whatever that, charlatan or not, Cagliostro tried to live by the highest principles of masonry. Just as, ten years earlier in Aix, he had given away his excess money to the poor, so now he set out to practise philanthropy on a grand scale.

He had developed another typical characteristic. Perhaps because he was so often snubbed by the aristocracy as a charlatan, he was inclined to refuse to treat them, or even to meet them if they came to his door. This is understandable. He felt he was working for the regeneration of mankind; he was an idealist; why should he gratify the idle curiosity of self-opinionated aristocrats? When the philosopher Lavater, a friend of Goethe, asked to meet him, Cagliostro replied: ‘If your science is greater than mine, you have no need of my acquaintance; if mine is the greater, I have no need of yours.’ Lavater persisted, and later became the warmest of Cagliostro’s defenders.

It is now that Cardinal de Rohan enters the story. He was a strange man, a prince of the family of Bourbon, tall, handsome, rich, enormously charming. In spite of his position in the Church, he loved wine, hunting and the opposite sex. The sorrow of his life was that the queen, Marie Antoinette, disliked him. Her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, had taken a strong dislike to him when he was ambassador to Austria, and his dreams of becoming the Richelieu, the Mazarin, behind Louis XVI, were receding further every day. He had another sorrow, even more curious: he was in love with the Queen. He had met her for the first time ten years earlier, when she came through Strasbourg (of which Rohan was the bishop), a girl of fifteen en route to join her husband. She was very beautiful, with ash-blonde hair and a perfect complexion, and a slim figure that would later become plumper. When the cardinal-bishop administered communion to the kneeling princess, he found himself envying the husband who would shortly claim her virginity. But, oddly enough, this was not to be. In bed with his beautiful young wife, the future king of France became impotent. In his diary he wrote ‘Nothing’. What was worse, the situation soon became common knowledge all over Europe. Louis’s doctors said that the trouble was physical not psychological and that it could be cured by a scalpel; but the King (he came to the throne in 1774) was afraid of pain and declined. So for the next six years, he clambered on to his wife every night, and the result continued to be ‘Nothing’. It must have struck the cardinal as a sinful waste, and deepened his morbid preoccupation with the lovely ash blonde.

It was ten years after the meeting that the cardinal-bishop of Strasbourg heard about the miracle worker who was now living in the town. He sent a note to Cagliostro, and was promptly rebuffed, in the same manner as Lavater. Cagliostro replied that if he was ill, he would cure him; if he wasn’t, then he had no need of a doctor, nor the doctor of him. The cardinal, unoffended, declared that he had asthma and asked Cagliostro to attend him. The two immediately impressed one another. The cardinal told the Abbé Georgel that he saw in Cagliostro’s face ‘a dignity so impressive that he felt himself in the grip of an awesome religious experience’. It was the cardinal-prince who became the acolyte and disciple, and who was flattered when Cagliostro told him one day, ‘Your soul is worthy of my own. You deserve to be the confidant of all my secrets.’ The Baroness D’Oberkirch, like many others, reacted unfavourably to the idea of an adventurer gaining so much influence over Rohan, yet found him hypnotically fascinating. Baron de Gleichen has left an accurate portrait:

Cagliostro was small, but he had a very fine head which could have served as the model for the face of an inspired poet. [In fact, Cagliostro’s bust gives him a strong resemblance to William Blake.] It is true that his tone, his gestures and his manners were those of a charlatan, boastful, pretentious and arrogant, but it must be remembered that he was an Italian, a physician giving consultations, self-styled Masonic grand master, and a professor of occult sciences. Otherwise his ordinary conversation was agreeable and instructive, his actions noble and charitable, and his healing treatments never unsuccessful and sometimes admirable: he never took a penny from his patients.

And Cagliostro was fabulously successful in Strasbourg; both as an occultist and a doctor. Sometimes it was simply warmth and confidence that produced their effect, as when he was successful in delivering a baby for a woman who had been given up by midwives. He decided the baby was still alive, and soothed her and gave her confidence, admitting afterwards to Gleichen that the result was due to luck rather than skill. He cured the Marquis de Lasalle of a gangrened leg. When the cardinal’s uncle, the Prince de Soubise, was dangerously ill, the cardinal took Cagliostro along to see him without disclosing the Grand Copt’s identity. The prince had been given up by his regular doctors. but Cagliostro had him up and about within three days. It was this cure that improved his reputation with the aristocracy.

His séances in Strasbourg were equally impressive, and he gave indubitable proofs of second sight and telepathy: reading the contents of a sealed envelope, predicting what people were doing in other places and successfully avoiding traps set for him by the unbelieving (when a widow asked a question about her husband, the colombe remained silent until the woman admitted the trick).

He impressed the Baroness D’Oberkirch by telling her one day that the Empress of Austria had just died; it took three more days for the news to reach Strasbourg. The baroness, while fascinated by Cagliostro, was determined to resist him, continuing to believe that he wanted some favour of her – an introduction to the Grand Duchess of Russia? (She could not have been aware that Cagliostro had left St. Petersburg under a cloud.) She told Rohan that she was convinced Cagliostro wanted to fleece him of money; the cardinal replied by showing her a diamond-and-gold ring worth 20,000 francs, which he claimed that Cagliostro had made in front of his own eyes. This convinced her.

There can be little doubt that Cagliostro had no intention of swindling anyone. He had plenty of money. (No doubt the ring had been given him by some freemason admirer, or by someone he had cured.) What he wanted now was simply to consolidate his position, to become the friend of princes, to regenerate the human race. He had no need to be a swindler now. He had proved his powers, and even if the cardinal broke with him, he still had his freemasons. (His own Egyptian lodges all sent him small contributions.)

As to Lorenza, now a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, she was the toast of the town. The Inquisition biographer states that she gave herself to many of her admirers, in exchange for money, of course. A more reliable source states that while she was capable of flirting and keeping them happy with smiles, she remained faithful to her husband. This is undoubtedly true; they were living in the public eye, and a liaison would have ruined her; besides, her husband had already forgiven her twice; his patience might not extend to a third time.

It was a pity that Cagliostro did not remain in Strasbourg, where he might have lived out the remainder of his life in comfort. But the hatred of the doctors made him uncomfortable, although he fortunately discovered in time a spy they had planted in his household. He went to Naples to nurse an old friend who was dangerously ill, then to Bordeaux and Lyons. Then he obeyed the cardinal’s insistent demands, and went to Paris. The eve of his downfall had arrived. And, in another sense, the eve of the French Revolution.

The decade between 1770 and 1780 had not been a happy one for Rohan, for the Queen had become his enemy, and blighted his career. When her husband became King, she had the cardinal – or bishop, as he was in those days – dismissed from his job as ambassador to Austria. She also tried hard to prevent him from being made cardinal, grand almoner, administrator general of the Sorbonne and abbot of St. Waast in Arras, and although she failed in each case, she managed to make her royal displeasure felt in a hundred minor matters. The crueller she became, the more infatuated became her admirer. (It might be supposed that sexual frustration was the underlying cause of her disapproval of the dashing cardinal; but she had ceased to be a virgin on July 20, 1777, when the King had finally risen to the occasion; a week later she was able to assure her mother that ‘the essay has been repeated’. She later produced two sons and a daughter.)

The cardinal’s eye for a pretty woman was his misfortune. In Strasbourg he had met a charming adventuress who called herself the Countess de la Motte Valois, who claimed to be a descendant of Henry II. She had married a handsome but impecunious army officer named La Motte. In Paris, she called on the cardinal, now grand almoner of France, to see if he could not do something to help restore her family’s ancestral lands, or perhaps get her husband a commission in the king’s regiment. The cardinal liked her; he liked her so much that her second visit lasted until the early hours of the morning; she was too grateful for the purse of gold he had given her to object when he began to unhook her dress. Oddly enough, the fifty-year-old cardinal fell violently in love with this young girl in her mid-twenties, and wrote her a number of indiscreet letters. It was the cardinal who made sure she was introduced at court. And, according to the Countess de la Motte, her misfortunes had soon made her a bosom friend of the Queen’s. Rohan was delighted. It was the opportunity he had wanted for years. He begged his attractive mistress to use all her influence with Marie Antoinette. And he was overjoyed when the countess assured him that the Queen was softening towards him.

In fact, the countess was hatching a plot to get rich. She believed, mistakenly, that the cardinal was a very rich man. (In fact, he was a spendthrift, and a fire at his mansion near Strasbourg had cost him a fortune.) The scheme was simple. It was known that the Queen, herself a talented spender, coveted a diamond necklace that had been made by two jewellers named Boehmer and Bassenge; but the price – 1,600,000 livres – was too much even for her.* Jeanne de la Motte’s plan was to persuade Rohan to purchase the necklace for the Queen, then she would make off with it. The cardinal was not expected to make the Queen a present of the necklace – only to buy it secretly for her, or rather, to pledge his credit for it.

It was all fatally easy. The countess undertook to deliver letters from the cardinal to the Queen, and she forged the Queen’s replies. The cardinal naturally expected some sign of the Queen’s approval; the countess and her husband hired a young courtesan, Nicole D’Oliva, to impersonate the Queen at a secret meeting in the gardens of Versailles. The cardinal was allowed to kiss her slipper, and seems to have had no suspicions.

Now, Cagliostro’s only part in this absurd business was as Rohan’s confidant. He had been in Lyons and Bordeaux during the period when the cardinal was negotiating for the necklace, so he had the perfect alibi. He had even warned the cardinal against Jeanne de la Motte at an early stage. But he does seem to have encouraged the cardinal’s hopes of advancement through the Queen, and the Inquisition biographer says he conjured up an image of the Queen in a bowl of water for the cardinal’s benefit. The most damaging thing that can be said of Cagliostro in this whole affair is that his occult gifts were clearly not working at all between 1784 and 1785, when the whole thing blew up. Did no star tell him that a tidal wave was about to burst over so many people?

It came in July 1785, when the first payment – of 400,000 francs – fell due on the necklace, and the cardinal received the request from the jewellers. He passed it on to the Queen through the Countess de la Motte; The countess forged a letter from the Queen saying she could not meet the payment. The cardinal was astounded, and then alarmed when the jewellers pointed out that in that case he would have to meet it himself. The countess had expected this, of course, and she had expected him to pay up quietly. This happened to be impossible; the cardinal could only raise an immediate 30,000 francs. The jewellers declined to give him the three months’ leeway he asked for, and applied direct to the Queen, who thought they had gone mad. Boehmer saw the King, who naturally demanded an explanation from Rohan himself. And it was at this point that the Queen interfered just once too often. She was so indignant that her name had been taken in vain that she demanded the instant arrest of Rohan. It would have been more sensible to hush the whole thing up: a public scandal could do no one any good. Instead, Rohan, Cagliostro, the countess and her lover Villette (who had taken part in the forgeries) were all arrested. The countess’s husband was in London, where he had been disposing of the jewels.

The result of Marie Antoinette’s decision was the eventual destruction of practically everyone involved in the case. Rohan and Cagliostro were acquitted, but Rohan was ruined, and Cagliostro had become a laughing stock. The countess was ordered to be whipped naked in public and branded. Nicole D’Oliva and Villette were acquitted, the latter banished. Marie Antoinette had been a popular queen before the case; now, although her innocence was established, she was booed and hissed by the Paris mob whenever she went out in her coach. Jeanne de la Motte, an endlessly fluent liar, managed to convey the impression that she was the victim of the Queen and cardinal, who had been having a love affair. When whipped and branded, she struggled like a fury and bit through the leather of the executioner’s tunic, drawing blood. The crowd sympathised with her. She escaped to London, but the line of her destiny was also plunging steeply. She wrote a Story of My Life, in which she lied as brilliantly as ever, declaring herself the victim of Cagliostro, Rohan and the Queen. She quarrelled with her husband, who got tired of her love affairs. She quarrelled with her lover, who got tired of her tantrums. The money for the necklace seems to have vanished very quickly – she had lived with immense extravagance in the six months before she was found out – and she was perpetually hounded for debt. Attempting to escape her creditors, she climbed out of a window, and fell three floors to the pavement, fracturing her hip, splintering her arm and losing an eye. She lingered on for several weeks – long enough to express grim satisfaction at the news of the King’s arrest at Varennes, and died before her thirty-fifth birthday. By that time, Cagliostro had been in the Inquisition’s prisons for two years, which also caused her some satisfaction. Even the girl Nicole D’Oliva, who had impersonated the Queen, died at the age of twenty-eight. The cardinal died fairly comfortably in Baden in 1803.

It was Cagliostro, the innocent bystander, who came off worst of all. Before his arrest, he was rich, famous and widely respected. Incarceration in the Bastille completely unnerved him. Besides, he was frantic with anxiety for his wife, who was arrested with him. After seven months, she was released, and received universal sympathy. Cagliostro stayed in jail for nearly a year. He took it very badly. And he made a ridiculous impression at his trial, ‘swaggering, dashing, in a gold-embroidered green taffeta coat’, his hair hanging in greasy ringlets to his shoulders. When the judge asked him who he was, he replied in the voice of a ham actor: ‘I am a noble voyager, Nature’s unfortunate child,’ which drew a burst of laughter. He had prepared a ‘life story’, which seems intended as a deliberate mockery. In it he claimed to be of noble birth, although he had no idea of his parentage, and that he was brought up under the name of Acharat in Arabia, and had apartments in the palace of the Mufti Salahaym, head of the Mohammedan religion; travels in Asia and Africa follow; he meets his Master, Althotas, who dies in Malta, pressing his hand. And so on. Cagliostro seems to have totally lost his judgement. It was time to be quiet, dignified, restrained, if he wanted to emerge from this with a shred of reputation. Instead, he played the mountebank.

After the trial, he went to London, banished by the King. He tried to sue the governor of the Bastille for the return of large sums of money and other items stolen when he was arrested, but lost the case. He was still sufficiently rich to send Nicole D’Oliva, whose beauty had made a great impression at the trial, seven hundred crowns. In London he addressed a Letter to the French People, which immediately achieved large sales in Paris. It was another nail in the coffin of the old order. The letter also has a prophetic ring, in view of future events; he declares that he will not return to Paris until the Bastille is pulled down and made into a public promenade, and prophesies that the French will have a prince who will abolish lettres de cachet (arbitrary orders of imprisonment or banishment) and will convoke the States-General (parliament); ‘he will not be satisfied with being the first of his ministers; he will aim at being the first of Frenchmen’. But to state that Cagliostro prophesied the Revolution and Napoleon is going a little too far. He did not say the Bastille would be made a public promenade – only that he would not return until it was. However, it is arguable that his letter did much to bring about that result not long after. It was the King himself who convoked parliament, even if the last sentence quoted fits Napoleon.

London was no refuge. The British freemasons were not interested in the Egyptian rites, while the Courier de L’Europe published an exposé of Cagliostro that is quite as vindictive as the Inquisition biographer’s account, revealing his true identity as Giuseppe Balsamo. Cagliostro and Lorenza moved to Basel, then Turin, where the police instantly ordered them to move on. They tried to settle in a small village in the Austrian Tyrol, Roveredo, but were again ordered to move on. In Trent in Austria he found another alchemist cardinal willing to become his patron, but the Emperor ordered him to leave Austrian soil. His wife had lost her beauty, although only in her early thirties, and as their fortune dwindled, was forced to sell her diamonds. Cagliostro finally made his supreme mistake and returned to Rome, attempting to propagate freemasonry under the nose of the Pope. In 1789 he was arrested, and never again gained his freedom. The Vatican hinted at vast plots by French revolutionaries to overthrow the Church, and doubled the guard around the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Cagliostro’s trial was undoubtedly intended as a declaration of war on freemasonry. The freemasons replied to the Inquisition biography with a pamphlet that made a far greater impact, and convinced the Pope that he was wise to have rid himself of the dangerous freemason. Cagliostro was transferred to the Castel San Leo, where the cells were made of old dried-up cisterns or cut out of solid rock; here he was almost literally buried alive in darkness. He died in 1795, at the age of fifty-two. His wife died in a nunnery in 1794, still under forty. When French soldiers took the San Leo prison in 1797, they searched for Cagliostro, intending to treat him as a revolutionary hero; but he was dead.

This remarkable man was, indeed, the last of the magicians, and nearly two centuries after his death he remains as misunderstood as during his lifetime. In spite of the broad streak of charlatanism in him, he was undoubtedly a genuine magician. He regarded himself as a man with a mission, and he pursued it single-mindedly. He loved good living, but he was also incredibly generous – perhaps the most basic sign of a fundamentally good man. As he himself pointed out at his trial, there is no reliable evidence that he ever harmed anyone during his extraordinary career, and there can be no doubt that he did much good. It is curious that his career, like that of so many others we have considered – Agrippa, Paracelsus, John Dee, Casanova, Mesmer – reached a certain apex and then went into a runaway decline. This seems to be a characteristic of all magicians; it can also be seen in Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley and Rasputin.

I have deliberately left one of his most remarkable predictions to the end, because it involves the complex science of numerology. This was made at a masonic gathering during his final period in Paris, at the home of the orientalist the Count de Gebelin.

Cagliostro explained to the assembly that each letter in the alphabet has a numerical value – a kabbalistic doctrine. He demonstrated the system, analysing the names of Catherine de Medici, Henry III and Henry IV of France, showing how, when the letters of their name were added up, the result could be ‘read’ like an astrological chart. He went on to try the result on the names of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The King’s prediction stated that he must beware of dying on the scaffold before his thirty-ninth year; ‘he is condemned to lose his head for being guilty of war’. Marie Antoinette would be ‘unfortunate, unhappy in France, a queen without throne or money, wrinkled prematurely through grief, kept on a meagre diet, imprisoned, beheaded’. Cagliostro based his numerology upon the system of Cornelius Agrippa, which is based upon the Hebrew alphabet. In this, the numbers from one to eight have the following letters associated with them:

1: A, I, Q, J, Y

2: B, K, R 3: C, G, L, S

4: D, M, T

5: E, H, N

6: U, V, W, X 7: O, Z

8: F, P

The system for ‘finding someone’s number’ (no doubt the slang phrase comes from this) is to take the letters of his Christian name and surname, and add them all together, thus:

C O L I N   W I L S O N

3 7 3 1 5     6 1 3 3 7 5

These numbers add up to 44. The two digits 44 add up to 8. The number corresponding to my name is therefore 8. If the digits had added up to 48, then the second addition would have produced the number 12; in that case, a third addition must be made to produce 3 (one plus two).

The signification given for the various numbers is as follows:

One: a number signifying directness, ambition, power. Its possessor is a pioneering, inventive personality, unlikely to have many friends or close associates. Capable of kindness and generosity, but also of ruthlessness. The poet Yeats summarised the personality of number one in the lines:

There is not a fool can call me friend.

And I may dine at journey’s end

With Landor and with Donne.

It will be found that the letters of William Butler Yeats add up to one. In this case, the middle name is included, because Yeats was known as W. B. Yeats, not as William. Oddly enough, if the letters of his most common nickname, Willy Yeats, are added up, they also come to one.

Two: this is the reverse of the previous number, signifying a well-balanced, gentle disposition. Richard Cavendish speaks of it as an evil and female number in The Black Arts. People with the number two make good subordinates or helpers, but may be over-sensitive, too easily depressed. Just as the negative aspect of number one is extreme self-assertion, refusal to admit one is in the wrong (what A. E. Van Vogt calls ‘the right man’ – a man who will assert he is right in the teeth of all the evidence), so the negative aspect of number two is deviousness or vacillation.

Three: the number of versatility and plenty, a traditionally lucky number. (‘Three times lucky.’) People with the number three are gay, charming, adaptable, talented, lucky, but inclined to be ‘other-directed’, living too much for the approval and liking of other people.

Four: this is the ‘square’ number of the Pythagoreans, indicating endurance, firmness of purpose, calmness. In its negative aspect it means dullness, ‘square’ in the modern slang sense. Since it is the number of the earth, it may also indicate powerful underground fires that sometimes break through in the form of earthquakes or volcanoes.

Five: this is a number of magic, the pentacle. Fives are lovers of adventure. They are also lucky, but inclined to instability, erratic, full of nervous energy, inclined to be boastful, lovers of women and often of alcohol.

Six: this is the number of dependability and harmony. At their best, sixes are kindly, peace-loving, stable, and lovers of home and family; at their worst they tend to be trivial, too obsessed with detail, fussy. Since six is divisible by both two and three. it has affinities with the qualities of both these numbers.

Seven: another magical number, the number of mystery and mysticism. Sevens may be psychic; they are usually introverted, more interested in an inner reality than in the external world. Aloof, self-controlled, dignified. In their negative aspect, they may be simply out of touch with reality, incompetent, vague.

Eight: this is an auspicious number, signifying drive and success. Eights have affinity with fours and twos; they are solid, four-square, capable of long efforts and great concentration. In their negative aspect, this may amount only to stubbornness and persistence in the wrong course of action, in which case the positive characteristics become negative, and success becomes failure.

Nine: this is the royal number, associated with a high degree of creativity (the nine muses) and spiritual achievement. Nines are visionaries and poets at their best, wildly volatile at their worst, given to intense romanticism.

Anyone who tries out this system will have some striking successes. I have pointed out that Yeats makes an ideal number one. The letters of Bernard Shaw make a nine, and, interestingly enough, Richard Cavendish adds that nines are always falling in and out of love, and quotes Cheiro to the effect that nines often undergo many operations by the surgeon’s knife. Both fit Shaw remarkably closely.

However, it must be admitted that failures are likely to be as frequent as the successes. Try to think of a typical ‘three’ – versatile, lucky, charming, a lover of people. Felix Mendelssohn seems to fit the bill precisely. But the letters of his name add up to four, the ‘square’. William Blake would surely be a nine, or at least a seven; instead, this most visionary and introverted of men is a five: the number of adventure and boastfulness, which suits Casanova or Cagliostro more than Blake. But Casanova is an eight, and Cagliostro is a one. This latter cannot be coincidence, for the letters of Giuseppe Balsamo add up to six, a number more suitable to Dickens’s Mr. Brownlow or Wells’s Mr. Polly. Oscar Wilde, who might also be expected to be a three, is an eight, signifying drive and will-power. It is true that he achieved tremendous success, and then tremendous failure, but this seems due to vacillation rather than unshakable purpose. A more modern system of numerology writes out the numbers from one to nine, then writes the alphabet under them, thus:

1: A, J, S

2: B, K, T

3: C, L, U

4: D, M, V

5: E, N, W

6: F, O, X

7: G, P, Y

8: H, Q, Z

9: I, R

Further information can be extracted from a name by adding up the sum of its vowels, which indicates the inner nature of the person concerned. Addition of the consonants gives the external personality, the social facade.

It goes without saying that there is more to numerology than this; for example, most numerologists also make use of astrology, and vice versa – the two sciences are closely connected. Cagliostro’s procedure must have been extremely complicated to draw such detailed answers from the ‘oracle’. One is tempted to dismiss the whole thing as just another apocryphal story about a ‘magician’. But there are well-authenticated stories of similar prophecies, which leave no doubt that such detailed prophecy is possible under propitious circumstances. Jacques Cazotte, a royalist and author of the romance Le Diable Amoureux, prophesied the revolution in some detail in 1788 at a dinner given by the Duchesse de Gramont. Cazotte, an occultist, apparently had a burst of what can only be called inspiration, in which he was able to foretell the future of many people present. He told Condorcet that he would take poison to cheat the executioner, that Chamfort would cut his own veins but die months later, that the astronomer M. Bailly would die at the hands of the mob, that the Duchesse de Gramont would die on the scaffold and that the only victim of the executioner who would be allowed a confessor would be the King himself. An atheist, Jean de la Harpe, was thoroughly sceptical, and wrote the whole thing down; Cazotte prophesied for him that he would become a Christian. He became a monk, in fact, and the prophecy was found among his papers after his death in 1803. A century later the whole matter was subjected to close examination by Dr. Walter Borman, who found abundant evidence for the prophecy in letters and journals of the period. Even the Baroness D’Oberkirch mentions it in her memoirs, published in 1852: she describes an evening in which it was discussed in her salon, and a medium who had been brought there by the Marquis de Puységur (the discoverer of hypnotism) was questioned about it; the medium went into even more detail about the fate of various people actually present, all of which was again proved accurate.

Now, it is true that there is a great difference between numerology, with its fixed rules, and prophecy, which may be due to Dunne’s ‘serial time’ or any other cause; but again, it must be pointed out that there are no exact sciences of prediction, whether by the stars, numbers, hands or anything else; everything depends upon the innate talent of the diviner; Cagliostro used numbers rather than consulting them.

Before leaving Cagliostro, a word should be said about his healing powers. In a sense, an adventurer like Cagliostro or even Casanova is potentially the ideal thaumaturgist. The nature of illness is bound up with negation. Human beings have the power to close their senses and focus upon unimportant matters – for example, I can spend a morning poring over my cheque-book stubs, until my mind feels oddly dehydrated. The reason children experience so much of the ‘glory and the freshness of a dream’ is that they have not yet acquired this power to narrow the mind; since they have no great responsibilities, they have no need for it. But now we reach the point of crucial importance. This useful power to focus upon detail can easily create a flood of emotional negation. (Anyone who has made the mistake of thinking about money worries in the middle of the night knows this.) It is for the same reason that a man balanced on his toes is easily pushed over. The mind needs to have a kind of penumbral area that is aware of other times and other places to keep it healthy: Faculty X.

Now, intelligent people can usually cure themselves of a tendency to negativity. Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality ode offers a perfect example; using his mind and his memory he jerks himself out of his negative mood until the mind is wide open again. Narrowness is like catarrh or a bad cold in the head; it produces a blocked-up feeling. Wordsworth’s ‘timely utterance’ has that effect of clearing the sinuses so one can breathe freely again.

Most illnesses bring with them a feeling of helplessness and depression that reinforces the illness, and not many people have Wordsworth’s highly developed power of getting the mind out of reverse and into forward gear. The power of a breezy adventurer like Cagliostro stems from his positiveness. The winds of heaven blow through his mind because he is used to meeting adversity and triumphing; the very energy of his demeanour is a reminder of how good the world is, how much can be achieved by effort; he acts on his patients like the sound of the Easter bells on Faust, bringing the breath of far-off things.

All this makes it sound as if Cagliostro’s chief asset was a good bedside manner; but it goes deeper than that. As the many descriptions of him make clear, he could radiate a compelling force that cannot be reduced to cheerful mannerisms. It was this force that was sapped by the Bastille experience. Instead of withdrawing to some quiet place, where he could slowly recuperate, until like Wordsworth he had restored his strength and optimism, he launched into controversy and litigation. All he had to do was sit tight for two more years, and he would have been again picked up by the tide of history and made into a revolutionary hero, as Cardinal Rohan, in fact, was. His downfall must be blamed upon unsound judgement; it was an avoidable tragedy.

If the stature of Cagliostro increases upon careful examination, the reverse is true of the other ‘great magician’ of that period, the Count of Saint-Germain. Kurt Seligman’s chapter on him begins: ‘Who was he and where did he come from? The riddle has never been solved. The dates of his birth and death are unknown. Incredible things are claimed of him. Frederick the Great called him the man who cannot die; and the count himself asserted that he had lived two thousand years …He would speak familiarly of a chat with the Queen of Sheba and of wonderful happenings at the marriage of Cana …’

Potentially, he sounds the most exciting magician of all. But Seligman seems to have been unaware of the researches of Gustav Berthold Volz in the twenties. These revealed that although Saint-Germain was infinitely more sophisticated and cultured than Cagliostro, he was fundamentally little more than a fine actor. When the reports of contemporaries are examined, it does not even appear that he displayed more finesse than Cagliostro; he was a boastful self-advertiser. Casanova, who was easily impressed by genuine intellectuality, immediately spotted him for a charlatan, and took pleasure in queering his pitch when they were both on diplomatic missions to the Hague. But he did not have to do a great deal; Saint-Germain’s own lack of tact quickly brought about his downfall, and he had to fly to England.

Only one ‘mystery’ remains: his origin. And it should be borne in mind that in those days it was not particularly difficult for that to remain a mystery. Communications were bad, and most registrations of births and deaths were confined to the parish records. The account that states that Saint-Germain was the son of a tax collector of San Germano, and that he was born in 1710, is probably correct. Nothing whatever is known of his life before the 1740s, when he seems to have appeared in Vienna and become acquainted with various members of the aristocracy, among them Counts Zabor and Lobkowitz. He also met there the French Marshal de Belle-Isle, who brought him to France. By 1758 – by which time he would be in his late forties – he had become an established favourite of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour (for whom the famous Diamond Necklace was originally intended).

Casanova, who met him at about this time, describes him as one of the most remarkable conversationalists he had ever met – and this is a considerable compliment from a man whose own talents were impressive. He describes Saint-Germain as a scholar, linguist, musician (he had an extremely pleasant singing voice), chemist, and as very good-looking (which Casanova himself was not, being swarthy and hook-nosed). He was a ‘perfect ladies’ man’, flattering them and offering them a wash that would prevent wrinkles which he claimed to be expensive but which he gave away. He probably came to the king’s attention through Madame de Pompadour.

Saint-Germain’s ‘gimmick’ was that he claimed never to eat, but to live on some strange food or elixir that he compounded himself. He would sit through society dinners, keeping the table amused by his conversation, declining all food and drink. He would explain in a smiling way that he was a great deal older than he looked, but deny that he was, as some people claimed, five hundred years old. Casanova says he would assert calmly that he was three hundred. Saint-Germain’s knowledge of history was considerable, so that he was able to report conversations of historical personages in such a way that it sounded almost as if he had been present himself. If asked whether he had been present, his answer would be an enigmatic smile. He developed mystification to a fine art.

What were his real achievements? He was a fine linguist, and seems to have discovered interesting processes for dyeing silk and leather. Altogether the evidence would seem to indicate that the love of his life was chemistry; whenever he could persuade a rich patron to offer him food and lodgings, he immediately set up a laboratory. The mid-eighteenth century was the pre-chemical age; Priestley, Cavendish, Lavoisier, belong to the later years of the century. But then, Saint-Germain seems to have been fascinated by minerals and dyes rather than by the question of the composition of air or water. His chemical knowledge was genuine; his charm and culture were genuine. A theatrical streak made him want to astonish as well as please; hence the hints about being present at Cana, and the affectation of eating only some magical food. (The simple answer is probably that he was a vegetarian, a natural ascetic who disliked the guzzling and boozing that went on at the tables of the rich.*)

In spite of his boastfulness, which made Count Warnstedt describe him, as late as 1779, as ‘the completest charlatan, fool, rattle-pate, windbag and swindler’, his style was less exuberant than Cagliostro’s, and he could give the impression of being quiet, modest and well balanced. As E. M. Butler remarks,† his relations with his patrons often ‘held elements of discipleship’ – that is, he aimed to interest the intellect as well as the sense of wonder in his patrons, and tended to assume the role of teacher. Strangely enough, he was a materialist, who stated that his only interest was the good of mankind.

Any man, even the most consistent, can appear to be many different persons in the eyes of different observers, and a man as mercurial and deliberately enigmatic as Saint-Germain is bound to arouse wide differences of opinion. He forced his acquaintance on his last patron, Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel, much against the prince’s will, and yet ended by winning him over so completely that the prince was shattered by his death (in 1784) and wrote, ‘He was perhaps one of the greatest sages who ever lived ...’

His known life seems to have been lived under the protection of a series of such patrons. After the diplomatic mission for Louis XV failed (he was supposed to put out feelers for a peace between France and England) due to the intervention of the French foreign minister, the Duke de Choiseul (who detested him), he fled to London, then later bought an estate in Holland, now calling himself Count Surmont. He came close to making a fortune by interesting people in high places in his various chemical processes, which included dyeing and ‘the ennobling of metals’. He was forced to vanish at a certain point, taking 100,000 gulden with him, but the factories he set up nevertheless seem to have prospered. He seems to have spent the next ten years or so in Russia, and again made friends in high places, including Count Alexei Orlov, one of the chief engineers of the palace revolution that placed Catherine the Great on the throne and the hero of the battle of Chesmé (1770), in which the Russian fleet defeated the Turks. E. M. Butler believed that he probably aided the Russian war effort actively; he was made a Russian general, calling himself General Welldone. Back in Nuremburg in 1774, he impressed the Margrave of Brandenburg, Charles Alexander, and his standing was further improved when he was publicly embraced by Orlov. He told the margrave that his real name was Prince Rakoczy, and that he was the last of the line, preserving his incognito in order to avoid assassins. In 1775, the margrave learned that the remaining three Rakoczys were dead, and that the retiring, studious guest at his castle at Triersdorf was really the adventurer who went under many aliases, one of which was Saint-Germain. Taxed with this, Saint-Germain had no alternative than to admit it, but asserted that he had never disgraced any of his many aliases, and that he had only adopted them to throw would-be assassins off the scent. He insisted that he was the last Rakoczy. The margrave disbelieved him, and the ageing Saint-Germain resumed his travels in 1776. Frederick the Great ignored a letter asking for patronage, although there is some evidence that Saint-Germain had worked for him as a secret diplomat (i.e. a spy) in France during the period of his involvement with the French royal family. (It was this suspicion that made Choiseul his enemy.)

In Leipzig, the grand master of the Prussian masonic lodges, Prince Frederick Augustus of Brunswick, subjected him to close scrutiny, and concluded that he was not a mason. (Saint-Germain claimed to be a mason of the fourth grade, but said he had forgotten all the secret signs.) Fortunately Saint-Germain found his last patron, Charles of Hesse-Cassel, in 1779, and spent the last five years of his life peacefully under his protection. He owned to being eighty-eight when he met the prince, although he was probably only in his late sixties. Lodging in a damp room gave him rheumatism, and he began to suffer fits of depression in his last years. After his death, at the age of about seventy-four, many people refused to believe he was dead. Respectable witnesses claimed to have seen him over thirty years later, and another story asserted that he had declared that he would spend eighty-five years in the Himalayas before reappearing in Europe. Madame Blavatsky declared he was one of the Hidden Masters in Tibet.

Perhaps the last word on him should be spoken by a not-entirely-hostile witness, the Prussian Ambassador to Dresden, Count Alvensleben, in 1777:

He is a highly gifted man with a very alert mind, but completely without judgement, and he has only gained his singular reputation by the lowest and basest flattery of which a man is capable, as well as by his outstanding eloquence, especially if one lets oneself be carried away by the fervour and enthusiasm with which he can express himself … Inordinate vanity is the mainspring driving his whole mechanism … he is stimulating and entertaining in society, as long as he is only narrating. But as soon as he tries to develop his own ideas, his whole weakness shows itself … But woe to him who would contradict him!*

And so the legend of the man of mystery explodes with a hollow pop when examined closely. In the twentieth century there would be no need for all this mystification and imposture; Saint-Germain would become a brilliant industrial chemist, or perhaps turn his eloquence to some purpose on television. In the century that starved Mozart, and nearly killed Bach and Handel with overwork, he had to fight to keep alive. It was a bad century for magicians.

* ‘Spirit teaching’ may be briefly summarised as follows. Man is not ‘saved’ by the death of Jesus on the cross; he must save himself by his actions during his life. All thoughts and actions are registered on the ‘spirit body’, so that after death, a man is known for exactly what he is. One’s actions are all important; a naturally good agnostic will achieve a higher status than an uninspired but punctilious churchgoer. ‘Compensation’ must be made for evil in the after-life, but there is no hell – it is a mental state. There is no upward limit to the progress of which the soul is capable, and which continues in the other world. These views are common to Swedenborg and to modern spirit teaching.

* Very Peculiar People, London, 1950.

* A livre in those days was roughly equivalent to an English shilling or American quarter, so the necklace cost $400,000, or £100,000.

* T. H. White’s The Age of Scandal presents an interesting picture of the astounding eating habits of this period.

† The Myth of the Magus, p. 199

* E. M. Butler, op. cit., p. 204.