Cagliostro

by W. R. H. Trowbridge

CHAPTER II

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY OCCULTISM

I

Man, at once instinctively mistrusting his own power, and inspired by the love of the marvellous which is inherent in human nature, has from the beginning invoked, or invented, as you will, the invisible powers of an inaccessible sphere. History is filled with the phenomena arising from this innate tendency to believe in the supernatural, which while varying in form according to epochs, places, and customs are at bottom identical. Belief in the supernatural is, indeed, the basic principle of primitive man’s first conception of community of interest, the germ from which religion, social order, civilization have developed.

In the beginning religion and magic were one. All the priests of Egypt and the East were invested with supernatural and mysterious powers of which they long possessed the monopoly. These powers were precisely the same as those of the mediums of the present day; but the effects they produced no doubt appeared infinitely greater owing to the boundless credulity, simplicity, and ignorance of those who witnessed them.

By degrees, as civilization after civilization perished, knowledge became more diffused. Magic passed from the sanctuary to the street. The Pagan world was filled with astrologers, sorcerers, sibyls, sooth-sayers, wonder-workers of all descriptions. In the Middle Ages, when Christianity finally superseded Paganism, the supernatural once more took up its abode in religion. Demonology, which had survived all the revolutions of antiquity, and which still exists without much fundamental difference under other forms all over the world, assimilated itself to the dogmas of the Church. The Popes affirmed the popular belief in sorcery, magic and diabolic possession. But the supernatural phenomena associated with the belief in these things were regarded as the work of the devil, in whose existence the Christian world believed as implicitly as in the existence of God; so while the Church sanctioned this belief as one of the mysteries of religion it waged a merciless war against all persons suspected of having commerce with demons. From its terrible ban the mystical visionaries alone were exempt. These persons, ascetics all, the sanctity of whose reputations was unquestioned and whose hallucinations were due to hysteria, epilepsy, or neuroticism, were canonized.

Towards the close of the seventeenth century, with the revival of a tolerant and enlightened philosophy, the devil had grown old and accusations of sorcery were rare. But the belief in the supernatural still continued to thrive; and in the century of universal scepticism, the century of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, when faith in everything till then venerated was exploded, that in the marvellous alone survived. “The more civilization advances,” wrote Voltaire, “the more noise does superstition make.”

On the eve of the French Revolution, Mesmer electrified the world with his animal magnetism. With this discovery the belief in the supernatural entered a new and more wonderful phase. The marvellous had passed from a grossly material to a purely spiritual plane. The magnetism of Mesmer was followed by the hypnotism of the Marquis de Puységur, with its attendant train of table-turning and telepathy, clairvoyance and clairaudience, spiritualism, theosophy, and Christian science. To-day the whole system of the hermetic philosophy of the Egyptians and Hindus has been re-discovered, re-deciphered, and restored with the most astonishing results and the most conspicuous success to the amazement of the world.

Never has the belief in the supernatural been more flourishing and more invincible than at the present. Side by side with the positivism of modern science marches the mysticism of the occult, equally confident and undaunted, and equally victorious. Not a link in the chain that connects the phenomena of the mediums and adepts of to-day with those of the Chaldaeans has been broken. Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Eddy are the latest descendants of Hermes Trismegistus, who whether regarded as man, god, or the personification of all the knowledge of his remote times, is the parent of all the wonder-workers, scientific as well as unscientific, of the world. The prodigies of these priestesses of theosophy and Christian science, which are the last and most popular manifestations of the marvellous, are no less significant, and much more wonderful because more inexplicable, than those of a Ramsay or a Curie.

A.MESMER

(After Pujo!)

As to the future of this faith in the supernatural, one thing may reasonably be taken for granted; the marvellous will never cease to appeal to the imagination of mankind till the riddle of the universe is solved. To deride it is ridiculous. Occultism is not a menace to progress, but a spur. Its secrets are not to be ridiculed, but to be explained. That is its challenge to modern science, which is at once its offspring and its servant.

******

The desire to prolong life, the desire to enjoy life, and the desire to look beyond life are inherent in human nature, and man has sought from time immemorial to realize them. To-day it is to science that we look for the realization of the first two of these great desires of which it is the outcome; while it is only with the third that the marvellous, or what is understood by occultism, is now associated.

Formerly, however, the search for remedies for the irremediable was conducted exclusively in the sphere of the supernatural. The love of life gave rise to the quest for the Fountain of Youth, which still continues under innumerable other forms and names that will occur to every one. The latest, perhaps, is the Menshikov Sour Milk Cure. From the love of ease sprang the search for the “philosopher’s stone,” which was to create wealth by the transmutation of metals into gold. This quest which long captivated the imagination of men is now entirely abandoned, though its object, needless to say, is more furiously desired than ever. While to the curiosity as to the future we owe the pseudo-sciences of astrology, palmistry, fortune-telling, divination, etc.

Those who devoted their lives to these things were divided into three classes—alchemists, astrologers, and the motley tribe of quacks and charlatans, who may be summed up for sake of convenience under the name of sorcerers. These divisions, however, were by no means hard and fast. United by a common idea each class dabbled in the affairs of the others. Thus astrologers and sorcerers were often alchemists, and alchemists seldom confined their attention solely to the search for the elixir vitae and the philosopher’s stone.

As the alchemists, owing to their superior knowledge, and the results they obtained, were more considered than the astrologers and sorcerers, alchemy developed into a science at an early date. The obscurity in which its origin is involved is a sign of its antiquity. Some enthusiasts believe it to be coeval with the creation of man. Vincent de Beauvais was of the opinion that all the antediluvians must have had some knowledge of alchemy, and cites Noah as having been acquainted with the elixir vitae, “otherwise he could not have lived to so prodigious an age and begotten children when upwards of five hundred.” Others have traced it to the Egyptians, from whom Moses was believed to have learnt it. Martini, on the other hand, affirms that alchemy was practised by the Chinese two thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ. But though a belief in the transmutation of metals was general in the Roman Empire, the practice of alchemy does not appear to have received much consideration before the eighth century. At this period the discoveries of Gebir, an Arabian alchemist, gave so great a stimulus to the quest of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life that he is generally regarded as the creator of these picturesque delusions, which for a thousand years had so great a hold on the popular imagination.

Banned and fostered in turn, and often at the same time, by the Church; practised in all classes of society and by all sorts and conditions of people; regarded with admiration and contempt; alchemy has played too vast and important a rôle in the history of humanity to be despised, wild and romantic though this rôle has been. Nothing could be more unjust and absurd than to judge it by the charlatans who exploited it. The alchemists whom history still remembers were in reality the pioneers of civilization, who, venturing ahead of the race befogged in dense forests of ignorance and superstition, cut a road through to the light, along which mankind travelled slowly in their wake. Not only were these fantastic spirits of light the parents of modern science and physics, but they have helped to adorn literature and art. Some idea of their importance may be gathered from the many words in common use that they have given to the language, such as: crucible, amalgam, alcohol, potash, laudanum, precipitate, saturation, distillation, quintessence, affinity, etc.

The alchemists often stumbled upon discoveries they did not seek. Science is thus indebted to Gebir for the first suggestion of corrosive sublimate, the red oxide of mercury, nitric acid, and nitrate of silver; to Roger Bacon for the telescope, the magic lantern, and gunpowder; to Van Helmont for the properties of gas; to Paracelsus, the most extraordinary of them all, for laudanum. It is to him also that medicine owes the idea of the clinic. As in chemistry so in other sciences the most important discoveries were made by men who had a marked taste for alchemic theories. Kepler was guided in his investigations by cabalistic considerations.

The search for gold and youth, however, were only one phase of alchemy. It was too closely allied to what was known as “magic” not to be confounded with it. In the popular estimation the alchemists were all magicians. Most, perhaps all, of the so-called occult phenomena so familiar to us to-day were performed by them. Long before such things as animal magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, ventriloquism, autosuggestion, etc., had a name, the alchemists had discovered them, though they themselves were as unable to explain or account for the wonders they performed as the ignorant world that witnessed them.

Albertus Magnus had the power to delude whole crowds, precisely as Indian necromancers do at the present. Cornelius Agrippa “at the request of Erasmus and other learned men called up from the grave many of the great philosophers of antiquity, among others Cicero, whom he caused to re-deliver his celebrated oration for Roscius.” He also showed Lord Surrey, when on the continent, “the resemblance in a glass” of his mistress, the fair Geraldine. “She was represented on a couch weeping for her lover. Lord Surrey made a note of the exact time at which he saw this vision and afterwards ascertained that his mistress was so employed at the very minute.” The famous Dr. Dee, whose whole life was devoted to the search for the philosophers stone, was an accomplished crystal-gazer and spirit-rapper.

It was, without doubt, the strong and crude element of magic in alchemy that prepared the way for the great change that came over the science at the beginning of the seventeenth century. With the revival of learning that followed the Renaissance, there arose a mysterious sect in Germany known as the Rosicrucians, who were destined to revolutionize the belief in the supernatural. They claimed to derive their name from a certain Christian Rosencreutz who, in a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, had been initiated into the mysteries of the wisdom of the East. The tenets of the Rosicrucians, as well as their existence, were first made known to the world at the beginning of the seventeenth century in an anonymous German work said to have been found in the tomb of Rosencreutz, who had died one hundred and twenty years previously.

The absurd legends concerning him have led many to deny that such a person as Rosencreutz ever existed. Such writers attribute the origin of the society to the theories of Paracelsus and Dr. Dee, who unconsciously became the real though unrecognized founders of the Rosicrucians. Be this as it may, no sooner were their doctrines generally known than all the alchemists and believers in the marvellous hastened to accept them. The influence thus acquired by the “Society of the Rose-Cross” was as beneficial as it was far-reaching. Its character was a sort of Protestant mysticism, and its chief aim the gratuitous healing of the sick. Hitherto alchemy and the belief in the supernatural had been grossly materialistic. The Rosicrucians refined the one and spiritualized the other. They claimed that by strictly conforming to the rules of their philosophy, of which chastity was the most rigorous and important, they could ignore hunger or thirst, enjoy perfect health, and prolong their lives indefinitely. Of the occult knowledge they possessed, that of transmuting metals into gold was stripped of its old significance. The philosopher’s stone was no longer to be regarded as merely the means of acquiring riches, but the instrument by which mankind could command the service of the spirits of the invisible world.

They denied that these were the horrible and terrifying demons with which the monks had peopled the unseen, but mild, beautiful, and beneficent sprites, anxious to be of service to men. In the Rosicrucian imagination there existed in each element a race of spirits peculiar to it. Thus the air was inhabited by Sylphs, the water by Undines, the earth by Gnomes, and the fire by Salamanders. It was by them that all that was marvellous was done. In the course of their development the mystical tendencies of the Rosicrucians became more and more pronounced. Thus they finally came to regard the philosopher’s stone as signifying contentment, the secret of which was compared in the mystical phraseology they adopted to “a spirit that lived within an emerald and converted everything near it to the highest perfection it was capable of.”

In fine, Rosicrucianism may be described as the bridge over which the belief in the supernatural passed from sorcery, witchcraft, and the grossest superstition to the highly spiritualized form in which it is manifested at the present. The transit, however, was not effected without interruption. Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century the bridge, undermined by the mockery and scepticism of the age, collapsed. About fifty years later it was reconstructed by Swedenborg on a new and spiritualistic system. In the meantime, as will be seen, superstition adrift on the ocean of unbelief, clutched credulously at every straw that floated by.

II

The old belief in alchemy as a magical science did not survive the seventeenth century. It is true the credulous and ignorant, deluded by swindlers and impostors, long continued to regard alchemy as supernatural; but the bona-fide alchemists themselves, who were able and intelligent men, had begun to understand the nature of their discoveries. The symbolic interpretation of the philosopher’s stone led to a new conception of the uses of the crucible. The alchemists of the eighteenth century, during which the name was still in common use, though its original signification had become obsolete, were really amateur chemists. From pseudo-science modern science was beginning to be evolved.

The great changes, however, that upset the convictions and disintegrated the whole fabric of society of the eighteenth century, were favourable to the increase and spread of superstition. The amazing recrudescence of the belief in the supernatural, which was one of the most conspicuous features of the age, was the direct result of the prevailing infidelity and indifference. Persecuted, banned, anathematized, but never exterminated, it crept from the hiding-places in which it had lurked for centuries, and in the age of unbelief emerged boldly into the light of day. The forms it assumed were many and various.

In 1729 Jansenism—a sort of evangelical movement in the Church of Rome—which in its war with Jesuitism in the previous century had been crushed, but not exterminated, took advantage of the apathy of the time to reassert itself. To do this with success it was necessary to make a powerful appeal to the popular imagination, and as no means are as sure of producing effect as supernatural ones, the world was startled by a series of miracles performed at the grave of Deacon Pâris, a famous martyr in the cause of Jansenism. These miracles, which at first took the form of cures such as at the present day are to be seen at Lourdes, soon acquired fame. All sorts of people, whom the doctors were unable to restore to health, began to flock to the Jansenist Cemetery of St. Médard, where it was discovered that other graves beside that of Deacon Pâris, and finally the whole cemetery shared the healing properties of his ashes. The hitherto simple character of the cures was changed. They were accompanied by extraordinary convulsions, considered more divine than the cures themselves, in which the bones cracked, the body was scorched with fever, or parched with cold, and the invalid fell into a prophetic transport.

The noise of these pathological phenomena attracted immense crowds to the Cemetery of St. Médard, where the spectators, who were drawn out of mere idle curiosity, as well as those who came to be cured, were seized or pretended to be seized with the convulsive frenzy. The popularity of St. Médard induced the Jansenists to attach similar virtues to other cemeteries. Convulsions became epidemic; the contagion spread to the provinces which, jealous of Paris, determined to have their share of the Jansenist deacon’s favours. Similar scenes to those at St. Médard were enacted in several towns all over France, notably at Troyes and Corbeil. The miracles now gave rise to scandalous scenes. Women convulsionnaires ran through the streets “searching for the prophet Elijah.” Some believing they had found him in a handsome priest named Vaillant, a visionary who had persuaded himself that he was the reincarnation of Elijah, testified their adoration for him in a manner that indicated their convulsions were caused by erotic hysteria rather than by the miraculous properties of the bones of Deacon Pâris. Others stretched themselves at full length on the ground of the cemetery, and invited the spectators to beat them and otherwise maltreat them, only declaring themselves satisfied when ten or twelve men fell upon them at once.

The cure of a girl who had a frightful collection of infirmities, “swellings in the legs, hernia, paralysis, fistula, etc.,” was the signal for a general St. Vitus’ dance, led by the Abbé Bécherand, an ecclesiastic with one foot shorter than the other. “He executed daily on the tomb of the sainted deacon,” says Figuier, “with a talent not to be matched, his favourite pas, the famous ‘carp jump,’ which the spectators were never tired of admiring.”

But by this time the miracles had become a public scandal, and the government hastened to suppress the “ballet de St. Médard” and close the cemetery. The Jansenists to escape ridicule, which would have killed them more surely than the Jesuits, were obliged to disassociate themselves from the convulsionnaires, who formed themselves into a sect, which existed down to the Revolution.

To-day medical science has stripped the convulsionnaires of St. Médard of the last rag of the supernatural, but in the eighteenth century only the sane intelligence of the philosophers divested them of all claims to wonder. Their fame spread throughout Europe and helped in its way to emphasize the trend of public opinion in which the boundless credulity and ignorance of the many advanced side by side through the century with the scepticism and enlightenment of the few.

So strong was the passion for the marvellous that the least mystification acquired a supernatural significance. In Catholic Germany a curé named Gassner who exorcised people possessed of devils and cured the sick by a touch had over a million adherents. In England, “Dr.” Graham with his “celestial bed,” his elixirs of generation, and his mud-baths, acquired an immense reputation. In Switzerland, Lavater, an orthodox Lutheran pastor, read character and told the future by the physiognomy with astonishing success.

At Leipsic, Schröpfer, the proprietor of a café, flattered credulity so cleverly that belief in his ability to communicate with the invisible world survived even his exposure as an impostor. His history is not without dramatic interest. Gifted with a temperament strongly inclined to mysticism he became so infatuated with the study of the supernatural that he abandoned his profession of cafétier as beneath him and turned his café into a masonic lodge where he evoked the souls of the dead, damned and saved alike. Some of those who witnessed these apparitions believing they recognized relations or friends, went mad, a fate that was not long in overtaking Schröpfer himself. Intoxicated by the immense vogue he obtained, he next turned his lodge into a private hotel in which he received only persons of rank, assuming himself that of a colonel in the French army to which he declared he was entitled as “a bastard of the Prince de Conti.” Unfortunately at Dresden, whither he had gone to evoke the shade of a King of Poland for the benefit of the Duke of Courland, his imposture was exposed. Schröpfer hereupon returned to Leipsic and after giving a grand supper to some of his most faithful adherents blew out his brains. Nevertheless, this did not prevent many from continuing to believe in his evocations. A report that he had predicted he would himself appear after his death to his followers at a given hour in the Rosenthal at Leipsic, caused a vast concourse of people to assemble in that promenade on the day specified in the expectation of beholding his shade.

Still more remarkable than the credulity that clung to imposture after its exposure, was the credulity that discovered supernatural powers in persons who did not even pretend to possess them. The curiosity that scented the marvellous in the impenetrable mystery in which it pleased the self-styled Count de Saint-Germain to wrap himself, induced him to amuse himself at the expense of the credulous. With the aid of his valet, who entered into the jest, he contrived to wrap his very existence in mystery. He had only to speak of persons who had been dead for centuries to convince people he had known them. Many believed he had witnessed the Crucifixion, merely because by a sigh or a hint he conveyed that impression when the subject was mentioned. No absurdity was too extravagant to relate of him that was not credited. Even his servant was supposed to have moistened his lips at the Fountain of Youth.

As the century advanced the folly increased. Rumours began to be current that agitated the popular mind—rumours of secret societies bound by terrible oaths and consecrated to shady designs, rumours of the impending fulfilment of old and awful prophecies; rumours of vampires and witches; of strange coincidences and strange disappearances—rumours in which one may trace the origin of the haunting suspicion to which the Reign of Terror was due. All the superstitions regarding the unseen world had their vogue. In Protestant countries interpreters of the Apocalypse were rife. Everywhere the dead came back to affright the living, led by the “White Lady,” Death’s messenger to the Hohenzollerns.

In such an atmosphere it was not surprising that the baquet divinatoire of Mesmer should have seemed more wonderful than the scientific discoveries of Newton and Lavoisier. Cagliostro had only to appear to be welcomed, only to provide credulity with fresh occult novelties to win a niche in the temple of fame.

III

Occultism, however, like human nature of which it is the mystical replica, has its spiritual as well as its material side, and from the depths of gross superstition is capable of mounting to the heights of pure mysticism. In the boundless credulity of the age, symptom of death though it was, the germ of a new life was latent.

The uneasy and forbidding ghosts of dead faiths that haunted Europe awoke aspirations in ardent and passionate souls which sought their realization in the fantastic reign of dreams. From the chaos of superstition the need to believe gradually emerged. In the process the marvellous became mystical. On the ruins of Rosicrucianism, Emmanuel Swedenborg erected a new supernatural belief.

This man whose influence in the latter half of the eighteenth century, especially in the years immediately preceding the Revolution was more subtle than the philosophers who derided him had any conception, is Occultism’s Copernicus; the spiritual Abraham from whom all the Blavatskys and Eddys of the present are descended.

He was born at Stockholm in 1688 and throughout his long life—he died in London in 1772 at the age of eighty-four—Fortune was uniformly and exceptionally kind to him. Possessed of brains, sharpened and cultivated by an excellent education, of an attractive personal appearance and influential friends, he began at an early date to make his mark, as the saying is. At twenty-one he started on the “grand tour,” which it was customary in those days for young men of wealth and position to make. But young Swedenborg was not one of those who merely wandered luxuriously about Europe pursuing pleasure. Avid of knowledge he devoted the time others spent in dissipation to Greek, Latin, Hebrew, mathematics, science and philosophy. At the end of five years he returned to Sweden with the intention of giving himself up entirely to science. He published a scientific review and gained some reputation as an inventor. At the age of twenty-eight Charles XII appointed him assessor of mines; and three years later Queen Ulrica raised him to the rank of nobility, by which his name was changed from Swedberg, as his family was originally called, to the more euphonious and aristocratic Swedenborg.

Being of an exceedingly inquiring and philosophical mind and having plenty of leisure he naturally widened the area of his investigations. For many years he sought to find the scientific explanation of the universe. This quest and the intensity with which he pursued it insensibly led him to seek to discover the connection between the soul and the body, the relation of the finite to the infinite. From this stage, to which he had been led no doubt by the force of heredity—his father, a Lutheran bishop and professor of theology believed himself in constant intercourse with angels—it was but a step to the supernatural. The scientist, however, takes a long time in turning into the mystic. Swedenborg was fifty-seven before the transformation was accomplished.

This event occurred in London in 1745.

“I was dining,” he says, “one day very late at my hotel in London, and I ate with great appetite, when at the end of my repast I perceived a sort of fog which obstructed my view, and the floor was covered with hideous reptiles. They disappeared, the darkness was dispersed, and I plainly saw in the midst of a bright light, a man sitting in the corner of the room, who said in a terrible voice, Do not eat so much!”

EMMANUEL SWEDENBORG

From the character of this vision, “Do not drink so much” would appear to have been the more sensible advice. Be this as it may, Swedenborg was so frightened that he resolved to do as he had been bidden. His diet henceforth was of the simplest, and it is possible that the sudden change from one extreme to the other at an age when the system has lost its elasticity may not be unconnected with the continuation of his visions.

The next night “the same man, resplendent with light,” appeared to him again. This time while Swedenborg gazed upon the spectre, which was perhaps a thought visualized by the intensity of its fascination, it said, “I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to explain the meaning of the Holy Scripture. I will dictate to thee what thou shalt write.”

Whatever cause Swedenborg may have assigned to the previous vision, he did not doubt for a moment now that the Most High had actually revealed Himself to him. This conviction was so reassuring that the strange things he beheld in his visions ceased to have any terror for him. If he ever asked himself why he should have been selected by the Almighty above the rest of mankind for so great an honour, the frequency of the divine appearances no doubt speedily satisfied his curiosity, for not a day passed during the rest of his life but God descended from Paradise—or if too busy, “sent an angel or saint in His place”—to converse with this remarkably privileged Swede and explain to him the mysteries of Heaven and Hell.

In the visions of St. Francis and St. Theresa, the Virgin, Jesus and the Almighty appeared according to the Roman Catholic conception of them. The faith of Swedenborg’s heavenly visitor was Lutheran—a faith be it said, to which Swedenborg adhered as devotedly as Saints Francis and Theresa did to theirs—and when he appeared he dressed accordingly, wearing neither the Stigmata nor the Crown of Thorns without which no good Catholic would have recognized him. He spoke a mystical jargon which was often so absurd as to be unintelligible.

The Unseen World, as revealed to Swedenborg was the exact counterpart of the seen. It was inhabited by spirits of both sexes—the good ones dwelt in Heaven and the bad ones in Hell. They had the same occupations as people on the earth. They married and begot children, among other things; and Swedenborg was present at one of these celestial weddings. They also had “schools for infant angels; universities for the learned; and fairs for such as were commercially inclined—particularly for the English and Dutch angels!” For the spirits of the Unseen had all lived in the seen.

According to Swedenborg, man never dies. The day he experiences what he calls death is the day of his eternal resurrection. Christ was the ruler of both these worlds. He was the one and only God. All human desire would be consummated when the two worlds should become one, as they had been in the beginning, before the Fall. On this day the New Jerusalem would be established on earth. To hasten this event, it was necessary to seek the “lost word” or “primitive innocence.” This was Swedenborg’s idea of the philosopher’s stone, which he declared was to be found in the doctrines he taught. Should any person be tempted to seek it elsewhere, he was advised to go in quest of it in Asia, “among the Tartars”!

It was some time, however, before he became at home in the spiritual world. Time ceased to have any significance to him. He would lie for days in a trance from which he would awake at night “to wrestle with evil spirits” to the terror of his household. Sometimes his soul would escape altogether from his body and “borne on the wings of the Infinite, journey through Immensity from planet to planet.” To these travels, the most marvellous that imagination has ever taken, we owe the Arcana Cœlestia and The New Jerusalem. These books translated from the Latin in which they had been dictated to him by the Almighty had a prodigious success. In Protestant countries—which he personally canvassed—especially in Sweden and England where he made the most converts, they were regarded as the gospel of a new religion, the Bible of the Church of the New Jerusalem.

“Show me four persons,” said Fontenelle, “who swear it is midnight when it is noon, and I will show you ten thousand to believe them.”

Firmly convinced that he was in daily intercourse with the Almighty, Swedenborg soon convinced others. For his was the faith which removes mountains. He had, moreover, a majestic appearance and a magnetic personality which rendered ridicule silent in his presence, and inspired the confidence and love of all who came in contact with him. Three extraordinary instances of his power to communicate with the unseen world are cited by his followers. Even Kant, the philosopher, was struck by them, though he confesses that on inquiry he dismissed them as having no foundation but report. Nevertheless there were thousands who did not doubt, least of all Queen Ulrica. Had Swedenborg not related to her the contents of a letter known only to herself and her brother who had been dead for years?

That the sentimental Lutheranized Gnosticism he preached should have been received with enthusiasm in Protestant Europe is not surprising. The peoples of the North are naturally mystical. Nothing that appears to them in the guise of religion is too fantastic to be refused a hearing. In England the more fantastic the more certain is it of success. Swedenborgianism was to the “illuminized Jerusalemites” of Manchester, where alone they numbered twenty thousand, merely a very delicious rechauffée of a diet to which their imagination was specially addicted. The eagerness with which it was accepted in England was due entirely to appetite.

Much more remarkable was the influence of Swedenborg in the Catholic world. Naturally it manifested itself differently in different nations, assuming the character peculiar to each. Thus, whilst in England supernaturalism under the influence of Swedenborg became a religious craze, in France it grafted itself upon philosophy, and in Germany infected the secret societies in which the theories of the French philosophers found active political expression.

The secret of this universal appeal is not far to seek. It was one of the articles of faith with the old Rosicrucians that by them “the triple diadem of the pope should be reduced to dust.” The theosophy of Swedenborg presumed the liberty, equality, and fraternity of mankind. It was at once the spiritual negation and defiance of the arrogant supremacy of both Church and State. Occultism, which has ever proclaimed the spiritual rebellion of the soul against any kind of tyranny, was in the eighteenth century of necessity revolutionary. Of the forces of disintegration to which the ancien régime succumbed, it was the only one that worked systematically towards a definite object.

In the previous century, when the social system that deprived the soul of its liberty seemed irrefragable, the Rosicrucians had resignedly considered contentment to be the philosopher’s stone. But now when the whole structure was toppling, it was necessary to interpret afresh, and in terms more in accordance with occult principles, the secret of perfection. To the mystics of the eighteenth century the “philosophical egg” by means of which the tyranny of throne and altar was to be transmuted into the gold of absolute liberty was the Revolution.

And the crass credulity and superstition of the age was the crucible in which they sought it.

IV

Nothing is more curious than to note the manner in which these descendants of the old alchemists, pioneers at one and the same time of modern Occultism and modern Socialism, while engaged in shadowing, so to speak, the unbelief of their century, conspired to put an end to the old régime.

In spite of the disasters that dimmed the glory of the last years of Louis XIV’s long reign, the immense prestige that France had acquired in le grand siècle remained unchallenged. Intellectually the influence of France under his successors was so supreme that the decay of French civilization in the eighteenth century may be regarded as a sort of mirror in which the process of the disintegration of European society generally is reflected. Already as early as 1704, eleven years before the death of Louis XIV, when authority still seemed to be everywhere dominant, Leibnitz detected “all the signs of the general Revolution with which Europe is menaced.” With the passing of Louis XIV respect, the chief stronghold of feudalism, surrendered to the cynicism of the Regency. In that insane Saturnalia chains were snapped, traditions shattered, old and worn-out conventions trampled under-foot. The Regency was but the Revolution in miniature.

The orgy of licence passed in its turn, as the gloomy and bigoted hypocrisy of which it was the natural reaction, had passed before it. But the calm of the exquisite refinement that took its place was only superficial. Freedom conceived in the revels of the Regency yearned to be born. To assist at this accouchement was the aim of all the philosophical midwifery of the age. In 1734 Voltaire, physician-in-ordinary to the century, declared “action to be the chief object of mankind.” But as freedom of action is impossible without freedom of thought Vauvenargues next demanded in clarion tones that “God should be freed.” The idea of “freeing God” in order to free man was an inspiration, and Vauvenargues’ magnificent phrase became the tocsin of the philosophers.

But the chief effect of the Regency upon France, and thus indirectly upon Europe, had been to “free unbelief.” Authority, which had feared faith when alive and despised it when dead, crawled into the shell from which the snail of belief had departed and displayed the same predatory and brutal instincts as the intolerant religion in whose iron carapace it dwelt. To dislodge it was the first step towards “freeing God”; and all sorts and conditions of athletes entered the arena to battle with prejudice and injustice. In France, where the contest was destined to be decided, the Bastille or banishment was the punishment that brute authority awarded those who dared to defy it. But to crush the rebellion of intelligence against stupidity was impossible. The efforts of the philosophers were reinforced by sovereigns imbued with the spirit of the century. With Frederick the Great a race of benevolent despots sprang into existence, who dazzled by the refulgence of the philosophical light they so much admired did not perceive till too late that in igniting their torches at its flame they were helping to kindle a conflagration destined to destroy the system that would deprive them of the absolute freedom they enjoyed, and to a limited share of which they were willing to admit the nations they ruled.

Nor for that matter did the philosophers themselves. To them as well as to their princely disciples “to free God” was another name for religious toleration. That was the revolution for which the Encyclopedists worked, and which Frederick the Great and the sovereigns who shared his enlightened opinions desired. Nothing was further from their intention than that it should take the form in which it eventually came. It is impossible to believe that the Revolution which demanded the heads of a Lavoisier and a Bailly would have spared those of a Voltaire or a Rousseau. Least of all would the stupid mob that watched the victims doomed to the guillotine “spit into the basket,” as it termed in ferocious jest the fall of the heads beneath the axe, have made any distinction between the virtuous and innocent Louis XVI and Joseph II, or the Empress Catherine, had it been possible to arraign them likewise at the bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The gratitude of the people is even less to be depended on than that of princes. But God was not to be “freed” in a day. Seventy-five years elapsed between Freedom’s conception in the Regency and birth in the Revolution.

During this long pregnancy the century which was to die in child-bed developed an extraordinary appetite for the supernatural. To the materialistic philosophy that analyzed and sought to control the process of decay which by the middle of the century had become visible, even to one so indifferent to “signs of the times” as Louis XV, the cult of the supernatural was an element unworthy of serious consideration. But though long ignored the time was to come when it obtained from the torch-bearers of reason a questionable and dangerous patronage. It was on the eve of the birth of Freedom that “the century of Voltaire,” as Henri Martin expresses it, “extended its hand to the occultists of the middle ages.”

Between Voltaire and cabalistic evocations, between the scepticism of the Encyclopedists and the mysticism of Swedenborg who would believe there could be any affiliation? Yet the transition was natural enough. The philosophers in their abuse of analysis had too persistently sacrificed sentiment to reason. Imagination, which Louis Blanc has called the intoxication of intelligence, had begun to doubt everything by the middle of the century. Reaction was inevitable. The sneers of Voltaire were succeeded by the tears of Rousseau. The age of sensibility followed the age of unbelief. This was the hour for which a despised occultism had waited. It alone had a clear and definite conception of the Revolution. Patronized by philosophy, which vacillated between sentiment and reason, it imbued it finally with its own revolutionary ideas. The extent of their ascendency may be gauged by the declaration of Condorcet, “that volcano covered with snow,” as he has been called, “that society must have as its object the amelioration, physical, intellectual and moral of the most numerous and poorest class.” In his desire to escape from materialism the philosopher trained in the school of Voltaire had but taken the road to perfection along which the mystics were leading France and Europe.

Strange to relate, the leader of the mystical movement in France to which philosophy was destined to attach itself, was himself the mildest and least revolutionary of men.

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin might be described as the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi in the eighteenth century. Had he lived four hundred years earlier he would have passed his gentle flower-like life in the seclusion of some cloister, had beatific visions of the Saviour of the world, communed with the Virgin and Saints, worked miracles, founded a monastic order, and at his death been canonized by the Church, of whose faith he would have been the champion and of its tenderness the exemplar. Pure and meditative by nature he had been greatly influenced when a boy by an ascetic book, The Art of Knowing Oneself, that he chanced to read. As his father, to whom he was deeply attached, intended him for the Bar he devoted himself to the study of law, and though he had no taste for the profession passed his examinations. But after practising six months he declared himself incapable of distinguishing in any suit between the claims of the defendant and the plaintiff, and requested to be allowed to exchange the legal profession for the military—not because he had any liking for the career of arms, but in order that he might “have leisure to continue the study of religion and philosophy.”

To oblige his father the Duc de Choiseul, then Prime Minister, gave him a lieutenancy in the Regiment de Foix, then in garrison at Bordeaux. Here he met one of those strange characters so common in this century, who, either charlatans of genius or dreamers by temperament, supplied with arms from the arsenal of the supernatural boldly asserted the supremacy of the occult and attacked science and philosophy alike. This particular individual was called Martinez Pasqualis, but as like so many of his kind he enveloped himself in mystery it is impossible to discover who or what he was, or where he came from. He was supposed to be a Christianized Jew from one of the Portuguese colonies in the East, which would account perhaps for his skill in the practice of the occult. At any rate, the strange secrecy he maintained in regard to himself was sufficient in the eighteenth century to credit him with supernatural powers.

When Saint-Martin met him in Bordeaux he had for ten years held a sort of school of theurgy. At Avignon, Toulouse, and other Southern cities his pupils or disciples formed themselves into a sect, known as Martinists after their master, for the practice of his doctrines, which though but vaguely understood were attractive from the hopes they held out of communicating with the invisible world. Saint-Martin was the first to grasp their meaning. He joined the Martinists, whose existence till then was scarcely known, and became their chief when the dissensions to which the private life of Pasqualis had given rise were healed by his sudden and singular departure for Haiti, where he died of yellow fever shortly after his arrival.

Drawn from obscurity by the personal charm and high social position of its new leader, Martinism rapidly attracted attention. In a strange little book, Des Erreurs et de la Vérité par un philosophe inconnu, Saint-Martin endeavoured to detach himself and his adherents from the magic in which Pasqualis—who practised it openly—had involved this sect. But though he gave up the quest of supernatural phenomena as unnecessary to an acquaintance with the unseen, and wandered deeper and deeper into pure mysticism, he never wholly succeeded in escaping from the grosser influence of his first initiation in the occult. From the fact, however, that he called himself the “Robinson Crusoe of spiritualism,” some idea may be gained of the distance that separated him from those who also claimed connection with the invisible world. He did not count on being understood. Of one of his books he said, “it is too far from ordinary human ideas to be successful. I have often felt in writing it as if I were playing valses on my violin in the cemetery of Montmartre, where for all the magic of my bow, the dead will neither hear nor dance.”

Nevertheless, though philosophy failed to follow him to the remote regions of speculation to which he withdrew, it grasped enough of his meaning to apply it. And the Revolution, which before its arrival he had regarded as the “lost word” by which the regeneration of mankind was to be effected, and when it actually came as “the miniature of the last judgment,” adopted his sacred ternary “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Martinism—as its device. Saint-Martin was one of the few who strove to inaugurate it whom it did not devour. He passed through it unmolested, dying as he had lived gently. His only regret in passing from the visible to the invisible was that he had left “the mystery of numbers unsolved.”

V

The influence of Saint-Martin, however, was passive rather than active. Though philosophy confusedly and unconsciously imbibed the Socialistic theories of mysticism, the French being at once a practical and an excitable people were not to be kindled by speculations of the intellect, however daring, original, and attractive they might be. The palpable prodigies of Mesmer appealed more powerfully to them than the vague abstractions of Saint-Martin.

It was in Germany that revolutionary mysticism found its motive power. Whilst Saint-Martin, proclaiming in occult language that “all men were kings,” sought to efface himself at the feet of sovereigns, Adam Weishaupt was shaking their thrones. It would be impossible to find two men more unlike. Weishaupt was the very antithesis of Saint-Martin. He was not a mystic at all, and furthermore always professed the greatest contempt for “supernatural tricks.” But consumed with an implacable hatred of despotism and with a genius for conspiracy he perceived in the widespread attraction and revolutionary tendency of the supernatural the engine of destruction he required.

Born of Catholic parents at Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Weishaupt had been sent as a boy to the Jesuit seminary in that town, but conceiving a great dislike for the method of instruction employed there he left it for the university. On the temporary abolition of the Order of the Jesuits, having taken his degree, he was appointed to the professorship of jurisprudence till then held by a Jesuit. Though deprived of their functions the members of the suppressed Order still remained in the country, and posing as martyrs continued to exercise in secret their malign influence as powerfully as ever. Weishaupt naturally found in them bitter enemies; and to fight them conceived the idea of founding a secret society, which the great popularity he enjoyed among the students enabled him to realize.

Perceiving the immense success that Gassner was having at this time by his cures, and fully alive to the powerful hold the passion for the supernatural had obtained on the popular imagination, he decided to give his society a mystic character as a means of recruiting followers. As Weishaupt’s object was to convert them into blind instruments of his supreme will, he modelled his organization after that of the Jesuits, adopting in particular their system of espionage, their practice of passive obedience, and their maxim that the end justifies the means. From mysticism he borrowed the name of the society: Illuminés. From freemasonry, the classes and grades into which they were subdivided, the purpose of which was to measure the progress of the adept in assimilating the doctrine of the absolute equality of man and to excite his imagination by making him hope for the communication of some wonderful mystic secret when he reached the highest grade. Those who enjoyed the confidence of Weishaupt were known as areopagites. To them alone was he visible, and as he deemed that too many precautions could not be observed in concealing the existence of a society sworn to the abolition of the Christian religion and the overthrow of the established social system, he and his accomplices adopted names by which alone they were known to the others.

Comprised at first of a few students at the University of Ingolstadt, the Illuminés gradually increased their numbers and sought recruits in other places, special attention being given to the enlistment of young men of wealth and position. In this way, the real objects of Illuminism being artfully concealed, the society extended within the course of four or five years all over Germany. Its adepts even had a hand in affairs of State and gained the ear of many of those petty and picturesque sovereigns of the Empire who, catching the fever of philosophy from Frederick the Great and Joseph II, amused themselves in trying to blend despotism, philanthropy, and the occult. As the Illuminés were utterly unscrupulous, they did not hesitate to seek recruits in the Church of Rome itself, of which they were the secret and deadly enemy, in order by taking sides in the theological quarrels of the day to increase dissensions and weaken the power of the Pope.

G. V. Mansinger pinx. C. W. Bockfe.

ADAM WEISHAVPT.

(After Mansinger)

However, cleverly organized though they were, the Illuminés, composed of very young and passionate men carefully chosen—Weishaupt himself was scarcely twenty-eight when he founded the sect in 1776—did not make much progress, till Baron von Knigge joined them in 1780. He possessed the one faculty that Weishaupt lacked—imagination. Young, monstrously licentious, irreligious and intelligent, he was consumed with an insatiable curiosity for fresh experiences. He had written a number of novels which had attracted some attention and certain pamphlets on morals that had been put on the Index. He had been admitted to most of the secret societies of the day, particularly that of the Freemasons. He had experimented in alchemy and studied every phase of occultism from the philosophy of the Gnostics to that of Swedenborg. Everything that savoured of the supernatural had a profound attraction for him; even sleight of hand tricks, it is said, had engaged his attention. At thirty he had seen, studied and analyzed everything, and still his imagination remained as untired and inquisitive as ever. An ally at once more invaluable and more dangerous it would have been impossible for Weishaupt to have procured.

Admitted to the confidence of Weishaupt this young Hanoverian nobleman rapidly gained an ascendency over him. It was owing to the advice of Knigge that Weishaupt divided the Illuminés into grades after the manner of the Freemasons, and adopted the method of initiation of which the mysterious and terrifying rites were well calculated to impress the proselyte. With a Knigge to invent and a Weishaupt to organize, the Illuminés rapidly increased their numbers and activities. Overrunning Germany they crossed the frontiers preaching, proselytizing, and spreading the gospel of the Revolution everywhere. But this rapid development was not without its dangers. Conscious that the existence of such a society if it became known would inevitably lead to its suppression, Knigge, who was nothing if not resourceful, conceived the idea of grafting it on to Freemasonry, which by reason of its powerful connections and vast proportions would, he trusted, give to Illuminism both protection and the means of spreading more widely and rapidly.

The origin of this association, the oldest known to the world, composed of men of all countries, ranks, and creeds sworn to secrecy, bound together by strange symbols and signs, whose real mystic meaning has long been forgotten, and to-day devoted to the practice of philanthropy on an extensive scale—has been the subject of much speculation. The theory, most generally accepted, is that which supposes it to have been founded at the time and for the purpose of building the Temple of Solomon. But whatever its early history, Freemasonry in its present form first came into prominence in the seventeenth century in England, whence it spread to France and Germany. It was introduced into the former country by the Jacobites early in the eighteenth century with the object of furthering the cause of the Stuarts. On the extinction of their hopes, however, it reverted to its original ideals of equality and fraternity, and in spite of these democratic principles obtained a strong hold upon the aristocracy. Indeed, in France it was from the first a decidedly royalist institution and this character it preserved, outwardly at least, down to the Revolution, numbering nobles and clergy alike among its members, and always having a prince of the blood as Grand Master.

In Germany, on the contrary, where since the Thirty Years’ War popular aspirations and discontent had expressed themselves inarticulately in a multitude of secret societies, the principles of Freemasonry had a political rather than a social significance.

The importance it acquired from the number of its members, its international character, and its superior organization could not fail to excite the hostility of the Church of Rome, which will not tolerate within it the existence of secret and independent associations. The Jesuits had sworn allegiance to the Pope and in their ambition to control the Papacy were its staunchest defenders. But the Freemasons refused to admit the Papal authority, and treated all creeds with equal respect. War between the Church of Rome and Freemasonry was thus inevitable—a war that the Church in such a century as the eighteenth, permeated with scepticism and the desire for individual liberty, was most ill-advised to wage. For it was a war in which extermination was impossible and the victories of Rome indecisive.

Anathematized by Clement XII, persecuted in Spain by the Inquisition, penalized in Catholic Germany by the law, and its members decreed worthy of eternal damnation by the Sorbonne in France, Freemasonry nevertheless managed to find powerful champions. Entrenched behind the thrones of Protestant Europe, particularly that of Frederick the Great, and encouraged by the philosophers who saw in it something more than a Protestant challenge to the Church of Rome, it became the rallying ground of all the forces of discontent and disaffection of the century, the arsenal of all its hopes and ideals, the nursery of the Revolution.

To render it, if possible, suspect even to its patrons Rome denied the humanity of its aims and the boasted antiquity of its origin. According to the stories circulated by the priests, which excited by their fears existed solely in their imagination, the Freemasons were the successors of the old Knights Templars sworn to avenge the abolition of that order by the bull of Pope Clement V and the death of its Grand Master, Jacques Molay, burnt alive by King Philip the Fair in the fourteenth century. But their vengeance was not to be limited to the destruction of the Papacy and the French monarchy; it included that of all altars and all thrones.[9]

This tradition, however, continually repeated and rendered more and more mysterious and alarming by rumour, merely helped to articulate the hatred of the enemies of the old régime who had flocked to Freemasonry as to a camp. As this association had at this period of its history no homogeneity, it was possible for anybody with a few followers to form a lodge, and for each lodge to be a distinct society united to Freemasonry by the community of signs and symbols. It thus became a vast confederation of independent lodges representing all sorts of opinions, often hostile to one another, and possessing each its own “rite” or constitution. Philosophy and occultism alike both found a shelter in it. Even Saint-Martin left his mystic solitude to found lodges which observed the “Swedenborg rite.”

To attach themselves to the Freemasons was therefore for the Illuminés as easy as it was natural. Lodges of Illuminism were founded all over Germany. The number and variety of sects, however, that had found an asylum in Freemasonry by the diversity of their aims tended to weaken rather than strengthen the association. At length, the discovery that impostors, like Schröpfer, Rosicrucians and even Jesuits had founded lodges led to a general council of Freemasons for the purpose of giving the society the homogeneity it lacked. With this object a convention of Masons was held at Wilhelmsbad in 1782 to which deputies were sent from all parts of Europe. Knigge and Weishaupt attended and, perceiving the vast possibilities of the consolidation of the sects, they endeavoured to capture the whole machinery of the organization for the Illuminés, much as the Socialists of to-day have endeavoured to capture the Trades Unions.

The intrigue, however, not only failed, but led to a misunderstanding between the chiefs of Illuminism. Knigge definitely withdrew from the society, the existence and revolutionary aims of which were betrayed two years later, in 1784, by a member who had reached the highest grade, only to discover that the mystic secrets by which he had been attracted to the Illuminés did not exist. This information conveyed to the Bavarian government was confirmed by domiciliary visits of the police who seized many incriminating papers. Weishaupt fled to Gotha, where he found a protector in the occultist Duke, whose friendship he had nursed for years in view of just such a contingency.

But though the society he had formed was broken up, it was too late to stamp out the fire it had kindled. The subterranean rumblings of the Revolution could already be heard. Mysticism which had made use of philosophy in France to sap tyranny was in its turn in Germany turned to political account. From the seeds sown by the Illuminés sprang that amazing crop of ideals of which a few years later Napoleon was to reap the benefit.

******

Such, then, was the “curtain” of Cagliostro; woven, so to speak, on the loom of the love-of-the-marvellous out of mystical masonic principles and Schröpfer-Mesmer phenomena.

And now let us turn once more to the personality of the man behind it.