- Note.—The titles of some of the treatises enumerated above have been mutilated by the original bibliographers, and owing to the extreme rarity of most alchemical books, it has been impossible to correct all errors.
APPENDIX.
I.
The life of Denis Zachaire has been made the subject of an interesting and well-written novel—“A Professor of Alchemy”—by “Percy Ross,” recently published by Mr George Redway. The life of the great adept, after his accomplishment of the Magnum Opus, is detailed at some length, M. Louis Figuier being apparently the authority for the bare facts of the case. The alchemist is represented by the French writer as having travelled to Lausanne, where he became enamoured of a young and beautiful lady, whom he carried from Switzerland into Germany, and then abandoned himself completely to a life of dissipation and folly, which closed tragically at Cologne in the year 1556. He was strangled in the middle of a drunken sleep by the cousin who had accompanied him in his travels, and who coveted his wealth and his mistress. The murderer effected his escape with the lady, who appears to have been his accomplice. The sole authority for this narrative appears to be a poem by Mardoché de Delle, who was attached, as a sort of laureate, to the court of Rodolph II. It is not improbably a mere invention of the versifier; there is nothing in the sober treatise of Denis Zachaire, written at the period in question, to give colour to the account of his extravagance.
II.
The manuscript volume entitled “Egyptian Freemasonry” fell, with the other papers of Cagliostro, into the hands of the Inquisition, and was solemnly condemned in the judgment as containing rites, propositions, a doctrine and a system which opened a broad road to sedition and were calculated to destroy the Christian religion. The book was characterised as superstitious, blasphemous, impious, and heretical. It was publicly burnt by the hands of the executioner, with the instruments belonging to the sect. Some valuable particulars concerning it are, however, preserved in the Italian life; they are reproduced from the original proceedings published at Rome by order of the Apostolic Chamber.
“It may be necessary to enter into some details concerning Egyptian Masonry. We shall extract our facts from a book compiled by himself, and now in our possession, by which he owns he was always directed in the exercise of his functions, and from which those regulations and instructions were copied, wherewith he enriched many mother lodges. In this treatise, which is written in French, he promises to conduct his disciples to perfection by means of physical and moral regeneration, to confer perpetual youth and beauty on them, and restore them to that state of innocence which they were deprived of by means of original sin. He asserts that Egyptian Masonry was first propagated by Enoch and Elias, but that since that time it has lost much of its purity and splendour. Common masonry, according to him, has degenerated into mere buffoonery, and women have of late been entirely excluded from its mysteries; but the time was now arrived when the grand Copt was about to restore the glory of masonry, and allow its benefits to be participated by both sexes.
“The statutes of the order then follow in rotation, the division of the members into three distinct classes, the various signs by which they might discover each other, the officers who are to preside over and regulate the society, the stated times when the members are to assemble, the erection of a tribunal for deciding all differences that may arise between the several lodges or the particular members of each, and the various ceremonies which ought to take place at the admission of the candidates. In every part of this book the pious reader is disgusted with the sacrilege, the profanity, the superstition, and the idolatry with which it abounds—the invocations in the name of God, the prostrations, the adorations paid to the Grand Master, the fumigations, the incense, the exorcisms, the emblems of the Divine Triad, of the moon, of the sun, of the compass, of the square, and a thousand other scandalous particulars, with which the world is at present well acquainted.
“The Grand Copt, or chief of the lodge, is compared to God the Father. He is invoked upon every occasion; he regulates all the actions of the members and all the ceremonies of the lodge, and he is even supposed to have communication with angels and with the Divinity. In the exercise of many of the rites they are desired to repeat the Veni and the Te Deum—nay, to such an excess of impiety are they enjoined, that in reciting the psalm Memento Domine David, the name of the Grand Master is always to be substituted for that of the King of Israel.