The most inexplicable part of this scene is the presence of the uninitiated person who tells the story. How the association could thus risk the betrayal of its mysteries is a question that cannot be answered, but the mysteries themselves can be explained easily.[312] The successors of the old Rosicrucians, modifying little by little the austere and hierarchic methods of their precursors in initiation, had become a mystic sect and had embraced zealously the Templar magical doctrines, as a result of which they regarded themselves as the sole depositaries of the secrets intimated by the Gospel according to St. John. They regarded the narratives of that Gospel as an allegorical sequence of rites designed to complete initiation, and they believed that the history of Christ must be realised in the person of each one of the adepts. Furthermore, they recounted a Gnostic legend, according to which the Saviour, instead of being buried in the new tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, having been swathed and perfumed, was brought back to life in the house of St. John. This was the pretended mystery which they celebrated to the sound of horns and harmonica.[313] The Candidate was invited to offer up his life and was actually subjected to bleeding which caused him to swoon. This swoon was called death and when he returned to himself, his resurrection was celebrated amidst outbursts of joy and gladness. The varied emotions produced, the scenes, by turns mournful and brilliant, must have permanently impressed the candidate’s imagination, and rendered him either fanatical or lucid. Many believed that a real resurrection took place in themselves and felt convinced that they were no longer subject to death. The heads of the society thus had at the service of their concealed projects the most formidable of all instruments, namely, madness, and secured on the part of their adepts that blind and tireless devotion which unreason produces more often and more surely than goodwill.
The sect of Saint-Jakin was therefore an order of Gnostics steeped in the illusions of the Magic of Fascination; it drew from Rosicrucians and Templars; and its particular name was one of the two names—Jachin and Boaz—engraven on the chief pillars of Solomon’s Temple. In Hebrew the initial letter of Jachin is Yod, a sacred letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also the initial of Jehovah, which Divine Name was indeed veiled from the profane under that of Jachin, whence the designation Saint-Jakin. The members of this order were theosophists, unwisely addicted to theurgic processes.[314]
All that is told of the mysterious Comte de Saint-Germain supports the idea that he was a skilful physician and a distinguished chemist. He is said to have known how to fuse diamonds so that there was no trace of the operation; he could also purify precious stones, thus making the most common and imperfect of high value. That imbecile and anonymous author[315] whom we have already cited places the latter claim to his credit but denies that he ever made gold, as if one did not make gold in the making of precious stones. Saint-Germain also invented, according to the same authority, and bequeathed to the industrial sciences, the art of imparting greater brilliance and ductility to copper—another invention sufficient to prove the fortune of him who devised it. Performances of this kind make us forgive the Comte de Saint-Germain for having been acquainted with Queen Cleopatra and for chatting familiarly with the Queen of Sheba. He was otherwise good-natured and gallant; he was one who loved children and amused himself by providing them with delicious sweetmeats and marvellous toys; he was dark and of small stature, dressed richly but with great taste and cultivating all the refinements of luxury. He is said to have been received familiarly by Louis XV, and was engrossed with him over questions of diamonds and other precious stones. It is probable that this monarch, entirely governed by courtesans and given up to pleasure, was rather yielding to some caprice of feminine curiosity than to any serious concern for science when he invited Saint-Germain to certain private audiences. The Comte was the fashion for a moment, and as he was an amiable and youthful Methuselah, who knew how to combine the tattle of a roué with the ecstasies of a theosophist, he was the rage in certain circles, though speedily replaced by other phantasiasts. So goes the world.
It is said that Saint-Germain was no other than that mysterious Althotas who was the Master in Magic of another adept with whom we are about to be occupied and who took the Kabalistic name of Acharat. The supposition has no foundation, as will be seen in due course.
Whilst the Comte de Saint-Germain was thus in request at Paris, another mysterious adept was on his way through the world, recruiting apostles for the philosophy of Hermes. He was an alchemist who called himself Lascaris and gave out that he was an eastern archimandrite, charged with collecting alms for a Greek convent. The distinction was this, that instead of demanding money, Lascaris seemed occupied, so to speak, in sowing his path with gold and leaving the trail of it behind him wherever he went. His appearances were momentary only and his guises many; here he was old and in the next place still a young man. He did not make gold in public on his own part, but caused it to be made by his disciples, with whom he left at parting a little of the powder of projection. Nothing is better established than the transmutations operated by these emissaries of Lascaris. M. Louis Figuier, in his learned work on the alchemists, does not question either their reality or their importance. Now, in physics above all, there in nothing more inexorable than facts, and it must be therefore concluded from these that the Philosophical Stone is not a matter of reverie, if the vast tradition of occultism, the ancient mythologies and the serious researches of great men in all ages are not otherwise sufficient to establish its real existence.[316] A modern chemist, who has not failed to publish his secret, has arrived at the extraction of gold from silver by a ruinous process, for the silver sacrificed by him does not produce in gold more than the tenth of its value, or thereabouts. Agrippa, who never attained the universal dissolvent, was notwithstanding more fortunate than our chemist, for he did obtain gold which was equivalent in value to the silver employed in his process and did not therefore lose his labour absolutely, if to employ it in research after the grand secrets of Nature can be called loss.
To set men upon researches which might lead them to the absolute philosophy by the attraction of gold, such would appear to have been the end of the propaganda connected with the name of Lascaris; reflection on Hermetic books would of necessity lead those who studied to a knowledge of the Kabalah. As a fact, the initiates of the eighteenth century thought that their time had come—some for the foundation of a new hierarchy, others for the subversion of all authority and for setting on the summits of the social order the level of equality. The Secret Societies sent their scouts through the world to sound opinion, and at need awaken it. After Saint-Germain and Lascaris came Mesmer, and Mesmer was succeeded by Cagliostro. But they were not all of the same school: Saint-Germain was the ambassador of illuminated theosophists, while Lascaris represented the naturalists attached to the tradition of Hermes. Cagliostro was the agent of the Templars, and this is how he came to announce, in a circular addressed to all Masons in London, that the time had come to build the Temple of the Eternal. Like the Templars, Cagliostro was addicted to the practices of Black Magic and to the fatal science of evocations. He divined past and present, predicted things to come, wrought marvellous cures and pretended to make gold. He introduced a new Rite under the name of Egyptian Masonry and sought to restore the mysterious worship of Isis. Wearing a nemys like that of the Theban sphinx, he presided in person over nocturnal assemblies, in chambers emblazoned with hieroglyphics and lighted by torches. His priestesses were young girls, whom he called doves, and he placed them in a condition of ecstasy by means of hydromancy in order to obtain oracles, water being an excellent conductor, a powerful reflector, and highly refracting medium for the Astral Light, as proved by sea and cloud mirages.
It is obvious that Cagliostro was a successor of Mesmer and had the key of mediumistic phenomena; he was himself a medium, meaning that he was a man whose nervous organisation was exceptionally impressionable, and to this he joined a fund of ingenuity and assurance, public exaggeration and the imagination—especially of women—supplying the rest. Cagliostro had an extravagant success; his bust was to be seen everywhere—inscribed: “The divine Cagliostro.” A reaction equivalent to the enthusiasm was of course to be foreseen; after having been a god, he became an intriguer and impostor, the debaucher of his wife, a scoundrel in fine, to whom the Roman Inquisition shewed grace by merely condemning him to perpetual imprisonment. The fact that his wife sold him lends colour to the idea that previously he had sold his wife.[317] He was taken in a snare, his prosecution followed and his accusers published as much of the process as they pleased. The revolution came in the meantime, and everyone forgot Cagliostro.
This adept is, however, by no means without importance in the history of Magic; his Seal is as significant as that of Solomon and attests his initiation into the highest secrets of science. As explained by the Kabalistic letters of the names Acharat and Althotas, it expresses the chief characteristics of the Great Arcanum and the Great Work. It is a serpent pierced by an arrow, thus representing the letter Aleph, an image of the union between active and passive, spirit and life, will and light. The arrow is that of the antique Apollo, while the serpent is the python of fable, the green dragon of Hermetic philosophy. The letter Aleph represents equilibrated unity. This pantacle is reproduced under various forms in the talismans of old Magic, but occasionally the serpent is replaced by the peacock of Juno, the peacock with the royal head and the tail of many colours. This is an emblem of analysed light, that bird of the Magnum Opus, the plumage of which is all sparkling with gold. At other times, instead of the emblazoned peacock, there is a white lamb, the young solar ram bearing the cross, as still seen in the armorial bearings of the city of Rouen. The peacock, the ram and the serpent have the same hieroglyphical meaning—that of the passive principle and the sceptre of Juno. The cross and arrow signify the active principle, will, magical action, the coagulation of the dissolvant, the fixation of the volatile by projection and the penetration of earth by fire. The union of the two is the universal balance, the Great Arcanum, the Great Work, the equilibrium of Jachin and Boaz. The initials L.P.D., which accompany this figure, signify Liberty, Power, Duty, and also Light, Proportion, Density; Law, Principle, and Right. The Freemasons have changed the order of these initials, and in the form of L∴D∴P∴[318] they render them as Liberté de Penser, Liberty of Thought, inscribing these on a symbolical bridge, but for those who are not initiated they substitute Liberté de Passer, Liberty of Passage. In the records of the prosecution of Cagliostro it is said that his examination elicited another meaning as follows: Lilia destrue pedibus: Trample the lilies under foot; and in support of this version may be cited a masonic medal of the 16th or 17th century, depicting a branch of lilies severed by a sword, having these words on the exergue: Talem dabit ultio messem—Revenge shall give this harvest.
The name Acharat, assumed by Cagliostro, is written Kabalistically thus: אש, אר, את, and expresses the triple unity: אש, the unity of principle and beginning; אד, the unity of life and perpetuity of regenerating movement; and את, the unity of end in an absolute synthesis.
The name Althotas, or that of Cagliostro’s master, is composed of the word Thot, with the syllables Al and As, which, if read Kabalistically are Sala, meaning messenger or envoy. The name as a whole therefore signifies: Thot, the messenger of the Egyptians, and such in effect was he whom Cagliostro recognised as his master above all others.[319]