To face page 92]
If the earlier part of “Cagliostro’s” life is unknown, the latter part is so overlaid with legends and lies, that it is almost impossible to get at the truth concerning it. In 1776 Cagliostro and his wife were in London, where “Cagliostro” became a Freemason, joining a lodge connected with “The Order of Strict Observance,” a secret society incorporated with Freemasonry, and which (on the Continent, at least) was concerned largely with occult subjects. “Cagliostro,” however, was unsatisfied with its rituals and devised a new system which he called Egyptian Masonry. Egyptian Masonry, he taught, was to reform the whole world, and he set out, leaving England for the Continent, to convert Masons and others to his views. We must look for the motive power of his extraordinary career in vanity and a love of mystery-mongering, without any true knowledge of the occult; it is probable, indeed, that ultimately his unbounded vanity triumphed over his reason and that he actually believed in his own pretensions. That he did possess hypnotic and clairvoyant powers is, we think, at least probable; but it is none the less certain that, when such failed him, he had no scruples against employing other means of convincing the credulous of the validity of his claims. This was the case on his visit to Russia, which occurred not long afterwards. At St. Petersburg a youthful medium he was employing, to put the matter briefly, “gave the show away,” and at Warsaw, where he found it necessary to turn alchemist, he was detected in the process of introducing a piece of gold in the crucible containing the base metal he was about to “transmute.” At Strasburg, which he reached in 1780, however, he was more successful. Here he appeared as a miraculous healer of all diseases, though whether his cures are to be ascribed to some simple but efficacious medicine which he had discovered, to hypnotism, to the power of the imagination on the part of his patients, or to the power of imagination on the part of those who have recorded the alleged cures, is a question into which we do not propose to enter. At Strasburg “Cagliostro” came into contact with the Cardinal de Rohan, and a fast friendship sprang up between the two, which, in the end, proved “Cagliostro’s” ruin. The “Count” next visited Bordeaux and Lyons, successfully founding lodges of Egyptian Masonry. From the latter town he proceeded to Paris, where he reached the height of his fame. He became extraordinarily rich, although he is said to have asked, and to have accepted, no fee for his services as a healer. On the other hand, there was a substantial entrance-fee to the mysteries of Egyptian Masonry, which, with its alchemistic promises of health and wealth, prospered exceedingly. At the summit of his career, however, fortune forsook him. As a friend of de Rohan, he was arrested in connection with the Diamond Necklace affair, on the word of the infamous Countess de Lamotte; although, of whatever else he may have been guilty, he was perfectly innocent of this charge. After lying imprisoned in the Bastille for several months, he was tried by the French Parliament, pronounced innocent, and released. Immediately, however, the king banished him, and he left Paris for London, where he seems to have been persistently persecuted by agents of the French king. He returned to the Continent, ultimately reaching Italy, where he was arrested by the Inquisition and condemned to death on the charge of being a Freemason (a dire offence in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church). The sentence, however, was modified to one of perpetual imprisonment, and he was confined in the Castle of San Leo, where he died in 1795, after four years of imprisonment, in what manner is not known.
[CHAPTER VI]
THE AGE OF MODERN CHEMISTRY
The Birth of Modern Chemistry.
§ 71. Chemistry as distinct from Alchemy and Iatro-chemistry commenced with Robert Boyle (see [plate 15]), who first clearly recognised that its aim is neither the transmutation of the metals nor the preparation of medicines, but the observation and generalisation of a certain class of phenomena; who denied the validity of the alchemistic view of the constitution of matter, and enunciated the definition of an element which has since reigned supreme in Chemistry; and who enriched the science with observations of the utmost importance. Boyle, however, was a man whose ideas were in advance of his times, and intervening between the iatro-chemical period and the Age of Modern Chemistry proper came the period of the Phlogistic Theory—a theory which had a certain affinity with the ideas of the alchemists.
PLATE 15.