The Order of Strict Observance, to which the Esperance Lodge was affiliated, was one of the many secret societies grafted on to Freemasonry in the eighteenth century. It had been founded in the middle of the century in Germany by a Baron von Hundt with the object of reviving the Order of the Knights Templar, who were regarded by the seditious as classic victims of papal and monarchical tyranny.[12] Hundt’s Order of Strict Observance, however, at the beginning at any rate, was the very opposite of a revolutionary character; though to the Church of Rome, aware that it perpetuated the tradition of the Templars, it was none the less anathema. To this fact the stories may be traced which caused Freemasonry as a whole to be suspected of conspiring to “trample the lilies under-foot.”
In England the Order of Strict Observance was purely philanthropic and social, though there, as elsewhere, it was steeped in occultism—a fact which of itself is quite sufficient to explain why Cagliostro joined the Esperance Lodge. The importance, moreover, acquired by this masonic order, whose lodges were scattered all over Europe, also explains the comparative ease with which he afterwards exploited the curiosity his remarkable faculties aroused.
The precise manner, however, in which he laid the foundations of his fame can only be conjectured. Between November 1777, when Cagliostro left England unknown and impoverished, and March 1779, when he arrived in Courland to be received into the highest society, his movements are wrapped in mystery.
“My fifty guineas,” he says, “which was all that I possessed on leaving London, took me as far as Brussels, where I found Providence waiting to replenish my purse.”
As he did not deign to enlighten the public as to the guise in which Providence met him, his Inquisition-biographer, who is always prejudiced and generally unreliable, was of the opinion that it was highly discreditable. This authority states that he procured money from a credulous man whom he duped into believing he could predict the winning number in a lottery, and that without waiting to learn the result of his prediction—which, on this occasion, in spite of his previous uniform success in London, was a failure—fled to the Hague.
Whilst here, so it was rumoured years later, he was admitted as a Freemason into a lodge of the Order of Strict Observance, to the members of which he made a speech on Egyptian Masonry. As a result of the interest he aroused, a lodge was founded in accordance with the Egyptian Rite, open to both sexes, and of which the Countess was appointed Grand Mistress.
The Inquisition-biographer professes to discover him next in Venice, “from which he fled after swindling a merchant out of one thousand sequins.” But as he is described as calling himself at the time Marquis Pellegrini—one of the aliases under which Giuseppe Balsamo had masqueraded some years previously, he may be acquitted of the charge. If Cagliostro was really Balsamo it is inconceivable that he would have returned to Italy under a name he had rendered so notorious. The incident, if it has any foundation in fact, must have occurred several years before this date. Moreover, if Cagliostro and Balsamo are the same, Freemasonry must have wrought a most remarkable and unprecedented spiritual reformation in the character of the Sicilian crook, for under the name of Count Cagliostro he most certainly ceased to descend to the vulgar villainies formerly habitual to him.
Much more in keeping with Cagliostro’s character is the following adventure reported to have befallen him at Nuremburg, whither rumour next traces him. Being asked his name by a Freemason who was staying at the same hotel, and to whom he had communicated the fact that he was also a member of the same fraternity by one of the secret signs familiar to the initiated, he replied by drawing on a sheet of paper a serpent biting its tail. This cryptic response, coupled with the air of mystery Cagliostro habitually gave to his smallest action, deeply impressed the inquisitive stranger, who with the characteristic superstition of the century at once jumped to the conclusion that he was in the presence of the chief of one of the secret societies attached to Freemasonry who, fleeing from persecution, was obliged to conceal his identity. Accordingly, with a sentimental benevolence—from which it may be inferred he was both a Mason and a German—“he drew from his hand a diamond ring, and pressing it upon Cagliostro with every mark of respect, expressed the hope that it might enable him more easily to elude his enemies.”
From Nuremburg rumour follows the Count to Berlin, where the interpretation the unsentimental police of Frederick the Great put upon the mystery in which he enveloped himself was so hostile that he hastened to Leipsic. In this town, veritable home of occultism and stage on which Schröpfer a few years before had persuaded his audience to believe in him in spite of his impostures, any mysterious person was sure of a welcome. The voice of rumour, hitherto reduced to a whisper, now becomes audible. The Freemasons of the Order of Strict Observance are said to have given a banquet in Cagliostro’s honour “at which three plates, three bottles, and three glasses were set before each guest in commemoration of the Holy Trinity.”
After the repast the Count made a speech, to the eloquence of which and its effect on his hearers the mystic triad of bottles would appear to have contributed. As at the Hague, he discoursed on Egyptian Masonry; praised the superiority of its ideals and rites to those of the lodge of which he was the guest; and carried away by bibulous enthusiasm, which caused him to ignore the rules of politeness and good breeding, he turned impressively to the head of the lodge—one Scieffort—and in impassioned accents informed him that if he did not adopt the Egyptian Rite “he would feel the weight of the hand of God before the expiration of the month.”