Both sexes were alike eligible for admission to the Egyptian Rite, the sole conditions being belief in the immortality of the soul and—as regards men—previous admission to some Masonic Lodge. There were, as in ordinary Freemasonry, three grades: apprentice, companion, and master Egyptian. The master Egyptians were called by the names of the Hebrew prophets, while the women of the same grade took those of sibyls.
Cagliostro himself assumed the title of Grand Cophta, which he declared to be that of Enoch, the first Grand Master of Egyptian Masonry. His wife, as Grand Mistress, was known as the Queen of Sheba.
The initiations of the neophytes consisted of being “breathed upon” by the Grand Master or Grand Mistress, according to their sex. This proceeding was accompanied by the swinging of censers and a species of exorcism that served as a preparation for moral regeneration. The Grand Cophta then made a short speech, which he also addressed to the members on their promotion from one grade to the other, ending with the words “Helios, Mene, Tetragammaton.”
Concerning the apparent gibberish of these words, the Marquis de Luchet, a clever writer of the day who never hesitated to sacrifice truth to effect, and found in Cagliostro a splendid target for his wit, pretends that “the Grand Cophta borrowed them from a conjurer, who in his turn had been taught them by a spirit, which spirit was no other than the soul of a cabalistic Jew who had murdered his own father.” As a matter of fact they are often employed in Freemasonry and signify the Sun, the Moon, and the four letters by which God is designated in Hebrew.
The ceremony of initiation concluded with a sort of spiritualistic séance, for which a very young boy or girl, known respectively as a pupille or colombe was chosen as the medium, whom the Grand Cophta rendered clairvoyant by “breathing on its face from the brow to the chin.”
The same rites were observed for both sexes. At the initiation of women, however, the Veni Creator and Miserere mei Deus were chanted. On these occasions the Grand Mistress drank “a draught of immortality,” and “the shade of Moses was evoked.” Moses, however, persistently refused to be evoked, because—so the Countess is reported to have confessed to the Inquisitors—“Cagliostro considered him a thief for having carried off the treasures of the Egyptians.”
As the promise of spiritual health was not of itself sufficient to ensure the success of Egyptian Masonry, Cagliostro in the course of time found it expedient to heighten its attraction by holding out hopes of bodily health, and infinite wealth as well. It was by his ability to cure the sick that the majority of his followers were recruited; and as he gave to his marvellous cures the same mysterious and absurd character as he gave to all his actions, his enemies—of whom he had many—unable to explain or deny them, endeavoured to turn the “physical regeneration” that Egyptian Masonry was said to effect into ridicule.
According to a curious and satirical prospectus entitled “The Secret of Regeneration or Physical Perfection by which one can attain to the spirituality of 5557 years (Insurance Office of the Great Cagliostro),” he who aspired to such a state “must withdraw every fifty years in the month of May at the full of the moon into the country with a friend, and there shutting himself in a room conform for forty days to the most rigorous diet.”
The medical treatment was no less heroic. On the seventeenth day after being bled the patient was given a phial of some “white liquid, or primitive matter, created by God to render man immortal,” of which he was to take a certain number of drops up to the thirty-second day. The candidate for physical regeneration was then bled again and put to bed wrapped in a blanket, when—if he had the courage to continue with the treatment—he would “lose his hair, skin, and teeth,” but would recover them and find himself in possession of youth and health on the fortieth day—“after which he need not, unless he liked, shuffle off the mortal coil for 5557 years.”
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the boundless credulity which characterized the period immediately preceding the French Revolution than the belief that this report, intended as a conte pour rire by the Marquis de Luchet, its author, obtained. As Cagliostro and his followers were very likely aware that any attempt to deny such a statement would but serve to provide their enemies with fresh weapons of attack, they endured the ridicule to which this malicious invention subjected them in silence. This attitude, however, was not only misunderstood by the public, but has even misled historians of a later date, very few of whom, like Figuier in his Histoire du Merveilleux, have had the wit to see the humour of the lampoon which they have been too careless or too prejudiced to explain.