Part 21
“What is truly a pleasure to me,” said the Abbé Voisenon, “is that amongst us one is perfectly cured of the folly of intelligence. You cannot conceive how I have been bantered about my ridiculous little romances. I had almost confessed that I appreciated these puerilities at their true value, but whether the modesty of an academician is disbelieved in, or whether such frivolity is out of character with my age and profession, I expiate almost daily the mistakes of my mortal existence.”
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Amid these marvels, Cagliostro proceeded with the dearest of all his projects, namely, the spread of his Egypto-masonic rite,[AN] into which ladies were subsequently admitted, a course of magic being opened for the purpose by Madame Cagliostro. The postulants admitted to this course were thirty-six in number, and all males were excluded. Thus Lorenza figured as the Grand Mistress of Egyptian Masonry, as her husband was himself the grand and sublime Copt. The fair neophytes were required to contribute each of them the sum of one hundred louis to abstain from all carnal connection with mankind, and to submit to everything which might be imposed on them. A vast mansion was hired in the Rue Verte, Faubourg Saint Honoré, at that period a lonely part of the city. The building was surrounded with gardens and magnificent trees. The séance for initiation took place shortly before midnight on the 7th of August 1785.
On entering the first apartment, says Figuier, the ladies were obliged to disrobe and assume a white garment, with a girdle of various colours. They were divided into six groups, distinguished by the tint of their cinctures. A large veil was also provided, and they were caused to enter a temple lighted from the roof, and furnished with thirty-six arm-chairs covered with black satin. Lorenza, clothed in white, was seated on a species of throne, supported by two tall figures, so habited that their sex could not be determined. The light was lowered by degrees till surrounding objects could scarcely be distinguished, when the Grand Mistress commanded the ladies to uncover their left legs as far as the thigh, and raising the right arm to rest it on a neighbouring pillar. Two young women then entered sword in hand, and with silk ropes bound all the ladies together by the arms and legs. Then after a period of impressive silence, Lorenza pronounced an oration, which is given at length, but on doubtful authority, by several biographers, and which preached fervidly the emancipation of womankind from the shameful bonds imposed on them by the lords of creation.
These bonds were symbolised by the silken ropes from which the fair initiates were released at the end of the harangue, when they were conducted into separate apartments, each opening on the Garden, where they made the most unheard-of experiences. Some were pursued by men who unmercifully persecuted them with barbarous solicitations; others encountered less dreadful admirers, who sighed in the most languishing postures at their feet. More than one discovered the counterpart of her own lover, but the oath they had all taken necessitated the most inexorable inhumanity, and all faithfully fulfilled what was required of them. The new spirit infused into regenerated woman triumphed along the whole line of the six and thirty initiates, who with intact and immaculate symbols re-entered triumphant and palpitating the twilight of the vaulted temple to receive the congratulations of the sovereign priestess.
When they had breathed a little after their trials, the vaulted roof opened suddenly, and, on a vast sphere of gold, there descended a man, naked as the unfallen Adam, holding a serpent in his hand, and having a burning star upon his head.
The Grand Mistress announced that this was the genius of Truth, the immortal, the divine Cagliostro, issued without procreation from the bosom of our father Abraham, and the depositary of all that hath been, is, or shall be known on the universal earth. He was there to initiate them into the secrets of which they had been fraudulently deprived. The Grand Copt thereupon commanded them to dispense with the profanity of clothing, for if they would receive truth they must be as naked as itself. The sovereign priestess setting the example unbound her girdle and permitted her drapery to fall to the ground, and the fair initiates following her example exposed themselves in all the nudity of their charms to the magnetic glances of the celestial genius, who then commenced his revelations.
He informed his daughters that the much abused magical art was the secret of doing good to humanity. It was initiation into the mysteries of Nature, and the power to make use of her occult forces. The visions which they had beheld in the Garden where so many had seen and recognised those who were dearest to their hearts, proved the reality of hermetic operations. They had shewn themselves worthy to know the truth; he undertook to instruct them by gradations therein. It was enough at the outset to inform them that the sublime end of that Egyptian Freemasonry which he had brought from the very heart of the Orient was the happiness of mankind. This happiness was illimitable in its nature, including material enjoyments as much as spiritual peace, and the pleasures of the understanding.
The Marquis de Luchet, to whom we are indebted for this account, concludes the nebulous harangue of Cagliostro by the adept bidding his hearers abjure a deceiving sex, and to let the kiss of friendship symbolise what was passing in their hearts. The sovereign priestess instructed them in the nature of this friendly embrace.
Thereupon the Genius of Truth seated himself again upon the sphere of gold, and was borne away through the roof. At the same time the floor opened, the light blazed up, and a table splendidly adorned and luxuriously spread rose up from the ground. The ladies were joined by their lovers _in propria persona_; the supper was followed by dancing and various diversions till three o’clock in the morning.
About this time the Count Cagliostro was unwillingly compelled to concede to the continual solicitations of the poor and to resume his medical _rôle_. In a short time he was raised to the height of celebrity by a miraculous cure of the Prince de Soubise, the brother of the Cardinal de Rohan, who was suffering from a virulent attack of scarlet fever. From this moment the portrait of the adept was to be seen everywhere in Paris.
In the meantime, the cloud in his domestic felicity, to which a brief reference has been made already, began to spread. A certain adventuress, by name Madame de la Motte, surprised Lorenza one day in a _tête-à-tête_ with the Chevalier d’Oisemont. The count at the time was far away from Paris, and the adventuress promised to keep the secret on condition that Lorenza should in turn do all in her power to establish her as an intimate friend in the house, having free entrance therein, and should persuade Cagliostro to place his knowledge and skill at her disposal, if ever she required it. The result of this arrangement was the complicity of Cagliostro in the extraordinary and scandalous affair of the Diamond Necklace. When the plot was exposed, Cagliostro was arrested with the other alleged conspirators, including the principal victim, the Cardinal de Rohan. He was exonerated, not indeed without honour, from the charge of which he was undoubtedly guilty, but his wife had fled to Rome at his arrest, and had rejoined her family. He himself began to tremble at his own notoriety, and grew anxious to leave France. He postponed till a more favourable period his grand project concerning the metropolitan lodge of the Egyptian rite.[AO] A personage, calling himself Thomas Ximenes, and claiming descent from the cardinal of that name, sought to reanimate his former masonic enthusiasm; but the vision of the Bastile seemed to be ever before his eyes, and neither this person, nor the great dignitaries of the Parisian lodges, could prevail with him. In spite of his acquittal he nourished vengeance against the Court of France, and more than once he confided to his private friends that he should make his voice heard when he had passed the frontier. He prepared to depart, and one day his disconsolate adepts learned that he was on the road to England.
Once in London he recovered his energy. He was received with great honour; many of his disciples from Lyons and Paris followed him. The English masons invited him to the metropolitan lodge, and gave him the first place, that of grand orient. He was entreated to convene a masonic lodge of the Egyptian rite, and consented with some sadness, for the memory of the brilliant Paris lodge which he had been on the point of founding was incessantly before him. He could not console himself for the fall of that beautiful and long-cherished plan, which had cost him so much study, pains, and preaching.
It was from this discreet distance that Cagliostro addressed his famous Letter to the People of France, which was translated into a number of languages, and circulated widely through Europe. It predicted the French Revolution, the demolishment of the Bastile, and the rise of a great prince who would abolish the infamous _lettres de cachet_, convoke the States-General, and re-establish the true religion.
The publication was intemperate in its language and revolutionary in its sentiments, and close upon its heels followed his well-known quarrel with the _Courrier de l’Europe_, which resulted in the exposure of the real life of Cagliostro from beginning to end.
Dreading the rage of his innumerable dupes, and extreme measures on the part of his creditors, he hastened to quit London, disembarked in Holland, crossed Germany, took refuge in Basle, where the patriarchal hospitality of the Swiss cantons to some extent reassured the unmasked adept. From the moment, however, of this exposure, the descent of Cagliostro was simply headlong in its rapidity. Nevertheless, he was followed by some of his initiates, who pressed him to return to France, assuring him of the powerful protection of exalted masonic dignitaries. In his hesitation he wrote to the Baron de Breteuil, the king’s minister of the house, but, as it chanced, a personal enemy of the Cardinal de Rohan. Considering Cagliostro as a _protégé_ of the prince, he replied that if he had sufficient effrontery to set foot within the limits of the kingdom, he should be arrested and transferred to a prison in Paris, there to await prosecution as a common swindler, who should answer to the royal justice for his criminal life.
From this moment Cagliostro saw that he was a perpetual exile from France, and feeling in no sense assured of his safety even in Switzerland, he left Basle for Aix, in Savoy. He was ordered to quit that town in eight and forty hours. At Roveredo, a dependency of Austria, the same treatment awaited him. He migrated to Trent, and announced himself as a practitioner of lawful medicine, but the prince-bishop who was sovereign of the country discerned the cloven hoof of the sorcerer beneath the doctor’s sober dress, and showed him in no long space of time his hostility to magical practices. The wandering hierophant of Egyptian masonry, somewhat sorely pressed, took post to Rome, and reached the Eternal City after many vicissitudes. Here, according to Saint-Félix and Figuier, he was rejoined by his wife; according to the Italian biographer, Lorenza had accompanied him in his wanderings, and persuaded him to seek refuge in Rome, being sick unto death of her miserable course of life. The former statement is, on the whole, the most probable, as it is difficult to suppose that she left Italy to rejoin Cagliostro at Passy, and she appears to have returned to him with marked repugnance. She endeavoured to lead him back to religion, which had never been eradicated from her heart. He lived for some time with extraordinary circumspection, and consented at last to see a Benedictine monk, to whom he made his confession. The Holy Inquisition, which doubtless had scrutinised all his movements, is said to have been deceived for a time, and he was favourably received by several cardinals. He lived for a year in perfect liberty, occupied with the private study of medicine. During this time he endeavoured to obtain loans from the initiates of his Egyptian rite who were scattered over France and Germany, but they did not arrive, and the sublime Copt, the illuminated proprietor of the stone philosophical and the medicine yclept metallic, came once more, to the eternal disgrace of Osiris, Isis, and Anubis, on the very verge of want.
His extremity prompted him to renew his relations with the masonic societies within the area of the Papal States. A penalty of death hung over the initiates of the superior grades, and their lodges were in consequence surrounded with great mystery, and were convened in subterranean places. He was persuaded to found a lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry in Rome itself, from which moment Lorenza reasonably regarded him as lost. One of his own adepts betrayed him; he was arrested on the 27th of September 1789, by order of the Holy Office, and imprisoned in the Castle of St Angelo. An inventory of his papers was taken, and all his effects were sealed up. The process against him was drawn up with the nicest inquisitorial care during the long period of eighteen months. When the trial came on he was defended by the Count Gætano Bernardini, advocate of the accused before the sacred and august tribunal, and to this pleader in ordinary the impartial and benign office, of its free grace and pleasure, did add generously, as counsel, one Monsignor Louis Constantini, “whose knowledge and probity,” saith an unbought and unbuyable witness (inquisitorially inspired), “were generally recognised.” They did not conceal from him the gravity of his position, advised him to refrain from basing his defence on a series of denials, promising to save him from the capital forfeit, and so he was persuaded to confess everything, was again reconciled to the church; and being almost odoriferous with genuine sanctity, on the 21st of March 1791 he was carried before the general assembly of the purgers of souls by fire, before the Pope on the 7th of the following April, when the advocates pleaded with so much eloquence that they retired in the agonies of incipient strangulation, Cagliostro repeated his avowal, and as a natural consequence of the unbought eloquence and the purchased confession, the penalty of death was pronounced.
When, however, the shattered energies of the advocates were a little recruited, a recommendation of mercy was addressed to the Pope, the sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment, and the condemned man was consigned to the Castle of St Angelo. After an imprisonment of two years, he died, God knows how, still in the prime of life, at the age of fifty.
Lorenza, whose admissions had contributed largely towards the condemnation of her husband, was doomed to perpetual seclusion in a penitentiary. The papers of Cagliostro were burned by the Holy Office, and the phantom of that institution keeps to the present day the secret of the exact date of its victim’s death. It carefully circulated the report that on one occasion he attempted to strangle a priest whom he had sent for on the pretence of confessing, hoping to escape in his clothes; and then it made public the statement that he had subsequently strangled himself. When the battalions of the French Revolution entered Rome, the commanding officers, hammering at the doors of Saint-Angelo, determined to release the entombed adept, but they were informed that Cagliostro was dead, “at which intelligence,” says Figuier, “they perceived plainly that the former _Parlement de France_ was not to be compared with the Roman Inquisition, and without regretting the demolished Bastile, they could not but acknowledge that it disgorged its prey more easily than the Castle of Saint Angelo.”
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The personal attractions of Cagliostro appear to have been exaggerated by some of his biographers. “His splendid stature and high bearing, increased by a dress of the most bizarre magnificence, the extensive suite which invariably accompanied him in his wanderings, turned all eyes upon him, and disposed the minds of the vulgar towards an almost idolatrous admiration.”
With this opinion of Figuier may be compared the counter-statement of the Italian biographer:--“He was of a brown complexion, a bloated countenance, and a severe aspect; he was destitute of any of those graces so common in the world of gallantry, without knowledge and without abilities.” But the Italian biographer was a false witness, for Cagliostro was beyond all question and controversy a man of consummate ability, tact, and talent. The truth would appear to lie between these opposite extremes. “The Count de Cagliostro,” says the English life, published in 1787, “is below the middle stature, inclined to corpulency; his face is a round oval, his complexion and eyes dark, the latter uncommonly penetrating. In his address we are not sensible of that indescribable grace which engages the affections before we consult the understanding. On the contrary, there is in his manner a self-importance which at first sight rather disgusts than allures, and obliges us to withhold our regards, till, on a more intimate acquaintance, we yield it the tribute to our reason. Though naturally studious and contemplative, his conversation is sprightly, abounding with judicious remarks and pleasant anecdotes, yet with an understanding in the highest degree perspicuous and enlarged, he is ever rendered the dupe of the sycophant and the flatterer.”
The persuasive and occasionally overpowering eloquence of Cagliostro is also dwelt upon by the majority of his biographers, but, according to the testimony of his wife, as extracted under the terror of the Inquisition and adduced in the Italian life:--“His discourse, instead of being eloquent, was composed in a style of the most wearisome perplexity, and abounded with the most incoherent ideas. Previous to his ascending the rostrum he was always careful to prepare himself for his labours by means of some bottles of wine, and he was so ignorant as to the subject on which he was about to hold forth, that he generally applied to his wife for the text on which he was to preach to his disciples. If to these circumstances are added a Sicilian dialect, mingled with a jargon of French and Italian, we cannot hesitate a single moment as to the degree of credibility which we are to give to the assertions that have been made concerning the wonder-working effects of his eloquence.”
But the Inquisition was in possession of documents which bore irrefutable testimony to the extraordinary hold which Cagliostro exercised over the minds of his numerous followers, and it is preposterous to suppose it could have been possessed by a man who was ignorant, unpresentable, and ill-spoken. Moreover, the testimony of Lorenza, given under circumstances of, at any rate, the strongest moral intimidation is completely worthless on all points whatsoever, and the biassed views of our inquisitorial apologists are of no appreciable value.
I have given an almost disproportionate space to the history of Joseph Balsamo, because it is thoroughly representative of the charlatanic side of alchemy, which during two centuries of curiosity and credulity had developed to a deplorable extent. There is no reason to suppose, despite the veil of mystery which surrounded Altotas, that he was an adept in anything but the sophistication of metals, and his skill in alchemical trickery descended to his pupil. That Balsamo was a powerful mesmerist, that he could induce clairvoyance with facility in suitable subjects, that he had dabbled in Arabic occultism, that he had the faculty of healing magnetically, are points which the evidence enables us to admit, and these genuine phenomena supported his titanic impostures, being themselves supplemented wherever they were weak or defective by direct and prepared fraud. Thus his miraculous prophecies, delineations of absent persons, revelations of private matters, &c., may to some extent be accounted for by the insatiable curiosity and diligence which he made use of to procure knowledge of the secrets of any families with which he came into communication. Lorenzo declared upon oath during her examination that many of the pupils had been prepared beforehand by her husband, but that some had been brought to him unawares, and that in regard to them she could only suppose he had been assisted by the marvels of magical art.
His powers, whatever they were, were imparted to some at least of his Masonic initiates, as may be seen in a genuine letter addressed to him from Lyons, and which describes in enthusiastic language the consecration in that town of the Egyptian lodge called Wisdom Triumphant. This letter fell into the hands of the Inquisition. It relates that at the moment when the assembly had entreated of the Eternal some explicit sign of his approval of their temple and their offerings, “and whilst our master was in mid air,” the first philosopher of the New Testament appeared uninvoked, blessed them after prostration before the cloud, by means of which they had obtained the apparition, and was carried upwards upon it, the splendour being so great that the young pupil or dove was unable to sustain it.
The same letter affirms that the two great prophets and the legislator of Israel had given them palpable signs of their goodwill and of their obedience to the commands of the august founder, the sieur Cagliostro. A similar communication testifies that the great Copt, though absent, had appeared in their lodge between Enoch and Elias.[AP]
CONCLUSION.
It has now been made plain beyond all reasonable doubt by the certain and abundant evidence of the lives and labours of the alchemists, that they were in search of a physical process for the transmutation of the so-called baser metals into silver and gold. The methods and processes by which they endeavoured to attain this _désir désiré_, and the secrets which they are supposed to have discovered, are embodied in allegorical writings, and their curious symbolism in the hands of ingenious interpreters is capable of several explanations, but the facts in their arduous and generally chequered careers are not allegorical, and are not capable of any mystical interpretations; consequently, the attempt to enthrone them upon the loftiest pinnacles of achievement in the psychic world, however attractive and dazzling to a romantic imagination, and however spiritually suggestive, must be regretfully abandoned. Their less splendid but substantial and permanent reputation is based on their physical discoveries and on their persistent enunciation of a theory of Universal Development, which true and far-sighted adepts well perceived, had an equal application to the triune man as to those metals which in their conception had also a triune nature.