THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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instead of the philosopher's stone; but it seemed to Brand as if he had found a she­ass instead of the expected kingdom. Even the swindler Cagliostro, in his by no
means scientific awareness, believed some of the tales of alchemists and ghost­seers which a greedy, corrupt, and bored aristocracy so willingly swallowed from him.
The contemporary and as it were liberal occult freemasons were also up to so many cranky tricks, with coffins, lights, hermetic arts, that Cagliostro, their so­called
‘Grand Cophta’, could almost appear as a serious case among mere scene­painters. It is altogether strange how at that time two or three trends could run alongside
and even into one another in this variously inventive sorcery: First the rising bourgeois tendency towards promoting the technological forces of production, but then the
obscurantist addiction to miracles of the declining feudal class, which produced the appearance of Cagliostro himself — in a way reminiscent of Rasputin at the court of
the Tsar. But these are joined by a third component, the cabbalism which still had a continuing influence precisely from the Renaissance again, from its witches’ kitchens
and incantations. Though witch­burnings themselves had also become rarer of late, the belief in helpful spirits had not; a book against ghosts like Balthasar Bekker's
‘Enchanted World’, which denied the pact with the devil, still seemed bold and almost paradoxical around 1690 and later, outside the highest academic sphere. The
magical Renaissance and the theosophical seventeenth century lived on for such a long time; the dividing line between freemasonry and the Rosicrucians was still often
blurred. Swedenborg, deep in the Age of Enlightenment, best demonstrates what a strange background open to wonders had still remained to Reason. In fact,
mechanics itself occasionally still had a ghostly element of its own at that time, one which was not even that far­fetched. It joined the old one surrounding the clock, this
strange life­simulating phenomenon, above all the church clock and its lonely dark activity. Surrounding the clicking and shifting of the wheels up in the casing,
surrounding the whole mechanical life­in­death and its aura. Thus cogwheels, gears, pulley blocks stare out at us from woodcuts of this period, all natural, all as if from
the belfry, all spooky. Even L'omme machine, the materialist catchphrase of La Mettrie, which seemed to break the spell so thoroughly around 1750, produced a new
shudder of horror, one which until then was even unknown, for the diversely uncontemporary bizarreness which persisted even during the bourgeois Enlightenment. It
was a mixture of a bit of the Golem. legend with the metaphor of the clock with which the Baroque is filled, particularly in its dramas: Hallmann's ‘Marianne’ talks of the