booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

Contemporaries, however, take him less seriously and represent him rather as an expert charlatan whom the
wits of the salons made the butt of pleasantries. His principal importance to the subject of this book consists,
however, in his influence on the secret societies. According to the Mémoires authentiques pour servir
à l'histoire du Comte de Cagliostro, Saint-Germain was the " Grand Master of Freemasonry,"[50] and it was
he who initiated Cagliostro into the mysteries of Egyptian masonry.
Joseph Balsamo, born in 1743, who assumed the name of Comte de Cagliostro, as a magician far eclipsed
his master. Like Saint-Germain, he was generally reputed to be a Jew-the son of Pietro Balsamo, a
Sicilian tradesman of Jewish origin[51]-and he made no secret of his ardent admiration for the Jewish race.
After the death of his parents he escaped from the monastery in which he had been placed at Palermo and
joined himself to a man known as Altotas, said to have been an Armenian, with whom he travelled to Greece
and Egypt.[52] Cagliostro's travels later took him to Poland and Germany, where he was initiated into Freemasonry,[53]
and finally to France; but it was in England that he himself declared that he elaborated his
famous " Egyptian Rite," which he founded officially in 1782. According to his own account, this rite was
derived from a manuscript by a certain George Cofton-whose identity has never been discovered-which he
bought by chance in London.[54] Yarker, however, expresses the opinion that " the rite of Cagliostro was
clearly that of Pasqually," and that if he acquired it from a manuscript in London it would indicate that
Pasquilly had disciples in that city. A far more probable explanation is that Cagliostro derived his Egyptian
masonry from the same source as that on which Pasqually had drawn for his Order of Martinistes, namely
the Cabala, and that it was not from a single manuscript but from an eminent Jewish Cabalist in London that
he took his instructions. Who this may have been we shall soon see. At any rate, in a contemporary account
of Cagliostro we find him described as " a doctor initiated into Cabalistic art" and a Rose-Croix; but after
founding his own rite he acquired the name of Grand Copht, that is to say, Supreme Head of Egyptian Masonry,
a new branch that he wished to graft on to old European Freemasonry.[55] We shall return to his further
masonic adventures later.
In a superior category to Saint-German and Cagliostro was the famous Swabian doctor Mesmer, who has
given his name to an important branch of natural science. In about 1780 Mesmer announced his great discovery
of " animal magnetism, the principle of life in all organized beings, the soul of all that breathes." But
if to-day Mesmerism has come to be regarded as almost synonymous with hypnotism and in no way a branch
of occultism, Mesmer himself-stirring the fluid in his magic bucket, around which his disciples wept, slept,
fell into trances or convulsions, raved or prophesied[56]-earned not unnaturally the reputation of a charlatan.
The Freemasons, eager to discover the secret of the magic bucket, hastened to enrol him in their Order, and
Mesmer was received into the Primitive Rite of Free and Accepted Masons in 1785.[57]
Space forbids a description of the minor magicians who flourished at this period-of Schroeder, founder
in 1776 of a chapter of " True and Ancient Rose-Croix Masons," practising certain magical, theosophical,
and alchemical degrees; of Gassner, worker of miracles in the neighbourhood of Ratisbonne; of " the Jew
Leon," one of a band of charlatans who made large sums of money with magic mirrors in which the imaginative
were able to see their absent friends, and who was finally banished from France by the police,-all these
and many others exploited the credulity and curiosity of the upper classes both in France and Germany
between the years of 1740 and 1790. De Luchet, writing before the French Revolution, describes the part
played in their mysteries by the soul of a Cabalistic Jew named Gablidone who had lived before Christ, and
who predicted that " in the year 1800 there will be, on our globe, a very remarkable revolution, and there
will be no other religion but that of the patriarchs."[58]
How are we to account for this extraordinary wave of Cabalism in Western Europe? By whom was it inspired?
If, as Jewish writers assure us, neither Martines Pasqually, Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, nor any of
the visible occultists or magicians were Jews, the problem only becomes the more insoluble. We cannot believe
that Sanhedrims, Hebrew hieroglyphics, the contemplation of the Tetragrammaton, and other Cabalistic
rites originated in the brains of French and German aristocrats, philosophers, and Freemasons. Let us
turn, then, to events taking place at this moment in the world of Jewry and see whether these may provide
some clue.
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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