Raising Hell (16 page)

In an eighteenth-century French rite, the initiate was held aloft, then slowly lowered to the floor, by several members; this was to symbolize his being lowered into his grave. Then, while he lay on the floor, a bloody cloth was thrown over his face; the members stood around him, swords pointing at his body. Finally, the grand master of the lodge would clasp the new apprentice by the hand, using the Mason’s grip, and raise him up from the floor. The Masonic grip, a handshake with the thumb cocked, was a way for Masons everywhere to recognize each other without having to say a word.

As a Mason progressed through the different levels of the lodge, he was allowed to share more and more of the secret knowledge and powers that the order was reputed to possess. According to “The Muses Threnodie,” published in Edinburgh in 1638, “We have the Mason Word and second sight, Things for to come we can fortell aright.” The lodges grew and prospered, making great inroads into colonial America, too; Benjamin Franklin, an initiate of the Philadelphia Lodge, printed and published the society’s
Book of Constitutions
in 1734, and George
Washington, when he was elected president, was serving as master mason of his lodge in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

But with its claims of extraordinary knowledge, coupled with the great shroud of mystery that the society purposely drew about itself, the Masons drew the suspicion, and later the outright hostility, of many other institutions, ranging from governments (the Russian minister of the interior closed down all the Masonic lodges in 1822) to the Catholic Church (the pope issued an 1884 encyclical condemning the organization). Still, the Masons survived all of the assaults and continued to instruct their apprentices in the hidden mysteries and secret signs that had purportedly been preserved and handed down by the members of their order from time immemorial.

THE GRAND COPT

The secret society of the Freemasons acquired no more enterprising member than the self-styled Count Cagliostro, who found in its elaborate rituals and high-flown philosophy the perfect venue for his talents. Both the society and the count prospered mightily from the alliance.

Born in 1743 to an impoverished but reputedly noble Sicilian family, Giuseppe Balsamo, as he was then known, showed much early promise. He was a quick study, with a knack for chemistry and medicine. But he also showed a rebellious streak, an impatience with authority, which caused him to be thrown out of one school or seminary after another. (Reciting from a sacred text in one such institution, he substituted the names of well-known prostitutes for those of the saints. He was, as he had no doubt intended, tossed out on his ear.) Making his way to Rome at the age of seventeen, he managed to scrape together a living using his skills as a draftsman (and forger) while drifting inexorably toward the region of his real interests—alchemy and the occult. A Greek named Altotas, who professed to be a master of these matters, became Balsamo’s first and most influential mentor.

Together, they traveled through Africa and Asia, stopping for protracted stays in Egypt, where Balsamo claimed to have acquired an ancient papyrus explaining the secrets of clairvoyance, and Malta, where Altotas gained them an introduction to the grand master of the Order of the Knights of Malta. Here, as everywhere else Balsamo landed during his peripatetic career, he gleaned all that there was to learn, added to his vast mental inventory of science, astrology, and philosophy, and then moved on to his next stop, where he could market what he’d just found out. The supreme salesman, Balsamo was never without a willing clientele. And by all accounts, his most marketable commodity was himself.

“While not actually handsome, his face was the most remarkable I have ever seen. His eyes above all,” wrote the baroness d’Oberkirch, an early supporter. “They were indescribable, with supernatural depths—all fire and yet all ice . . . he at once attracted and repelled you; he frightened you and at the same time inspired you with insurmountable curiosity.” In summary, she asserted that he was “possessed of a demonic power; he enthralled the mind, paralyzed the will.”

As his career caught fire, he abandoned his own name and took on that of his godmother, the Countess Cagliostro. Married to a beautiful young woman he’d met in Rome, Cagliostro traveled through the capitals of Europe, reading minds, telling fortunes, healing through the laying on of hands. It was reported that he had conjured up the archangel Michael; that he had predicted the winning numbers in a lottery three times in a row; that he dined at night with the shades of deceased statesmen and royalty. Wherever he went—Strasbourg, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Lisbon—he attracted the notice of the local nobility and, of course, anyone with a hankering for knowledge of otherworldly things.

But it was on his second visit to London in 1776 that Cagliostro claimed to have come across the means by which he was to achieve his greatest fame and fortune. At a bookstall, he found an obscure manuscript by one George Gaston, in which were described the mystical rites of Egyptian Masonry. (No other
record of this book seems to have surfaced, and it’s more than possible that Cagliostro made up its existence altogether.) But according to Cagliostro, there was this order of Freemasons even older and more powerful than its modern-day counterpart, an order founded by the prophet Elijah and by Enoch, who was also known as the Grand Copt; before long, Cagliostro was using that title himself. Members of this ancient order never died, but were bodily removed, like Elijah himself, straight from earth to Heaven. It was around this time that Cagliostro started circulating the story that he himself was actually several thousand years old.

Armed with these newfound rites, and under the aegis of the Esperance Lodge of Freemasons to which he’d been admitted on April 12, 1777, in rooms at the King’s Head in London, Cagliostro embarked on an ambitious tour of other Freemason lodges, to promote his Egyptian program. In each city—Venice, Berlin, Nuremberg, St. Petersburg—he was welcomed with a sumptuous banquet, after which he lectured and offered demonstrations of his occult abilities. Using his five-year-old son as medium, he conjured up angels who left audible kisses on the child’s cheeks; he read minds and foretold the future; and he indefatigably pushed his Egyptian rites, telling an audience in Leipzig that if they refused to accept and practice them, the master of the lodge would suffer dire consequences by the end of the month. When the master took his own life a short time later, this was considered confirmation of Cagliostro’s claim, and the lodge immediately signed on to Cagliostro’s program.

With monies pouring in from the Egyptian lodges, and his fame increasing hourly, Cagliostro was at the peak of his career. When Johann Lavater, the Swiss theologian and friend of Goethe, requested a meeting, Cagliostro answered, “If your science is greater than mine, you have no need of my acquaintance; if mine is the greater, I have no need of yours.” But Lavater was not so easily dissuaded, and after the two men met, he became one of Cagliostro’s most ardent proponents.

Not everyone was. Cagliostro had many enemies, including high-ranking clergy of the Catholic Church; in the count’s purported
“miracles,” they saw a challenge to their own divine authority. And there were many others who simply thought he was a fraud and a trickster. The baron de Gleichen touched on both points of view in his own description of the man: “Cagliostro was small, but he had a very fine head which could have served as the model for the face of an inspired poet. It is true that his tone, his gestures and his manners were those of a charlatan, boastful, pretentious and arrogant, but it must be remembered that he was an Italian, a physician giving consultations, self-styled Masonic grand master, and a professor of occult sciences. Otherwise his ordinary conversation was agreeable and instructive, his actions noble and charitable, and his healing treatments never unsuccessful and sometimes admirable: he never took a penny from his patients.” Indeed, in keeping with the higher tenets of the Masonic code, Cagliostro gave away money, in great quantities, to the poor and the needy.

But the seeds of his downfall were sown when he became involved, if unjustly, in the Affair of the Queen’s Necklace in France. Marie-Antoinette had long coveted a diamond necklace that was too expensive even for her to purchase. Aware of the queen’s desire, however, and knowing that the jeweler who owned the necklace was aware of it, too, the comtesse de La Motte concocted an elaborate scheme to convince the jeweler that the queen was secretly buying it, unbeknownst to the king, Louis XVI; to that end, she forged letters signed by Cardinal de Rohan, a man who had long been seeking preferment from the queen.

The jeweler, figuring he was dealing with the queen’s own emissaries, let the necklace go without being paid for it up front. But when the bill continued to go unpaid, he secured an audience with the unsuspecting king to make his complaint. The king, naturally, took a long look at the letter purportedly written by the cardinal—who, as it happened, was also one of Cagliostro’s closest confidants and friends. The scheming comtesse de La Motte claimed that it was Cagliostro who had made off with the now missing necklace. Thrown into the Bastille, he languished there for almost a year, before offering his testimony
and being exonerated. Still, for a man whose reputation rested on his ability to see the future, read minds, and outwit anyone, this was a public relations disaster.

And it was one from which he never fully recovered.

In the remaining years of his life, Cagliostro and his wife continued their travels, but under an increasing cloud. He was hounded out of several countries, his erstwhile adherents and confederates turned on him, and when he finally turned up in Rome, with the intention of practicing his Freemasonry in the papal city itself, he made his fatal mistake. Arrested by the Inquisition on charges of heresy in 1789, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. His wife was immured in a convent (where she subsequently died). And though Cagliostro’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in the fortress of San Leo, he had made his last escape. Confined in almost total darkness, in a dismal cell carved from solid rock, he survived until 1795, when, rumor had it, he was strangled by his jailer.

THE ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

It isn’t often that a magical society has as brilliant a chronicler, and convert, as William Butler Yeats, but the Order of the Golden Dawn did. A poet with a strong religious sensibility and metaphysical yearnings, Yeats was attracted to the mysticism and ritual of the Golden Dawn—and much impressed by MacGregor Mathers, the Scotsman who’d founded the order in 1887.

“At the British Museum Reading Room,” Yeats wrote, “I often saw a man of thirty-six or thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and an athletic body, who seemed, before I heard his name, or knew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance. . . . He had copied many manuscripts on magical ceremonial and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious
memory.” For Yeats, this source was the
anima mundi,
a kind of collective memory shared by all the members of the human race. Although colored and detailed by our individual lives and experiences, this common memory bank could be accessed by those who properly pursued the mystical course.

The road map, as it were, was provided in the sacred texts that MacGregor Mathers had personally translated and interpreted. Among these texts were such magical standards as the
Key of Solomon,
the Cabbala, and the elaborate Enochian system devised by the Elizabethan astrologer Dr. John Dee. MacGregor Mathers drew from them all, and from another lesser known source, too—an antique manuscript, written in code, that was first discovered in a London bookstall. Mathers, with the help of a couple of other men who were, like himself, Masons, took on the job of deciphering the London text, which turned out to contain instructions for various occult rituals along with general notes on Cabbalistic wisdom and practice. It was this manuscript that was to provide the springboard to the founding of the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Mathers made a good start, attracting to his new order over a hundred intelligent and influential people; besides Yeats, he recruited the writers Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, and Algernon Blackwood. Lodges were founded in many cities, including Paris, Bradford, and Edinburgh. But what began as a quasi-religious society (one text declared that the establishment “of closer and more personal relations with the Lord Jesus, the Master of Masters, is and ever must be the ultimate object of all the teachings of our Order") gradually changed, as did its leader. The emphasis on magic increased—black magic, in particular—and Mathers, who had never been exactly shy and retiring, became more autocratic and irritable than ever.

In Paris, he claimed to have had a transforming experience. Out walking one night in the Bois de Boulogne, he was suddenly surrounded by spirits, whom he later characterized as “the Secret Chiefs of the Third Order.” To him alone would they now confide the secrets of “the Great Work,” to him alone would they entrust such arcane knowledge as the true meaning of the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and only he would serve in perpetuity as head of the order.

On this and subsequent occasions, these Secret Chiefs revealed themselves to him in mortal guise, and Mathers wrote that he believed them “to be human and living upon this earth; but possessing terrible superhuman powers.” In private, they wore long robes and magical paraphernalia, while in public they looked and dressed like ordinary people, with but one exception—"the appearance and sensation of transcendent health and physical vigour (whether they seem persons in youth or age).” Mathers attributed this physical luster to the elixir of life.

The order also became more and more hierarchical, with eleven grades or degrees, broken down into three categories. Adepts studied geomancy and alchemy, astrology and astral travel. (It was on the “astral plane” that Mathers claimed to conduct most of his sessions with the Secret Chiefs.) Adepts were also taught how to prepare their own magical equipment, which included a cup, dagger, wand, and consecrated sword. The color of the robe they wore indicated what grade they had achieved in the order.