Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, caused her young rival to die by means of a Black Mass.
One of Louis XIV’s doctors, called Lesebren, gave a strange account of what happened to a friend of his who had concocted what he believed to be the elixir of life. He had started to take a few drops every morning at sunrise with a glass of wine. After fourteen days his hair and nails began to fall out, and he lost his nerve. He started giving the potion to an elderly female servant, but she too became frightened and refused to continue. So finally he started an old hen on a course of this medicine, by soaking corn with it. After six days its feathers began to fall out until it became completely naked. Then two weeks later new feathers began to grow brighter and more beautifully coloured than the feathers she had had in her youth, and she began to lay eggs again.
Amid extremes of cynicism and gullibility, where quacks and frauds were common, genuine initiates developed ways of presenting themselves to the outside world. Esoteric teachers had always known their wisdom looked foolish to the uninitiated. They had always focused on the tricky paradoxical nature of the cosmos. Now initiates began to present themselves in the guise of tricksters and scoundrels.
A poor boy from the backstreets of Sicily reinvented himself as Count Cagliostro. By a mixture of mesmeric charm, his habit of using as bait Seraphita, his beautiful young wife, and above all his rumoured possession of the philosopher’s stone, he rose to the top of European society.
To those at the bottom of society he seemed some kind of saint. Healing miracles performed among the poor of Paris, unable to afford a doctor, made him a popular hero, and when, after a short imprisonment, he was released from the Bastille, some eight thousand people came to cheer. When Cagliostro was challenged to a debate in front of his intellectual peers, his opponent Court de Gebelin, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s and a renowned expert on esoteric philosophy, soon admitted he was up against a man whose erudition far surpassed his own.
Cagliostro also seems to have had remarkable powers of prophecy. In a famous letter of 20 June 1786 he prophesied that the Bastille would be completely destroyed, and it is said that he even predicted the exact date of this event — 14 July — in graffiti found inscribed on the wall of the prison cell in which he died.
Anyone with supernatural power is bound to suffer temptation. Perhaps the most charismatic and disconcerting initiate of the twentieth century was G.I. Gurdjieff. He deliberately presented his ideas in an absurd way. He wrote of an organ at the base of the spine that could enable everyone to see everything upside down and inside out, calling it the ‘Kunderbuffer’. In this way he deliberately gave the power of the kundalini serpent, the reserve of unredeemed energy that lies coiled at the base of the spine, and which is central to Tantric practice, a laughable name. Similarly he wrote of gods in giant spaceships and that the surface of the sun is cool. Anyone who dismissed it showed himself unworthy. Anyone who persisted and was able to tune in found that Gurdjieff’s spiritual disciplines worked.
Since his death it has emerged that he sometimes used his undoubted powers of mind control to prey on vulnerable young women.
A friend of mine journeyed to India, to visit the renowned teacher, adept and miracle-worker Sai Baba. My friend was travelling with his beautiful young girlfriend. After an exquisite dinner the servants withdrew and Sai Baba took his guests into the library. My friend was perusing a book while his girlfriend talked to Sai Baba. He noticed that he was standing unusually close to her and became anxious when Sai Baba turned the conversation to the subject of the sexual dimension in Hindu myths. Suddenly Sai Baba reached to ring a copper bell engraved with sigils and simultaneously seemed to grab something out of mid-air. He turned his hand palm up to reveal a golden chain with a crucifix on it. He told the girl that this was real magic and held his palm out to her, offering her the object, which seemed to my friend to glow with a dark aura.
He also noticed that the sigils on the bell were Tantric, and realized that the intention was probably to bewitch his girlfriend with a view to seducing her. He asked where the chain came from.
‘It appeared before your very eyes,’ said Sai Baba.
My friend took the chain from him, to prevent his girlfriend from touching it. Holding it over his palm, he used the art of psychometry to determine its origins. He had a disturbing vision of grave robbers, and realized that this crucifix and chain had been dug up from the grave of a Jesuit missionary.
He confronted Sai Baba with this and so, by demonstrating his own magical powers, he was able to make him back down.
Telling me about this many years later, my friend said that since Prospero had broken his wand at the end of
Is there any other evidence to suggest that magic is still practised today? In a secondhand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells I recently came across a small cache of letters in which an occultist gave out advice on how to use magic spells to achieve their goals. One included introducing menstrual blood secretly into food as a way of awakening a man’s sexual desires. This might seem outlandish, but in 2006 the British government announced its plans to give large grants for the development of ‘biodynamic’ farming. This method, devised by Rudolf Steiner, depends on the correspondences between plants and the spirits of the stars described by Paracelsus and Boehme. Steiner recommends that an infestation of field mice should be dealt with by burying in the field the ashes of a field mouse prepared when Venus is in the sign of Scorpio.
IF CAGLIOSTRO REMAINS AN ENIGMA, the man he looked up to is an even greater mystery.
Cagliostro’s own account of meeting the Comte de St Germain at a castle in Germany in 1785 records that he and his wife arrived at 2 a.m, the appointed time. The drawbridge lowered and they crossed to find themselves in a small, darkened room. Suddenly, as if by magic, great doors opened to reveal a vast temple made dazzling by the lights of thousands of candles. In the middle of the temple sat the Comte de St Germain. He was wearing many fabulous diamond rings and on his chest there rested a bejewelled device that seemed to reflect the light of all the candles and beam it on Cagliostro and Seraphita. Sitting either side of St Germain two acolytes held up bowls from which incense arose, and, as Cagliostro entered, a disembodied voice he took to be count’s — though his lips did not seem to move — resonated around the temple.
‘Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?’
Of course in at least one sense St Germain knew exactly who Cagliostro was — the visit had been pre- arranged, after all — but here he was asking about his previous incarnations, his daemon, his deeper motives.
Cagliostro threw himself on the ground in front of St Germain, and after a while said, ‘I come to invoke the God of the Faithful, the Son of Nature, the Father of Truth. I come to ask one of the fourteen thousand and seven secrets he bears in his bosom. I come to give myself up as his slave, his apostle, his martyr.’
Clearly Cagliostro thought he recognized St Germain, but
There was a clue in the fact that St Germain then initiated Cagliostro into
St Germain had appeared in European society quite suddenly in 1710, apparently from Hungary and seemingly about fifty years old. Small and dark skinned, he always wore black clothes and extraordinary diamonds. His most arresting features were his hypnotic eyes. By all accounts he quickly commanded attention in society because of his accomplishments, speaking many languages, playing the violin and painting. And he also seemed to have an extraordinary ability to read minds.
He was believed to practise secret breathing techniques taught by the Hindu fakirs and, in order to meditate better, he adopted yoga positions unknown in the West at that time. Though he attended banquets, he was never seen eating in front of others and drank only a strange herbal tea he concocted himself.
But the greatest mystery surrounding the Comte de St Germain was his longevity. Having appeared in public life in 1710, apparently in late middle age, when he met the composer Rameau in Venice, he remained in public life at least as late as 1782
It would be tempting to dismiss all this as a romance in the style of Alexander Dumas were it not for the fact that witnesses who left accounts of meeting him over such a long period were of such high standing. As well as Rameau, they included Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Clive of India and Casanova. He was a prominent figure at the court of Louis XV, an intimate of both Madame de Pompadour and the king himself, for whom he took diplomatic missions in Moscow, Constantinople and London. There in 1761 he negotiated an agreement called the Family Compact, which paved the way for the Treaty of Paris, putting an end to the colonial wars between France and
