Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  Lambert de Lintot died in the 1790s, leaving an impressive collection of Masonic manuscripts, drawings and jewels. An inventory of these materials is found among the papers of General Charles Rainsford, the commander-in-chief of occult Masonry in late eighteenth-century England.98 A professional soldier who had witnessed the battles of Fontenoy and Culloden, Rainsford became equerry to George III's brother the duke of Gloucester, with whose patronage he gained a seat in the House of Commons. His friendship with Hugh Percy, 2nd duke of Northumberland, a fellow military officer, led to further Parliamentary service, although the general was not an active politician. The height of Rainsford's military career came in 1776–8, when he was the commissary responsible for moving German troops through the Dutch Republic to the Americas to serve in the War of Independence. The German prince on whom he most relied during this process, Frederick II of Hesse-Cassel, was later initiated into Lambert de Lintot's Perfect Observance lodge, as was the son and heir of Charles, duke of Brunswick, who had also provided soldiers for the expedition. This may not have been a coincidence, since Rainsford clearly knew the lodge's master. After 1778, promotions fell rapidly on Rainsford's head: he became governor of Chester Castle, aide-de-camp to King George III, organizer of the military camps established during the Gordon Riots and commander of the garrison of Gibraltar. He served for decades as deputy lieutenant of the Tower of London, and was buried there after his death in 1809.99

  Towards the end of his career, Rainsford proudly recorded his progress through the ranks of the army, his Fellowship in the Royal Society, and his membership of the Society of Antiquaries, the Society for Making Discoveries in Africa and the Society for Helping the Poor, along with a bewildering number of Masonic societies: the Rosy Crucians, the Grand Orient at Paris, Pernety's Order of Illuminati of Avignon and the Grand Lodge of England, among others. He was inspector of Masonic lodges “universally” and “Member of 32 Elevations to 7th Degree exclusive,” meaning he had been initiated into Lambert de Lintot's Rite.100 Rainsford also noted his membership of the Exegetical Society of Stockholm, a quasi-Masonic organization founded for the propagation of Swedenborgian doctrines. Its most prominent member was Charles, duke of Södermania, brother of King Gustav III, grand master of the Strict Observance Rite and later himself to become monarch of Sweden.101 Rainsford did not record some of the more curious stages in this triumphant progress to enlightenment: how in 1756, for example, he had copied out manuscripts supposedly belonging to John Dee on the conjuration of spirits and the names of angels, then added thirty years later anecdotes about the astrological healer Dr Richard Napier that showed how he was assisted by spirits. Rainsford had encountered more conventional sources of wisdom as well. While travelling through Germany with the duke of Gloucester in 1770, the unmarried Rainsford became enamoured of a woman he called “charming lovable Jeanette,” a Jewish Berliner. He asked her to recommend him to “the great Mendelssohn the Philosopher so celebrated and enlightened … of whom I would very much like to be the Pupil.”102 He meant Moses Mendelssohn, the renowned scholar of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. What if Rainsford had become his devotee? Would astrology and magic have figured so largely in his mental framework?

  Although Rainsford's correspondence and papers have not survived in their entirety, what is left of them shows that he was in touch with Freemasons throughout Europe. He answered questions about the antiquity of the Craft from the “Écharpes Blanches” (White Sashes) of Paris (probably a branch of the Élus Coens), received Count Grabianka, grand master of the Avignon Masons, when he visited England in 1786, and kept himself informed about the “Society of Illuminés,” headed by King Frederick William II of Prussia, who “pretend to supernatural Powers, and of bringing Those that are Dead or Alive to whatever Place they chuse to call them.”103 He was equally involved with international Swedenborgianism, receiving reports of the spread of the baron's works in White Russia and reading bitter complaints from Benedict Chastanier about a New Jerusalem Church minister who was “rather a Minister of Belial than a Servant of J.C.”104 Rainsford combined these pursuits with a passion for occult philosophy. A correspondent at Harwich sent him news of his investigations at Algiers into “Cabalistic Magic” and Rosicrucianism. Another forwarded a prophecy received from Hanover, whose author had “intended to write and to publish something about Hyeroglyphics, but was prevented by his death.105 Ebenezer Sibly gave him a copy of “The Tables of Rotalo,” a series of compass-like wheels by which the future could be foretold according to the “Science” of “Cabala.” The user was assured that “[f]rom this work Cagliostro learnt his surprising feats.” Sibly claimed that he had paid 300 guineas to copy the work, which sounds dubious. “My Brother the Minister”—that is, Manoah Sibly—carried the strange treatise over to Rainsford's house. Like the general, Ebenezer Sibly was a member of the Order of Harodim. An invitation to a 1796 chapter meeting addressed to the astrologer can be found among Rainsford's papers.106

  Rainsford clearly regarded occult thinking as perfectly compatible with his religious beliefs. Like other Swedenborgians, he accepted the authority of visions, but he recorded only one of his own, which he experienced at London on the morning of 8 May 1786. Before waking, “I had an Information as it were given to me” concerning a Hebrew book. Although he interpreted the vision as relating to the New Testament, his mind was fixed at the time on the Book of Enoch, a “lost book” of the Bible that pertains to wicked angels who mated with human women and sired giants. According to Rainsford, these angels taught “Magick & Incantations, or, the Art of Divination,” and became evil spirits.107 At some point in the late 1780s, he wrote a long letter to Count Grabianka, praising “the doctrine of that great Man, Swedenborg,” but adding a further list of spiritual worthies:

  I have employed myself for some time, in studying the Cabala of Fludd … who according to my Ideas was the most profound of his time in the true doctrines as well as in the Holy Bible … I have also searched in the Mysteries of Masonry … I will say nothing of the Science of Cagliostro; because I know nothing either of his Principles, or of his Aim. But I would strongly wish to establish here among the true searchers and Advocates of the sacred Science a Regime that might be able to do Honor to Man and sustain the Cult and Adoration of the Lord.108

  Rainsford went on to send compliments to Grabianka on the Fables Egyptiennes and Dictionnaire Hermetique, works written by Antoine-Joseph Pernety. He asked for his own ideas to be passed on to the famous Abbé.

  Alchemy remained the general's passion. He was, of course, fascinated by James Price's experiments with “red and white powders” in 1782–3, as were the Écharpes Blanches and the mysterious writer from Harwich.109 He wondered in a 1785 letter to a Masonic friend whether his etymology of the word “Alchemy” “agrees with any Ideas of your Friend Behmen.” Four years later, he received a reply. “I am disposed to believe Jacob Behmen when he says that a Man must be purified into a divine Magus, before he can have such a command over nature as to effect the Philosophical Change,” maintained his correspondent.110 Unfortunately, this learned Freemason did not explain where he had read such an extraordinary passage in Boehme, who generally denied that physical alchemy was possible. Rainsford's own approach to alchemy was summed up in the notebooks that he kept in 1786–7 and that record a series of experiments. Clearly, he was searching for an actual gold-making process, but he also wrote down philosophical quotations from Boehme and Georg von Welling, a Bavarian alchemist of the early eighteenth century.111 Welling's chief work, Opus Mago-Cabalisticum et Theosophicum, was hugely popular in late eighteenth-century Germany—even Goethe used it as the basis for his forays into alchemy. Rainsford eventually had Ebenezer Sibly transcribe an English copy for him.112

  The general's Behmenist interpretation of alchemy is reflected in a heavily corrected manuscript of 1799 that was put in the same binding as his experimental papers. The work, which does not seem to be in Rainsford's handwriting, describes the divine and androgynou
s origins of Adam, “the perfect red, passive and Spiritual Earth or vessel.” Adam “fell into deep magical Sleep, became thickened in his inward astral elements,” which led to his splitting into two genders. Eve, unfortunately, was an “inferior astral and paradysical vessel,” who dragged poor Adam down with her. When Adam and Eve admitted “the gross and unharmonized inferior nature and Spiritual fiery Tincture of the Serpent, they were both Tinctured and subdued thereby.” To achieve “reunion with God” would require “ascending by the True Jacobs Ladder … by the ordained degrees of purifications, to the inmost and uppermost steep [sic] where God is.” Christ, the Second Adam, came to transmute “this boddy of Earth … by the overruling Energy of the Divine omnipotent Tincture of Love.”113 The philosophy and language of the treatise are Behmenist, but, unlike the original Theosopher, the author leaves open a path to practical alchemy (through Christ's “transmuting” of Adam's “red earth”). The references to Jacob's Ladder and to degrees of purification are essentially Masonic. Rainsford may have thought of this philosophy as Swedenborgian, but it bears none of the baron's emphasis on correspondences or visions.

  Rainsford's alchemy was supported and assisted by two close friends who were also Freemasons. The first was the Irishman Peter Woulfe, a noted maker of chemical apparatus. Rainsford called him “one of the most able Chemists of the Century, as well as a profound Philosopher.” Woulfe was, like his friend, a Fellow of the Royal Society. He gave the Society's prestigious Bakerian Lecture three times and was sent to investigate James Price's alchemical claims in 1783. He was a long-time friend of Sir Joseph Banks, whom he supplied with perfumes, chemicals and bottles for use on the second Cook expedition. Woulfe remained a highly respected figure in chemical circles throughout the late eighteenth century.114 Rainsford's other alchemical friend was Hugh Percy, who became the 2nd duke of Northumberland in 1786, and whose activities resembled those of his Tudor ancestor, the “Wizard Earl.” Percy was a professional soldier, who served in the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence. During the latter conflict, he gradually came to sympathize with the American patriots. Percy was an amiable, albeit unconventional and extravagant person. Giacomo Casanova met him in Turin in 1762, when young Baron Warkworth, as Percy then was, tempted the Italian lover's mistress away from him with a promise of 2,000 guineas. Casanova was posing as a “Kabbalist” or magician who could predict the outcome of lotteries through a mathematical system (perhaps he had read the “Tables of Rotalo”), and was contemplating a trip to London. Percy cheerfully gave him a miniature portrait of himself by way of introduction to his mother, the duchess.115

  In 1785, Percy sent his friend Rainsford an amusing letter, inquiring about his alchemical experiments and sending him the compliments of three house guests at his ancestral home of Alnwick Castle, who were themselves engaged in the purging of lead ore. “I heartily wish you was here to enjoy our Experiments & our Fun,” wrote Percy merrily. The group included Louis Dutens, a Huguenot clergyman whom Percy had met in Turin and who became historiographer to King George III, as well as “Mr. Morse,” who might be the military engineer Robert Morse. The most unexpected guest was the “venerable Secretary of the Learned Society of Antiquaries,” who “promises on this Condition not to trouble you on your first Entrance into that most ancient Society [of alchemists], till [Rainsford answers] any Questions either ordinary or Extraordinary respecting the Runick Medal in his Possession.”116 This can only refer to the Reverend John Brand, recently appointed secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, whose parish was in the gift of the dukes of Northumberland. He later became Percy's secretary and librarian. Brand was best known for reissuing Henry Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares, to which he added his own observations. Although he was no less scathing than his predecessor in condemning “the superstitious Notions and Ceremonies of the People,” Brand showed more interest than Bourne in the meticulous chronicling of their details. His participation in Percy's alchemical ventures casts a new light on a sentence that appears in the preface to his reissue of Popular Antiquites: “By the chemical Process of Philosophy, even Wisdom may be extracted from the Follies and Superstitions of our Forefathers.”117 Was Brand implying that knowledge of alchemical processes might be enhanced by the investigation of witch beliefs, second sight or “Vulgar Superstitions Concerning the Moon”?

  How seriously the alchemical activities of Percy and his guests should be taken is a moot point. The irrepressible Percy once added a cheeky P.S. to a letter to his friend Rainsford, asking, “but where is the gold?”118 For his own part, Rainsford was wholly dedicated to the spagyric science, as was Peter Woulfe. From all indications, they made little attempt to disguise their passion for it. Unlike the Newtonians of the first half of the century, they did not fear the consequences of being perceived as occult thinkers. Neither of them can be described as marginal. Remarkably, by the 1780s, the occult sciences were beginning to seem respectable, at least as a private pursuit. For a learned person to publish works on alchemy or astrology or ritual magic was to run a risk, as the affair of James Price demonstrated, but to study them privately was no longer something of which to be ashamed.

  This shift may be linked to the diffuse, unfocused and broadly tolerant nature of the English Enlightenment. If the effects of a dominant strain of enlightened thought had been felt more strongly in England, perhaps Rainsford, Woulfe, Lambert de Lintot and Sibly would have been held to stricter account. Perhaps an English version of Immanuel Kant would have arisen, a philosopher who took Swedenborg's writings seriously but condemned them as the dreams of a “spirit-seer.”119 Instead, English critics like Horace Walpole may have scoffed at the baron, but they did not bother to read his works. We should not suggest, of course, that the English case was entirely unique. A dismissive tolerance towards occult thinking might be traced almost anywhere in Europe. If England was more open to practitioners of the occult than Scotland, it was arguably less so than France or Germany, which were the seedbeds of occult thinking in the late eighteenth century. England produced no occult prose writer as original as Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, “the Unknown Philosopher,” who refracted Jacob Boehme's Theosophy through a strange prism composed of Freemasonry, mystical number theory and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.120 In other parts of Europe, however, occult philosophy was hotly contested, while in England it was simply ignored by those who did not agree with it—up to a point. When that point was crossed and the occult began to seem threatening to the social and political order, the situation might change. The first sign of such trouble was in the treatment of that magnificent charlatan, Count Cagliostro.

  Cagliostro in London

  Hugh Percy's 1785 letter to General Rainsford ends on a hopeful note:

  By the bye I hope you know that the famous Count Caliostro [sic] is at Paris & that the manner in which he lives & the stories told of him are so wonderful, that I long much to know whether there is any truth in them. I will only tell you that he is said to be 300 Years old, & lives, without any visible means of acquiring such Wealth, at a greater Expence, then the first of all the Nobility at Paris.121

  The implication was clear: this remarkable Italian must have knowledge of the Philosopher's Stone. In fact, Giuseppe Balsamo, the self-styled Count Cagliostro, claimed to have much more wisdom than that. He was perhaps the most successful in a string of wandering Italians who made a sensation in late eighteenth-century European society by being thought to know secrets. They included the seedy Casanova, as well as the so-called count de St.-Germain, a talented composer who lived in London in the mid-1740s. The latter's real name was probably Giovannini, but it was for his fabled wealth and longevity (he was said to be thousands of years old), not for his music, that he became legendary. St.-Germain was seen as an alchemical adept, although scholars now doubt whether he actively courted this reputation. He was also said to have studied “Freemasonry and other dark sciences” with the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, at whose court he died in 1784.122 Cagliostro, however, made
a bigger splash than any of them, before suffering a quick and devastating fall from grace.

  Giuseppe Balsamo was born in Palermo in 1743, although in his “Confession” he claimed to have grown up in Medina, the orphaned child of Christian parents. His tale of living as a Muslim, but with “true religion” in his heart, before at last being recognized by the Knights of Malta, is a sentimental Orientalist fantasy.123 Together with his redoubtable wife, Seraphina, “the Great Copt,” as he called himself, travelled across Europe, from St Petersburg to Portugal, pursuing various schemes of self-enrichment. He made three trips to London: first, in 1771–2, as a would-be painter; second, in 1776, as the possessor of a system to win at lotteries (he may have derived the idea from that wily “Kabbalist” Casanova); and third, in 1786–7, as the grand master of “Egyptian Rite” Freemasonry. By the time of the third visit, Seraphina was heading a female branch of the order. The big secret of the Egyptian Rite was communication with the dead, usually through a young boy or girl who acted as a medium. The promise of hidden treasure was frequently hinted at, and the seances themselves were accompanied by all the symbolic paraphernalia of ritual magic—candles, circles, incantations. Cagliostro was essentially marketing an old product under an exciting new label, with the addition of dramatic stage effects, and he found a large number of willing customers. Unfortunately, his lechery, thievery and pomposity kept getting in the way of a successful sales pitch, and he usually ended up absconding from the stage only one step ahead of the authorities. His greatest blunder was to involve himself in the turgid French affair of Queen Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace. One of Cagliostro's child oracles helped to persuade the cardinal de Rohan to borrow the dazzling 2,840-carat necklace on credit from a jeweller. The cardinal thought he was delivering it to the queen, whom he imagined to be in love with him, but in fact the recipient was the countess de la Motte, a close associate of the Cagliostros. Discovered, “the Great Copt” and Seraphina rapidly made off for London.124