Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  Cagliostro started out well there, meeting the prince of Wales, prince Edward later duke of Kent and the duke of Clarence, all Freemasons. He moved into a house in Sloane Square, next door to Samuel Swinton, proprietor of the Courier de l'Europe, an international newspaper that had supported the American cause in the War of Independence. A retired naval officer, Swinton belonged to a well-known landowning family from the Scottish Borders. In spite of the sympathies proclaimed by his newspaper, and his friendship with the French spy and dramatist Pierre de Beaumarchais, he had run a network of British agents at Boulogne during the war. He was as determined a huckster as the count. By 1785, he was encountering financial difficulties, which led him to invite Cagliostro to go into business with him, manufacturing “Egyptian pills” for 36 shillings a box.125 He also introduced “the Great Copt” to two men who would cause him a great deal of harm: Lord George Gordon, who gave his name to the famous riots of 1780 and whose admiration for Cagliostro incited him to make vicious attacks on Marie Antoinette; and the journalist Théveneau de Morande, a blackmailer and French agent. Gordon was considered mad, which did the count's image no good, while Morande would work tirelessly to destroy him.126

  While disaster was brewing, Cagliostro was seeking out the Freemasons. On 1 November 1786, he made an appearance at the Lodge of Antiquity—the same lodge that had spurred the defection of 1779 and the formation of the Grand Lodge South of the River Trent. He must have been aware that this new Grand Lodge had sponsored Lambert de Lintot's Rite of Seven Degrees, and was no doubt hoping that it would adopt his “Egyptian Rite” as well. At the lodge meeting, however, the count was reportedly mocked by a certain Brother Marsh, an optician, who called him “a travelling Doctor” and imitated his voice in praising the efficacy of his “balsamo” (a barbed reference to his real name). Nevertheless, the following day, an advertisement appeared in the Morning Herald, calling for Freemasons and Swedenborgians to come together in forming “the new Temple of New Jerusalem” at O'Reilly's tavern in Great Queen Street. This daring move by Cagliostro had little effect, because the Courier de l'Europe had already published a withering account of the 1 November lodge meeting. Smelling blood, the London press followed up with finishing blows. James Gillray issued a print showing the intrepid Brother Marsh using “Satire's laugh” to “strip the vile Imposter of his Mask.” On 29 November, the General Advertiser ran its own account of the Lodge of Antiquity affair, lambasting Cagliostro's “ridiculous” costume, “not unlike that of a Drum Major.” When he reappeared at the lodge on 6 December, Brother Black asserted that he was “unworthy to be received.” All was not yet lost—Brother Cooper, who had defended Cagliostro in a letter to the General Advertiser, maintained that the newspaper report was “a misrepresentation,” an opinion upheld by a unanimous vote of the lodge.127

  Cagliostro tried to defend himself publicly in a rambling, tendentious “Letter to the English People,” written in French, which mostly consists of a detailed defence of his behaviour in London on his second visit of 1776–7—Morande had accused him of fleeing from creditors.128 Never a good writer, the count was now trapped in a thicket of his own inventions. Lord George Gordon did not help him by suddenly converting to Judaism. Cagliostro's most faithful supporter at this low point in his career was Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, whom he had first met at a lodge of occult Freemasons in Strasbourg. Among Loutherbourg's pastimes was alchemy, although his wife Lucy's tolerance for it was limited—when she caught her husband conducting nocturnal experiments, she reportedly smashed his crucible and “broke his head with a urinal.”129 Together with the Loutherbourgs, Cagliostro and Seraphina fled London in the spring of 1787, eventually settling at Bienne near Basel. It took less than a year for the artist to become thoroughly disgusted with the count, who had borrowed a good deal of money from him. In the end, he satirized “the Great Copt” as a medical quack and spiritual impostor.130 Even in these biting attacks on his former friend, however, Loutherbourg recognized the count as a splendid showman—which indeed he was, up to the time of his arrest in Rome, which led to his imprisonment and a wretched death in 1795.

  It would be wrong to conclude, as Masonic historians often have, that Cagliostro's absurd pretensions were rejected by the clear-headed English Brothers. On the contrary, the Lodge of Antiquity did not expel him, although it did not adopt his “Egyptian Rite” system either. In fact, one has to question whether he had even bothered to devise such a system. The only surviving evidence of its existence is a series of watercolours executed by Loutherbourg. Their most surprising elements are a female initiate (perhaps Seraphina herself), the presence of howling witches and the appearance of the glorious figure of Cagliostro, who dispels Time and slays Mercury (doubtless an alchemical reference) before ushering the initiate into the Temple of Arcane Mysteries. Cagliostro was apparently more familiar with the symbolism of alchemy and magic than with that of the higher grades of Masonry. In the end, however, it was the newspapers, not the Knights Templar or the Harodim, who turned against him.

  The count's fundamental crime was an inability to explain his identity, in an age when the arbiters of English culture were increasingly insistent on proper social identification. Anyone whose nationality, parentage, status, race and religious beliefs were unfixed, as Cagliostro's undoubtedly were, could prove dangerous to the good order of society.131 In part, this attitude was generated by the requirements of commerce, which depended on trust and openness on the part of those who engaged in it. In part, it was a reaction to the destabilizing effects of social mobility, which made it harder to determine who was and who was not a gentleman. Finally, it may have been a response to the loss of the American colonies, which put British national honour in question and encouraged assertions of patriotic belligerence against mysterious foreigners. In such an atmosphere, the question of whether Cagliostro was really Giuseppe Balsamo became central—in fact, it determined the truth of all his other claims. In the 1790s, as will be seen in the next chapter, attacks on occult thinkers were extended even further. Were they insane, or masking subversive purposes? Their existence, it was felt, only increased the menaces facing a governing elite and a national ideology already under threat from the French Revolution.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Prophets and Revolutions

  IN THE 1790s, the occult revival faltered, slowed and in some respects came to a grinding halt. The intellectual energy that it had projected since the 1760s suddenly diminished, and the respectability that it had begun to enjoy was severely curtailed. This does not mean that occult thinking disappeared or that fewer people were attracted to it. New editions of Ebenezer Sibly's encyclopaedias continued to appear into the new century, while Sigismond Bacstrom kept working at his experiments in the dingy “hut” in Albion Street. After war broke out with the French republic in 1793, however, the cultural climate changed. Unconventionality was suspect. Predictions or prophecies came to be regarded as potentially dangerous. In the late 1790s, a devastating attack on occult Freemasonry was launched by the Abbé Barruel, a French émigré, who saw it as the cause of the French Revolution. By then, anything new in the realm of occult thought was likely to be derided or censured by the press. The sole significant exception—Francis Barrett's The Magus of 1801—was published by Lackington and Allen during the short-lived Peace of Amiens between Britain and France.

  As the war continued, even the rushing stream of Gothic fantasy dried up. A last, provocative example of the genre was the radical William Godwin's 1799 novel St. Leon, dealing with a French aristocrat who learns the secret of alchemy but whose efforts to improve the world are thwarted by fear, ignorance and suspicion.1 The literary sensations of the war years would be Walter Scott's historical romances, in which supernatural elements are virtually absent.2 When Lackington and Allen ventured again into the realm of occult publishing in 1814, with a volume on apparitions, the compiler was careful to note his own scepticism concerning most such tales. While God might allow some instances of hau
ntings, “by no means do I believe they are suffered to appear half so frequently as our modern ghost-mongers manufacture them.”3 Only after the war was over in 1815 did Lackington and Allen follow up with a sequel to The Magus in the form of a collection of biographies of noted alchemists.4

  The reversal of occult fortunes after 1793 was due not to government repression, but to a shift in public opinion. It is difficult to measure the extent of such a shift, but its impact was palpable. The press was vital in encouraging and shaping it. Newspapers that supported the government like The Times became increasingly hostile to the occult in all of its forms. Anyone who held sectarian religious views might come under scrutiny from the press, because they were perceived as potential fifth columnists, working against the established constitution in Church and State. Swedenborgians were bound to be included among potential subversives, even though the New Jerusalem Church leaders made heartfelt protestations of patriotism and loyalty. Like them, the astrologer John Parkins was careful to proclaim himself “a most dutiful subject to the best of Monarchs.”5

  Many devotees of the occult genuinely abhorred the French Revolution. Some, however, invited public retribution by espousing reform at a time when Britain was threatened by republican France. Consider, for example, the extraordinary Swedenborgian effort to settle poor black people living in England, mostly freed slaves and former sailors, on the west coast of Africa. Combining social benevolence with imperial ambitions, the scheme did not seem very seditious.6 The baron had argued that Africans “think more interiorly and spiritually than others” and that a new revelation was beginning in the African interior.7 Inspired by these teachings, two Swedish followers, Carl Bernhard Wadström and August Nordenskjöld, became passionate proponents of African settlement schemes. Their heads were full of occult projects: Wadström, director of the Swedish Royal Assay Office, dreamed of a Swedenborgian Freemasonry, while Nordenskjöld, a physician and mineralogist, was captivated by alchemy. He wrote a treatise on the subject, translated into English in 1779 by Mordechai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, the first Jew to be awarded a medical degree in the British Isles (like Sibly, he simply purchased the honour, in his case, from Marischal College, Aberdeen).8 Ten years later, Nordenskjöld sent an address to the New Jerusalem Church in London, in which he maintained that Swedenborg had discovered “the Spiritual Stone,” but that the “natural Philosopher's Stone,” which would abolish “the Tyranny of Money,” could only be found through “the Manifestation of Urim and Thummim,” whatever that meant.9 He was no doubt well aware that Africa was a major source of gold.

  In 1787, Wadström was asked by King Gustavus III to look into the foundation of a Swedish colony in West Africa. He embarked on a voyage to the Guinea coast that led to the publication of Observations on the Slave Trade, a work frequently cited by English abolitionists.10 Settling in London, he and Nordenkjöld became founding members of the New Jerusalem Church and editors of the New Jerusalem Magazine. They also wrote up a proposal for the spiritual liberation of humanity, published in 1789 as a Plan for a Free Community upon the Coast of Africa. “Man is born to Liberty,” proclaimed the authors, adopting the tone of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract, “and according to his ability and industry, he is intitled to all the prerogatives that the Community can afford him; but Liberty is restrained, and all true access to every thing agreeable in life is shut up.” This was blamed on economic exploitation, as well as on “Anti-conjugal” tendencies that had restricted sexual freedom. The only way to cure people of the resulting “Lust of Dominion” was to form a new community, governed by boards that would regulate health, education, economic life, justice and foreign affairs.11 Towards the end of the pamphlet, “the vile Traffic in human Flesh carried on with Africa” was condemned. The authors’ solution to it was the creation of European colonies among the Africans, “not for the base purpose of transplanting our vices … but with a view to their Civilization.” Instead of enslavement, “a gentle Servitude is to be instantly adopted.” Former slaves would serve an “Apprenticeship” before being granted freedom.12

  In pursuit of this Swedenborgian utopia, Nordenskjöld and Wadström travelled to Sierra Leone, where the former died in 1792. Returning to England, Wadström published An Essay on Colonization, to which the abolitionists Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharpe and William Wilberforce, along with Wadström's friend General Rainsford, were subscribers.13 Within a year, however, Wadström had lost a considerable sum of money on a Manchester cotton-spinning venture, and decided to relocate to France. There, in a democratic republic that had recently ended slavery, he joined the leading abolitionist society, the Amis des Noirs, and lobbied the Directory government to oppose slave trading around the world. Having become a French citizen and director of an agricultural credit society, he died in 1799.

  Wadström's defection to the side of Britain's mortal enemy can only have increased the suspicions of the authorities regarding West African colonization. Their attention focused on Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vasa), former commissary of the Sierra Leone Company, a freed slave and anti-slavery advocate who had published a popular autobiography in 1789. He had a lot of supporters in occult circles: Wadström, Rainsford, Hugh Percy and Richard Cosway subscribed to his book, which began with a letter from Alexander Tilloch defending the author's veracity.14 Equiano's account of growing up in West Africa, which may not have been based on his own experience (evidence suggests that he was born in South Carolina), affirms Swedenborg's opinion of the Africans as a particularly spiritual people. Equiano even calls them descendants of the Jews.15 Government attention was drawn to Equiano when it was discovered that he lodged with Thomas Hardy, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, a radical democratic group sympathetic to the French Revolution. After Hardy was arrested and charged with sedition in 1794, a letter from Equiano was found among his papers, which showed that the famous African was an early member of the Corresponding Society.16 Another link between the colonization scheme and radicalism was the printer, engraver and poet William Blake. In his early Swedenborgian phase, he knew Wadström and Nordenskjöld, and even wrote an odd poem about the spirituality of Africans, “The Little Black Boy.” An opponent of slavery, Blake clearly sympathized with radical causes as well as with the French Revolution.17 Blake was the quintessential sectarian radical the government was continually searching for in the revolutionary period, but they did not catch up with him until after 1800.

  Admittedly, the chain of connections that has been drawn here is circumstantial and mostly trivial: it does not demonstrate the existence of a Swedenborgian conspiracy in favour of French republicanism. What it does show, though, is that anybody who wanted to believe in such a conspiracy did not have to look very far for evidence. Moreover, while, the suspicions of loyalists concerning sectarian movements were exaggerated, the billowing smoke of sedition that they claimed to see did exist—albeit given off by small fires. The jump from occult thinking to radical politics was easy enough to make. In contrast to the anti-democratic impulses of some occult movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the occult revival of the late eighteenth century espoused many of the ideals of human improvement lauded by revolutionaries.

  Arguably, the boldest radical voice in the occult circles of the 1790s was that of the Astrologer's Magazine. Amid articles on witches and demons, ghosts, magic circles and the moon's effects on madmen, readers of the journal might have noticed in September 1793—eight months after Louis XVI's execution and the subsequent French declaration of war on Britain—an article by “Astrologus,” answering a friend's request for predictions concerning the progress of military operations on the continent. “Astrologus's” reading of the stars was prefaced with the following astonishing words:

  My friend, like myself, laments those detestable extremes to which many measures have been pushed in France … yet … the late king of France ungratefully and treacherously endeavoured to sap the foundation of that constitution which he had repeatedly, and vol
untarily, sworn to maintain; a constitution which had for its object, the first end and aim of all legitimate government—the happiness of the people … Monarchy, therefore, being abolished in France, the querent is anxious, as many other friends to the peace and happiness of mankind appear to be, that the French Republic may be indivisible, incorruptible, and immortal, and that by proving a salutary lesson to tyrants in every clime, and of every description, that revolution may preclude the necessity of others.18

  This was strong stuff, justifying the fate of King Louis and suggesting that every monarch might learn a salutary lesson from it. In retaliation for similar statements, Joseph Priestley's house had been ransacked by a mob, while effigies of Tom Paine had been hanged, shot and burned by loyalists throughout England.19 Other professors of the celestial arts, however, shared the views of “Astrologus.” Henry Andrews wrote a sympathetic account of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Vox Stellarum for 1799, and as late as 1805 a dispute broke out between Thomas Orger and John Worsdale as to whether Napoleon's nativity marked him as a great lawgiver or a tyrant.20