The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Finally, Saint-Germain found another patron, Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel, who was cool and uninterested to begin with, but gradually succumbed to Saint-Germain’s charm and enthusiasm. Prince Charles was not disposed to doubt any of Saint-Germain’s stories, including that he was Prince Rakoczy, that he had been brought up in the household of the last of the Medici, and that he was now eighty-eight years old. He set Saint-Germain up in a factory in Eckenforde, in Schleswig-Holstein, and there the adventurer lived out his last years quietly, suffering periodically from depression and rheumatism, and dying in February 1784, to the grief of Prince Charles, who described him as “one of the greatest sages who ever lived”.

  No sooner was Saint-Germain dead than rumours that he was still alive began to circulate. A journal published in the following year said he was expected to return soon. Madame de Genlis was convinced she had seen him in Vienna in 1821. In 1836 a volume of Souvenirs by the Countess d’Adhémar, who claimed to be familiar with the court at Versailles in the last days of the monarchy, claimed that she had seen Saint-Germain as late as 1793, and that he had warned her about the death of Marie Antoinette. He told her she would see him five times more, “and do not wish for a sixth”, and she claims that she saw him five times between then and 1820. But G.B. Volz, who conducted an investigation of the life of Saint-Germain in the 1920s, asserts that the countess never existed and that the Souvenirs are a forgery. In 1845 Franz Graffer declares in his Memoirs that he had seen Saint-Germain, and that he had announced that he would appear in the Himalayas towards the turn of the century – a claim that in due course led Madame Blavatsky to include him among her “Secret Masters” in Tibet, and to quote him with respect in The Secret Doctrine. But again, the Memoirs of Franz Graffer are thought to be a forgery. On the other hand, Madame Blavatsky went to the trouble of visiting the then Countess d’Adhémar in 1885, and Mrs Cooper-Oakley, whose book on Saint-Germain appeared in 1912, discovered that there were still documents about him in the possession of the d’Adhémar family. As late as January 1972, a young man called Richard Chanfray appeared on French television claiming to be Saint-Germain, and apparently transformed lead into gold, using only a camping stove.

  When all the claims and counter-claims have been taken into account, what can we say of the “man of mystery”? First – regretfully – that he cannot be taken seriously as a mage or a secret Master. Whether the Prussian ambassador in Dresden is correct when he says “inordinate vanity is the mainspring of his mechanism”, there can be no doubt that Saint-Germain was a vain man who talked too much – too many contemporaries make this comment for it to be untrue. But a man may be vain and talkative, and still possess genius (Bernard Shaw being the example who immediately springs to mind). It is also perfectly clear that Saint-Germain was a genuine enthusiast, with an extraordinary range of talents. He himself never claimed to be a “mage”, or a student of occultism. In fact, he insisted that he was a materialist whose chief desire was to benefit humanity. Diderot and D’Alembert would no doubt have found him an ideal contributor to their Encyclopedia.

  The real mystery about Saint-Germain is that he was a man of genius, and at the same time a charlatan. He had what we would now call a strongly developed sense of publicity, a desire to intrigue and fascinate. And this in itself argues that he was not what he claimed to be. He was undoubtedly not the last surviving member of the Transylvanian royal family – precise details are known about its last three surviving members. But this desire to pose as a king in exile suggests that Saint-Germain was born in fairly humble circumstances, and that he spent a great deal of his childhood and youth daydreaming about fame and glory. The annals of charlatanism are full of Walter Mittys and Billy Liars, but it is difficult to recollect a swindler who was really born in a palace or a stately home. We may probably assume, then, that Saint-Germain was not the bastard son of the Queen of Spain. But it seems equally clear that he managed to acquire himself a good education, and that chemistry was the love of his life. In different circumstances he might have become a Lavoisier or Robert Boyle or Michael Faraday. His natural brilliance made him contemptuous of the intelligence of his fellow-men, and when he claimed to be three hundred years old, or dropped hints about his acquaintance with Francis I, he probably told himself that he was poking fun at human stupidity.

  The only real mystery is where he acquired the money to pose as a prince. Since he seems to have been an honest man (if we except the little affair of the Tournai factory), the answer, presumably, is that he was able to turn his chemical researches to commercial use. It is a disappointing conclusion that the Man of Mystery, the Secret Master, was merely a brilliant industrial chemist. But it is the only theory that corresponds to the facts as we know them.

  48

  The Miracles of Saint-Médard

  The strange events that took place in the little Paris churchyard of Saint-Médard between 1727 and 1732 sound so incredible, so preposterous, that the modern reader is tempted to dismiss them as pure invention. This would be a mistake, for an impressive mass of documents, including accounts by doctors, magistrates and other respectable public figures, attests to their genuineness. The miracles undoubtedly took place. But no doctor, philosopher or scientist has even begun to explain them.

  They began with the burial of François de Pâris, the Deacon of Paris, in May 1727. François was only thirty-seven years old, yet he was revered as a holy man, with powers of healing. He was a follower of Bishop Cornelius Jansen, who taught that men can be saved only by divine grace, not by their own efforts. The Deacon had no doubt whatever that his own healing powers came from God.

  Great crowds followed his coffin, many weeping. It was laid in a tomb behind the high altar of Saint-Médard. Then the congregation filed past, laying their flowers on the corpse. A father supported his son, a cripple, as he leaned over the coffin. Suddenly, the child went into convulsions; he seemed to be having a fit. Several people helped to drag him, writhing, to a quiet corner of the church. Suddenly the convulsions stopped. The boy opened his eyes, looking around in bewilderment, and then slowly stood up. A look of incredulous joy crossed his face; then to the astonishment of the spectators he began to dance up and down, singing and laughing. His father found it impossible to believe, for the boy was using his withered right leg, which had virtually no muscles. Later it was claimed that the leg had become as strong and normal as the other.

  The news spread. Within hours cripples, lepers, hunchbacks and blind men were rushing to the church. At first few “respectable” people believed the stories of miraculous cures – the majority of the Deacon’s followers were poor people. The rich preferred to leave their spiritual affairs in the hands of the Jesuits, who were more cultivated and worldly. But it soon became clear that ignorance and credulity could not be used as a blanket explanation for all the stories of marvels. Deformed limbs, it was said, were being straightened; hideous growths and cancers were disappearing without trace; horrible sores and wounds were healing instantly.

  The Jesuits declared that the miracles were either a fraud or the work of the Devil; the result was that most of the better-off people in Paris flatly refused to believe that anything unusual was taking place in the churchyard of Saint-Médard. But a few men of intellect were drawn by curiosity, and they invariably returned from the churchyard profoundly shaken. Sometimes they recorded their testimony in print: some, such as one Philippe Hecquet, attempted to explain the events by natural causes. Others, such as the Benedictine Bernard Louis de la Taste, attacked the people who performed the miracles on theological grounds, but were unable to expose any deception or error by them, or any error on the part of the witnesses. The accumulation of written testimony was such that David Hume, one of the greatest of philosophers, wrote in An enquiry concerning human understanding (1758):

  There surely never was a greater number of miracles ascribed to one person . . . But what is more extraordinary; many of the miracles were immediately proved upon the spot, before judges o
f unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses of credit and distinction, in a learned age. . . . Where shall we find such a number of circumstances, agreeing to the corroboration of one fact?

  One of those who investigated the happenings was a lawyer named Louis Adrien de Paige. When he told his friend, the magistrate Louis-Basile Carré de Montgéron, what he had seen the magistrate assured him patronizingly that he had been taken in by conjuring tricks – the kind of “miracles” performed by tricksters at fairgrounds. But he finally agreed to go with Paige to the churchyard, if only for the pleasure of pointing out how the lawyer had been deceived. They went there on the morning of 7 September 1731. And de Montgéron left the churchyard a changed man – he even endured prison rather than deny what he had seen that day.

  The first thing the magistrate saw when he entered the churchyard was a number of women writhing on the ground, twisting themselves into the most startling shapes, sometimes bending backward until the backs of their heads touched their heels. These ladies were all wearing a long cloth undergarment that fastened around the ankles. M.Paige explained that this was now obligatory for all women who wished to avail themselves of the Deacon’s miraculous powers. In the early days, when women had stood on their heads or bent their bodies convulsively, prurient young men had begun to frequent the churchyard to view the spectacle.

  However, there was no lack of male devotees of the deceased Abbé to assist in the activities of the churchyard. Montgéron was shocked to see that some of the women and girls were being sadistically beaten – at least, that is what at first appeared to be going on. Men were striking them with heavy pieces of wood and iron. Other women lay on the ground, apparently crushed under immensely heavy weights. One girl was naked to the waist: a man was gripping her nipples with a pair of iron tongs and twisting them violently. Paige explained that none of these women felt any pain; on the contrary, many begged for more blows. And an incredible number of them were cured of deformities or diseases by this violent treatment.

  In another part of the churchyard, they saw an attractive pink-cheeked girl of about nineteen, who was sitting at a trestle table and eating. That seemed normal enough until Montgéron looked more closely at the food on the plate, and realized from its appearance as well as from the smell that reached him that it was human excrement. In between mouthfuls of this sickening fare she drank a yellow liquid, which Paige explained was urine. The girl had come to the churchyard to be cured of what we would now call a neurosis: she had to wash her hands hundreds of times a day, and was so fastidious about her food that she would taste nothing that had been touched by another human hand. The Deacon had indeed cured her. Within days she was eating excrement and drinking urine, and did so with every sign of enjoyment. Such cases might not be remarkable in asylums; but what was more extraordinary – indeed, preposterous – was that after one of these meals she opened her mouth as if to be sick, and milk came pouring out. Monsieur Paige had collected a cupful; it was apparently perfectly ordinary cow’s milk.

  After staggering away from the eater of excrement, Montgéron had to endure a worse ordeal. In another part of the churchyard a number of women had volunteered to cleanse suppurating wounds and boils by sucking them clean. Trying hard to prevent himself vomiting, Montgéron watched as someone unwound a dirty bandage from the leg of a small girl; the smell was horrible. The leg was a festering mass of sores, some so deep that the bone was visible. The woman who had volunteered to clean it was one of the convulsionnaires – she had been miraculously cured and converted by her bodily contortions, and God had now chosen her to demonstrate how easily human beings’ disgust can be overcome. Yet even she blenched as she saw and smelt the gangrened leg. She cast her eyes up to heaven, prayed silently for a moment, then bent her head and began to lap, swallowing the septic matter. When she moved her face farther down the child’s leg Montgéron could see that the wound was now clean. Paige assured him that the girl would almost certainly be cured when the treatment was complete.

  What Montgéron saw next finally shattered his resistance and convinced him that he was witnessing something of profound significance. A sixteen-year-old girl named Gabrielle Moler had arrived, and the interest she excited made Montgéron aware that, even among this crowd of miraculous freaks, she was a celebrity. She removed her cloak and lay on the ground, her skirt modestly round her ankles. Four men, each holding a pointed iron bar, stood over her. When the girl smiled at them they lunged down at her, driving their rods into her stomach. Montgéron had to be restrained from interfering as the rods went through the girl’s dress and into her stomach. He looked for signs of blood staining her dress. But none came, and the girl looked calm and serene. Next the bars were jammed under her chin, forcing her head back. It seemed inevitable that they would penetrate through to her mouth; yet when the points were removed the flesh was unbroken. The men took up sharp-edged shovels, placed them against a breast, and then pushed with all their might; the girl went on smiling gently. The breast, trapped between shovels, should have been cut off, but it seemed impervious to the assault. Then the cutting edge of a shovel was placed against her throat, and the man wielding it did his best to cut off her head; he did not seem to be able even to dent her neck.

  Dazed, Montgéron watched as the girl was beaten with a great iron truncheon shaped like a pestle. A stone weighing half a hundredweight (25 kilograms) was raised above her body and dropped repeatedly from a height of several feet. Finally, Montgéron watched her kneel in front of a blazing fire, and plunge her head into it. He could feel the heat from where he stood; yet her hair and eyebrows were not even singed. When she picked up a blazing chunk of coal and proceeded to eat it Montgéron could stand no more and left.

  But he went back repeatedly, until he had enough materials for the first volume of an amazing book. He presented it to the king, Louis XV, who was so shocked and indignant that he had Montgéron thrown into prison. Yet Montgéron felt he had to “bear witness”, and was to publish two more volumes following his release, full of precise scientific testimony concerning the miracles.

  In the year following Montgéron’s imprisonment, 1732, the Paris authorities decided that the scandal was becoming unbearable and closed down the churchyard. But the convulsionnaires had discovered that they could perform their miracles anywhere, and they continued for many years. A hardened skeptic, the scientist La Condamine, was as startled as Montgéron when, in 1759, he watched a girl named Sister Françoise being crucified on a wooden cross, nailed by the hands and feet over a period of several hours, and stabbed in the side with a spear. He noticed that all this obviously hurt the girl, and her wounds bled when the nails were removed; but she seemed none the worse for an ordeal that would have killed most people.

  So what can we say of the miracles from the standpoint of the twentieth century? Some writers believe it was a kind of self-hypnosis. But while this could explain the excrement-eater and the woman who sucked festering wounds, it is less plausible in explaining Gabrielle Moler’s feats of endurance. These remind us rather of descriptions of ceremonies of dervishes and fakirs: for example, J.G.Bennett in his autobiography Witness describes watching a dervish ritual in which a razor-sharp sword was placed across the belly of a naked man, and two heavy men jumped up and down on it – all without even marking the flesh. What seems to be at work here is some power of “mind over matter”, deeper than mere hypnosis, which is not yet understood but obviously merits serious attention.

  It would be absurd to stop looking for scientific explanations of the miracles of Saint-Médard. But let us not in the meantime deceive ourselves by accepting superficial “skeptical” explanations.

  49

  The Sea Kings of 6000 BC

  The Maps That Contradict the History Books

  In 1966 Charles Hapgood, a professor of the history of science, caused something of a scandal when he published a book entitled Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. For what Professor Hapgood was arguing, with a logic that was difficult to f
ault, was that civilization may be far, far older than historians now recognize: that as long as twelve thousand years ago, when man was still a wandering hunter, ancient seafarers may have been sailing across the Atlantic. These conclusions were not the outcome of wild speculation, they were the logical result of the study of old maps that had been available for centuries.

  The story began in 1956, when a cartographer named M. I. Walters, at the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, found himself looking at a copy of a strange map that had been presented to the Office by a Turkish naval officer. It was obviously very old – in fact, it was dated 919 in the Muslim calendar, which is AD 1513 by Christian reckoning. It was basically a map of the Atlantic Ocean, showing a small part of North Africa, from what is now Morocco to the Ivory Coast, and all of South America. These were in their correct longitudes, a remarkable – in fact, almost unbelievable – achievement for those days, when most maps were laughably crude. (One of the most famous medieval maps shows Italy joined to Spain; another shows the British Isles shaped like a teapot.) It was also, for 1513, an astonishingly accurate map of South America. And what was even more surprising was that it apparently showed Antarctica, which was not discovered until 1818. Oddly enough, it also showed the mid-Atlantic ridge, which seems an unbelievable piece of knowledge for any period before the invention of sonar depth soundings – unless, of course, it had been observed while it was still above water.