There was also the so-called Rite of Strict Observance founded in 1756 by Karl Gotthelf, better known as the Baron von Hund, who had been initiated into Freemasonry in Paris in 1743 in one of the fashionable ‘Templar’ orders.62 Baron von Hund, like the Chevalier Ramsay before him, claimed that Freemasonry was linked to the medieval Knights Templar, and his own Rite of Strict Observance was to enjoy astounding success in Germany and other parts of Europe. It was in one of the Strict Observance lodges, Zur Wohltätigkeit, that the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was initiated, and it is obviously from the influence of Hund's and Köppen's Masonic rite that Mozart was to develop the theme for his famous Masonic opera, The Magic Flute, which is set in a pseudo-Egyptian context highly charged with Masonic symbolism and virtues.63
But by far the most famous of all these exotic orders, and also somewhat connected to Hund's Strict Observance order, was an intensely anticlerical organisation called the Illuminati of Bavaria. It had been founded in 1776 in Ingolstadt by the lawyer Adam Weishaupt and was backed by the influential Baron Knigge, a Freemason and also a member of the Strict Observance.64 Such German Masonic activity in the late 1770s was to have a great influence on American ‘higher degree’ Freemasonry and the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree in Charleston, SC (later moved to Washington, DC).65
In 1777, a year after the start of the American Revolution and 12 years before the start of the French Revolution, Cagliostro arrived in Germany. He immediately involved himself with a wide variety of Masonic orders all of which had in common a distinctive blend of Hermetic-Egyptianism and neo-Templar ideologies.
And although most Masonic historians maintain that the ‘Egyptian’ type of Freemasonry was the invention of Cagliostro, it does very much appear that at least some of his ideas were cribbed from Köppen's Crata Repoa. The basis of the Egyptian Rite can be summed up in Cagliostro's celebrated claim that: … all light comes from the East and all initiation from Egypt.66
Cagliostro was the first Freemason to be aware of a huge and untapped source of Masonic recruits: women. And even though it is true that the idea of women's lodges had occurred to the Grand Orient de France as early as 1744,67 it was nonetheless Cagliostro with his intriguing and attractive Egyptianised version of Freemasonry who, in practice, brought the ladies flocking in droves into the Masonic world.68 It all began in 1775 when Cagliostro first set up an ‘Egyptian Rite’ lodge for women in the Hague, and where he was assisted by the beautiful Lorenza who would assume the role of ‘Isis’ in the rituals performed. From the outset what really seemed to appeal to women was the promise of a ‘rejuvenation’ ritual that Cagliostro and Lorenza performed in a pseudo-Egyptian setting. The course apparently took 40 days to complete, a period clearly modeled on the 40 days of embalming in ancient Egypt reported by classical authors such as Diodorus, who called this period the ‘remedy which confers immortality.’69 It is also said in the Bible when Jacob died in Egypt that: Joseph threw himself upon his father [Jacob], weeping and kissing his face. Then Joseph directed the physicians in his service to embalm his father [Jacob]. So the physicians embalmed him, taking a full forty days, for that was the time required for embalming.70
It was widely believed that the goddess Isis had invented the rites of embalming and rejuvenation, and therefore not surprisingly Cagliostro claimed that his own ritual was also the invention of the goddess Isis. Such claims, as well as Cagliostro's amazing reputation as a healer, did wonders for his new Masonic Egyptian Rite. But things started to go wrong when his travels brought him to Russia. At the court of Queen Catherine the Great, in the autumn on 1780, the queen herself accused him of being an imposter and a charlatan.
Fleeing Russia, Cagliostro travelled to France, entering through the Alsatian town of Strasbourg. There he met the immensely rich but also immensely naïve Louis René Édouard de Rohan, the French bishop of Strasbourg, known as the Cardinal de Rohan. He was fascinated by Cagliostro who performed a ‘miracle’ by curing Rohan's uncle, the Prince of Soubise, from a near-fatal attack of Scarlet fever. The story of the ‘miracle’ went around France like wildfire, and from that moment on Cagliostro's reputation as a healer and magician began to open doors for him.
In the summer of 1784 he made his triumphal entrance in the city of Lyons. There hundreds of regular Freemasons willingly deserted their lodges to join Cagliostro's new ‘Egyptian’ lodge, La Sagesse Triomphante, which he hastily founded to receive them. On 24 December 1784, under the ecstatic gaze of his followers, Cagliostro proclaimed to the world the re-establishment of the ‘true and ancient order of the higher rituals of Egyptian Freemasonry’. He would head it and hold the title Great Copt.71 Funds were immediately raised by his enthusiastic disciples for the construction of a magnificent Egyptian temple, which, predictably, was to be in the form of a pyramid.
This was only the beginning of Cagliostro's meteoritic to rise to fame in France and his equally meteoric fall. His pyramidal ‘temple’ in Lyons was built and finally inaugurated in 1786, without the presence of Cagliostro who by that time was in Paris languishing in the Bastille for reasons that we'll explain in the next chapter. Afterwards his ‘temple’ remained a landmark in the district of Brotteaux in Lyons for many years. In 1788, the year before the Revolution, it was proposed that a second pyramid should be erected beside it – this one in honour of Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, the famous pioneer of the hot-air balloon, who was also a Freemason. Then in 1793 the idea was proposed yet again at the same location, only now the pyramid was to be a mausoleum for the ‘martyrs’ of the massacre of 1793, when the army of the Convention attacked Lyons. It is interesting that today, not far from this place, stands a high tower, the so-called crayon, shaped like an Egyptian obelisk with a huge glass pyramid at the top, owned by the Crédit Lyonnais bank. It was designed in 1977 by the New York architect, Araldo Cossutta. Oddly, Crédit Lyonnais owns another building at Lille which is designed as an inverted pyramid.
But we're getting far ahead of Cagliostro's story. On 30 January 1785, blissfully unaware of what lay in wait for him at the Bastille, he made his way to Paris.
We are now four short years from the French Revolution. For some it would be a cataclysm; for others an unprecedented opportunity …
Wonderful year! You will be the regenerating year, and you will be known by that name. History will extol your great deeds. You have changed my Paris, it is true. It is completely different today…Inourish my spirit on it …
Sebastien Mercier, ‘Farewell to the Year 1789’, as quoted in Lusebrink & Reichardt's
The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom
Someone asked me if I would return to France in the case that those who attacked me [the king and the government] would be removed? Surely, I replied, but only if the site of the Bastille [where I was imprisoned] becomes a public park …
Cagliostro, in a letter sent from London, 20 June 1786, where he predicts the destruction of the Bastille after being exiled
Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Contrat Social, the phrase that most inspired the French Revolution
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE NEW CITY OF ISIS
Cagliostro first took up residence in Paris in early February 1785 at the Hôtel de Strasbourg in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, where his sponsor, the Cardinal de Rohan, resided. But then Cagliostro and Serafina (as he now called his wife Lorenza) moved to another small residence in the Rue Saint-Claude-au-Marais.1
There Cagliostro set up an ‘Egyptian’ Masonic lodge which very soon attracted many notables, among them the Duke of Montmorency-Luxembourg who, at the time, was Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Orient. Among the members was also the famous musician, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, who had been the personal valet of Louis XV. The duke was appointed by Cagliostro as the Grand Master Protector of his new ‘Egyptian’ Freemasonry.2 Then, in August 1785, Cagliostro, with the help of his wife, created his famous adoption lodge ‘Isis’ which
immediately became a huge success with the ladies of the court. Among his recruits were the Countess of Polignac, the Countess of Brienne, the Countess of Choiseul (the wife of Louis XVI’s finance minister), and many other ladies of the nobility.3
Cagliostro's Egyptian Rite rapidly became the craze of Paris, so much so that the ill-fated Queen Marie-Antoinette was to write in a letter to her sister: ‘Tout le monde en est; on sait tout ce qui s'y passe’ (‘Every one has joined; and everything that goes on is known to us’).4 Soon the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, who was himself a keen adept of Cagliostro's Freemasonry, was to honour the maestro by fashioning a bust of him. It is reported that members of the famous Philalethes lodge, which studied the occult sciences, also fell under Cagliostro's spell and converted en masse into his new Egyptian Rite. Nothing, it seemed, could now stop this selfdeclared ‘prophet of Isis’.5
Flashback (1) 15th – 17th centuries: traditions of Paris as the city of Isis
There was, in fact, something about Paris itself that very much played in favour of Cagliostro's Egyptian Rite that conditioned citizens to respond enthusiastically to his claims regarding the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis.
Since the early part of the 15th century it is possible to document a persistent belief among Parisian historians that their city was somehow related to Isis. The belief probably goes back much further than that but is confirmed in a collection of manuscripts dating from around 1402 kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In these rare medieval documents we can find miniature drawings showing the goddess Isis dressed as a French noblewoman arriving by boat in Paris, where she is greeted by French nobles and clergymen6 bearing the title ‘the very ancient Isis, goddess and queen of the Egyptians.’7 It is the ‘boat of Isis’ that is striking in these medieval miniatures for it bears an uncanny resemblance to the boat that was also placed on the medieval coat-of-arms of the city of Paris.8 And during the same period we know that Parisians believed the name of their city to have been derived from the name of Isis. For example, a 14th century Augustine monk called Jacques le Grant wrote that: In the days of Charlemagne [eighth century AD] … there was a city named Iseos, so named because of the goddess Isis who was venerated there. Now it is called Melun. Paris owes its name to the same circumstances, Parisius is said to be similar to Iseos (quasi par Iseos), because it is located on the River Seine in the same manner as Melun.9
In 1512, another French historian, Jean Lemaire de Belges, reported that an idol of the goddess Isis had been worshipped in a temple immediately outside the southern gate of Paris, where now stood the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. 10 And the same was reported by many other contemporary writers, notably the 16th century Parisian historian Gilles Corrozet, who is reputed to be the first historian ever to produce a comprehensive guide to the city of Paris. In 1550 Corrozet also published a history of Paris titled Les Antiquitez, Histoire et Singularitez de Paris, in which he wrote that, … coming to the imposition of the name [of Paris], it is said that there, where stands St. Germain-des-Prés, was a Temple of Isis of whom it is said was the wife of the great Osiris or Jupiter the Just. The statue [of Isis] having come in our times, of which we recall … This place is called the Temple of Isis and, for the nearby city, this was called Parisis … meaning near the Temple of Isis.11
The early 17th century French editors Pierre Bonfons and Jacques du Breul republished Corrozet's book under their own names and titled Les Antiquitez et choses plus remarquables de Paris, recueillies par M. Pierre Bonfons et augmentées par frère Jacques du Breul in 1608. Jacques du Breul was a Jesuit monk from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and thus presumably conversant with the records kept at that abbey. It is therefore of great interest to find him writing as follows: … at the place where King Childebert [fifth century AD] had constructed the church of St. Vincent now called St. Germain, and to which he donated his fief of Issy, the consensus was that there was there a Temple of Isis, wife of Osiris, also known as Jupiter the Just, and from whom the village of Issy got its name, and where can still be seen an ancient edifice and murals which are believed to be from the castle of Childebert.12
In 1612 yet another French historian, André Favyn, reported that the church of Notre-Dame des Champs also once possessed an idol of Isis similar to the one found in the nearby Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés: I believe this was due to another idol, for the proximity that there is with [Notre Dame] and the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés where was venerated Isis, called by the Romans Ceres …13
During the reign of Louis XIV an archaeological discovery was to add even more fervour to this widely held set of beliefs linking Isis with Paris. In 1653, as we reported in Chapter Twelve, a worker digging the foundation of a new vicarage in the city of Tournai stumbled across an ancient tomb containing hundreds of golden ornaments. The tomb was thought to belong to Childeric, a fifth century Frankish king and legendary ancestor of the French monarchs.14 Among the ornaments found within, and at a second site discovered nearby, was a statue of Isis, the head of an ancient Egyptian ‘Apis’ bull (associated with the Osiris and later Serapis cults) and also some 300 golden bees. It was known, even at the time, that the symbol of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs was the bee, which was immediately taken to mean that there was a link between the ancient solar pharaohs of Egypt and the ancient solar kings of France.
Flashback (2) 1665: the mystery of the deviated axis (1)
In 1665 the Childeric treasures were sent to Louis XIV who had them stored in his personal Cabinet des Médailles. We saw in Chapter Fourteen that the same year also witnessed a gathering in Paris of a powerful cabal of architects and city planners, including the stellar figure of Gian Lorenzo Bernini from Italy, Christopher Wren from England, and France's own André Le Nôtre. Wren was there to learn and listen. Bernini was designing the new façade of the Louvre Palace, and Le Nôtre was planning the Tuilleries Garden on the west side of the Louvre.
The central axis of the Louvre is set roughly east-west, running more or less parallel to the River Seine, which flows immediately to the south, and the Rue de Rivoli, which runs immediately to the north. If we follow the axis west today (i.e. towards the Tuilleries Garden) we will find that it passes through the apex of a huge glass Pyramid installed in the courtyard of the Louvre in 1984 and then, further west, through the centerline of the Arc du Carrousel (a triumphal arch built by Napoleon in 1806). At this point something strange happens – and it is the result of Le Nôtre's work in the 17th century. Instead of extending the ‘axis of the Louvre’ further to the west along its existing alignment, Le Nôtre made a deliberate decision, whilst developing the Tuilleries Garden, to deviate it a few degrees to the north – such that it now runs precisely at 26° north-of-west.15 At first glance, it would appear that Le Nôtre may have wanted to adjust the alignment of the axis in order to have the Tuilleries Garden run more precisely parallel to the flow of the River Seine. That would seem a logical and practical decision for an urban architect to make. But still, why did he opt for exactly 26° and not, a rounded value such as, say, 25° or even 30°? We might suppose that the choice was arbitrary but for one very important point …
A few hundred yards downriver from the Louvre is the famous Cathedral of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité, a small and peculiarly boat-shaped island in the River Seine. Here we find the alignment of 26° north-of-west incorporated into the axis of the cathedral itself.16 Our point is that not only that Notre Dame's axis was established centuries before Le Nôtre but also that there is no obvious practical reason, in the case of the cathedral, that could account for this 26° alignment. It is not likely to be a coincidence that two major monuments within a few hundred yards both have the same axial alignment. If the angle is meaningful, however, then what does it mean?
The clue, we suggest, is the Sun. Let's not forget that Le Nôtre was planning a programme of monumental works for the Sun King. It should hardly be surprising, therefore, if solar symbolism were to be incorporated into such schemes. Further evidence that
this is probably the right approach comes, yet again, from the anomalistic alignment of Notre Dame. As the Parisian historian Jean Phaure has observed, the axis of this great cathedral starts at an angle of 23.5° north-of-west but incorporates a deliberate deviation to the final figure of 26° north-of-west.17 Why?
Readers with even a basic education in astronomy will recognize as we did that the angle of 23.5° has solar significance since it represents exactly the positive and negative declinations of the Sun at the summer and winter solstices respectively. But if this is to be the explanation for the axis of Notre Dame then why the deviation to 26°? Is it another solar alignment?
Let's first understand the significance of the angle of 23.5°.
The sun's altitude in the sky, measured at noon, changes throughout the year. It is at its highest at mid-summer (the summer solstice) and at its lowest at mid-winter (the winter solstice). These regular annual changes occur because the axis of the Earth is titled at an angle of 23.5° relative to the solar plane (referred to by astronomers as the ecliptic). Like a cosmic skewer passing through the north and south poles, this oblique axis governs our relationship to the Sun at all times and is, of course, the true axis mundi of our planet. The reader will recall from Chapter Fifteen how the spire of St. Paul's Cathedral in London was taken to symbolise the axis mundi and also how John Evelyn sought to equip St. Paul's with intense solar symbolism through his sephirothic scheme. We suggest that the angle of 23.5° in the axis of Notre Dame may have been intended to express a similar solar connection.
The Master Game Page 55