Many of Cagliostro’s teachings were attempts to discover this cure, but none was ever brought to a conclusion, so we still do not know to this day whether he ever achieved the promised result.
Perhaps he had been taught how to make the elixir of eternal life by that most enigmatic figure of the whole eighteenth century, the Comte de St Germain. Legends of St Germain abound, but there are few reliable facts. He was a real historic personage who for a while enjoyed the confidence of Louis XV. The legends’ chief claim is that he was several thousand years old, that he was alive at the time of Christ, and knew the Redeemer personally. On one occasion, in the presence of an acquaintance, he said to his manservant:
“Do you remember, old chap, when we were walking with St Peter beside Lake Genazareth? …”
“Your mind is beginning to wander, sir,” the man replied. “You forget that I have only been in your service these last five hundred years.”
St Germain was an altogether more elegant kind of magician than Cagliostro. By the latter’s time, the end of the century, the whole business had been to some extent democratised. Among the real magi Cagliostro was a Figaro, an impudent barber and footman.
But as far as it is possible to judge from the high-flown metaphysical texts quoted by Haven, and the mass of gossip that has been passed down, there must have been at least some genuine occultism in the Egyptian rite, some communication with the spirit world. It was Swedenborg who, as we have remarked, made that connection so easy and familiar for people of the time. The literary critic Leigh Hunt records of the great English poet and artist William Blake, who was one of Swedenborg’s followers, that once, as they strolled beside the Thames, Blake suddenly raised his hat. Leigh Hunt looked around, but saw no one there for Blake to greet.
“Who was that?” he asked, in some alarm.
“No one, just St Paul flying past,” Blake replied.
Cagliostro had the same easy and natural relationship with spirits. He would invite them to dinner, lay places for them at the table, and tell his living guests which of the illustrious dead they had the good fortune to be dining with. Sometimes he used mediums, a young boy or an innocent girl (he called these his ‘doves’), but his followers had mostly to take his word for it that they were in the presence of the Seven Great Spirits around the Deity’s throne: Anael, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Zobiachel and Anachiel. These last played a central role. The medium would see them in a pitcher filled with water, together, naturally, with candles and the three magical names: Helios, Mene and Tetragammon.
But most miraculous of all was the sheer number of Cagliostro’s adherents, and the depth of their belief. Haven quotes the letter of thanks written to Cagliostro by the members of the Wisdom Triumphant lodge:
Sire and Master,
Nothing can match the goodness of your deeds unless it be the happiness they bring us … if you will deign to take us under your wing and bestow on us your continuing protection, your sons will be always grateful, being ever inspired by the proclamation which you in your lofty eminence established among us through the ‘dove’ who implored you on his own behalf and ours: ‘Tell them that I love them, and always will’. We promise, each and everyone, our eternal gratitude, respect and love to you, and crave your blessing to crown the pledge of your obedient, respectful sons and disciples.
Cagliostro achieved this enormous power through his oratory. People would listen enchanted, and believe everything he said. It is a commonplace that the power of a great orator depends not on what he says but on the way he says it. So what was the secret of Cagliostro’s performances?
Jeanne’s admirer Beugnot once dined at her house when Cagliostro was present, and recorded his impressions in the following words:
“He spoke double Dutch (baragouin) — half-French, half-Italian, peppered with words supposedly from Arabic, which he did not bother to translate. He was the only one who spoke, and he managed to touch on twenty different topics in the time. Every few seconds he would ask if we understood what he was saying, and we all nodded. Once he had warmed to a particular subject, he would go into a sort of trance, talking loudly and finishing with large gestures. Then he would suddenly come down from his soapbox and murmur tender compliments and amusing endearments to the lady of the house, calling her his little fawn, his gazelle, his swan and his dove, in short, endowing her with all the softest names of the animal kingdom. And so it went on for the entire meal. I didn’t understand very much, only that he talked about heaven, the stars, the Great Arcanum, Memphis, the hierophants, transcendental chemistry, giants, enormous beasts, a city in Central Africa ten times the size of Paris, and how he had regular correspondents based there — and of course the great ignorance in which we found ourselves in so far as all those fine marvels were concerned, which were known to him without recourse to books.”
Beugnot and others confirm that he larded his sentences with bits of Arabic. A German orientalist once addressed him in the language, and he understood not a word. Perhaps his own version was simply mumbo-jumbo. To some extent this might have been forced on him. His command of French was so poor he could not have expressed himself clearly had he wanted to. Another witness said of his performance: “If gibberish (galimatias) equals ‘sublime’, then no one was more sublime than Cagliostro. He would pronounce long words in the middle of his incomprehensible sentences, and the less his audience understood the greater was the miracle he worked on them. They thought him oracular simply because he was obscure. His art consisted of addressing nothing to the understanding and trusting the imagination of the listener to supply a meaning. The truth is always obvious, but only to the wise. The bogus is incomprehensible, which is precisely why it impresses the multitude.”
This last witness more or less explains the secret of Cagliostro’s power. With these ‘Arabic’ terms he reduced his listeners to a kind of stupor. The people of the time must have been much as they are today — they might give their assent to wise and intelligent words, but they kept their fervour for those they did not understand. The astonishing power the magician has over the half-educated lies in his ill-formed concepts, his nebulous terminology and high-sounding incomprehensibilities. This is especially true in times of impending social upheaval, when people are looking for miracles. Cagliostro’s ‘Arabic’ words made the benign vision blaze before the devout eyes of his audiences. If he did say anything they could understand, they indulgently heard him out simply for the sake of what they did not.
By 1785, the fatal year of the necklace trial, Cagliostro saw that the time had finally come for him to conquer the capital of the world, and he made his move to Paris. There, he rented a house in the Marais district, as Jeanne had done. The house still stands, on the corner of the Rue St Claude and the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The present writer looked it over, but there is nothing memorable about it.
As we saw in his dealings with Rohan, Cagliostro was a master of the arts of choosing his moment and waiting for the right time. He arrived just as Paris was beginning to feel the need for a miracle doctor. Its citizens, like those of every great city, and the French by their nature, had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored. In the second half of the century doctors became highly fashionable. Their connection with the flourishing natural sciences steadily raised their social status, and they began to fulfil the role in aristocratic houses once played by the priestly confessor.