Count Cagliostro

The teaching

Taught from the ritual of his Egyptian Rite as its copies keep it, with the defence printed in his name in 1786.

Egyptian masonry

Cagliostro teaches that common Freemasonry is a shadow of the true craft, which is Egyptian, founded by the prophets Enoch and Elijah and handed down in the East. Its head is the Grand Copht, and its aim is the perfecting of man in soul and body: a moral regeneration that restores the innocence Adam had before the fall, and a physical regeneration that renews the body. It has three grades, Apprentice, Companion and Master, and it receives women as well as men, the women in lodges of their own.

The dove

Its most famous rite needs a child. A boy or a girl in a state of innocence, called the pupil or the dove, is set before a carafe of clear water, or behind a screen in a small tabernacle, and the master calls on God and the angels to grant the child the power of sight. Then the dove looks, and reports what appears: angels, the absent, the dead, or things happening far off, in answer to the questions put. The rite asks innocence of its seer, for it holds that the angels show themselves only to the pure.

The seven angels

The rite calls on the seven angels who stand before the throne of God and govern the seven planets: Anael, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Zobiachel and Anachiel. They are the powers through whom the Grand Copht works, and the regeneration of the masters is completed by their appearing.

The moral regeneration

A master who would be made perfect retires with twelve others for forty days to a house set apart from the world. The days are given to prayer, to fasting and to the work of the rite, at fixed hours and in silence. Toward the end the seven angels appear and give each master a pentagon, a sheet of virgin parchment marked with their signs, and with it the master regains the first innocence and a power over the spirits. The ritual promises this; it is taught here as its promise, and its long fasts are not to be copied.

The physical regeneration

The second regeneration is a cure of forty days, to be taken every fifty years at the full moon of May, in the country, with a friend to tend the one who takes it. It is a regimen of thin food, purging, the letting of blood, drops and grains of a medicine the ritual calls the primal matter, and long sleeps, after which, it promises, the old skin is shed, the hair and teeth come again, and youth returns. Bleeding, purging and starving harm the body, and nothing in the cure has ever renewed one; it is told here as the ritual tells it, because it shows what Cagliostro offered.

Healing without pay

Beside the rite stood his practice as a healer. In the towns where he stayed he received the sick, the poor with the rich, gave them his remedies and asked nothing for them, keeping the old rule that the adept heals freely, and it was the healing that first drew the crowds to him.