Giacomo Casanova

The teaching

Taught from his own Story of My Life, with his pamphlet of 1786 against the magicians of his age.

The cabbala of numbers

The oracle that made Casanova an adept is a game of numbers, and he tells how it was played. The question is written out plainly; its letters are turned into numbers; the numbers are set out in a pyramid of rows; and from the pyramid, by rules that look exact, new numbers are drawn and turned back into letters, which spell the answer, sometimes as a line of verse. The rules are for show. While he works the numbers he composes the answer in his head, and the pyramid only dresses it.

The answers were good counsel spoken in an oracle's voice, and those who asked believed that a spirit spoke through the numbers; he called it Paralis, his genius. A sound answer that is believed to come from beyond is obeyed where the same advice from a man would be ignored, and that is the whole of the oracle's power.

Why the believers believe

Casanova's memoirs are frank about the trade. The senator Bragadin and his friends wanted a wonder, and he gave them one; the Marquise d'Urfé had read every book on the spirits of the elements, longed to speak with them and to be reborn a man, and he drew his promises from her own library. In each case, as he tells it, the believer did the work: the wish to believe made the oracle, and the cheat had only to agree. He excuses himself that his counsel did them no harm and often did them good, and he never pretends that a spirit was there.

The circle in the storm

At Cesena, as a young man, he staged a raising of buried treasure for a credulous farmer: a great circle drawn on the ground, a robe and a wand, invocations in a voice of command. While he stood in the circle a violent storm broke, with thunder and lightning all about him, and he who had invented every word of the rite was seized by terror and dared not leave the circle, which he found himself trusting to keep him safe. When it passed he gave up the scheme. He tells the story against himself: a rite made to deceive others can take hold of its maker when fear comes.

The secret of the lodge

Of Freemasonry he gives a teaching he held to be true. Every young man who means to travel and to know the world, he says, should be received a Mason, for the lodges open doors everywhere. The secret of the craft is safe by its very nature: the Mason who knows it has not been told it by anyone but has guessed it for himself, so it cannot be betrayed. Those who join only to find the secret out may grow old under the trowel without ever finding it.

Against the magicians

Late in life he wrote against Cagliostro and the others who claimed to make gold, to live for centuries and to command spirits. Such men, he argues, live on the credulity of those who want wonders more than truth, and they are believed because they promise what every heart desires; the thinker's defence is to ask what is promised, and who profits by it. The warning carries the weight of a man who had worked the same trade.