alchemists

"Hermes' message to humanity remains timeless[;] his words are a call to the awakening of the divine within ourselves. To transcend and transform this suffering world into a paradise on earth. And he is calling his people today once again, to rise and race towards building a Divine Just State as he had hoped for humanity."

"Come unto me, Lord Hermes, even as into women’s wombs [come] babes!"

"Perhaps no character in history has formed the subject of so much and so varied study and speculation as that of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus and we shall realize the truth of this statement as we individually seek light upon the sublime philosophy rightly attributed to this Avatar. At the very outset, we are confronted with a remarkable dearth of exact information regarding his person and life. A dearth all the more inexplicable when we realize that from the Rosicrucian standpoint Hermes may be justly regarded as one of the greatest of all Messiahs who have incarnated on this sphere."

"I, Mind, Myself am present with holy men and good, the pure and merciful, men who live piously. To such My Presence doth become an aid, and straightway they gain Gnosis of all things, and win the Father's love by their pure lives, and give Him thanks, invoking on Him blessings, and chanting hymns, intent on Him with ardent love (ii, 14)."

"They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which He has built..."

"Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven."

"A torrent of tears streamed from my eyes, and I was able at last, without dying, to press to my heart..."

"Oh, you privileged beings to whom heaven has made the rare and fatal gift of an ardent soul and a sensitive heart, you who have experienced the delights of a first love, you alone will understand me, you alone will appreciate what after ten months of torture the first moment of bliss is like!"

"I do not know whether my enemies will reply to me, or adopt the role of silence. Whatever they may do I declare to them that this letter will be my only reply to all their calumnies, past, present or future; and I give my word of honor to the public that whatsoever they may say or do, I shall not write a single line more in my justification. (Postscriptum)"

"He described people and places of the distant past with a minuteness of detail that produced the impression that he had been personally acquainted with them."

"I amuse myself, not by making people believe what I wish, but by letting them believe what they wish. These fools of Parisians declare that I am five hundred, and I confirm them in the idea since it pleases them."

"I quitted the Bastille, about half-past eleven in the evening. The night was dark, the quarter in which I resided but little frequented. What was my surprise, then, to hear myself acclaimed by eight or ten thousand persons. My door was forced open; the courtyard, the staircase, the rooms were crowded with people. I was carried straight to the arms of my wife."

"The least credulous believed him to be at least a hundred. Madame de Pompadour said to him once that old Madame de Gergy remembered having met him fifty years before in Venice when he passed for a man of sixty."

"The band of young desperadoes to which he belonged frequently came into collision with the night-watch, whose prisoners, if any, they would attempt to set free."

"It was a universal custom in all religious associations that one of their number during meals should read aloud to the others passages from the Lives of the Saints. This dull and unpopular task having one day been allotted to Giuseppe (probably as a punishment) he straightway proceeded, careless of the consequences, to read out whatever came into his head, substituting for the names of the Saints those of the most notable courtesans of Palermo. The effect of this daring sacrilege was dire and immediate. With fist and foot the scandalized monks instantly fell upon the boy and having belaboured him, as the saying is, within an inch of his life, indignantly packed him back to Palermo as hopelessly incorrigible and utterly unworthy of ever becoming a Benfratello."

"He more than once saw the inside of the Palermo jail; but from lack of sufficient proof, or from the nature of the charge against him, or owing to the intercession of his estimable uncles, as often as he was arrested he was let off again."

"It was in the laboratory of the convent that Cagliostro learnt "the principles of chemistry and medicine" which he afterwards practiced with such astonishing results."

"What is singular about Cagliostro, is that in spite of possessing the characteristics that one associates with a charlatan, he never behaved as such all the time he was at Strasburg or at Paris. On the contrary, he never took a sou from a person, lived honourably, always paid with the greatest exactitude what he owed, and was very charitable."

"According to the Inquisition- biographer, one day whilst he and his companions were idling away the time together the conversation having turned upon a certain girl whom they all knew, one of the number wondered what she was doing at that moment, whereupon Giuseppe immediately offered to gratify him. Marking a square on the ground he made some passes with his hands above it, after which the figure of the girl was seen in the square playing at tressette with three of her friends. So great was the effect of this exhibition of clairvoyance... upon the amazed Apaches that they went at once to look for the girl and found her in the same attitude playing the very game and with the very persons that Balsamo had shown them."

"Even his valet was supposed to have discovered the secret of immortality. This fellow, a veritable Scapin, assisted him admirably in mystifying the credulous. "Your master," said a skeptic one day, seizing him by the collar, "is a rogue who is taking us all in. Tell me, is it true that he was present at the marriage at Cana?" "You forget, sir," was the reply, I have only been in his service a century.""

"According to the equally extraordinary High Priestess of the Theosophists, Cagliostro escaped from San Leo, and long after his supposed death in 1795 was met by various people in Russia, even residing for some time in the house of Madame Blavatsky's father, where in the midst of winter he produced by magical power a plate full of fresh strawberries for a sick person who was craving it."

"The "noble traveler," as he described himself... on his examination, confessed that Cagliostro was only one of the several names he had assumed in the course of his life. An alias (he had termed it incognito) is always suspicious."

"It could surely be no innocent victim of injustice who aroused contempt so malevolent, hatred so universal. The mystery in which he masqueraded was alone sufficient to excite suspicion."

"From ridicule to calumny is but a step, and for every voice raised in defense of his honesty there were a dozen to decry him."

"In his own day, with very few exceptions, those whom he charmed or duped—as you will—by acts that in any case should have inspired gratitude rather than contempt observed a profound silence."

"Documents and books relating to him abound, but they possess little or no value. The most interesting are frequently the most unreliable. The fact that material so questionable should provide as many reasons for rejecting its evidence (which is, by the way, almost entirely hostile) as for accepting it, has induced theosophists, spiritualists, occultists, and all who are sympathetically drawn to the mysterious to become his apologists. By these amiable visionaries Cagliostro is regarded as one of the princes of occultism whose mystical touch has revealed the arcana of the spiritual world to the initiated, and illumined the path along which the speculative scientist proceeds on entering the labyrinth of the supernatural."

"The portrait Carlyle has drawn of Cagliostro is the one most familiar to English readers. Now, though Carlyle's judgments have in the main been upheld by the latest historians (who have had the advantage of information to which he was denied access), nevertheless, like everybody else, he made mistakes. In his case, however, these mistakes were inexcusable, for they were due, not to the lack of data, but to the strong prejudices by which he suffered himself to be swayed to the exclusion of that honesty and fairness he deemed so essential to the historian."

"On the day he was set at liberty (for he had no difficulty in proving his innocence) eight or ten thousand people came en masse to offer him their congratulations... But this ovation... was Intended less as a mark of respect to him than as an Insult to the queenQueen, who was known to regard the verdict as a stigma on her honour."

"That he believed in his mission to enlighten the world through his mystic doctrines admits of no doubt in my mind. Had he been a mere charlatan he would not have practiced his system of medicine and Masonry in such a humanitarian manner."

"Egyptian Masonry he asserted to have been instituted by Enoch and Elijah, who taught its divine mysteries, and he reintroduced adoptive or androgynous Masonry..."

"Though much has been written about Cagliostro... It is based on contemporary records inspired by envy, hatred and contempt in an age notoriously passionate, revengeful and unscrupulous. It is, moreover, extremely superficial, being merely a repetition of information obtained second-hand by compilers apparently too ignorant or too lazy to make their own investigations."

"Cagliostro is supposed by some writers to have been an agent of the Illuminati, a secret order pledged to overturn the thrones of Europe and establish democracy... hence this trampling upon the lilies alluded to the stamping out of the French monarchy by the Illuminati, which was an order grafted on Freemasonry."

"After a long imprisonment and many examinations by the inquisitors of the Holy Office, Cagliostro was finally condemned to death as a heretic, sorcerer and FreeMason, on March 21, 1791; but Pope Pius VI commuted the sentence to life imprisonment."

"Whatever sympathy for Cagliostro my researches may have evoked it has always been exceeded by contempt of those who, combining an unreasoning prejudice with a slovenly system of compilation, have repeated the old charges against him with parrot-like stupidity. The object of this book is not so much an attempt to vindicate Cagliostro as to correct and revise, if possible, what I believe to be a false judgment of history."

"From the Seminary of San Rocco, where he received his first schooling, he ran away several times. As the rod, which appears to have played an important part in the curriculum of the seminary, failed to produce the beneficial results that are supposed to ensue from its frequent application, his uncles, anxious to get rid of so troublesome a charge, decided to confide the difficult task of coaxing or licking him into shape to the Benfratelli of Cartegirone. Giuseppe was accordingly enrolled as a novice in this brotherhood, whose existence was consecrated to the healing of the sick, and placed under the supervision of the Convent-Apothecary. He was at the time thirteen."

"Thus it was reported that Cagliostro stopped one day before a Descent from the Cross in the Louvre and began to talk of the Crucifixion as if he had witnessed it. Though the story was devoid of foundation it was not without effect, and many declared, and believed too, that the Grand Cophta had lived hundreds, and even thousands of years."

"He assumed now the role of a practical magician, and astonished the city by the evocation of phantoms, which he caused to appear, at the wish of the inquirer, either in a mirror or in a vase of clear water. These phantoms equally represented dead and living beings, and as occasionally collusion appears to have been well-nigh impossible, and as the theory of coincidence is preposterous, there is reason to suppose that he produced results which must sometimes have astonished himself. All Paris, at any rate, was set wondering at his enchantments and prodigies, and it is seriously stated that Louis XVI was so infatuated with "Le divine Cagliostro" that he declared that anyone who injured him should be considered guilty of treason."

"He knows everything and divines what he knew not. He is the contemporary of all time. He has lived through all ages. He speaks—the Lord forgive me! and forgive him for such blasphemy! not only of Alexander the Great, Cæsar and Charlemagne, as though he had known them, albeit I believe they were dead ever so long ago, but also of the high priest Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate and Our Lord Himself, whose martyrdom he claims to have witnessed."

"Seldom did he speak of love, and I remember me of no caresses save a kiss night and morning"

"He was a man about thirty, taller than the average, but so wonderfully well built that the utmost strength and skill seemed to circulate in his supple and nervy limbs."

"I am not myself when he is by, but his; whatever he wills, I must do; one look fascinates me and subdues me."

"He is a dangerous man, terrible too, before whom everything bends, snaps and crumbles away. When he is taken to be defenseless he is armed at all points; when believed alone, he stamps his foot and an army springs up; or at a beck of the finger—smiling the while."

"I am ignorant what he is. I only know that no king inspires more respect—no idol commands more adoration—than he from those to whom he deigns to reveal himself."

"His countenance was a notable mixture of power and intelligence, with all the play of Southern races; his glance, able to display any emotion, seemed to pierce any one on whom it fell with beams that sounded the very soul. His cheeks had been browned by a sun hotter than that of France. His mouth was large but finely shaped, and parted to reveal magnificent teeth, all the whiter from his dark complexion. His hand was small but muscular; his foot long but fine."

"All religions were tolerated under this system: a belief in God was the sole qualification..."

"The day after his acquittal he was banished from France by order of the king. At St. Denis his carriage was driven between two dense and silent lines of sympathizers; and, as his vessel cleared the port of Boulogne, 5,000 persons knelt down on the shore to receive his blessing."

"He appeared in court proud and triumphant in his coat of green silk embroidered with gold. "Who are you, and whence do you come?" asked the attorney for the Crown. "I am an illustrious traveler," he answered bombastically. There was great laughter in court, in which the judges joined."

"The mention of Cagliostro’s name produces a twofold effect. With the one party, a whole sequence of marvelous events emerges from the shadowy past; with others the modern progeny of a too realistic age, the name of Alexander, Count Cagliostro, provokes wonder, if not contempt."

"He taught that the Philosopher's Stone was no fable, and that belief many before and since his time have shared..."

"As indeed had been obscurely foreshadowed by Cagliostro prophetic Quack of Quacks, when he, four years ago, quitted the grim durance;—to fall into a grimmer, of the Roman Inquisition, and not quit it."