by Mark Booth
So who was the Comte de St Germain? A key to his secret identity lies in Freemasonic history. It is said that it was he who coined the Freemasonic mantra Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and whether or not this is accurate, he may be seen as the living spirit of esoteric Freemasonry.
More particularly, St Germain should be identified with another personality beset by rumour, counter-rumour and uncertainty about whether he really lived at all. In the secret history St Germain is Christian Rosenkreuz reincarnated in the age of enlightenment, of imperial expansion and international diplomacy.
To borrow a phrase from the eminent science fiction writer and esotericist Philip K. Dick, he had learned how to reconstitute his body after death.
This should alert us to an even deeper mystery. In an earlier incarnation Rosenkreuz/Germain had been Hiram Abiff, the Master Builder of Solomon’s Temple. The murder of Hiram Abiff had led to the Word’s being lost. On one level the lost Word was a power of supernatural procreation which humankind had wielded before the Fall into matter. Part of the mission of St Germain, through esoteric Freemasonry, was the reintroduction of knowledge of the Word into the stream of history.
La Très Sainte Trinsophie is a booklet often attributed to St Germain and which certainly comes from the same school of occult Freemasonry. It is an avowed account of initiation, in which the candidate descends into the volcanic bowels of the earth, and passes the night there. At dawn he climbs out of his underground chamber, following a star. He is freed of his material body and flies up to the planets where he meets ‘the old man of the palace’. In the palace he sleeps for seven days and, when he awakes, his robe is changed to beautiful, scintillating green. Then there is a strange passage in which he sees a bird with butterfly wings and knows he must catch it. He drives a steel nail through its wings, so that it is pinned down, but its eyes grow bright. Finally, in a hall with a beautiful, naked woman, he stabs the sun with his sword. The sun shatters into dust and each atom of dust becomes a sun in itself. The Work is completed. This depiction of a portal is by Paolo Veronese, believed by Theosophists to be an incarnation of one of the Hidden Masters.
The deepest mystery of this individuality, though, concerns an even earlier incarnation from the time when human bodies were on the borderline of becoming solid flesh. Enoch was the earliest prophet of the Sun god, a man whose face shone with a sun-like radiance.
When St Germain took Cagliostro on a tour of the heavens they were going on the tour described in the Book of Enoch. In the phrase Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, St Germain looked forward to a time when humanity would reach out to the Sun god with freedom of thought and will, as they had failed to do the first time He came.
The secret history of the world from the late sixteenth century to the nineteenth century is dominated by the work behind the scenes of the great ascended masters of Western tradition, Enoch and Elijah, and by preparations for the descent from the skies of the Archangel of the Sun — and, beyond this, for the descent of an even greater being.
These men were preparing the way for the Second Coming.
AS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PROGRESSED, sightings of the mysterious count become rarer, but a mood of optimism and expectation filled the lodges of the secret societies. In France ‘the Unknown Philosopher’, St Martin, was teaching that ‘every man is a king’. Chevalier Ramsay, the Scottish laird who had founded a Grand Lodge in Paris in 1730, made a speech to new initiates in Paris in 1737: ‘The whole world is nothing but a great republic. We strive for the reunion of all people of an enlightened mind… not only through the love of the fine arts, but even more through the elevated principles of virtue, science and religion, in which the interests of the brotherhood and that of the entire family of humankind can meet each other… and from which the subjects of all kingdoms can learn to love each other.’
Freemasonry provided a protected space for the tolerant discussion of ideas, for free scientific enquiry and for investigation into the spirit worlds.
Following the establishment of mother lodges in Scotland, London and Paris, the great event of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century took place in the 1760s. This was the founding of the Order of Elus Coens (or ‘chosen priests’) by the Portuguese magus Martines de Pasqually. The rituals of the Elus Coens, devised by de Pasqually, were sometimes up to six hours long and involved an incense that blended hallucinogens and fly agaric mushroom spores. In the later rituals of Stanislas de Guaita, much influenced by de Pasqually, a blindfold was removed and the candidate might find himself facing men wearing Egyptian masks and headdresses who silently pointed swords at his chest.
In the way that Dr Dee had worked to bring back real spiritual experience into the Church by the practice of ceremonial magic, men like de Pasqually and Cagliostro did the same in Freemasonry. In 1782 Cagliostro founded Egyptian Right Freemasonry, which would be highly influential in both France and America.
De Pasqually’s pupil and successor, St Martin, placed less emphasis on ceremony and more on internal, esoteric disciplines. Influenced in this by his reading of Boehme, his version of Martinist philosophy has remained highly influential in French Freemasonry to this day. Living in Paris at the time of the Terror, St Martin allowed men and women to come to his apartment, initiating them by a mystical laying on of hands. They were in such peril that they continued to wear their masks even during their meetings in order to hide their identities even from one another.
Famous for his genially excoriating attacks on religion, Voltaire is often thought of as a God-hater. In reality, it was organized religion he was against. When he was initiated by Benjamin Franklin, he was given the apron belonging to Helvetius to kiss. Helvetius was the famous Swiss scientist whose account of alchemical transmutation remains the second most highly authenticated account after that of Leibniz.
The historian of Freemasonry and mystical experience A.E. Waite wrote of Masonry’s ‘dreams of antique science, proclaiming that the reality behind dreams must be sought in the spirit of dreams’. He talked of Voltaire as the man ‘who held the keys — who had forged the key — which opened up the door to this reality and unfolded amazing vistas of possibility… Condemned practices, forbidden arts might lead through some clouds of mystery into the light of knowledge.’ We will see more clearly what this means in the next chapter, but for the moment it is enough to say that the initiates of the secret societies were amazed by these new vistas.
Their breasts were full of such faith and optimism that they would undoubtedly have agreed with Wordsworth that bliss was it that dawn to be alive.
Among the artists, writers and composers of the secret societies this great wealth of enthusiasm and these expectations of the dawn of a new age gave rise to the Romantic movement. Whenever there is a great flowering of imaginative art and literature, as, for example, in the Renaissance and Romanticism, we should suspect the presence somewhere in the shadows of sacred idealism as a philosophy of life and of the secret societies which cultivate that philosophy.
THIS HAS BEEN A HISTORY OF THE WORLD according to idealism — if we take idealism in its philosophical sense of proposing that ideas are more real than objects. Idealism in the more common, colloquial sense — meaning living according to high ideals — was, as George Steiner has pointed out, an invention of the nineteenth century.
In the previous century the lodges of England, America and France had worked to create societies that were less cruel, superstitious and ignorant, less repressive and prejudiced and more tolerant. The world had become all of these things — and also more insincere and frivolous.
Even before the Terror there was disquiet, an anxiety that, although society might be made to run along straight lines, this enterprise was adequate neither to human nature nor to other, darker forces operating outside the laws of nature. Romanticism was partly an attempt to come to terms with a galvanic feeling of intensity rising up from below and what today we would call the unconscious. It would give rise to intense music and poetry. It would be im
patient of convention, encouraging spontaneity and self-abandon.
In the land of Eckhart various writers saw France in particular as a land of ‘soulless little dancing masters who did not understand the inner life of man’. In Lessing, Schlegel and Schiller philosophical idealism became a philosophy of life once more. Above all, this idealism would exalt the imagination, holding the mystical and esoteric belief that the imagination is a higher mode of perception than that offered by the senses. Imagination can be trained to grasp higher realities than the materialism being peddled by the apostles of common sense.
In conventional history Romanticism was a reaction to the polite, ordered eighteenth century. In the secret history it was demonic forces, rather than merely subconscious forces, that caused this reaction.
The roots of this reaction were sexual.
IN JULY 1744 JOHN PAUL BROCKMER, a London watchmaker, worried what on earth was wrong with his lodger. Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish engineer, had seemed a quiet, respectable character, attending the local Moravian chapel every Sunday.
Now his hair stood on end. He foamed at the mouth and chased Brockmer down the street, gibbering and apparently claiming to be the Messiah. Brockmer tried to persuade him to see a doctor but instead Swedenborg went to the Swedish embassy. When they wouldn’t let him in, he ran to a nearby drainage ditch, undressed himself and rolled around in the mud, throwing money at the crowd.
In a recent breakthrough book, the fruit of years of meticulous research, Marsha Keith Suchard reveals that Swedenborg had been experimenting with certain sexual techniques for achieving extreme altered states of consciousness that were taught at the outwardly respectable Moravian chapel. Marsha Keith Suchard also shows that William Blake was brought up in this church and that these sexual practices inspired his poetry.
We have touched on various techniques for inducing altered states, including breathing exercises, dancing and meditation. But these sexual techniques are the hard stuff, the most closely guarded secrets of the secret societies. It’s instructive, then, to follow with Marsha Keith Suchard the different stages of development of Swedenborg’s practice, as recorded in his journals and alluded to in his publications.
Even as a boy Swedenborg had experimented with breath control. He noticed that if he held his breath for long periods, he went into a sort of trance. He discovered, too, that by synchronizing his breath to his pulse he could deepen the trance. ‘Sometimes I was reduced into a state of insensibility as to the body senses, thus almost unto the state of dying persons, retaining however my interior life unimpaired, attended with the power of thinking and with sufficient breathing for life.’ Persistence in these techniques could bring practitioners great rewards… ‘there is a certain cheering light and joyful, confirmatory brightness that plays around the sphere of the mind, and a kind of mysterious radiation… that darts through some temple in the brain… the soul is called into a more inward communion, and has returned at that moment into the golden age of its intellectual perfections. The mind… in the kindling flame of its love despises all in comparison… all merely corporeal pleasures.’ Swedenborg seems to be describing different stages of altered states of the kind we have seen involved in the process of initiation. As Marsha Keith has pointed out, modern neurological research has confirmed that meditation increases the levels of DHEAS and melatonin, secretions produced by the pineal and pituitary glands which together are said by occultists to create the Third Eye.
At the age of fifteen Swedenborg was sent to live with his brother-in-law, who for the next seven years would be his mentor, and it was here at his new home that Swedenborg’s own researches turned markedly cabalistic.
We have seen how in the Cabala, as in all esoteric traditions, the creation is conceived of in terms of a series of emanations (sephiroth, or servants) from the cosmic mind. In the Cabala, as much as in the myths of the Greeks and Romans, these emanations are thought of as male and female. The En Sof, the unattainable cosmic mind, emanates male and female spirits, and these intertwine in a sexual way as the impulse of creation spirals downwards. In the same way that erotic images in the mind create sperm, the En Sof’s acts of loving imagination generate physical effects. The imagination — and particularly the sexually-fired imagination — is therefore seen to be the root principle of creativity.
On this cabalistic account, the Fall happened because of an imbalance which occurred between the male and female sephiroth. By imagining balanced and harmonious love-making between the sephiroth, the adept helps set right this primordial cosmic wrong.
In cabalistic lore the Cherubim arching their wings above the Ark of the Holy Covenant in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple were seen as an image of the harmonious love-making of the male and female sephiroth. Then when the second Temple was sacked by Antiochus in 168 BC, these erotic images were paraded through the streets to ridicule the Jews. When the Temple was destroyed in AD 70, a great need arose in the heart of the people to rebuild it. Sacred imagery of the love-making of the male and female sephira lay at the heart of a programme to right a historical wrong.
Swedenborg also wrote about rhythmic breathing methods relating to the pulse of the genitals. It is evident that, while living with his father’s brother-in-law, he began to practise such exercises in breath control in conjunction with the imagining of naked human bodies contorted erotically into the shapes of Hebrew letters already alluded to. These were believed to be powerful magical emblems or sigils. Similar techniques of taking sexual energies and using them as a force for spiritual good are used by some Hasidic groups today. Bob Dylan, who is in some way heir to the poetic tradition of Blake, has explored some of these practices.
The element of control is crucial to these practices and this was emphasized in another esoteric tradition of sexually charged spirituality. The expansion of European empires eastwards had caused rumours of Tantric practices to trickle back in the other direction. Swedenborg explored sexual tantra in detail. Psychological discipline was needed to achieve prolonged arousal. This in turn was needed to redirect sexual energies to the brain and thereby achieve a breakthrough into the spirit worlds, a visionary ecstasy rather than a narrowly sexual one. Swedenborg also mastered what is by all accounts an extremely difficult technique of muscle control known to Indian adepts, whereby at the moment of ejaculation the sperm is diverted to the bladder and therefore not expelled.
Clearly the techniques are dangerous — one of the reasons why they are kept so secret. They risk the sort of nervous breakdown witnessed by Swedenborg’s landlord, not to mention madness and death.
The peculiar admixture to his researches that Swedenborg discovered while attending the Moravian church in New Fetter Lane was a specifically Christian version of the arcana of love. At that time Moravians in London were under the sway of the charismatic Count Zizendorf. Members of the congregation were encouraged by him to visualize, smell and touch in imagination the side wound in the body of Christ. This wound was, in Zizendorf’s vision, a sweet, luscious vagina oozing a magical juice. The spear of Longinus was to be thrust repeatedly and ecstatically into it.
Late eighteenth-century European depiction of Tantric practice.
Zizendorf encouraged sex as a sacramental act and urged his followers to see the divine, spiritual emanations in each other at the moment of climax. A joint mental prayer at this moment has particular magical force. As Swedenborg put it, ‘partner sees partner in mind… each partner has the other in himself’ so they ‘cohabit in their innermost’. In a visionary trance partners were able to meet, communicate, even make love in their dismembered, spiritual forms.
Marsha Keith Suchard records that Blake’s parents were members of this congregation and that Blake absorbed these ideas from his wide reading of Swedenborg. She has shown how the prudish Victorians erased from Blake’s drawings much explicitly sexual imagery — including drawing pairs of underpants over genitals. Although there is a popular understanding that Blake was influenced by the esoteri
c philosophy of Swedenborg and others, we have until now overlooked these very specific techniques of sex magic that were at the root of his imaginative vision.
Blake experienced visions from an early age. At the age of four he saw God looking in through the window, and at four or five, while walking through the countryside, he had a vision of a tree filled with angels ‘bespangling every bough like stars’. But it seems that the secret techniques of Zizendorf and Swedenborg gave him a systematic, cabalistic approach to these phenomena.
In Los he would write, ‘In Beulah the Female lets down her beautiful Tabernacle Which the Male enters magnificent between her Cherubim And becomes One with her mingling… There’s a place where Contraries are equally true, This place is called Beulah.’
In Romanticism the individual interior life has finally expanded to become a vast cosmos of infinite variety. Love is the love of one cosmos for another. Deep calls unto deep. With Romanticism love moves into a new mode and becomes symphonic.
The historical significance of this is that the secret meditations and prayerful practices of a handful of initiates created a popular surge of feeling against materialism. A new way of making love, of re-enacting the creation of the cosmos, was a way of saying that right isn’t simply a matter of might, that there are higher ideals than expediency or enlightened egotism, that if you work yourself into the right frame of mind, you can experience the world as meaningful.
