Solomon's Secret Arts (59 page)

Rainsford clearly regarded occult thinking as perfectly compatible with his religious beliefs. Like other Swedenborgians, he accepted the authority of visions, but he recorded only one of his own, which he experienced at London on the morning of 8 May 1786. Before waking, “I had an Information as it were given to me” concerning a Hebrew book. Although he interpreted the vision as relating to the New Testament, his mind was fixed at the time on the Book of Enoch, a “lost book” of the Bible that pertains to wicked angels who mated with human women and sired giants. According to Rainsford, these angels taught “
Magick
&
Incantations
, or, the Art of
Divination
,” and became evil spirits.
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At some point in the late 1780s, he wrote a long letter to Count Grabianka, praising “the doctrine of that great Man, Swedenborg,” but adding a further list of spiritual worthies:

Rainsford went on to send compliments to Grabianka on the
Fables Egyptiennes
and
Dictionnaire Hermetique
, works written by Antoine-Joseph Pernety. He asked for his own ideas to be passed on to the famous Abbé.

Alchemy remained the general's passion. He was, of course, fascinated by James Price's experiments with “red and white powders” in 1782–3, as were the Écharpes Blanches and the mysterious writer from Harwich.
¹⁰⁹
He wondered in a 1785 letter to a Masonic friend whether his etymology of the word “Alchemy” “agrees with any Ideas of your Friend Behmen.” Four years later, he received a reply. “I am disposed to believe Jacob Behmen when he says that a Man must be purified into a divine Magus, before he can have such a command over nature as to effect the Philosophical Change,” maintained his correspondent.
¹¹⁰
Unfortunately, this learned Freemason did not explain where he had read such an extraordinary passage in Boehme, who generally denied that physical alchemy was possible. Rainsford's own approach to alchemy was summed up in the notebooks that he kept in 1786–7 and that record a series of experiments. Clearly, he was searching for an actual gold-making process, but he also wrote down philosophical quotations from Boehme and Georg von Welling, a Bavarian alchemist of the early eighteenth century.
¹¹¹
Welling's chief
work,
Opus Mago-Cabalisticum et Theosophicum
, was hugely popular in late eighteenth-century Germany—even Goethe used it as the basis for his forays into alchemy. Rainsford eventually had Ebenezer Sibly transcribe an English copy for him.
¹¹²

The general's Behmenist interpretation of alchemy is reflected in a heavily corrected manuscript of 1799 that was put in the same binding as his experimental papers. The work, which does not seem to be in Rainsford's handwriting, describes the divine and androgynous origins of Adam, “the perfect red, passive and Spiritual Earth or vessel.” Adam “fell into deep magical Sleep, became thickened in his inward astral elements,” which led to his splitting into two genders. Eve, unfortunately, was an “inferior astral and paradysical vessel,” who dragged poor Adam down with her. When Adam and Eve admitted “the gross and unharmonized inferior nature and Spiritual fiery Tincture of the Serpent, they were both Tinctured and subdued thereby.” To achieve “reunion with God” would require “ascending by the True Jacobs Ladder … by the ordained degrees of purifications, to the inmost and uppermost steep [
sic
] where God is.” Christ, the Second Adam, came to transmute “this boddy of Earth … by the overruling Energy of the Divine omnipotent Tincture of Love.”
¹¹³
The philosophy and language of the treatise are Behmenist, but, unlike the original Theosopher, the author leaves open a path to practical alchemy (through Christ's “transmuting” of Adam's “red earth”). The references to Jacob's Ladder and to degrees of purification are essentially Masonic. Rainsford may have thought of this philosophy as Swedenborgian, but it bears none of the baron's emphasis on correspondences or visions.

Rainsford's alchemy was supported and assisted by two close friends who were also Freemasons. The first was the Irishman Peter Woulfe, a noted maker of chemical apparatus. Rainsford called him “one of the most able Chemists of the Century, as well as a profound Philosopher.” Woulfe was, like his friend, a Fellow of the Royal Society. He gave the Society's prestigious Bakerian Lecture three times and was sent to investigate James Price's alchemical claims in 1783. He was a long-time friend of Sir Joseph Banks, whom he supplied with perfumes, chemicals and bottles for use on the second Cook expedition. Woulfe remained a highly respected figure in chemical circles throughout the late eighteenth century.
¹¹⁴
Rainsford's other alchemical friend was Hugh Percy, who became the 2nd duke of Northumberland in 1786, and whose activities resembled those of his Tudor ancestor, the “Wizard Earl.” Percy was a professional soldier, who served in the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence. During the latter conflict, he gradually came to sympathize with the American patriots. Percy was an amiable, albeit unconventional and extravagant person. Giacomo Casanova met him in Turin in 1762, when young
Baron Warkworth, as Percy then was, tempted the Italian lover's mistress away from him with a promise of 2,000 guineas. Casanova was posing as a “Kabbalist” or magician who could predict the outcome of lotteries through a mathematical system (perhaps he had read the “Tables of Rotalo”), and was contemplating a trip to London. Percy cheerfully gave him a miniature portrait of himself by way of introduction to his mother, the duchess.
¹¹⁵

In 1785, Percy sent his friend Rainsford an amusing letter, inquiring about his alchemical experiments and sending him the compliments of three house guests at his ancestral home of Alnwick Castle, who were themselves engaged in the purging of lead ore. “I heartily wish you was here to enjoy our Experiments & our Fun,” wrote Percy merrily. The group included Louis Dutens, a Huguenot clergyman whom Percy had met in Turin and who became historiographer to King George III, as well as “Mr. Morse,” who might be the military engineer Robert Morse. The most unexpected guest was the “venerable Secretary of the Learned Society of Antiquaries,” who “promises on this Condition not to trouble you on your first Entrance into that most ancient Society [of alchemists], till [Rainsford answers] any Questions either ordinary or Extraordinary respecting the Runick Medal in his Possession.”
¹¹⁶
This can only refer to the Reverend John Brand, recently appointed secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, whose parish was in the gift of the dukes of Northumberland. He later became Percy's secretary and librarian. Brand was best known for reissuing Henry Bourne's
Antiquitates Vulgares
, to which he added his own observations. Although he was no less scathing than his predecessor in condemning “the superstitious Notions and Ceremonies of the People,” Brand showed more interest than Bourne in the meticulous chronicling of their details. His participation in Percy's alchemical ventures casts a new light on a sentence that appears in the preface to his reissue of
Popular Antiquites
: “By the chemical Process of Philosophy, even Wisdom may be extracted from the Follies and Superstitions of our Forefathers.”
¹¹⁷
Was Brand implying that knowledge of alchemical processes might be enhanced by the investigation of witch beliefs, second sight or “Vulgar Superstitions Concerning the Moon”?

How seriously the alchemical activities of Percy and his guests should be taken is a moot point. The irrepressible Percy once added a cheeky P.S. to a letter to his friend Rainsford, asking, “but where is the gold?”
¹¹⁸
For his own part, Rainsford was wholly dedicated to the spagyric science, as was Peter Woulfe. From all indications, they made little attempt to disguise their passion for it. Unlike the Newtonians of the first half of the century, they did not fear the consequences of being perceived as occult thinkers. Neither of them can be described as marginal. Remarkably, by the 1780s, the occult sciences were beginning to seem respectable, at least as a private pursuit. For a learned person
to publish works on alchemy or astrology or ritual magic was to run a risk, as the affair of James Price demonstrated, but to study them privately was no longer something of which to be ashamed.

This shift may be linked to the diffuse, unfocused and broadly tolerant nature of the English Enlightenment. If the effects of a dominant strain of enlightened thought had been felt more strongly in England, perhaps Rainsford, Woulfe, Lambert de Lintot and Sibly would have been held to stricter account. Perhaps an English version of Immanuel Kant would have arisen, a philosopher who took Swedenborg's writings seriously but condemned them as the dreams of a “spirit-seer.”
¹¹⁹
Instead, English critics like Horace Walpole may have scoffed at the baron, but they did not bother to read his works. We should not suggest, of course, that the English case was entirely unique. A dismissive tolerance towards occult thinking might be traced almost anywhere in Europe. If England was more open to practitioners of the occult than Scotland, it was arguably less so than France or Germany, which were the seedbeds of occult thinking in the late eighteenth century. England produced no occult prose writer as original as Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, “the Unknown Philosopher,” who refracted Jacob Boehme's Theosophy through a strange prism composed of Freemasonry, mystical number theory and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
¹²⁰
In other parts of Europe, however, occult philosophy was hotly contested, while in England it was simply ignored by those who did not agree with it—up to a point. When that point was crossed and the occult began to seem threatening to the social and political order, the situation might change. The first sign of such trouble was in the treatment of that magnificent charlatan, Count Cagliostro.

Cagliostro in London

Hugh Percy's 1785 letter to General Rainsford ends on a hopeful note:

The implication was clear: this remarkable Italian must have knowledge of the Philosopher's Stone. In fact, Giuseppe Balsamo, the self-styled Count Cagliostro, claimed to have much more wisdom than that. He was perhaps the
most successful in a string of wandering Italians who made a sensation in late eighteenth-century European society by being thought to know secrets. They included the seedy Casanova, as well as the so-called count de St.-Germain, a talented composer who lived in London in the mid-1740s. The latter's real name was probably Giovannini, but it was for his fabled wealth and longevity (he was said to be thousands of years old), not for his music, that he became legendary. St.-Germain was seen as an alchemical adept, although scholars now doubt whether he actively courted this reputation. He was also said to have studied “Freemasonry and other dark sciences” with the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, at whose court he died in 1784.
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Cagliostro, however, made a bigger splash than any of them, before suffering a quick and devastating fall from grace.

Giuseppe Balsamo was born in Palermo in 1743, although in his “Confession” he claimed to have grown up in Medina, the orphaned child of Christian parents. His tale of living as a Muslim, but with “true religion” in his heart, before at last being recognized by the Knights of Malta, is a sentimental Orientalist fantasy.
¹²³
Together with his redoubtable wife, Seraphina, “the Great Copt,” as he called himself, travelled across Europe, from St Petersburg to Portugal, pursuing various schemes of self-enrichment. He made three trips to London: first, in 1771–2, as a would-be painter; second, in 1776, as the possessor of a system to win at lotteries (he may have derived the idea from that wily “Kabbalist” Casanova); and third, in 1786–7, as the grand master of “Egyptian Rite” Freemasonry. By the time of the third visit, Seraphina was heading a female branch of the order. The big secret of the Egyptian Rite was communication with the dead, usually through a young boy or girl who acted as a medium. The promise of hidden treasure was frequently hinted at, and the seances themselves were accompanied by all the symbolic paraphernalia of ritual magic—candles, circles, incantations. Cagliostro was essentially marketing an old product under an exciting new label, with the addition of dramatic stage effects, and he found a large number of willing customers. Unfortunately, his lechery, thievery and pomposity kept getting in the way of a successful sales pitch, and he usually ended up absconding from the stage only one step ahead of the authorities. His greatest blunder was to involve himself in the turgid French affair of Queen Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace. One of Cagliostro's child oracles helped to persuade the cardinal de Rohan to borrow the dazzling 2,840-carat necklace on credit from a jeweller. The cardinal thought he was delivering it to the queen, whom he imagined to be in love with him, but in fact the recipient was the countess de la Motte, a close associate of the Cagliostros. Discovered, “the Great Copt” and Seraphina rapidly made off for London.
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