Count Cagliostro And The Egyptian Rite of Psychedelic Freemasonry Alessandro Cagliostro is almost universally dismissed as a fraud, faker, false healer and con-man. He is supposed "really" to have been an uppity prole named Joseph Balsamo[103] who had made himself adept at hypnosis and sleight-of-hand. Writers like Dumas remember that he was accused of complicity in the "Affair of the Diamond Necklace" but tend to forget that he was acquitted of any wrong- doing -- and in fact was never successfully charged with any crime. It could be argued against him that his idealism verged on naïvté, that he caused public hysteria by his miraculous cures (free for the poor, expensive for the rich) and other "miracles", which he failed to keep secret enough; and that he enjoyed fooling people into believing he was immortal (like the hero of Bulwer-Lytton's Rosicrucian novel Zanoni). After all, a superhuman aura forms a vital aspect of the shaman's ability to heal.[104] The inquisition got him for heresy and magic, not for fraud or murder! Like Giordano Bruno, his biggest mistake was setting foot in Rome (in 1789, a bad year to annoy the Pope). I have always considered Cagliostro a great genius and a key figure in the Western occult Tradition, if only for his one great achievement: -- the establishment of Egyptian Freemasonry. Of course it was Napoleon's invasion of Egypt that led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Prior to that, knowledge of Egyptian religion relied on a handful of objects (some of them fake) from Egypt, and a few classical texts by such authors as Plutarch and Iamblichus. The hieroglyphs constituted the happy hunting ground of occultists like Athanasius Kircher, who amused themselves by "cracking" the texts on a few obelisks and discovering Neo-Platonic messages.[105] From the 15th to the 19th century the one "authentic" Egyptian text (written in Greek and therefore legible) was the Corpus Hermeticum. Rediscovered in the West in 1460 and translated into Latin in 1471 by Marsilio Ficino, the text was believed to be exceedingly ancient and composed by Hermes Trismegistus, a prophet (or god, identified with the Egyptian Thoth). In 1614 however the Hermetica was "debunked" by philologist Isaac Casaubon and dated to the "late" Hellenistic era, after which only crackpot occultists like Cagliostro took it seriously. Recently however a revisionist view of the text has occupied certain quite scholarly scholars of Egyptian antiquities, who now believe that it actually incorporates authentic ancient material, undoubtedly transmitted orally to certain bilingual hierophants in Greek Egypt (3rd-2nd century BC) and thus saved from the decline and disappearance of genuine Egyptian tradition. [106] So Ficino, Bruno and Cagliostro were not wrong to believe that the Hermetica enshrines "Egyptian Wisdom" -- even if their reasons for that belief were somewhat shaky. And Cagliostro's moment of world-class genius consisted of the brilliant notion of amalgamating the Hermetic ("Egyptian") tradition with the mythos of Freemasonry.[107] Eventually Masonry came to englobe (in the "Scottish" Jacobite degrees) all of Western esotericism: Templar, Rosicrucian, alchemical, "yogic" and -- as we shall see -- entheogenic.[108] If modern Masonry has lost sight of that rich heritage it is not the fault of Count Cagliostro![109] (In fact I believe European Masonry to be far more advanced than the American in this regard -- tant pis.) Let us explore and try to discover how much can be saved of this tradition. ** It would seem that the ideal form of Christianity (for us anyway) would resemble one of the "New World" entheogenic sects such as Santo Daime or Unio Vegetal -- "ayahuasca Protestants", so to speak -- or the Native American Church, which uses or venerates peyote. In the 1960s many of us first heard of peyote from Antonin Artaud's remarkable account of the Tarahumara of Mexico, or from the Native American Church, which used the judicial principle of freedom of religion to argue -- successfully -- for the legality of their sacrament. The irony was that it was not legal for us Euro-Americans -- a typical example of American racism. Art Krebs (whom I met at Millbrook in the mid-60s) founded the Neo-American Church to contest this anomaly, but without success. [110] For some time in the 60s one could still mail-order peyote from a farm in Texas and imitate Aldous Huxley, who achieved enlightenment with mescaline, which could be prepared at home by boiling and straining peyote and drying the residue (which, contrary to still-common misinformation, could be smoked as well as ingested orally). The great seriousness of the Native American Church ritual and theology played a positive role even for us Euro's, who were generally excluded from Church membership (in part because of the race laws, but also due to an understandable distrust by the Indians of white people). [111] [illo, Mike Jay, Mescaline, p. 102] [Note: See now the excellent and comprehensive study by Mike Jay, Mescaline (Yale, 2019).] It's too bad that mescaline seems almost to have vanished from the psycho- pharmacopeia these days; and also a pity that all seekers cannot avail themselves of the guidance and experience of the N.A.C. Once an Indian poet said to me (apropos of white "Wannabe-Indians"): "First you people took our land, they you took our languages and customs -- and now you want our religion! Why don't you white people get a religion of your own?!" I thought this made a lot of sense and I began to search for a tradition that would not involve my trying to pose as a "native" or "make-believe Moroccan" or "white Negro", etc. I decided to work on developing what I called Western Rite Hinduism, by reviving Indo-European paganism via identifications of Hindu deities with Greco-Roman-Egypto-Celtic- Norse deities, like Hermes=Odin=Thoth=Lugh=Budh (the Hindu Mercury) etc. Basically this thought experiment led me to Hermeticism, a Western syncretic magical path that seemed still "alive" and valid.[112] In this way I was able to find not only an "occidental" tradition without authoritarian excrescences, but also with entheogenic praxis. There exists a Western parallel and equivalent of the Rig Vedic sacramental path adumbrated in Wasson's Soma (1968). Broadly speaking this psychedelic path can be connected to the mysteries of alchemy[113] -- but we can be more specific. It turns out that Cagliostro's Egyptian Freemasonry was an entheogenic cult. ** Recently I was pleased to discover that a single manuscript copy of the initiation rites in Egyptian Masonry survived the holocaust of Cagliostro's writings and magical paraphernalia, perpetrated by the Vatican after immuring the Magus in an oubliette beneath the fortress of San Leo in Urbino where he died in 1795. [114] Translated and published by Philippa Faulks and Robert L.D. Cooper in The Masonic Magician: The Life and Death of Count Cagliostro and his Egyptian Rite (Watkins, 2008), this manuscript appears to be quite authentic.[115] I was surprised and excited to read the following segment of Cagliostro's beautiful ritual: (from "Reception of an Apprentice to the Degree of Companion", pp 221 ff) The Worshipful Master shall have his right hand armed with the sword, which has a gold handle and a silver blade. The 7 planets shall be engraved [on the sword] on the two sides of the Moon . and a plaque in the form of a Rose bearing all around this inscription: Primal Matter and the motto I believe in the Rose ... On the Worshipful Master's altar there shall be two covered crystal vases; one shall contain red liqueur, pleasant to drink, which may be wine; the other shall be filled with leaves of gold. (the candidate requests initiation) The candidate lowers his head and two Masters positioned beside him, each having a small burner in his hand, giving off an aroma, and purifying him with the smoke, which the Worshipful Master explains to the candidate in these words: "I am now going to purify your body and your mind; this perfume is the symbol of that purification." (more ritual follows; then:) This done, those present shall rise and surround the candidate who shall drink the liqueur, raising his spirit in order to understand the following speech which their Worshipful Master shall address to him at the same time. "My child, you are receiving the primal matter; understand the blindness and the dejection of your first condition. Then you did not know yourself, everything was darkness within you and without. Now that you have taken a few steps in the knowledge of yourself, learn that the Great God created before man this primal matter and that He then created man to possess it and be immortal. Man abused it and lost it, but it still exists in the hands of the Elect of God and from a single grain of the precious matter becomes a projection into infinity. "The acacia which has been given to you at the degree of Master of ordinary Masonry is nothing but that precious matter [ . .]. " (my italics) Now as anyone who has kept up with recent breakthroughs in psychedelic chemistry knows, acacia[116] denotes a number of varieties of a plant, about 100 of which contain dimethyltryptamine or DMT, a powerful psychotropic or hallucinogen. From these plants DMT can be extracted in "crystal" form, smoked, or injected intravenously, to induce a short but intense "trip". If you eat or drink DMT however nothing will happen because your body will digest it before it can reach your brain; this digestion is caused by a monoamine oxidase (MAO) in your intestinal tract.