“It must have been hard,” Belbo said, with comprehension.
“But who,” I asked, “are these barons von Hund who seek the Unknown Superiors…?”
“New groups sprang up at the time of the necklace farce, altogether different in nature. To gain adepts, they identified themselves with the Masonic lodges, but actually they were pursuing more mystical ends. It was at this point that the debate about the Unknown Superiors took place. Hund, unfortunately, wasn’t a serious person. At first he led his adepts to believe that the Unknown Superiors were the Stuarts. Then he said that the aim of the order was to rescue the original possessions of the Templars, and he scraped together funds from all sides.
Unsatisfied with the proceeds, he fell into the hands of a man named Starck, who claimed to have learned the secret of making gold from the authentic Unknown Superiors, who were in Petersburg. Hund and Starck were surrounded by theosophists, cheap alchemists, last-minute Rosicrucians.
All together, they elected as grand master a thoroughly upright man, the Duke of Brunswick. He immediately realized that he was in the worst possible company. One of the members of the Strict Observance, the landgrave of Hesse, summoned the Comte de Saint-Germain, believing this gentleman could produce gold for him. And why not? In those days the whims of the mighty had to be indulged. But the landgrave also believed himself to be Saint Peter. I assure you, gentlemen: once, when Lavater was the landgrave’s guest, he had a dreadful time with the Duchess of Devonshire, who thought she was Mary Magdalene.”
“But what about this Willermoz and this Martínez Pasqualis, who founded one sect after another?”
“Pasqualis was an old pirate. He practiced theurgical operations in a secret chamber, and angelic spirits appeared to him in the form of luminous trails and hieroglyphic characters. Willermoz took him seriously, because he himself was an enthusiast, honest but naïve. Fascinated by alchemy, Willermoz dreamed of a Great Work to which the elect should devote themselves: to discover the point of alliance of the six noble metals through studying the measurements comprised in the six letters of the original name of God, which Solomon had allowed his elect to know.”
“And then?
“Willermoz founded many orders and joined many lodges at the same time, as was the custom in those days, always seeking the definitive revelation, always fearing it was hidden elsewhere—which indeed is the case. That is, perhaps, the only truth…. So he joined the Elus Cohen of Pasqualis. But in ’72 Pasqualis disappeared, sailed for Santo Domingo, and left everything up in the air. Why did he leave? I suspect he came into possession of a secret he didn’t want to share. In any case, requiescat; he disappeared on that dark continent, into well-deserved darkness.”
“And Willermoz?”
“In that year we had all been shaken by the death of Swedenborg, a man who could have taught many things to the ailing West, had the West listened to him. But now the century began its headlong race toward revolutionary madness, following the ambitions of the Third Estate…. It was then that Willermoz heard about Hund’s rite of the Strict Observance and was fascinated by it. He was told that a Templar who reveals himself—by founding a public association, say—is not a Templar.
But the eighteenth century was an era of great credulity. Willermoz created, with Hund, the various alliances that appear on your list, until Hund was unmasked—I mean, until they discovered he was the sort who runs off with the cash box—and the Duke of Brunswick expelled him from the organization.”
Agliè cast another glance at the list. “Ah, yes, Weishaupt. I nearly forgot. The Illuminati of Bavaria: with a name like that, they attracted, at the beginning, a number of generous minds. But Weishaupt was an anarchist; today we’d call him a Communist, and if you gentlemen only knew the things they raved about in that ambience—coups d’etat, dethroning sovereigns, bloodbaths … Mind you, I admired Weishaupt a great deal—not for his ideas, but for his extremely clearheaded view of how a secret society should function. It’s possible to have a splendid organizational talent but quite confused ideas.
“In short, the Duke of Brunswick, seeing the confusion around him left by Hund, realized that at this juncture there were three conflicting currents in the German Masonic world: the sapiential-occultist camp, including some Rosicrucians; the rationalist camp; and the anarchist-revolutionary camp of the Illuminati of Bavaria. He proposed that the various orders and rites meet at Wilhelmsbad for a ‘convent,’ as they were called then, an Estates-General, you might say.
The following questions had to be answered: Does the order truly originate from an ancient society, and if so, which? Are there really Unknown Superiors, keepers of the ancient Tradition, and if so, who are they? What are the true aims of the order? Is the chief aim to restore the order of the Templars? And so forth, including the problem of whether the order should concern itself with the occult sciences. Willermoz joined in, enthusiastic, hoping to find at last the answers to the questions he had been asking himself all his life….And here the de Maistre affair began.”
“Which de Maistre?” I asked. “Joseph or Xavier?”
“Joseph.”
“The reactionary?”
“If he was reactionary, he wasn’t reactionary enough. A curious man. Consider: this devout son of the Catholic Church, just when the first popes were beginning to issue bulls against Masonry, became a member of a lodge, assuming the name Josephus a Floribus. He approached Masonry in 1773, when a papal brief condemned the Jesuits. Of course it was the Scottish lodges that de Maistre approached, since he was not a bourgeois follower of the Enlightenment; he was an Illuminato.”
Agliè sipped his cognac. From a cigarette case of almost white metal he took out some cigarillos of an unusual shape. “A tobacconist in London makes them for me,” he said, “like the cigars you found at my house. Please … They’re excellent….” He spoke with his eyes lost in memory.
“De Maistre … a man of exquisite manners; to listen to him was a spiritual pleasure. He gained great authority in occult circles. And yet, at Wilhelmsbad he betrayed our expectations. He sent a letter to the duke, in which he firmly renounced any Templar affiliation, abjured the Unknown Superiors, and denied the utility of the esoteric sciences. He rejected it all out of loyalty to the Catholic Church, but he did so with the arguments of a bourgeois Encyclopedist. When the duke read the letter to a small circle of intimates, no one wanted to believe it.
De Maistre now asserted that the order’s aim was nothing but spiritual regeneration and that the ceremonials and the traditional rites served only to keep the mystical spirit alive. He praised all the new Masonic symbols, but said that an image that represented several things no longer represented anything. Which—you’ll forgive me—runs counter to the whole hermetic tradition, for the more ambiguous and elusive a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power. Otherwise, what becomes of the spirit of Hermes, god of a thousand faces?
“Apropos of the Templars, de Maistre said that the order of the Temple had been created by greed, and greed had destroyed it, and that was that. The Savoyard could not forget, you see, that the order had been destroyed with the consent of the pope. Never trust Catholic legitimists, no matter how ardent their hermetic vocation.
De Maistre’s dismissal of the Unknown Superiors was also laughable: the proof that they do not exist is that we have no knowledge of them. We could not have knowledge of them, of course, or they would not be unknown. Odd, how a believer of such fiber could be impermeable to the sense of mystery. Then de Maistre made his final appeal: Let us return to the Gospels and abandon the follies of Memphis. He was simply restating the millennial line of the Church.
“You can understand the atmosphere in which the Wilhelmsbad meeting took place. With the defection of an authority like de Maistre, Willermoz would be in the minority; at most, a compromise could be reached. The Templar rite was maintained; any conclusion about the origins of the order was postponed; in short, the convent was a failure. That was the moment the Scottish branch missed its opportunity; if things had gone differently, the history of the following century might have been different.”
“And afterward?” I asked. “Was nothing patched together again?”
“What was there to patch—to use your word?…Three years later, an evangelical preacher who had joined the Illuminati of Bavaria, a certain Lanze, died in a wood, struck by lightning. Instructions of the order were found on him, the Bavarian government intervened, it was discovered that Weishaupt was plotting against the state, and the order was suppressed the following year.
And further: Weishaupt’s writings were published, containing the alleged projects of the Illuminati, and for a whole century they discredited all French and German neo-Templarism…. It’s possible that Weishaupt’s Illuminati were really on the side of Jacobin Masonry and had infiltrated the neo-Templar branch to destroy it. It was probably not by chance that this evil breed had attracted Mirabeau, the tribune of the Revolution, to its side. May I say something in confidence?”
“Please.”
“Men like me, interested in joining together again
