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CAGLIOSTRO
Different from all the other "Masters of Transmutation" featured in this site about whom we have given some biographical information, we have decided not to write anything on Cagliostro’s life. The simple reason is that the identification of Cagliostro with Giuseppe Balsamo, an adventurer from Palermo, is still quite questionable especially according to some Italian Freemasonry's historiographers.
A few of them have even declared that Count Alessandro di Cagliostro has never existed, quoting similar cases found in different esoteric traditions.
For example, the figure of Manu in Hinduism- characters whose historical existence is in doubt, but who were created to symbolize and synthesize in their name a particular function from the tradition of a certain period of time; in Manu’s case, the “primreview legislator” (or the transition from Shamanism to Priesthood, occurring at the dawn of sedentary civilizations);in Cagliostro’s case the “Masonificator” or the transposition of ancient rituals in Masonic terms, happened almost everywhere in 18th century Europe .
We disagree with this extreme hypothesis but is anyway a matter of fact that the first and most remarkable “Masonification” was started in the same school where Cagliostro received his own science. We owe him the attainment of one of its most important and mysterious rituals.
The hermetic society - which continued in the centuries under different denominations - known as “Neapolitan School”, claims the right to be the oldest Transmutation School in the West up to today.
In the times of Emperor Augustus a small Egyptian-Jewish colony settled in Naples (in the area known today as Piazza Nilo) where for over two thousand years the oral transmission of transmutation techniques imported from their own land got perpetuated.
According to a rather forcedly approximate reconstruction, we know today that there were three teaching levels. In the first level, theoretically, one could learn the fundamentals of Hermetism: the analog science, symbolism (which in the Neapolitan School was extremely rich and detailed with respect to other hermetic schools) and probably also the “art of memory”.
In the second level one could start the real transmutation work and according to a superb technique –of mitraic ancient origin characterized by a special kind of sexual magic called “osiridean”. In the third level, the transmutation student could use two techniques of individual mastering for the purpose of giving him superior mental powers and starting the regeneration of the physical body.
For unknown reasons (and still discussed today), around the middle of the eighteen century the School decided to originate three systems of High Masonic Ranks, each allegorically describing the symbolism of the three levels of teaching: the Rite of Memphis for the first level, the Rite of Misraim for the second and the Egyptian Freemasonry. The history of the Memphis and Misraim Rites was different from the Egyptian Freemasonry from the very beginning and this is the reason why we will talk about it separately.
The Memphis and Misraim Rites both started in Naples through the work of a number of remarkable people from the School. Among them we are pleased to remember Prince Raimondo Sangro di San Severo (1710-1771) who commissioned the building of the extraordinary hermetic monument, San Severo Chapel in Naples, and Baron Henry Theodore de Tschoudi (1724-1769) author of the Masonic catechism “The Flaming Star” .Between the two Rituals, the Memphis Ritual was entirely speculative from the very beginning. No transmutation operative ritual was to be found besides its very rich symbolic content.
The Misraim Rite instead was retaining(and practicing at least in the very beginning, in its higher ranks) the influence of some of the most influential osiridean rituals of the School: the so called Stair of Naples, or “Arcana Arcanorum”. But pretty soon both of the Rites started to be part of the international Freemasonry (where they could spread thanks to Jean– Marie Ragon, the famous historian of the Scottish Ritual) and their success brought the Freemasons of Misraim to quit using the Arcana, which - representing a foreign practice in contrast to Masonic orthodoxy – could have been an obstacle for accepting and spreading the Rite.
Very similar to each other, Memphis and Misraim Rites melted together and eventually they separated several times during the course of events. The definitive fusion, in 1908, originated what regular Freemasonry recognizes today as “Ancient and Primitive Memphis and Misraim Rite”; which in reality is not at all very ancient and primitive because the original purpose of showing the first two levels of the Neapolitan School has been lost.
Outside of the Freemasonry, the Arcana kept on being handed on through different screen-organizations connected to the School in deep secrecy. In 1897, in Paris, the occultist Sedir (Yvon Le Loup; 1871- 1926) published the paraphrased version in a short essay called “The Magic Venus”, but the obscurity of his hermetic terminology prevented full understanding of the details. The complete ritual was not completely divulged until 1988, when a small publishing house from Milan published it in an unabridged edition, against the will of the School. The volume in limited edition, sold out after a few days.
To continue, the Arcana consist of three degrees or ritual cycles bringing to mastery plus a “High Arcane”(Secretum Secretorum).Their calendar runs according to the lunar cycle, and the 9 days of ritual fasting, during which one must follow complete chastity). The osiridean transmutation work is performed in pairs: by a woman and a man. The first degree performed by a man consists in a self–assimilation of his sperm, obtained by a self-sexual magic; the short cycle which is more used , covers forty operations, one every 9 days, during one year activity . As for the woman, the sperm is replaced by a microscopic sample of menstrual blood.
After the end of the year a third ingredient (differently diversified) is added to the sperm and blood and the compound is drunk over a cyclic period of fasting and light meals still insisting on these numbers: 9, 6, 3 and 1.
In the second degree these operations are repeated (with light variations), by combining all the three ingredients together.
The third degree is based on couple sexual practice where the philosophical amalgam (the three elements together) is “cooked” through the three passages called “Black Mercury”, ”White Mercury” and “Red Mercury” (three different sexual practices performed in pairs: one of sodomy, one without sperm emission and one during menstruation). A new philosophical amalgam will be obtained. Once it is swallowed it should cause the sprouting of the energetic body (called “Body of glory” according to the School terminology)
The final level or Major Arcane, is based on five retreats performed in darkness, each lasting seven days, with a decreasing number of sexual performances (9, 6, 3, 1 and then none, replaced by breathing exercises) where one comes back to the assimilation of one element only (sperm or blood) plus a third ingredient; the absence of light encourages the development of the body of glory and its strengthening.
Only after having finished this work could the transmutation student, from The School of Naples, face the advanced rituals of the third level, which Cagliostro has handed on through Egyptian Freemasonry.
The commission to create it was given to him by Cavalier Luigi D’Aquino (1739-1783) who according to the tradition was his initiator as well.
Cagliostro met him in Malta in 1766 and stayed with him in Naples in 1773, to receive the instructions which enabled him to found the Egyptian Freemasonry, in Paris, in the same year his master passed away.
The system he created is not, in Masonic terms, a Rite, but an Order: it does not deal with the High Degrees .Rather it deals with the three “Blue Degrees” of Freemasonry (Apprentice, Fellow-craft and Master) integrated with the thick hermetic symbolism Cagliostro added to it.
Later on because of this device, it developed as a kind of parallel Freemasonry totally independent from the body of the “regular” Freemasonry. This fact allowed Cagliostro to admit women too, although still excluded from the “regular” Lodges, and it gave the necessary independence to prevent the danger of a forced suspension of the transmutation activity. This inconvenience was threatening the Rite of Misraim exactly in those years.
When the level of Master is achieved, an opportunity is offered to the Egyptian Brother or the Sister to engage in the famous “Quarantine”, two operations of transmutation, lasting 40 days each.
The first Quarantine: "How to achieve the Pentagon and become morally perfect" has to be practiced by thirteen Masters together. Strongly hybridized with magic-cabalistic elements, occasionally reminiscent of the Sacred Magic by Abramelin, had the purpose of sharpening the subtle faculties of the Master’s body of glory to give him the capacity to correctly explain the enigmatic instructions of the second Quarantine: “How to rejuvenate and become physically perfect”
The following text is almost the unabridged version, written by Cagliostro himself, as handed down from the many Egyptian Lodges still existing today (especially in southern France):
“The Aspirant has to retreat with a friend in the countryside on a full moon night and locked inside a room he has to suffer from a very exhausting diet for forty days time. The diet consists of scarce food based on light soups and tender cooling laxative vegetables, distilled water beverages or May rain. Each meal must to start with a liquid, a drink and end with a solid snack as a biscuit or bread crust.
On the seventeenth day of this retreat after a small emission of blood, he will start taking some white drops of secret composition. He will have to take six of them in the morning and evening, adding two a day till the thirty-second day. Another blood emission is taken on this day at sunset, the following day he stays in bed till the end of the Quarantine. Then he starts taking the first grain of Original Matter, the same that God has created in order to give man immortality. Because of sin, man has lost the knowledge of it. It can’t be conquered other than by a favor from the Eternal, and Masonic work.“
“After having taken this grain the one who is going to rejuvenate becomes unconscious for three hours and in convulsions he sweats and evacuates continuously. After having come to himself and changed bed he must be fed with a pound of fat free beef and cooling herbs. If this food makes him feel better on the following day he is given the second grain of Original Matter in a cup of broth that besides the effect of the first grain will cause him a very strong delirious fever .He will lose the skin, and the teeth and hair will fall out. On the following thirty-fifth day if the patient recovers his strength, he will soak in a bath for one hour in neither cold or hot water. On the thirty-sixth day he will have his third and last grain of Original Matter in a glass of vintage and generous wine that will make him sleep quietly and peacefully. Then the hair grows back, the teeth too and the skin gets healed. When he wakes up he soaks in new aromatic bath and on the thirty-eighth day he will have a bath in plain water mixed with niter .Later on he gets dressed and starts walking in his room, then on the thirty-ninth day, he takes ten drops of Balsam of the Great Master along with two spoons of red wine. On the fortieth day he will leave the house, rejuvenated and perfectly recharged”.