Homage to Cagliostro

Alessandro di Cagliostro, self-styled Count (and other things), f/k/a Giuseppe Balsamo, 18th century Freemason (of sorts), alchemist, magician, adventurer, con-man, forger, imposter and adventurer. spent his life defrauding the great and not-so-great of the Age of Enlightenment with remarkable success.  In a way he makes a mockery of that time, supposedly one featuring the triumph of reason over superstition.  As far as demonstrating its lack of reason, he's far better at it than the many Romantics of the 19th century and the postmoderns of the 20th, and their successors of the 21st, who try to deny that Age's achievements.  They decried the limits and misapplication of reason; he made great gaping fools of the those who thought themselves reasonable.

He's generally depicted as above, either staring up at the heavens to his right or our left, like Mithras slaying the bull, or to his left our right.  There are many such drawings, paintings and busts of the Count.  Not a bad, or at least not a small, legacy for a relatively poor Sicilian who made good, or bad.  He purported to see a great deal up there, but also everywhere else; spirits, ghosts, treasures revealed to him through his own efforts or through those of his guides, generally angels or fellow mages, though deceased.  Many believed he did, and it seems he managed to live quite well for the most part together with his wife and partner in crime, Serafina, who it seems was quite as adept as he was in making fools of the rich and noble, though perhaps in different ways.  And so, despite being imprisoned now and then, most famously in the Bastille under suspicion of being involved in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, he made his mark on history.

He died in 1795, while imprisoned.  It seems to me he would have managed to show up as a subsidiary player in the French Revolution had he been free, enchanting Robespierre with his discussions with the Supreme Being.

It's interesting how much those he fooled so completely wanted so much to believe that he had occult powers and that there was a vast world of spirits and djinns, angelic and demonic, infesting our lives in the here and now and the afterlife.  And what a success he was in leading them on all sorts of wild goose chases.  Money, jewels, riches of all sorts were his, willingly donate, as it were, by his admirers.  He earned the respect and jealousy even of Casanova, no mean scoundrel himself, who knew him fairly well.  Aleister Crowley thought he was a reincarnation of the Count, and his misdeeds enthrall us even now.  

His great enemy was the Church, of course.  The Inquisition and the Jesuits pursued him and all Freemasons at that time, some even posing to be mystics and magicians themselves in order to learn what was needed to denounce him and others of his ilk.  Casanova himself was a kind of double agent for the Venetian Inquisition after he had fallen on hard times.

Is it possible we owe the agents of the Inquisition thanks for pursuing such con artists, preying on the foolish and hopeful, longing for meaning and gnosis--hidden knowledge known only to initiates?  Or were they merely hoping to do away with a rival encroaching on their territory?

We can't really claim to be more knowing and sophisticated than those he befuddled centuries ago, though.  Crowley managed much the same in bedazzling the gullible in the early 20th century, along with Madame Blavatsky and others.  The Rosicrucians and Freemasons who delved into alchemy, magic and Egyptian and Hermetic lore in Cagliostro's time are with us still, though perhaps not quite as preposterous in this as they once were.

Perhaps now we're merely more inclined to fall for other scams, those more secular and political, but still practiced by enchanters though of another kind.  Which kind of scam will prove more catastrophic for us and the world?

Some Thoughts on Modern Paganism

The word "pagan" is derived from the Latin paganus, which was used to refer to someone from the countryside, someone rustic, unsophisticated, unlearned; something of a bumpkin, I suppose.  As Christianity came to take hold in the Roman Empire, it began to be used, by Christians, as a term of disapproval or contempt, referring to those who were not Christians.  This may make a certain kind of sense, as those who recognized the old gods came to avoid urban areas which Christians came to control or where Christian intolerance was prevalent (except, perhaps, Rome itself, where the aristocratic old families remained stubbornly attached to the older religion).  The old beliefs and rituals survived in the countryside, it's said, for centuries after the advent of Christianity.  They may survive even now, in modified, Christianized form.

Halloween may be considered a particularly pagan time of year.  By Christians, that is.  I'm not sure, myself, just how pagan it may be.  I suppose Christians think it pagan because they associate it with Satan and his minions, and Christians have long thought pagan gods to be demons of one sort or another.  But Satan himself isn't much of a figure in traditional paganism.  There is no Satan among the Greco-Roman pantheon, for example; no Satanic figure at all, really, except physically in the form of Pan.  Pan, though, is otherwise not very Satan-like.  The Devil seems to be a peculiar fixture of the Abrahamic religions.

What's referred to as Modern Paganism, or Neo-Paganism, seems to be groups of people who for various reasons practice what they think to be ancient pagan rituals and hold what they think to be ancient pagan beliefs.  It's claimed that it's growing.  Some modern pagans are adherents of Wicca, a kind of witchcraft revival hatched in the mind of a retired British civil servant in 1954.  Some follow the Norse gods, or certain of them.  Some think of themselves as Druids.  Some are followers of a goddess or the goddess, and are convinced that such worship is in effect the original religion, when society was, it's claimed, matriarchal long before the advent of the sky gods.

Some hold various beliefs which involve nature-worship, theistic, polytheistic or pantheistic.  Some may be considered Deists.  Modern Paganism has been around for some time, I believe, and is in some respects a phenomenon of the late 19th-early 20th century when many became interested in occultism or spiritualism, or became enthralled with ancient Egyptian religion after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen, when Madame Blavatsky and others sought to resurrect Hermeticism or something else which could be said to have a pagan pedigree.

It would seem that Christianity, though otherwise remarkably successful in quashing paganism for centuries, hasn't managed to destroy it utterly.  Nor has its efforts to assimilate it been entirely successful.  It retains its magic.  This shouldn't be unexpected, as it existed and flourished for thousands of years.

I doubt, though, that the pagans of our times live, or think, or believe as did the pagans of the ancient past.  It simply isn't likely that they could after all that's happened.  The picture at the beginning of this post is of a relief showing Marcus Aurelius making sacrifice.  Animal sacrifice was essential in Greco-Roman paganism, performed in complicated rituals.  Livers of animals were perused by haruspices in ancient Rome, a form of divination the Romans learned from the Etruscans.  Who today could honestly ascribe to such ceremonies the significance they were accorded by the ancients?  Who, indeed, could perform them?

Who knows what the Druids did, really, or what they believed?  Our sources of information about them are Roman and so unlikely to be sympathetic or entirely accurate.  How many moderns believe, sincerely, in witchcraft?  How many while joining hands and chanting at Stonehenge or some other ancient site can really claim to be believers of the kind who did the same, if indeed they did the same, so long ago?  None of them knew or had experienced what we know and experience now.  Given that knowledge and experience, would they believe now as they did then?  How could they?

There's no reason (unless we accept the view that they were deceived by demons) to think ancient pagans were not sincerely pious, and it must be assumed the beliefs of many of them were fervent.  But that piety can no longer be shared, or even imagined.

I suspect there's a great deal of Romanticism involved in the efforts to recreate paganism, as well as what may be a longing which cannot be satisfied now by Christianity as an institutional religion.  But we fool ourselves if we believe we can be what pagans were.  They were different from us in matters of faith, in mystic belief, in ways too profound for them to live again in us, or for their beliefs to be shared by those living now.