Theosophy - The Count de Saint-Germain and H.P.Blavatsky - Two Messengers of the White Lodge - by H.S. Olcott
Adyar
Pamphlet No 90, June 1918
The Count de Saint-Germain and
H.P.B.-
Two
Messengers of the White Lodge
By
H.S. Olcott
[Reprinted from The Theosophist July 1905]
Theosophical
Publishing House - Adyar, Chennai (Madras) India
To
me, one of the most picturesque, impressive and admirable characters in modern
history is the wonder-worker whose name heads this article. The world does not
see him as a recluse of the desert or the jungle, unwashed, wrinkled, hairy
and clothed in rags, living apart from his fellow men and devoid of human sympathies;
but as one who amid the splendour of the most brilliant European courts, equalled
the greatest of the personages who move across the canvas of history. He towered
above them all -- kings, nobles, philosophers, statesmen and men of letters,
in the majesty of his personal character, the nobility of his ideals and motives,
the consistency of his acts and the profundity of his knowledge, not only of
the mysteries of Nature, but also of the literature of all peoples and epochs.
By reading all I could find about him, including the instructive articles of
Mrs Cooper-Oakley in The Theosophical Review (Vol 21 and 22) I have come
to love as well as to admire him; to love him as did H.P.B. ; and for the same
reason --- that he was a messenger and agent of the White Lodge, accomplishing
his mission with unselfish loyalty and doing all that lay within man’s
power to benefit others.
The
recent reading of a biographical memoir under the form of an historical romance,
of the famous “Souvenirs” of the Baron de Gleichen; of an interesting
article in Vol 6 of Le Lotus Bleu; of the article on the Count in the
Encyclopedia Britannica and other publications, has freshened up all
my memories of what I had heard about him, and, more important still, has persuaded
me of his identity with one of the most charming of the Unseen Personages who
stood behind the masque of H.P.B. during the writing of Isis Unveiled.
The more I think of it, the more fully am I persuaded of the truth of this surmise.
Before
going into these details, however, it will be well just simply to say that one
day, in the eighteenth century, he appeared in France under the name above given.
It is said that he had taken it from an estate bought by him in the Tyrol. Mrs
Cooper-Oakley gives, on the authority of Mme D’Adhémar, a list
of the different names under which this maker of epochs had been known, from
the year 1710 to 1822. I cite the following: Marquis de Montferrat, Comte Bellamarre,
Chevalier Schoening, Chevalier Weldon, Comte Soltikoff, Graf Tzarogy, Prinz
Ragoczy, and finally, Saint-Germain, Mrs Cooper-Oakley, with the help of friends,
made an industrious search in the libraries of the British Museum and in those
of several European kingdoms. She patiently collated from various sources bits
of history which go to identify the great Count with the personages known under
these different titles. But it is conceded by all who have written about him
that the real secret of his birth and nationality was never discovered; all
the labours of the police authorities of different countries resulted only in
failure. Another fact of great interest is that no crime nor criminal intention
nor deception was ever proved against him; his character was unblemished, his
aims always noble. Though living in luxury and seemingly possessed of boundless
wealth, no one could ever learn whence his money came; he kept no bank account,
received no cash remittances, enjoyed no pension from any government, refused
every offer of presents and benefits made him by King Louis XV, and other sovereigns,
and yet his generosity was princely. To the poor and miserable, the sick and
the oppressed, he was an incarnate Providence ; among other public benefactions,
he founded a hospital in Paris, and possibly others elsewhere.
Grim, in his celebrated “Correspondance Litteraire,” which is described by the Encyc Brit,
as “the most valuable of existing records of any important literary period,” affirms that St-
Germain was “the man of the best parts he had ever seen”. He knew all languages, all
history, all transcendental science; took no present nor patronage, refused all offers of
such, gave lavishly, founded hospitals, and worked ever and always unflaggingly for the
benefit of the race. One would think that such a man might have been spared by the
slanderer and calumniator, yet he was not; while yet living and since his death (or
disappearance, rather) the vilest insults have been showered upon his memory. Says the
Encyc Brit, he was “a celebrated adventurer of the eighteenth century who by the assertion
of his discovery of some extraordinary secrets of nature exercised considerable influence
at several European Courts. . . .It was commonly stated that he obtained his money from
discharging the functions of spy to one of the European Courts.”
The identical opinion of him is echoed by Bouilferet in his Dictionnaire d’Histoire et de
Geographie, and by various other writers.
We
have various descriptions of the personal appearance of Count St-Germain, and
although they differ somewhat in details, yet all describe him as a man in radiant
health, and of unflagging courtesy and good humour. His manners were the perfection
of refinement and grace. He seems to have been a remarkable linguist, speaking
fluently and usually without foreign accent the current languages of Europe.
One writer, signing himself Jean Léclaireur, says in an interesting article
on “Le Secret du Comte de Saint-Germain,” in the Lotus
Bleu, Vol VI, 314-319, that he was familiar with French, English, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Danish, Swedish and many oriental dialects.
His accomplishments in this latter respect supply one of the points of resemblance
which are so striking between himself and H.P.B. For His Highness the late Prince
Emil de Sayn-Wittgenstein, A.D.C. to the Emperor Nicholas and an early member
of our Society, wrote me once that when he knew H.P.B. at Tiflis, she was famed
for her ability to speak most of the languages of the Caucasus — Georgian,
Mingrelian, Abhasian, etc., while we ourselves have seen her producing literature
of a superior class in Russian, French and English. But the more one reads about
Saint-Germain and knows about H.P.B. the more numerous and striking are the
resemblances between the two great occultists. Mrs Cooper-Oakley in her careful
compilation says (Theos. Rev Vol XXI, p 428): “It was almost universally
accorded that he had a charming grace and courtliness of manner. He displayed,
moreover, in society a great variety of gifts, played several musical instruments
excellently, and sometimes showed faculties and powers which bordered on the
mysterious and incomprehensible. For example, one day he had dictated to him
the first twenty verses of a poem, and wrote them simultaneously with both hands
on two separate sheets of paper -- no one present could distinguish one sheet
from the other.”
Mr.
Léclaireur, in the article above noticed, has summarized many points
about Count St-Germain which corroborate the foregoing and seem to be carefully
compiled from the literature of the subject. He says that: “His beauty
was remarkable and his manners splendid; he had an extraordinary talent for
elocution, a marvelous education and erudition. . . . An accomplished musician,
he played on all instruments, but was particularly fond of the violin; he made
it vibrate so divinely that two persons who heard him and afterwards the famous
Italian master, Paganini, placed the two artists on the same level.” Here
we recall the superb facility of H.P.B. as a pianist, her butterfly-like touch,
her improvisatorial faculty and her knowledge of technique. Baron Gleichen quotes
him as saying: “You do not know what you are talking about; only I can
discuss the matter, which I have exhausted, as I have music, which I abandoned
because I was unable to go any farther in it.” The Baron was invited to
his house with the ostensible object of examining some very valuable paintings,
and the Baron says that “he kept his word, for the paintings which he
showed me had the character of singularity or of perfection, which made them
more interesting than many pictures of the first rank, especially a holy family
of Murillo which equalled in beauty that of Raphael at Versailles; but he showed
me much more than that, viz., a quantity of gems, especially of diamonds,
of surprising colour, size, and perfection. I thought I was looking at the treasures
of the Wonderful Lamp. There were among others an opal of monstrous size and
a white sapphire as large as an egg, which paled by its brilliancy that of all
the stones that I placed beside it for comparison. I dare to profess to be a
connoisseur in jewels, and I declare that the eye could not discover the least
reason to doubt the fineness of these stones, the more so since they were not
mounted.”
Many
years ago my sister, Mrs Mitchell, feeling indignant at the base slanders that
were being circulated against H.P.B. and myself, and wishing to place on record
some of the facts that came under her own notice while occupying, with her husband
and children, a flat in the same building as ourselves, published in a London
journal an article in which the following incident among others is given: “
One day she said she would show me some pretty things; and going to a small
chest of drawers that stood beneath one of the windows, she took from them many
pieces of superb jewelry; brooches, lockets, bracelets and rings, that were
ablaze with all kinds of precious stones, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, etc.
I held and examined them, but on asking to see them the next day I found only
empty drawers.” My sister thought they must have been worth a great many
thousands of dollars. Now as I happened to know that H.P.B. had no such collection
of precious stones nor even a small portion of them, my only possible inference
is that she had played on my sister’s sight one of those optical illusions
which she described as psychological tricks. I am inclined to believe that St-Germain
did the same to Baron Gleichen. True, these wonder workers can at their pleasure
turn such an illusion into a reality and make the gems solid and permanent.
Take, for instance, my “rose-ring” (see O.D.L., I 96) which she
first made to leap out of a rose which I was holding in my hand, and, eighteen
months later, while my sister held it, caused three small diamonds to be set
in the gold in the form of a triangle. Many persons in different countries have
seen this ring, and some have seen me write with it on glass, thus proving the
stones to be genuine diamonds. The ring is still in my possession, and during
the intervening thirty years has not changed its character at all. Moreover,
there are the cases of her duplication of a yellow diamond for Mrs Sinnett at
Simla, of sapphires for Mrs Carmichael and other friends at different places,
her making her mystic seal-ring, now in Mrs Besant’s possession, by rubbing
between her hands my own intaglio seal-ring; and the hybrid silver sugar-tongs,
and, first and last, many articles of metal and stone which, having been duly
described in my O.D.L., need not be here recapitulated. The reader will see
that the respective phenomena of St-Germain and H.P.B. complement and corroborate
each other, and that they go to show that among the branches of occult science
that are familiar to adepts and their advanced pupils, is to be included an
intimate knowledge of and control over the mineral kingdom. St-Germain told
somebody that he had learnt from an old Hindu Brahmin how to “revive”
pure carbon, that is to say to transmute it into diamond; and Kenneth Mackenzie
is quoted as saying (in his Royal Masonic Cyclopedia, p 644): “In
1780, during his visit to the French ambassador to the Hague, he smashed with
a hammer a superb diamond which he had produced by alchemical means; the mate
to it, also made by him, he had sold to a jeweler, for the price of 5.500 louis
d’or.”
We have nothing in any of these accounts going to show whether any of the gems made
by him remained solid or whether they dissolved back into the astral matter out of which
they had been composed, except in the specific cases where a gem had been given to
some individual, or in that where one had been sold to a jeweler. To me it is unthinkable
that he should have sold the diamond for the sake of raising 5,500 louis, for the fact of his
having apparently unlimited command of money shows that he could not have needed so
small a sum.
We have spoken above of the dissolution of a gem magically created. If the reader will
refer to O.D.L., I, 197 and 198, he will see that the first picture of “Chevalier Louis,”
precipitated by H.P.B. on a certain evening, had faded out by the next morning, but that
when she again caused it to appear, at Mr. Judge’s request, she had “fixed” it so that it
remains unchanged to the present time of writing. My explanation of that is that it
depended entirely upon the adept operator whether he should make a fugitive precipitation
of the thought-picture, leaving it to be acted upon and dissipated by the attraction of space,
or on making the deposit of pigment, cut off the current which connected it with space and
so leaving it a permanent pigmentary deposit on the paper or other surface. In fact I
strongly advise anyone who wants to get at the mysteries of Count St-Germain, Cagliostro
and other wonder-workers, to read in connection with them the various accounts of H.P.B’s
phenomena which have been published by credible witnesses. Take for example the
quotation made by Mrs Cooper-Oakley from the “Souvenirs de Marie-Antoinette.” by the
Countess d’Adhémar, who had been an intimate friend of the Queen and who died in 1822.
She is giving an interesting account of an interview between Her Majesty, the Count de
Maurepas, herself and St-Germain. The last-named had paid Mme D’Adhémar a visit of
momentous importance to the Royal family and to France, had departed and the minister,
M. de. Maurepas, had come in and was slandering St-Germain outrageously, calling him
a rogue and a charlatan. Just as he had said that he would send him to the Bastille, the
door opened and St-Germain entered, to the consternation of M. de Maurepas and the
great surprise of the Countess. Stepping majestically up to the Minister, St-Germain
warned him that he was ruining both monarchy and kingdom by his incapacity and
stubborn vanity, and ended with these words: “Expect no homage from posterity, frivolous
and incapable Minister! You will be ranked among those who cause the ruin of empires.”
. . . “M. De Saint-Germain, having spoken thus without taking breath, turned towards the
door again, shut it and disappeared. . . All efforts to find the Count failed,” Compare this
with the several disappearances of H.P.B. in and near Karli Caves and elsewhere, and see
how the two agents of the Brotherhood employed identical means for making themselves
invisible at the critical moment.
He kept house sumptuously and accepted invitations to dinner from kings and other
important persons, but always with the understanding that he should not be expected to
eat or drink with the company; and, in fact, he never did, giving as his excuse that he was
obliged to follow a special and very strict regimen. It was said that he kept his body strong,
young and healthy by taking elixirs and essences, the composition of which he kept secret;
it is alleged that his visible diet was only what we might call oatmeal porridge, and that also
was prepared by himself. M. Léclaireur says that he “often retired very late, but was never
exhausted; he took great precautions against the cold. He often threw himself into a
lethargic condition which lasted from thirty to fifty hours, and during which his body seemed
as if dead. Then he reawakened, refreshed and rejuvenated and invigorated by this
magical repose, and stupefied those present by relating all important things that had
passed in the city or in public affairs during the interval. His prophecies as well as his
foresight never failed.”
This recalls the story told by Collin de Planey (Dictionnaire Infernal, Vol II, 223) about
Pythagoras who, on returning from his journeyings on the astral plane “knew perfectly all
that had happened on earth during his absence”.
To continue our comparison of the two “messengers,” friends and co-workers, we see that
H.P.B. did not confine herself to porridge or even a non-flesh diet, but, like the Count, she
too would fall into these states of lethargy when she was oblivious to surrounding things,
but would come back full of her experiences during the interval of her temporary physical
abstraction. In the first Vol of O.D.L. these “brown study” states are described, as also the
changes in her moods and manners as one Master after another came “on guard”. It is
also recorded how the new entity coming in had to pick up out of the brain of the body the
register of what had just been transpiring; sometimes making palpable mistakes.
Unfortunately we have no record of the effect produced on St-Germain by suddenly
awaking him out of this recuperative trance condition, probably because he always took
precautions against such a thing happening; but in the case of H.P.B. I have described the
great shock that she experienced when suddenly and unexpectedly dragged back into
physical consciousness; more than once she held my hand against her heart to let me feel
it beating like a trip-hammer, and she told me that, under certain circumstances, such a
thing might be fatal. I am not alluding to those cases where she would leave her body for
one or more hours to be worked by one or other of the Masters who were superintending
the production of Isis Unveiled, but only to those brief withdrawals from the external to the
internal plane of consciousness.
In another point there was a great difference between the two messengers. St-Germain
would, very often, when the conversation turned upon any given epoch of the past,
describe what had happened as though he had been present, and, as Baron Gleichen tells
us, “would depict the most trifling circumstances, the manners and gestures of the
speakers, even the room and the place in it they had occupied, with a detail and vivacity
which made one think that one was listening to a man who had really been present . . . He
knew, in general, history minutely, and drew up mental pictures and scenes so naturally
represented, that never had any eye-witness spoken of a recent adventure as did he of
those of the past centuries.” The revelations of psychometry have made it perfectly easy
for us to understand how a man of St-Germain’s evident adeptship could recall out of the
“galleries of the astral light the incidents of any given historical epoch, even to the details
of house construction, furnishing and decoration, and the appearance, actions, speech and
gestures of the inhabitants; and by spreading out his observations like a spider’s web in
different directions, get at any facts going on. Without having been incarnate at that remote
time, he would thus make himself in very truth an eye-and ear-witness of the period in
question.” Such is the splendid potentiality of Buchanan’s epoch-making discovery. Do we
not find in Denton’s Soul of Things scores of cases where trained psychometers did this
very thing? And if the members of Denton’s family could do so much without previous
occult training, why should not so grandiose a being as St-Germain have been able to do
much more?
We
have seen above that he persistently mystified those inquisitive persons of
all ranks --- royal, noble and plebeian --- who tried to penetrate the secret
of his birth, country and age. Have we not also seen H.P.B. playing the same
trick on her troublesome inquisitors? Sometimes she would say that she was eighty
years old, sometimes that she was born in the eighteenth century, and we have
on record the testimony of a newspaper correspondent who, after watching her
throughout the evening, said and wrote that she seemed at one moment an old
woman and at the next a young girl, while more than one person saw her physical
appearance change from one to the other sex. Then we have the case where, when
she and I were alone in the room of our “Lamasery” at New York,
she attracted my attention and I saw rise out of her body that of a Master with
his Indian complexion and black hair, thus for the moment extinguishing the
woman of Caucasian type, blue eyes and light hair, who sat before me.
Léclaireur says, in proof of the Count’s prodigious memory, that “he could repeat exactly
and word for word the contents of a newspaper which he had skimmed over several days
before; he could write with both hands at once; with the right a poem, with the left a
diplomatic paper, often of the greatest importance. Many living witnesses could, at the
beginning of this century (18th), corroborate these marvelous faculties. He read, without
opening them, closed letters, and even before they had been handed him.” Here, again,
we are made to recall the feats of the same sort which H.P.B. did in the presence of
witnesses, myself included. She, too, would not only read closed letters before touching
them, but also pick up a pencil and write their contents, as in the cases of Mr. Massey and
others at New York, and that of the Australian Professor Smith at Bombay, which latter was
interesting. One morning Damodar received four letters by one post, which contained
Mahâtmic writing, as we found on opening them. They were from four widely separated
places and all post-marked. I handed the whole mail to Prof. Smith, with the remark that
we often found such writings inside our mail correspondence, and asked him first to kindly
examine each cover to see whether there were any signs of its having been tampered with.
On his returning them to me with the statement that all were perfectly satisfactory, so far
as could be seen, I asked H.P.B. to lay them against her forehead and see if she could find
any Mahâtmic message in either of them. She did so with the first few that came to hand,
and said that in two there was such writing. She then read the messages clairvoyantly and
I requested Prof. Smith to open them himself. After again closely scrutinizing them, he cut
open the covers, and we all saw and read the messages exactly as H.P.B. had deciphered
them by clairvoyant sight.
A form of phenomenon, however, which we do not find recorded of St-Germain, was that
of the interception of letters in the post, which in my opinion is among the most remarkable
things that I ever witnessed. The whole story is told in O.D.L., First Series, pp 35, 36, 37,
but it may be summarized in a few words. I had come over from New York to Philadelphia
on a visit to H.P.B., as I was giving myself a short rest after seeing Eddy’s book, People
from the Other World, out of the press. Intending to stay only two or three days and not
knowing what my Philadelphia address would be, I had left no instructions for the
forwarding of my postal matter; but finding that she insisted on my making a longer visit,
I went to the Philadelphia Post Office, gave the address of her house and asked that if
anything came for me, it should be sent there. I was expecting nothing, but somehow or
other I was impelled to do as I did. That very afternoon, letters from South America, Europe
and some of the Western States of the Union were delivered at the house by the postman,
H.P.B’s house address being written in lead pencil on each cover. But, and this is what
gives the stamp of evidential value to the phenomenon, the New York address was not
crossed off, nor did the post-mark of the New York Post Office appear on the backs of the
covers, as proof that they had reached the destination intended by my several
correspondents. Anybody with the least knowledge of postal matters will see the great
importance of these details. Now, on opening the letters which came to me in this fashion
during my fortnights visit to my colleague, I found inside many of them, if not all, something
written in the same handwriting as that in letters I had received in New York from the
Masters, the writing having been made either in the margins or any other blank space left
by the writers. The things written were either some comments on the character or motives
of the writer, or matters of general purport as regards my occult studies.
The histories of the times all speak of St-Germain and of the important part played by him
in current politics of more than one reign. Thus he is said to have had much to do with the
accession of the Empress Catherine to the throne of Russia. He was the intimate friend of
Frederick the Great of Prussia, of Louis XV of France, of the Landgraf von Hessen, and
of various princes and other great nobles. For many years he occupied a great place in the
public thought of various courts and nations, but, of a sudden, in the year 1783, he
disappeared from public view with the same mystery attending his exit from the scene as
attended his appearance. We have no record whatever of his fate, beyond the statement
of his friend, the Prince of Hesse Cassel, that he died in 1783, while making some
chemical experiments in Eckrenford, near Schleswig. There is absolutely no historical
record of the last illness or death of this man who, for many years, agitated the courts of
Europe, nor one word about the disposal of the alleged colossal fortune, in gems and gold,
that he had always with him. As Léclaireur says: “A man who had so brilliant a career
cannot be extinguished so suddenly as to fall into oblivion.”
Moreover,
as the same author says: “It is reported that he had a very important
interview with the Empress of Russia in 1785 or 1786. It is related that he
appeared to the Princess de Lamballe when she was before the revolutionary tribunal,
shortly before they cut off her head, and to the mistress of Louis XV, Jeanne
Dubarry, while she was awaiting the fatal stroke, in 1793. The Countess d’Adhémar,
who died in 1822, left a manuscript note, of date May 12th, 1821,
and fastened with a pin to the original MS., in which she says that she saw
M. de Saint-Germain several times after 1793, viz., at the assassination
of the Queen (Oct 16th, 1793); the 18th Brumaire (Nov
9th, 1799); the day following the death of the Duke d’Enghien
(1804); in the month of January, 1813; and on the eve of the murder of the Duke
de Berri (1820). “It is to be observed in this connection that these later
visits to his friend, the Countess, after his disappearance from Hesse Cassel
and his supposed death, may have been made in the same way as that of a Master
to myself at New York --- in the projected astral body; for we have, in Mrs
Cooper-Oakley’s article, a quotation from Grafer’s “Memoirs,”
the statement that St-Germain told him and Baron Linden that he should disappear
from Europe at about the end of the 18th century, and betake himself
to the region of the Himalayas, adding: “I will rest; I must rest. Exactly
in eighty-five years will people again set eyes on me. Farewell, I love you.”
The date of this interview may be deduced approximately from another article
in the same volume, where it is said: “St-Germain was in the year 1788,
or 1789, or 1790, in Vienna, where we had the never-to-be-forgotten honour of
meeting him.” If we take the first date, then eighty-five years would
bring us to 1873, when H.P.B. came to New York to find me; if the second, then
the eighty-five years would coincide with our meeting at Chittenden; if the
third, that marks the date of the foundation of the Theosophical Society and
the commencement of the writing of Isis Unveiled, in which work, as above
stated, I am persuaded that St-Germain was one of the collaborators.
I have thus very briefly, yet in good faith, traced the connection between these two
mysterious personages, St-Germain and H. P. Blavatsky, messengers and agents of the
White Lodge, as I believe. The one was sent to help in directing the convergent lines of
karma that were to bring about the political cataclysm of the 18th century with all its
appalling consequences, to let loose the moral cyclone which was to purify the social
atmosphere of the world; the other came at a time when materialism was to meet its
Waterloo and the new reign of spiritual high-thinking was to be ushered in through the
agency of our Society.
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