x-Germain Saint - Two Messengers of the White Lodge,
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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.
”
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