, so that by means of the huge increase the
higher degrees conferred it might be quite possible for an exalted adept
to attain the age of 1,500.

Saint-Germain has been represented by modern writers--not only those who
compose his following--as a person of extraordinary attainments, a sort
of super-man towering over the minor magicians of his day.
Contemporaries, however, take him less seriously and represent him
rather as an expert charlatan whom the wits of the _salons_ made the
butt of pleasantries. His principal importance to the subject of this
book consists, however, in his influence on the secret societies.
According to the _Memoires authentiques pour servir a l'histoire du
Comte de Cagliostro_, Saint-Germain was the "Grand Master of
Freemasonry,"[446] and it was he who initiated Cagliostro into the
mysteries of Egyptian masonry.

Joseph Balsamo, born in 1743, who assumed the name of Comte de
Cagliostro, as a magician far eclipsed his master. Like Saint-Germain,
he was generally reputed to be a Jew--the son of Pietro Balsamo, a
Sicilian tradesman of Jewish origin[447]--and he made no secret of his
arden admiration for the Jewish race. After the death of his parents he
escaped from the monastery in which he had been placed at Palermo and
joined himself to a man known as Altotas, said to have been an Armenian,
with whom he travelled to Greece and Egypt[448]. Cagliostro's travels
later took him to Poland and Germany, where he was initiated into
Freemasonry[449], and finally to France; but it was in England that he
himself declared that he elaborated his famous "Egyptian Rite," which he
founded officially in 1782. According to his own account, this rite was
derived from a manuscript by a certain George Cofton--whose identity has
never been discovered--which he bought by chance in London[450]. Yarker,
however, expresses the opinion that "the rite of Cagliostro was clearly
that of Pasqually," and that if he acquired it from a manuscript in
London it would indicate that Pasquilly had disciples in that city. A
far more probable explanation is that Cagliostro derived his Egyptian
masonry from the same source as that on which Pasqually had drawn for
his Order of Martinistes, namely the Cabala, and that it was not from a
single manuscript but from an eminent Jewish Cabalist in London that he
took his instructions. Who this may have been we shall soon see. At any
rate, in a contemporary account of Cagliostro we find him des