cribed as
"a doctor initiated into Cabalistic art" and a Rose-Croix; but after
founding his own rite he acquired the name of Grand Copht, that is to
say, Supreme Head of Egyptian Masonry, a new branch that he wished to
graft on to old European Freemasonry.[451] We shall return to his
further masonic adventures later.

In a superior category to Saint-German and Cagliostro was the famous
Swabian doctor Mesmer, who has given his name to an important branch of
natural science. In about 1780 Mesmer announced his great discovery of
"animal magnetism, the principle of life in all organized beings, the
soul of all that breathes." But if to-day Mesmerism has come to be
regarded as almost synonymous with hypnotism and in no way a branch of
occultism, Mesmer himself--stirring the fluid in his magic bucket,
around which his disciples wept, slept, fell into trances or
convulsions, raved or prophesied[452]--earned not unnaturally the
reputation of a charlatan. The Freemasons, eager to discover the secret
of the magic bucket, hastened to enrol him in their Order, and Mesmer
was received into the Primitive Rite of Free and Accepted Masons in
1785.[453]

Space forbids a description of the minor magicians who flourished at
this period--of _Schroeder_, founder in 1776 of a chapter of "True and
Ancient Rose-Croix Masons," practising certain magical, theosophical,
and alchemical degrees; of _Gassner_, worker of miracles in the
neighbourhood of Ratisbonne; of "the Jew Leon," one of a band of
charlatans who made large sums of money with magic mirrors in which the
imaginative were able to see their absent friends, and who was finally
banished from France by the police,--all these and many others exploited
the credulity and curiosity of the upper classes both in France and
Germany between the years of 1740 and 1790. De Luchet, writing before
the French Revolution, describes the part played in their mysteries by
the soul of a Cabalistic Jew named Gablidone who had lived before
Christ, and who predicted that "in the year 1800 there will be, on our
globe, a very remarkable revolution, and there will be no other religion
but that of the patriarchs."[454]

How are we to account for this extraordinary wave of Cabalism in Western
Europe? By whom was it inspired? If, as Jewish writers assure us,
neither Marlines Pasqually, Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, nor any of the
visible occultists or magicians were Jews, the problem only becomes the
more insolubl