Esoteric Coffeehouse

Last time I have shown how the modern vampire story may have originated in Godwin’s St Leon and its offshoots. Today I want to further investigate how the novel of St Leon itself may have drawn on the legends primarily associated with the figure of the Count of St. Germain. First I will say a few things about St. Germain himself, then explore the possible link between his figure and the literary St Leon.  Finally I will draw conclusions as to the influence St. Germain’s legend may have had on the birth of the Vampire Count Dracula.

The 1700s were a time full of gentlemen of mysterious, eccentric and ambiguous character. Of the more renowned ones we remember Count Cagliostro, founder of an Egyptian rite in Freemasonry, Casanova, another famous Freemason and Rosicrucian, and the Count of St Germain.

The Count of St Germain is now mostly remembered as a protégé of Louis XV of France in the decades prior to the French Revolution. Yet apart from the memoirs of some nobles of the time, not much else is known about him. The origins or nationality of the Count are obscure, despite endless speculations since his appearance at the Versailles court until today. Many – including some scholars – believe he was a prince from Transylvania called Ragotzy (1, 2). What is certain is that St Germain customarily changed his name, a fact he admitted of himself (3).

As far as memoirs of him recall, Count of St Germain was the epitome of the “Renaissance man”, speaking at least five languages fluently and without any accent, playing several instruments perfectly, knowledgeable in all the sciences, particularly chemistry and medicine, composing music, painting and writing (4). Pieces of his music are still extant in the British Museum, and his reputation as a talented composer is now being re-evaluated (5). He appeared to be very rich, wearing diamonds and carelessly giving them about, without anyone knowing the source of his wealth. He was reputed as a great alchemist, transforming iron into gold in the presence of nobles (6). His gift of prophecy was claimed particularly by the Countess d’Adhemar, a close friend of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette; he was said to prophesize the French Revolution, the French queen’s death, as well as the future fate of France (7).

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There is a new vampire movie in town called Twilight. Twilight is built on a best-selling novel featuring a forbidden love between a mortal girl, Bella, and an immortal vampire, Edward (1). Like Angel in the series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire-boy Edward is haunted by his own immortality and ‘stuck between two worlds’. Edward is the newest (and perhaps cleanest) of the breed that I would call the ‘good vampires’: he is an innocent as he has inherited his vampirism from his parents and, to top it all, avoids drinking human blood at all costs. His image made me think of the tendency in today’s pop culture to portray romantic, good vampires. Coppola’s Dracula, vampire Louis in Interview with the Vampire or Buffy’s Angel immediately spring to mind. This led me to wonder: what is the prototype of the ‘good vampire’? To find out, I thought to go back to the source of modern vampire stories. At the end of the line I re-discovered one legendary summer night back in 1816.

On a dark and stormy night in Switzerland, a few illustrious friends met at Lord Byron’s Villa Dorati (2). Amongst the invitees the most well known were Percy Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley; a less famous character was Dr. Polidori. Lord Byron came up with the idea of a contest: each should write their own supernatural tale. Out of this competition originated Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yet, there was a second book that today is almost forgotten: Dr. Polidori’s The Vampyre. It is ironic that one rainy night could spawn two major twentieth century pop myths: Frankenstein and the Vampire (later called Dracula).

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Back in the late 1700s, a Freemason by the name of Court de Gebelin was shown for the first time a tarot pack. He studied the cards and a revelation hit him: they were living remnants of ancient Egyptian religion. He was so convinced of his intuition that he wrote an entire treatise on the Tarot and its Egyptian origins (1). He did not offer much in terms of evidence to uphold his conviction, but we must keep in mind that he was writing at a time when the so-called ‘scientific method’ was not part of the humanistic tradition. A friend of his, the Count of Mellet, wrote a supporting essay that went even further by claiming that Tarot was the surviving “book of Thoth” that contained divine Egyptian revelations (2). Gebelin and Mellet’s work gave birth to an entire esoteric tradition that maintained the Egyptian origin of the play pack. Following this tradition, a French cartomancer named Eteilla became famous by expanding on the Egyptian Tarot, and later in the 19th century, the physician Papus affirmed that the Tarot was the “Bible of Bibles”, the book of Hermes Trismegistus, kept alive by the Gypsies (3). It was only at the beginning of the 20th century, in the authoritative work of A.E.Waite, Pictorial Key to the Tarot, that he remonstrated those that believed that the pack could have possibly originated from Egypt (4). However, remnants of the old esoteric belief can still be found in Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth tarot pack and modern tarot creations like the Ancient Egyptian Tarot (5, 6).

Waite’s deconstructionism was based on a rising modern concern with recorded history. In this sense, he was correct: apparently, the first tarot packs in a recognizable form rose in Italy in the 1400s, before spreading far and wide across Europe (7). In the 1600 and 1700s the tarot game was at its peak, being played in many intellectual salons throughout the continent (8). There is little evidence that any mystical or esoteric meaning was associated to the Tarot prior to Gebelin’s revelation: apparently it was only in the early 1700s that symbolism began to be associated with it (9). What is certain is that, after Gebelin and Mallet’s “manifestos”, Tarot became less and less of a game and more and more of an instrument of divination, meditation or esoteric philosophy, as it remains until today. You can hardly hear of anyone actually playing the Tarot, even though except for the 22 trumps, the others are very similar to the normal playing cards.

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Since the Apocalypse failed to occur in 2000, there is a new end of the world being prophesied: December 21, 2012. Apparently, the ancient Mayan calendar “reset” itself on this date, the end of a “Great Cycle” (1). As this date corresponds to a significant astronomical event, the Sun crossing the Equator of the Milky Way, expectations of a ‘new’ apocalypse are on the rise (2). In this context, what strikes me is how a prophecy that has been made more than one thousand years ago by an obscure culture is making headlines today. It made me think about the long lasting power of the millennial tradition in Western culture. Chances are, if nothing of note occurs on 21 December, the attention will be focused on 2060, the date Isaac Newton predicted for the apocalypse (3).  Apocalyptic-millennial thinking is nothing new to the West: it has been pervasive for two thousand years or more, and no past ‘failed’ prediction impeded believers to move on to another apocalyptic date.  To observe millennial thinking in process and its results, I’m going to briefly look at a “case study”: the Renaissance.

Before proceeding, perhaps it would be useful to differentiate between “apocalypse” and “millenarianism”. Apocalypse refers to the tragic events at the end of days: the emphasis is on catastrophe, suffering, dramatic events, portents and death. Millenarianism, on the other hand, is a belief in the transformation of the world into a better place. I see these as two sides of the same coin: apocalypse is the destructive aspect, and millenarianism the positive, constructive side. They do not have to occur together, but most often they do: a more or less dramatic change has to take place for the world to be transformed.

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