Count Saint Germain: A man who knows everything and who never dies

Count Saint Germain: A man who knows everything and who never dies

Count Saint Germain was a confidant of two kings of France, a dazzlingly rich and gifted social figure, the subject of a thousand rumors — but no one knows to this day where or when he was born, who he was, or when he died. A few believe that he still lives.

It has been supposed that Saint-Germain was the natural son of the widow of Charles II of Spain, although theosophists have made a good case for his being the son of Francis Racoczi II, the prince of Transylvania. Either genealogy would place the year of his birth at about 1690. The musician Jean-Philippe Rameau was certain, however, that he had met the count in 1710, under the name of the Marquis de Montferrat, and stated that he appeared to be in his forties at the time.

The life of the self-styled count is as shadowy as his origin. He seems to have become a celebrity in the 1750s as a friend of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour, who together spent evenings with him simply for the pleasure of his conversation. Not only was he remarkably knowledgeable, but he had other attributes—artistry as a violinist, talent as a painter, skill in alchemy and chemistry, and a largesse with precious stones.

He was known to carry jewels sewn into his clothing and was said to have presented a cross ornamented with gems to a woman he scarcely knew, because she had idly admired it. The count claimed that he had learned how to turn several small diamonds into one large one and to make pearls grow to spectacular size. It was widely suspected that he also knew the secret for making gold out of base metal.

Whether he was a genius or a charlatan, Saint-Germain had the talent to make himself noticed and the subject of gossip. But in Versailles and Paris he was embraced as the confidential adviser of Louis XV. The position earned him the envy and enmity of the kings ministers, who denounced him as an adventurer with a smooth line of talk. Matters came to a head in 1760, when the count—at the behest of the king—involved himself in foreign affairs, going behind the back of the ministry. Threatened with arrest, he was obliged to flee to England, where he stayed for a while, possibly for a period of two years.

From England Count Saint-Germain apparently went to Russia, where—it is claimed—he took part in a conspiracy that put Catherine the Great upon the throne in 1762. After that nothing much is known of the count until 1774, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette came to the throne.

Saint-Germain: The Immortal Count

Count Saint-Germain, whose longevity and young appearance made him seem immortal, was described as “A man who knows everything and who never dies” by his contemporary Voltaire. Some thought the count had found the “Elixir of Youth ”

Saint-Germain now returned to France. It is said that he warned the royal couple of the revolution then 15 years in the future, saying, “There will be a blood-thirsty republic, whose scepter will be the executioner s knife.” On the other hand, he consorted with many whose dabbling in the occult was actually a cover for revolutionary activities, and his real political leanings—if he had any—are still debated.

Secret societies were the fashion in prerevolutionary France, and some of them recognized Saint-Germain as an “adept,” one who knew the ancient wisdoms hinted at in the rites of the Freemasons, Rosicrucians, and Knights Templars. And it was no wonder. In relating events of centuries past, the count would deliberately lead credulous listeners to believe that he had been present. “These fools of Parisians believe that I am five hundred years old,” he once remarked to a friend. “I confirm them in this idea because I see that it gives them much pleasure—not that I am not infinitely older than I appear.” He attributed his youthful appearance in part to his abstemiousness and a diet that consisted principally of oatmeal.

Later he lived in Germany as a protégé of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel. Close friends, they worked together at alchemy. Most reference works say that the count died at the prince’s court on February 27, 1784. According to Maurice Magre, author of Magicians, Seers, and Mystics (1932), Prince Charles was uncommunicative about his friend's death “and turned the conversation if anyone spoke of him. His whole behavior gives color to the supposition that he was the accomplice of a pretended death.”

Many continued to insist that the count was very much alive. Documents of the Freemasons indicate that he represented French Masons at a meeting in 1785. Madame de Genlis claimed to have seen him in Vienna in 1821. Several travelers in the 1800 s were sure they saw him in the Far East and other parts of the world. Theosophist Annie Besant said that she met the count in 1896, incarnated as a “Master,” or spiritual leader. Finally, in 1972, a Frenchman named Richard Chanfray claimed to be Saint-Germain, and to prove it, he appeared on television to demonstrate that he could turn lead into gold as the legendary count was believed to have done.

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Spontaneous Human Combustion: When Truth Is as Strange as Fiction

Spontaneous human combustion was such a well- known phenomenon during the late 18th and 19th centuries that a number of authors used it to dispose of some of their fictional characters.

Spontaneous Human Combustion: When Truth Is as Strange as Fiction

In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, published in the mid-1800’s, Krook, an old, cadaverous, gin-soaked rag-and-bottle merchant, dies gruesomely of spontaneous combustion. Krook was a symbol for all the social evils and inequities then rampant in England, and through his horrible death Dickens prophesied the self-destruction of“all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretenses are made, and where injustice is done.” The chapter depicting Krook's demise concluded:

Call the death by any name [you] will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only— Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

How Dickens Fueled Spontaneous Combustion Truthers

An illustration from Dickens's Bleak House shows William Guppy and a friend as they arrive at Krook's house only to find he had combusted. Nothing of him remained.

When this installment of the serialized Bleak House appeared, the literary critic George Henry Lewes severely chided his old friend Dickens for perpetuating what he felt to be a vulgar and unscientific superstition. But Dickens vigorously defended the reality of spontaneous combustion, citing many documented cases, including those of Mme. Millet of Rheims and of the Countess di Bandi as well as his own memories of inquests he attended when he was still a young reporter. Later, when Bleak House was reissued in a single volume, Dickens continued to defend the authenticity of spontaneous human combustion in his foreword:

I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.

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The earliest literary account of spontaneous combustion is from the 1798 novel Wieland, written by Americas first novelist and master of the gothic, Charles Brockden Brown. The main character is a German pietist who observes the mysterious solitary rites of his religion in a tumbledown wooden shack he calls his chapel. One night his wife is startled by a bright light that bursts above the chapel and by a “loud report, like the explosion of a mine.” She hears horrible shrieks, but by the time she gets to the shack, the light and cries have died away. She finds Wieland “insensible,” his clothing in cinders, his body frightfully burned, but the chapel unharmed. The wretched man dies after terrible suffering:

... the disease ... betrayed more terrible symptoms. Fever and delirium terminated in lethargic slumber.... Yet not until insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction had driven from his chamber and the house everyone whom their duty did not detain.

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In Frederick Marryat’s 1834 novel Jacob Faithful, the hero’s mother is a victim of spontaneous combustion. In his account Marryat closely followed the details of an 1832 case reported in London. Jacob enters his parents’ cabin aboard a barge on the Thames:

The lamp fixed against the after bulkhead, with a glass before it, was still alight, and I could see plainly to every corner of the cabin. Nothing was burning—not even the curtains to my mother’s bed appeared to be singed ... there appeared to be a black mass in the middle of the bed. I put my hand fearfully upon it — it was a sort of unctuous pitchy cinder. I screamed with horror.... I staggered from the cabin, and fell down on the deck in a state amounting to almost insanity.... She perished from what is called spontaneous combustion, and inflammation of the gases generated from the spirits absorbed into the system.

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In Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) there is a regretful mention of the death of a blacksmith combined with relief that the smithy itself had not burned:

He caught fire himself. Something inside him caught fire. Must have had too much to drink. Only a blue flame came out of him, and he smoldered, smoldered, and turned as black as coal. And he was such a clever blacksmith....

Nikolai Gogol is a painting by Afterdarkness

Nikolai Gogol is famous for his social commentary, in which he ridiculed Russian society and officials. Dead Souls, one of his greatest works, contains an episode in

which a man catches on fire. Gogol hypothesized that the flames, presumably induced by alcohol, were the just reward of drunkenness.

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Herman Melville, too, used the device. In Redburn (1849), Miguel, a shanghaied sailor, is found on deck in a stupor, drunk and stinking. As the rest of the horrified crew look on, ...two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between the lips and in a moment, the cadaverous face was covered by a swarm of worms like flames ... the uncovered body burned before us, precisely like a phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea.

Herman Melville’s Soft Withdrawal

Herman Melville's Redburn is based upon his first experience at sea as a cabin boy on a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool. Could it be that he had witnessed an incidence of spontaneous combustion?

And Thomas de Quincey, in the 1856 revised edition of Confessions of an English Opium - Eater, included as one of the ''Pains of Opium'' the fear that the narcotic, like alcohol, might result in spontaneous combustion and that he might himself take leave of the literary world in that fashion.

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The mysterious fiery death was also used by Mark Twain in his Life on the Mississippi (1883):

Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die.

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Finally, in Emile Zola's 1893 novel, Le Docteur Pascal, one of the members of the degenerate Macquart family catches fire from the smoldering tobacco of his pipe while he sits in a drunken stupor, as his sister watches with horror:

At first Felicite thought that it was his linen, his underpants or his vest, which was burning. But, there was no doubt about it, it was his flesh, burning with a flickering blue flame, light, dancing, like a flame spreading over the surface of a bowl of alcohol... it was growing, spreading rapidly and the skin was splitting and the fat beginning to melt.... Now the liquid fat was dribbling through the cracks in his skin, feeding the flame which was spreading to his belly. And Felicite realized that he was burning up, like a sponge soaked in alcohol.

Emile Zola Illustration from 19th century

Emile Zola, leader of French literatures' naturalist school, emphasized in many of his works the influence of heredity on the individual. In Le Docteur Pascal, one of 20 novels in his famous series, Les Rougon-Macquart, he graphically portrayed the death of Antoine Macquart, who burst into flames while in a drunken sleep.

#combustion #humancombustion #spontanehumancombustion #charlesdicken #bleakhouse #HermanMelville #emilezola #LeDocteurPascal #PainsofOpium #ThomasdeQuincey #NikolaiGogol

Daily Strange's Toxic Thursday A Hidden Fire: State of Combustion

Daily Strange's Hidden Fire: State of Combustion

In 1847 a French couple was indicted for murdering the man’s father and burning his body to conceal the crime. They claimed that the 71-year-old man was found in a “state of combustion” in his bed on January 6 of that year. According to the account given in court:

The chamber was filled with a cloud of dense smoke, and one of the witnesses asserted that he saw playing around the body of the deceased, a small whitish flame, which receded from him as he approached. The clothes of the deceased, and the coverings of the bed were almost entirely consumed, but the wood was only partially burnt. There were no ashes and only a small quantity of vegetable charcoal; there was, however, a kind of mixed residue, altered by fire, and some pieces of animal charcoal, which had evidently been derived from the articulations.

The victim’s son and daughter-in-law declared that the deceased, according to his usual practice, had a hot brick placed at his feet when he went to bed the previous evening. When they passed his door two hours later, they noticed nothing out of the ordinary. However, early the next morning the victim’s grandson entered his grandfather’s room and found the old man burning up as described.

The inquest established that the victim was not addicted to drunkenness and that he had been in the habit of carrying “Lucifer” matches (an early type of friction match) in his waistcoat pocket. A Dr. Masson, who was commissioned to investigate the case, had the body exhumed and examined. A partially burned cravat was found around the neck, and part of the sleeve of his nightshirt was intact. His burned hands were attached to the forearms only by some carbonized tendons, which gave way when touched. The legs were detached from the torso and looked as though they had been deliberately cut off, except for the presence of some charring around their edges.

The doctor gave evidence to the effect that he thought it's impossible for the victim to have died of accidental burning or as a result of having been deliberately set on fire after he had been killed. He concluded that the burning resulted from “some inherent cause in the individual” and that perhaps the hot brick had touched something off. All in all, Dr. Masson could not put the facts together as they stood. The case was, as far as he could tell, to be classed as one of spontaneous combustion. The son and daughter-in-law were acquitted.

SOURCE:

Theodoric R. and John B. Beck, Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, 10th ed., Vol.3 2, pp.104-05

#compustion #humancompustion #mystery