However, cleverly organized though they were, the Illuminés, composed of very young and passionate men carefully chosen—Weishaupt himself was scarcely twenty-eight when he founded the sect in 1776—did not make much progress, till Baron von Knigge joined them in 1780. He possessed the one faculty that Weishaupt lacked—imagination. Young, monstrously licentious, irreligious and intelligent, he was consumed with an insatiable curiosity for fresh experiences. He had written a number of novels which had attracted some attention and certain pamphlets on morals that had been put on the Index. He had been admitted to most of the secret societies of the day, particularly that of the Freemasons. He had experimented in alchemy and studied every phase of occultism from the philosophy of the Gnostics to that of Swedenborg. Everything that savoured of the supernatural had a profound attraction for him; even sleight of hand tricks, it is said, had engaged his attention. At thirty he had seen, studied and analyzed everything, and still his imagination remained as untired and inquisitive as ever. An ally at once more invaluable and more dangerous it would have been impossible for Weishaupt to have procured.

Admitted to the confidence of Weishaupt this young Hanoverian nobleman rapidly gained an ascendency over him. It was owing to the advice of Knigge that Weishaupt divided the Illuminés into grades after the manner of the Freemasons, and adopted the method of initiation of which the mysterious and terrifying rites were well calculated to impress the proselyte. With a Knigge to invent and a Weishaupt to organize, the Illuminés rapidly increased their numbers and activities. Overrunning Germany they crossed the frontiers preaching, proselytizing, and spreading the gospel of the Revolution everywhere. But this rapid development was not without its dangers. Conscious that the existence of such a society if it became known would inevitably lead to its suppression, Knigge, who was nothing if not resourceful, conceived the idea of grafting it on to Freemasonry, which by reason of its powerful connections and vast proportions would, he trusted, give to Illuminism both protection and the means of spreading more widely and rapidly.

The origin of this association, the oldest known to the world, composed of men of all countries, ranks, and creeds sworn to secrecy, bound together by strange symbols and signs, whose real mystic meaning has long been forgotten, and to-day devoted to the practice of philanthropy on an extensive scale—has been the subject of much speculation. The theory, most generally accepted, is that which supposes it to have been founded at the time and for the purpose of building the Temple of Solomon. But whatever its early history, Freemasonry in its present form first came into prominence in the seventeenth century in England, whence it spread to France and Germany. It was introduced into the former country by the Jacobites early in the eighteenth century with the object of furthering the cause of the Stuarts. On the extinction of their hopes, however, it reverted to its original ideals of equality and fraternity, and in spite of these democratic principles obtained a strong hold upon the aristocracy. Indeed, in France it was from the first a decidedly royalist institution and this character it preserved, outwardly at least, down to the Revolution, numbering nobles and clergy alike among its members, and always having a prince of the blood as Grand Master.

In Germany, on the contrary, where since the Thirty Years’ War popular aspirations and discontent had expressed themselves inarticulately in a multitude of secret societies, the principles of Freemasonry had a political rather than a social significance.

The importance it acquired from the number of its members, its international character, and its superior organization could not fail to excite the hostility of the Church of Rome, which will not tolerate within it the existence of secret and independent associations. The Jesuits had sworn allegiance to the Pope and in their ambition to control the Papacy were its staunchest defenders. But the Freemasons refused to admit the Papal authority, and treated all creeds with equal respect. War between the Church of Rome and Freemasonry was thus inevitable—a war that the Church in such a century as the eighteenth, permeated with scepticism and the desire for individual liberty, was most ill-advised to wage. For it was a war in which extermination was impossible and the victories of Rome indecisive.

Anathematized by Clement XII, persecuted in Spain by the Inquisition, penalized in Catholic Germany by the law, and its members decreed worthy of eternal damnation by the Sorbonne in France, Freemasonry nevertheless managed to find powerful champions. Entrenched behind the thrones of Protestant Europe, particularly that of Frederick the Great, and encouraged by the philosophers who saw in it something more than a Protestant challenge to the Church of Rome, it became the rallying ground of all the forces of discontent and disaffection of the century, the arsenal of all its hopes and ideals, the nursery of the Revolution.

To render it, if possible, suspect even to its patrons Rome denied the humanity of its aims and the boasted antiquity of its origin. According to the stories circulated by the priests, which excited by their fears existed solely in their imagination, the Freemasons were the successors of the old Knights Templars sworn to avenge the abolition of that order by the bull of Pope Clement V and the death of its Grand Master, Jacques Molay, burnt alive by King Philip the Fair in the fourteenth century. But their vengeance was not to be limited to the destruction of the Papacy and the French monarchy; it included that of all altars and all thrones.[9]

This tradition, however, continually repeated and rendered more and more mysterious and alarming by rumour, merely helped to articulate the hatred of the enemies of the old régime who had flocked to Freemasonry as to a camp. As this association had at this period of its history no homogeneity, it was possible for anybody with a few followers to form a lodge, and for each lodge to be a distinct society united to Freemasonry by the community of signs and symbols. It thus became a vast confederation of independent lodges representing all sorts of opinions, often hostile to one another, and possessing each its own “rite” or constitution. Philosophy and occultism alike both found a shelter in it. Even Saint-Martin left his mystic solitude to found lodges which observed the “Swedenborg rite.”

To attach themselves to the Freemasons was therefore for the Illuminés as easy as it was natural. Lodges of Illuminism were founded all over Germany. The number and variety of sects, however, that had found an asylum in Freemasonry by the diversity of their aims tended to weaken rather than strengthen the association. At length, the discovery that impostors, like Schröpfer, Rosicrucians and even Jesuits had founded lodges led to a general council of Freemasons for the purpose of giving the society the homogeneity it lacked. With this object a convention of Masons was held at Wilhelmsbad in 1782 to which deputies were sent from all parts of Europe. Knigge and Weishaupt attended and, perceiving the vast possibilities of the consolidation of the sects, they endeavoured to capture the whole machinery of the organization for the Illuminés, much as the Socialists of to-day have endeavoured to capture the Trades Unions.

The intrigue, however, not only failed, but led to a misunderstanding between the chiefs of Illuminism. Knigge definitely withdrew from the society, the existence and revolutionary aims of which were betrayed two years later, in 1784, by a member who had reached the highest grade, only to discover that the mystic secrets by which he had been attracted to the Illuminés did not exist. This information conveyed to the Bavarian government was confirmed by domiciliary visits of the police who seized many incriminating papers. Weishaupt fled to Gotha, where he found a protector in the occultist Duke, whose friendship he had nursed for years in view of just such a contingency.

But though the society he had formed was broken up, it was too late to stamp out the fire it had kindled. The subterranean rumblings of the Revolution could already be heard. Mysticism which had made use of philosophy in France to sap tyranny was in its turn in Germany turned to political account. From the seeds sown by the Illuminés sprang that amazing crop of ideals of which a few years later Napoleon was to reap the benefit.

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Such, then, was the “curtain” of Cagliostro; woven, so to speak, on the loom of the love-of-the-marvellous out of mystical masonic principles and Schröpfer-Mesmer phenomena.

And now let us turn once more to the personality of the man behind it.