Recent revelations of occult goings-on have occasioned another of this blog’s deep dives into high strangeness.
This time, the object of our search is real-life immortals. Are they just the stuff of legend, folklore, and chicanery? Or are there those walking among us who really do live forever?
Voltaire seems to side with the latter in his description of the notorious Count of St. Germain:
He is the man who knows everything and never dies.
Some say Voltaire was being sarcastic. Read the conflicting accounts of the Count’s life and decide for yourself.
The Count of Saint Germain (c. 1710–1784) was a mysterious gentleman who appeared among the royal families of Europe in the eighteenth century, known as der Wundermann.
His varied and unique talents reportedly included chemistry, alchemy, music, and magic. He had no visible means of support, but no lack of resources either. From historical and personal reports, he has been at various times considered a prophet, a charlatan, a healer, a spy, and a visionary.
Quite an impressive CV for one lifetime.
It appears that the Count St. Germain may have arrived on the scene in Europe as early as 1710. At that time, he appeared to be in his mid-forties. The story goes that he always appeared this way. He seemed to never age. From 1737-1742, he was supposedly in Persia studying alchemy. He went to Versailles in 1742 and then in 1743 he was in England for the Jacobite Revolution. He then went to Vienna to visit Frederick the Great and then to Edinburgh in 1745.
Contemporaries described the Count as pale, with “extremely black” hair and a beard. “He dressed magnificently, [and] had several jewels” and was clearly receiving “large remittances, but made no other figure.”
In 1755, Count Saint Germain went to India. When he came back, he stayed in the Royal Chateau of Chambord in Touraine on King Louis XV’s invitation. There he rubbed elbows with Voltaire, who appeared to be impressed by the man.
Impressed enough to at least half-jokingly referred to St. Germain as all-knowing and immortal.
Myths and speculations about Saint Germain began to be widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when he was often referenced in Theosophy. He is said by some to have been the founder of Freemasonry which inspired several of the American Founding Fathers. Others say he may have written most of the works of Shakespeare while simultaneously being the scientific genius known to history as Francis Bacon.
Whoever he was – or is – St. Germain unquestionably left his mark on the Western imagination.
But were any of the many claims of his preternatural powers true?
Consider these contemporary reports.
Horace Walpole mentions the Count St. Germain as being arrested in London on suspicion of espionage (this was during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745), but released without charge:
The other day they seized an odd man, who goes by the name of Count St. Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes [two wonderful things, the first] that he does not go by his right name; and the second that he never had any dealings with any woman – nay, nor with any succedaneum. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him; he is released; and, what convinces me that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of his being taken up for a spy.
Walpole reports that St Germain:
spoke Italian and French with the greatest facility, though it was evident that neither was his language; he understood Polish, and soon learnt to understand English and talk it a little […] But Spanish or Portuguese seemed his natural language.
Walpole concludes that the Count was
… a man of Quality who had been in or designed for the Church. He was too great a musician not to have been famous if he had not been a gentleman.
The Count gave two private musical performances in London in April and May 1749. On one such occasion, Lady Jemima Yorke described how she was
“very much entertain’d by him or at him the whole Time – I mean the Oddness of his Manner which it is impossible not to laugh at, otherwise you know he is very sensible & well-bred in conversation … He is an Odd Creature, and the more I see him the more curious I am to know something about him. He is everything with everybody: he talks Ingeniously with Mr Wray, Philosophy with Lord Willoughby, and is gallant with Miss Yorke, Miss Carpenter, and all the Young Ladies. But the Character and Philosopher is what he seems to pretend to, and to be a good deal conceited of: the Others are put on to comply with Les Manieres du Monde, but that you are to suppose his real characteristic; and I can’t but fancy he is a great Pretender in All kinds of Science, as well as that he really has acquired an uncommon Share in some.
Giacomo Casanova describes in his memoirs several meetings with the “celebrated and learned impostor”. Of his first meeting, in Paris in 1757, he writes:
The most enjoyable dinner I had was with Madame de Robert Gergi, who came with the famous adventurer, known by the name of the Count de St. Germain. This individual, instead of eating, talked from the beginning of the meal to the end, and I followed his example in one respect as I did not eat, but listened to him with the greatest attention. It may safely be said that as a conversationalist he was unequalled.
St. Germain gave himself out for a marvel and always aimed at exciting amazement, which he often succeeded in doing. He was scholar, linguist, musician, and chemist, good-looking, and a perfect ladies’ man. For a while he gave them paints and cosmetics; he flattered them, not that he would make them young again (which he modestly confessed was beyond him) but that their beauty would be preserved by means of a wash which, he said, cost him a lot of money, but which he gave away freely. He had contrived to gain the favour of Madame de Pompadour, who had spoken about him to the king, for whom he had made a laboratory, in which the monarch – a martyr to boredom – tried to find a little pleasure or distraction, at all events, by making dyes. The king had given him a suite of rooms at Chambord, and a hundred thousand francs for the construction of a laboratory, and according to St. Germain the dyes discovered by the king would have a materially beneficial influence on the quality of French fabrics.
This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of ten or twelve small diamonds, one large one of the finest water without any loss of weight. All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him. Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive. In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me.
The Count had a knack for securing noble patronage, including the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the King of France, and finally – or so it’s said – Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel.
The Prince was impressed and installed the Count in an abandoned factory at Eckernförde he had acquired especially for the Count, and supplied him with the materials and cloths that St. Germain needed to proceed with the project. The two met frequently in the following years, and the Prince outfitted a laboratory for alchemical experiments in his nearby summer residence Louisenlund, where they, among other things, cooperated in creating gemstones and jewelry. The prince later recounts in a letter that he was the only person in whom the count truly confided. He told the prince that he was the son of the Transylvanian Prince Francis II Rákóczi, and that he had been 88 years of age when he arrived in Schleswig.
A question unresolved in the source material is just what was meant by “creating gemstones.” Were the Prince and the Count playing with a rock tumbler, or something else …?
Now, if the Count had kept up his activities until the present day, there’s be no mystery here. Reports of his death do exist. But like every other detail of his life, they conflict.
Here’s the official version:
The count died in his residence in the factory on 27 February 1784, while the prince was staying in Kassel, and the death was recorded in the register of the St. Nicolai Church in Eckernförde. He was buried 2 March and the cost of the burial was listed in the accounting books of the church the following day. The official burial site for the count is at Nicolai Church (German St. Nicolaikirche) in Eckernförde.
Case closed, right?
The alchemist of Louisenlund , Count of Saint Germain , was also buried in St. Nicolai , but his tombstone has not been preserved. He fell victim to a storm surge.
So we have church records of the Count’s death and burial but no tombstone, which would imply no positive ID on the actual grave. Also, the exact cause of death is unclear. Did he die at home or did he drown? Eckernförde is on the seacoast, so it’s possible that storm waves flooded his residence. But records also show that the factory where he lived survived, and the Prince gave it to the crown, who turned it into a hospital.
Then there’s the Count’s self-claim of his Transylvanian birth – which may be important, but not for the reason you think it is.
The count claimed to be a son of Francis II Rákóczi, the Prince of Transylvania, which could possibly be unfounded. However, this would account for his wealth and fine education. The will of Francis II Rákóczi mentions his eldest son, Leopold George, who was believed to have died at the age of four. The speculation is that his identity was safeguarded as a protective measure from the persecutions against the Habsburg dynasty.
If St. Germain was indeed the son of Francis II, and the Habsburgs did have it in for him, it would mean that from birth he had powerful enemies it would’ve been wise to hide from. His own father may well have faked St. Germain’s death at age four. And that excellent education of his may have included how to replicate the same feat.
Skipping town, having his best buddy the Prince fake his death, and using a flood to cover up the physical evidence wouldn’t have been hard. Nor would disappearing into cosmopolitan 18th century Europe under yet another false identity.
Food for thought.
For more spooky fun, read my crowd-pleasing horror adventure novel Nethereal.
