In 1745, one of the most intriguing people in history visited London; a man who was said to be over a thousand years old! Some said he was in league with the Devil, others thought he was a Himalayan yogi of the highest order; all that we know is that, according to written historical references, a Count St Germain was apparently on the European scene from 1651 to 1896 - a period of 245 years. Unable to explain the incredible lifespan of this man, the historians either omitted him from the history books or claimed several impostors in different time periods were responsible for the myth. But if we face the unadulterated facts about the count as they were written, they paint a very perplexing picture of a phenomenal man. Here then, is the story.
When the English soldiers returned from the Holy Land after the third Crusade came to a disastrous end in the twelfth century, they brought back with them many fabulous tales of the mysterious Orient.
One particular story the crusaders often told was of a man known in the East as the Wandering Jew. The story went as follows. In the Judgement Hall of Pontius Pilate, there was a Jewish doorkeeper named Cartaphilus, who had actually been present at the trial of Jesus of Nazareth. When Christ was dragging his cross through the streets on the way to Calvary, he halted for a moment to rest, and at this point, Cartaphilus stepped out from the large crowd lining the route and told Jesus to hurry up.
Jesus looked at Cartaphilus and said, "I will go now, but thou shall wait until I return."
The Roman soldiers escorting Christ to the crucifixion site pushed Cartaphilus back into the crowd, and Jesus continued on his way.
What did Jesus mean? thought Cartaphilus, and many years later, the doorkeeper gradually realized that all his friends were dying of old age, while he had not aged at all. Cartaphilus remembered Christ's words and shuddered. He would wander the earth without ageing until Christ's Second Coming.
This tale was dismissed by the religious authorities of the day as an apocryphal yarn, and the legend of the Wandering Jew was later interpreted by the Christians as an allegorical story, symbolizing the global wanderings and persecutions of the Jewish race because of their refusal to accept Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah. The tale gradually passed into European folklore and joined the other fairy tales of the Middle Ages.
Then, in the 13th century, a number of travellers returning to England from the Continent spoke of meeting and hearing of a strange blasphemous man who claimed he had been around when Christ was on earth. These curious reports were later strengthened in 1228 when an Armenian archbishop visited St. Albans. The archbishop told his astonished audience that he had recently dined with an unusual man who confessed to being Cartaphilus, the man who mocked Christ.
Many more encounters with Cartaphilus were reported in the following centuries, and each meeting seemed to be taking place nearer and nearer to Western Europe. Then one day in the year 1740, a mysterious man dressed in black arrived in Paris.
The gaudily-dressed fashion-conscious Parisians instantly noticed the sinister stranger, and admired the dazzling collection of diamond rings on each of his fingers. The man in Black also wore diamond-encrusted shoe-buckles, a display of wealth that obviously suggested that he was an aristocrat, yet nobody in Paris could identify him. From the Jewish cast of his handsome countenance, some of the superstitious citizens of Paris believed he was Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew.
The man of mystery later identified himself as the Count of St. Germain, and he was quickly welcomed by the nobility into the fashionable circles of Parisian life.
In the distinguished company of writers, philosophers, scientists, freemasons and aristocrats, the Count displayed a veritable plethora of talents. He was an accomplished pianist, a gifted singer and violinist, a linguist who spoke fluent Spanish, Greek, Italian, Russian, Portugese, Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, English, and of courese, French. The Count of St Germain was also a fine artist, an historian, and a brilliant alchemist. He maintained that he had travelled widely, and recounted his many visits to the court of the Shah of Persia, where he had learned the closely-guarded science of improving and enlarging gemstones. The Count also hinted that he had learned many other arcane lessons of the occult.
But what stunned his awestruck listeners most was his insinuation that he was over a thousand years old. This came about one evening when the course of conversation turned to religious matters. When the Count was invited to comment on the subject, he movingly described Christ as if he had personally known him, and talked in detail of the miraculous water-into-wine event at the marriage feast of Cana as if he were describing a party-trick. After his peculiar anecdote, the Count became tearful, and in a broken, uncharacteristically sombre voice, he said, "I had always known that Christ would meet a bad end."
The Count of St Germain also spoke of other historical celebrities such as Cleopatra and Henry VIII and as if he had known them personally. Whenever sceptical historians would try to trip the Count up by questioning him about trivial historical details that were not widely known, the Count would always reply with astonishing accuracy, leaving the questioner quite perplexed.
The Count's claim to be much older than he looked was reinforced one day when the old Countess von Georgy met him. She immediately recognized the enigmatic nobleman as the same individual she had met fifty years previously in Venice, where she had been the ambassadress. But she was amazed that the Count still looked the same age now as he did then, which was about forty-five. The Countess was naturally confused by this, and asked the Count St Germain if his father had been in Venice at that time. The Count shook his head and told her that it had been himself, and he baffled the Countess by telling her how beautiful she had looked as a young woman< and how he had enjoyed playing her favourite musical piece on the violin. The Countess recoiled in disbelief and told him, "Why, you must be almost one hundred years old."
"That is not impossible." replied the Count.
"You are a most extraordinary man!" exclaimed the old Countess, "A devil!"
The comparison to a demon touched a sore point in the Count, and in a raised voice, he replied, "For pity's sake! No such names!"
He turned his back on the shocked Countess and stormed out of the room.
The King of France, Louis XV was intrigued by the stories of the mysterious Count St Germain. He sought him out and offered him an invitation to attend the royal court. The Count accepted the invitation, and succeeded in captivating the king and his courtiers, as well as Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress.
During the spectacular banquets that were held at the court, the Count would abstain from food and wine, but would sometimes sip mineral water instead. Furthermore, when the Count did dine, it was always in private, and precisely what he did consume is not known, although some of the courtiers claimed he was a vegetarian.
Count St Germain arrived in London in 1743 and lodged at a house in St Martin's Street. He stayed in the capital for two years, and during that time he set up a laboratory and carried out mysterious experiments in it that seem to have been of an alchemical nature. His work was closely guarded, but seems to have involved attempts at manufacturing artificial diamonds. During his stay in London, the count was a frequent guest at the Kit-Kat club, where he mingled with members of the highest nobility. At this prestigious club, the Count once astounded members by talking of two inventions he was working on; the steam train and steamboat. This was twenty years before James Watt put together his crude prototype of the steam engine, and 84 years before George Stephenson's Rocket steam train of 1829.
In 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion in Britain, the Count St Germain was arrested at a coffee house in Paternoster Row and charged with spying. Horace Walpole, the son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first Prime Minister, mentioned the incident in a letter to his lifelong correspondent, Sir Horace Mann. Walpole wrote:
At a time when English xenophobia was at an all-time high because many foreigners, especially Frenchmen were known to be sympathetic to the Jacobite cause, the Count should have been imprisoned. But instead, he was released. Just why this occurred is still a mystery. One curious report that circulated at the time claimed that the Count used hypnotic suggestion to 'persuade' his detainers that he was innocent. This is a real possibility, because, true enough, Anton Mesmer, who is credited with the discovery of hypnotism, stated years before that the Count possessed a 'vast understanding of the workings of the human mind' and had been directly responsible for teaching him the art of hypnosis.
In 1756, the Count was spotted by Sir Robert Clive in India, and in 1760, history records that King Louis XV sent Monsieur St Germain to The Hague to help settle the peace treaty between Prussia and Austria. In 1762, the Count took part in the deposition of Peter III of Russia and took an active role in bringing Catherine the Great to the throne.
Count St Germain opened a mass-production factory in Venice in 1769 where he developed a synthetic form of silk. During this period he also executed several magnificent sculptures in the tradition of the classical Greeks. A year later he was again active in interfering in the politics of other nations; this time he was seen in the uniform of a Russian General with Prince Alexei Orloff in Leghorn!
After the death of Louis XV in 1774, the man from nowhere turned up unexpectedly in Paris and warned the new monarch, King Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette of the approaching danger of the French Revolution, which he described as a 'gigantic conspiracy' that would overthrow the order of things. Of course, the warning went unheeded, and among the final entries in her diary, Marie Antoinette recorded her regret at not taking the Count's advice.
In February 1784, Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel, Germany, announced the news that the Count was dead, and was to be buried at the local church in Eckenforde. Among the crowds that attended the fueneral service were many prominent occultists, including Count Cagliostro, Anton Mesmer, and the philosopher Louis St Martin.
The coffin was lowered into the grave, and many of the mourners sobbed at what seemed so unbelievable; the death of the immortal count. But that is not the end of the story.
A year later, in 1785 a congress of Freemasons was held in Paris. Among the Rosicrucians, Kabbalists and Illuminati was the supposedly dead Count St Germain.
Thirty-six years after his funeral, the Count was seen by scores of people in in Paris. These included the diarist Mademoiselle d'Adhemar, and the educationalist Madame de Genlis. Both women said the Count still looked like a forty-five year-old.
In 1870 the Emperor Napoleon III was so fascinated by the reports of 'The Undying Count' he ordered a special commission to be set up at the Hotel de Ville to investigate the nobleman. But the findings of the commission never came to a conclusion, because in 1871, an mysterious fire of unknown origin gutted the Hotel de Ville, destroying every document that related to the self-styled count.
The Count St Germain was briefly seen in Milan in 1877, attending a meeting of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons.
In 1896, the theosophist Annie Besant said she had met the Count, and around the same year, Russian theosophist Madame Blavatsky said the Count had been in contact with her, and she proclaimed that he belonged to a race of immortals who lived in an subterranean country called Shambhala, north of the Himalayas.
In 1897, the French singer Emma Calve also claimed that the Count St Germain had paid her a visit, and she called him a 'great chiromancer' who had told her many truths.
The story of the immortal count went out of vogue at the beginning of the Twentieth century - until August 1914, in the early days of World War One. Two Bavarian soldiers captured a Jewish-looking Frenchman in Alsace. During the all-night interrogation, the prisoner of war stubbornly refused to give his name. Suddenly, in the early hours of the morning, the unidentified Frenchman got very irritable and started to rant about the futility of the war. He told his captors, "Throw down your guns! The war will end in 1918 with defeat for the German nation and her allies!"
One of the soldiers, Andreas Rill, laughed at the prisoner's words. He thought that the man was merely expressing the hopes of every Frenchman, but he was intrigued by the prisoner's other prophecies...
"Everyone will be a millionaire after the war! There will be so much money in circulation, people will throw it from windows and no one will bother to pick it up. You will need to carry it around in wheelbarrows to buy a loaf!" the Frenchman predicted. Was he referring to the rampant inflation of post-WWI Germany?
The soldiers scoffed at the prediction. They let the prophet ramble on. He gave them more future-history lessons: "After the confetti money will come the Antichrist. A tyrant from the lower classes who will wear an ancient symbol. He will lead Germany into another global war in 1939, but will be defeated six years on after doing inhuman, unspeakable things.
The Frenchman then started to become incoherent. He started to sing, then began to sob. Thinking he was mad, the soldiers decided to let him go, and he disappeared back into obscurity. His identity is stil unknown. Could he have been the Count St Germain?
Today, most historians regard the Count St Germain as nothing more than a silver-tongued charlatan. But there are so many unanswered questions. What was the source of the Count's wealth? How can we possibly explain his longevity? For that matter, where did he come from? If he had been an impostor, surely someone would have recognized him.
The only surviving manuscript written by the Count, entitled, "La Tres Sainte Trinosophie" is in the library at Troyes, France, and to date, it has resisted every attempt to be fully deciphered, but one decoded section of the text states:
"We moved through space at a speed that can only be compared with nothing but itself. Within a fraction of a second the plains below us were out of sight and the Earth had become a faint nebula."
What does this signify? Could it be that the Count St Germain was some type of traveller in the realms of space and time? A renegade timelord from the future who liked to meddle with history? If this were so, perhaps he really had talked with Christ and the kings of bygone days.
FROM TOM SLEMEN'S "STRANGE BUT TRUE"
ISBN 0-75252-407-0
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
For more offbeat stories from Liverpool writer Tom Slemen, go to these sites:
Ghost City 19
The Liverpool Valentine Ghost
The Devil in the Cavern Club
The Song that can Kill You
The Last Dance
The Welsh Werewolf
The Wail of the Banshee
The Phantom Matchmakers
The Thing in Berkeley Square
The Zodiac Murders Mystery
Cheshire Timewarps
Merseyside Timeslips
The Penny Lane Poltergeist
The Kennedy and Lincoln Coincidences
The UFO that Crashed in Wales
The Mysterious Spring-Heeled Jack
George Washington's Vision of the Future
The Rings on her Fingers
Mysteries of the Titanic - was she Torpedoed?
Who was Hannah Brade?
The Sad Tale of the Little Storyteller
The Dead of Night
Who Was Jack the Ripper?
Three Halloween Tales
Haunted by his Future Wife
A Marriage Made in Hell
Enigma of the Green Children
The Witch Doctor's Curse
Was Jesus an Extraterrestrial?
UFOs and the Old Testament
The Hippy Babysitter
The Sad Spectre of Smithdown Road
The Mysterious Mr Boon - a Victorian Robin Hood
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Vanishing Eskimo Folk
The Lost Family
Star Trekkers of the Middle Ages
UFO Zones
The Ghosts of Christmas
The Finger of Suspicion
The Dark Side of Rock
The Ship that Sailed into Limbo
The Fir Lane Spectre
From A Window
Feel free to e-mail Tom personally with any comments or queries:Tom Slemen
