fluid in his magic bucket, around which his disciples wept, slept, fell into trances or convulsions, raved or prophesied--earned not unnaturally the reputation of a charlatan. The Freemasons, eager to discover the secret of the magic bucket, hastened to enrol him in their Order, and Mesmer was received into the Primitive Rite of Free and Accepted Masons in 1785.
Space forbids a description of the minor magicians who flourished at this period--of Schroeder, founder in 1776 of a chapter of "True and Ancient Rose-Croix Masons," practising certain magical, theosophical, and alchemical degrees; of Gassner, worker of miracles in the neighbourhood of Ratisbonne; of "the Jew Leon," one of a band of charlatans who made large sums of money with magic mirrors in which the imaginative were able to see their absent friends, and who was finally banished from France by the police,--all these and many others exploited the credulity and curiosity of the upper classes both in France and Germany between the years of 1740 and 1790. De Luchet, writing before the French Revolution, describes the part played in their mysteries by the soul of a Cabalistic Jew named Gablidone who had lived before Christ, and who predicted that "in the year 1800 there will be, on our globe, a very remarkable revolution, and there will be no other religion but that of the patriarchs."
How are we to account for this extraordinary wave of Cabalism in Western Europe? By whom was it inspired? If, as Jewish writers assure us, neither Marlines Pasqually, Saint-Germain,