The story of the mysterious Count De St Germain

From an original book by Thomas Slemen ,Strange But True ISBN 0-75252-407-0 Available from Woolworth in the UK for £3.99

When English soldiers returned from the Holy Land after the third Crusade came to a disastrous end in the twelfth century, they brought back many fabulous tales of the mysterious orient.

One particular story they often told was of a man known in the east as the "Wandering Jew". The story went thusly. In the judgement halls of Pontius Pilate, there was a Jewish doorkeeper called Cartaphilus, who had actually been present at the trial of Jesus of Nazareth. When Jesus was dragging his cross through the streets on his way to Calvary, he halted for a moment to rest, at this point; Cartaphilus stepped out from the 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.

Cartaphilus had no idea what Jesus meant until many years later he realised that all of his friends were dying of old age, but he had not aged at all. The doorkeeper 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 a allegorical story, symbolising 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 thirteenth century, a number of travellers returning to England from the continent spoke of meeting or 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 occur nearer and nearer to western Europe. Then one day in 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 suggested 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, Portuguese, Chinese Arabic, Sanskrit, English and of course French. The count of St. Germain was also a fine artist, 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 learnt the closely guarded science of improving and enlarging gemstones. The count also hinted that he had learnt many arcane lessons of the occult.

But what stunned his awe-struck listeners most was his claim that he was over a thousand years old. This assertion came about one evening when the conversation turned to religious matters. The count 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 Cana as if he were describing a party trick. After this peculiar anecdote, the count became tearful, and in a broken , uncharacteristically sombre voice said, " I have always known that Christ would meet a bad end."

The count of St. germain also spoke of other historical celebrities as if he had been an eye witness to their deeds. Whenever sceptical historians tried to trip him up by questioning him with trivial details that were not widely known, the count would always reply with astonishing accuracy, leaving the questioner quite perplexed.

The counts claim to be much older than he looked was reinforced one day when the old Countess von Georgy met him. She immediately recognised the enigmatic nobleman as the same individual she had met 50 years previously in Venice, where she had been the ambassadress. But she was amazed that the count looked exactly the same age as he had then., which was about 45, the countess was naturally confused by this and asked him if his father had been in Venice at that time. The count shook his head and told her that it had been he, and preceded to baffle the countess by telling her how beautiful she had looked as a young woman and how he had enjoyed playing her favourite classical piece on the violin. The countess recoiled at this in disbelief and told him, "Why you must be almost 100 years old." "That is not impossible", replied the Count. "You are a most extraordinary man", exclaimed the countess, "a devil". The comparison to a demon touched a sore point in the count, and in a raised voice said "for pities sake ,no such names"

He then 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 courts. He 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, 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. precisely what he did consume is not known, although some of the courtiers claimed that he was a vegetarian.

In 1745 the year of the Jacobite Rebellion in Britain, Count St Germain turned up in London, where he was arrested on a charge of 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: "The other day they seized an odd man who goes by the name of the Count St Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name. He sings and lays on the violin wonderfully, is mad and not very sensible."

At a time when English xenophobia was at an all-time high because many foreigners, especially Frenchmen, were know 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 Count used hypnotic suggestion to "persuade" his detainers that he was innocent. This is a real possibility; Anton Mesmer, who is credited with the discovery of Hypnotism, had 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 settle the peace treaty between Prussia and Austria. In 1762, the Count took part in the deposition of Peter III of Russia and played an active role in bringing Catherine the Great to the throne.

The 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 with 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" and 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 to be buried at the local church in Eckenforde. Among the crowds that attended the funeral service were many prominent occultists, including Count Cagliostro, Anton Mesmer and the philosopher Louis St Martin. The coffin was lowered into the ground and many of the mourners sobbed at what seemed so unbelievable; the death of an immortal Count. But that is not the end of the story.

A year later, 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 Paris. These included the diarist Mademoiselle d'Adhemar, and the educationalist Madame de Genlis. Both women said the Count still looked like a 45 year old. In 1870 Emperor Napoleon III was so fascinated by the "Undying Count" that he ordered a special commission be set up at the Hotel de Ville to investigate the nobleman. But the findings of the committee never came to a conclusion because, in 1871 a mysterious fire gutted the Hotel de Ville, destroying every document that related to the self styled Count.

The Count St Germain was then briefly seen in Milan in 1867, 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. She proclaimed that he belonged to a race of immortals who lived in a subterranean country called Shambhala, north of the Himalayas.

In 1897, the French singer Emma Calvay* also claimed the Count St Germain had paid her a visit, and she called him a "great chi romancer", 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, when two Bavarian, when 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 post war inflation in Germany? The soldiers scoffed at the predictions, but 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 later, after doing inhuman, unspeakable things."

The Frenchman then started to sob. Thinking he was mad, the soldiers decided to let him go, and he disappeared back into obscurity. His identity is still unknown. Could he have been the Count St Germain.

Today, most historians regard the Count 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 imposter, surely someone would have recognised him.

The only surviving manuscript written by the Count, entitled, La Tres Sainte Trinosophie is in the library at Troyes, France, and to date 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 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 time and space? A renegade time lord from the future who like to meddle with history? If this were so, perhaps he really has talked with Christ and the kings of bygone days.

* Emma Calvey is notably connected with Berenger Sauniere, the priest in the mystery of Rennes Le Chateau.