10.06.09
Cagliostro
Comment on Distortions of the Lozowick case
mybrainisafleamarket said,
09.06.09 at 2:49 pm
If a reader wants to deepen his or her understanding of types like Lozowick, EJ Gold, Gurdjieff, Castaneda and milder more benign cons such as Paul Brunton (see Jeffrey Masson’s My Father’s Guru), etc, etc, it highly educational to read a biography of someone who ran the same con 100 to 200 years earlier and look for comparisons.Just finished reading a biography of Cagliostro entitled The Last Alchemist, by Iaian McCalman.
Cagliostro, born in the 18th Century, did not yet have access to the teachings from Indian, Japanese or Chinese sources–these were not yet available in Europe—not even in distorted form.
So Cagliostro claimed the roots of his spiritual pedigree lay in esoteric teachings derived from Freemasonry and, ultimately claimed he had access to ancient Egyptian teachings that would purify Masonry itself and lead to the moral and spiritual regeneration of humanity.
Note how later on, Gurdjieff exploited the Sufis, and much later, as source texts were published, India and then Tibet became the legitimating source for the next generations of New Age mountebanks. But… underneath the names, you see the same marketing and PR methods–and the care taken to recruit socially influential persons who are psychologically vulnerable and able to pay a guru’s bills.
Cagliostro was born into a desperately poor neighborhood in Palermo in 1743. He became quick witted, got an education in healing herbs and chemistry as a lay brother in a monastery–and was an excellent health care provider and a very astute street psychologist. And, he did have remarkable talents as a healer and a genuine capacity to connect with persons who were poor. Though he behaved much as a cult leader and exploited his intimates, Cagliostro also set up drop in healing clinics for poor patients in Strasbourg, St Petersberg, and Warsaw–persons unable to afford local physicians’ fees. In that regard, unlike Gurdjieff and the other rogues Ive listed, Cagliostro did real service to persons who were down and out. To this day, he is a folk hero in the streets of Palermo, considered a sort of Robin Hood, man of the people.
But….Cagliostro remarkably fits the profile of someone who self invents and mystifies with claims of access to ancient powers–and untraceable sources.
His biographer noted that one person who acknowledged Cagliostro was Mme Blatvatsky. And, James Webb has amply demonstrated the extent to which Gurdjieff plundered Thesophy and incorporated elements of it into his own system. One could consider Cagliostro to be a proto-Theosopher
He learned to run cons, forge anyone’s handwriting, created many cover stories, and appears to have had a talent for trance induction.
He joined the Masons, created innovations of his own and used the existing pan-European Masonic network to access idealistic and yearning persons who were preferably, high status and wealthy.
And significantly, Cagliostro met and married a ravishingly lovely 14 year old girl and turned her into his accomplice–and used her as sexual bait to lure and blackmail wealthy men.
Just as significantly, Cagliostro knew how to alternatie between charm and terrifying rages, calculated to throw disciples and his wife off balance. He would make endless promises, con people into feeling inferior if they had doubts, etc, etc.
Eventually, the 18th century equivalent of the Internet ended Cagliostro’s career: too many people began writing and publishing exposes of him and he had angered too many governments and well placed persons.
Eventually his lonely and exhausted wife received a smuggled letter from her family, who were still worried about her, 20 years later, telling her they wanted her home with them. And Seraphina had become exhausted by the choatic life she had to live with her husband, his rages, whims, and the exhausting oscillations between good living and being hounded out of town after town.
It all reads in an amazingly contemporary manner. Cagliostro functioned in the 18th century equivalent of what sociologist Philip Jenkins has termed ‘the cultic milieu’–and the vulnerable and wealthy persons willing to patronize that milieu in exchange for its promises and a choice rank in its inner heirarchy.
Read about Cagliostro and it will demystify persons like Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff was, like Cagliostro, a fringe member of a larger community, who had to live by his wits, mastered the art of intuiting what people’s longings were.
The author of The Last Alchemist noted that many clever con artists gamed their way through the cities and courts of the 18th century, full of bored and powerful people, often idealistic. What one had to do was figure out the right ‘hook’ by which to exploit local conditions so as to get invitations to the right social circles.
And one needed a network of like minded persons from whom one could get recommendations and who would pass you along from one sympathetic household to another. In Cagliostro’s day, that network was Freemasonry.
Today the networks are different, but the function remains the same.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=the+last+alchemist&btnG=Google+Search
On Cagliostro From Gurdjieff Con | Illuminati Conspiracy Archive Blog said,
13.06.09 at 12:17 pm
[...] mybrainisafleamarket – 09.06.09 [...]
mybrainisafleamarket said,
14.06.09 at 9:11 am
It appears that Cagliostro learned some techniques that would be recognizable today as forms of trance induction. In reading sustained descriptions of Cagliostro in Frances Mossiker’s book, The Queens Necklace, one strategy used by Cagliostro was to bombard a person with questions, to which the person repeatedly would answer yes, or agree to.
Today, this technique is known to professional hypnotists as the ‘Yes Set’. It has been found that if someone is led to say ‘yes’ repeatedly, it then becomes harder for the target to make a refusal.
The ‘yes set’ has been appropriated by less than ethical sales persons…and also by persons doing speed-seduction.
Cagliostro also gestured with his hands, a technique used by many stage magicians to this day, used children as mediums, and had a talent for identifying a person’s most profound obsessions and yearnings–what in modern terms is called psychological operations. We also cannot rule out that he may have been adept at doing espionage so as to learn ahead of time about persons and areas where he planned to operate.
There is yet another technique, known in modern times as ‘cold questioning’, very likely used by Cagliostro. It is a way to quiz people so as to elicit personal information from them without seeming to do so. It is utilized quite successfully by tarot card readers, palm readers, and possibly by persons utilizing bogus gadgets such as the much-vaunted enneagram.
One can utilize cold questioning and then make it seem one has psychic ablities has ‘read’ targets mind, when all one has done is adroitly elicit information.
A former New Age healer, reveals that one can do cold reading quite sincerely, not even knowing one is doing it.
Karla McLaren writes ‘I was never taught cold reading and I never intended to defraud anyone – I simply picked up the technique through cultural osmosis. ”
It is very interesting that someone has come over from the other side and reports that one can practice this technique, not even knowing what it is, and make the mistake of believing one has some sort of psychic talent.
Karla McLaren, a former New Age healer who has since repudiated this line of work and has gone on to do academic studies in sociology, wrote:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-05/new-age.html
“I knew many psychics and alternative healers who seemed to be very good at what they did, and I directly experienced healings and psychic readings that I couldn’t logically refute.
In that period, it would have been wonderful to come upon skeptical and critical thinking techniques, but alas, critical thinking wasn’t taught in my high school. I didn’t even know the category existed! When I went to junior college, I took geometry and logic for my critical thinking courses and thus I missed out on the subject once again.
“In my education, I didn’t gain the skills I needed to help me understand what was occurring when New Age and metaphysical ideas and techniques *seemed to work.* My empirical experience “proved” the validity of things like psychic skills, auras, chakras, contact with the dead, astrology, and the like – and I had very little in my intellectual arsenal at that time to help me understand what was truly occurring.
McClaren tells us this:
“For instance, an understanding of cold reading would have helped me a great deal. I never knew what cold reading was, and until I saw professional magician and debunker Mark Edward use cold reading on an ABC News special last year, I didn’t understand that I had long used a form of cold reading in my own work! I was never taught cold reading and I never intended to defraud anyone – I simply picked up the technique through cultural osmosis. ”
Cagliostro made it hard for high ranking people to gain access to him, and once one did, that person would be warned that Cagliostro was moody and apt to go into rages if he felt insulted by someone’s doubts. This forced a visitor to be passive, to be afraid of making a wrong move…putting them at a disadvantage in relation to the man. Even perceptive and skeptical persons found themselves impressed by him.
Detailed descriptions of Cagliostro given by contemporary witnesses are available in Mossiker’s book ‘The Queen’s Necklace’ a 400 plus page tome that quotes at length from 18th century witnesses. If one has the patience to read this vast book, he or she will learn something about the social context of the times, and also the emotional climate–the material, even the legal briefs written by the attorneys, are influenced by the new cult of romantic sensibility which had begun to take hold in Europe, a cult of public displays of emotion, an interest in psychology and in affairs of the heart.
But Iain MaCalman, unlike Mossiker, could focus much more closely on Cagliostro, and supplies detailed descriptions of ritual theatrics designed by Cagliostro, and the book has pictures of a series of drawings for paintings Cagliostro commissioned to adorn his projected Egyptian Freemasonry lodge.
The Gurdjieff Con » More on Cagliostro said,
14.06.09 at 5:10 pm
[...] http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2009/06/10/cagliostro/comment-page-1/#comment-34994 mybrainisafleamarket said, 14.06.09 at 9:11 am · It appears that Cagliostro learned some techniques that would be recognizable today as forms of trance induction. In reading sustained descriptions of Cagliostro in Frances Mossiker’s book, The Queens Necklace, one strategy used by Cagliostro was to bombard a person with questions, to which the person repeatedly would answer yes, or agree to. [...]