Cagliostro and His Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry
book · 1919
LINK
SUMMARY
Early-twentieth-century account of Cagliostro's Egyptian Rite, digitized with full text on the Internet Archive (identifier CagliostroAndHisEgyptianRiteOfFreemasonry; creator Henry Ridgely Evans; date 1919, copied from the archive.org metadata record on 2026-06-03). It is the source consulted for the forty-day 'moral and physical regeneration' regimen and the quoted precepts ('pray for forty days and sleep for forty nights', the body made 'as pure as that of a child', 'the beginning of immortality'), which Evans reproduces explicitly from the nineteenth-century French occultist Eliphas Levi's *History of Magic*. Evans and Levi are late secondary renderings, not contemporary eighteenth-century records, so the regimen detail is attributed in this bundle to Levi's account as reproduced by Evans rather than asserted as a documented contemporary protocol. Evans also names Cardinal de Rohan among the Paris patrons.
NOTES
This 1919 account by Henry Ridgely Evans is the bundle’s source for the specific ritual detail of Cagliostro’s “moral and physical regeneration”: the forty-day tabernacle retreat and the quoted promise that the adept’s body would be made young again. Evans reproduces the passage from Eliphas Levi’s History of Magic; both are later secondary renderings of the rite rather than contemporary eighteenth-century documents, and the bundle frames the regimen accordingly. The general fact that Cagliostro sold a regeneration promising restored youth is anchored independently in Trowbridge (1910) and McCalman (2003).