Note 44 — Chapter VII

Cagliostro’s pretended transmission of his supernatural powers, as previously stated, was nothing more than the discovery that the so-called “psychic” faculty, instead of being confined to a few exceptional people, as was till then generally believed, existed in a more or less developed state in everybody. Before his time, and in fact till many years after, the “psychic” faculty was so little understood that the above phenomenon, familiar enough to spirit-rappers and planchette-writers of the present day, was believed to be the work of the powers of darkness whose manifestations inspired terror, of which familiarity has apparently robbed them now-a-days.