Note 308 — Chapter II · THAUMATURGIC PERSONALITIES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The writer in question certifies (a) that the Comte de Gabalis was a German, (b) that he was a great nobleman and a great Kabalist, (c) that his lands were on the frontiers of Poland, (d) that he was a man of good presence who spoke French with a foreign accent. Saint-Germain testified on his own part to Prince Karl of Hesse that he was the son of Prince Ragoczy of Transylvania. Perhaps the latter place will be regarded as sufficiently in proximity to Poland to make the story of Éliphas Lévi a little less unlikely than it appears on the surface. But the prince in question was Franz-Leopold Ragoczy, who spent his life in conspiracies against the Austrian Empire, “with the object of regaining his independent power” and the freedom of his principality. No more unlikely person can be thought of as the original of the ridiculous Comte de Gabalis, and the Comte de Saint-Germain never intimated that he belonged to a line of Kabalists, least of all such a Kabalist and occultist as is depicted by the Abbé de Villars. See Mrs. Cooper Oakley’s Monograph on the Comte de St. Germain, Milan, 1912.