Referred to as an enigmatical personage by modern writers. Frederic II, King of Prussia, used to say of him that he was a man whom no one had ever been able to make out. By some he was regarded as an incarnate god, by others as a clever Alsatian Jew. One thing is certain, Count de St. Germain—whatever his real patronymic may have been—had a right to his name and title, for he had bought a property called San Germano, in the Italian Tyrol, and paid the Pope for the title. He was uncommonly handsome, and his enormous erudition and linguistic capacities are undeniable, for he spoke English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Swedish, Danish, and many Slavonian and Oriental languages, with equal facility with a native. He was extremely wealthy, never received a sou from anyone—in fact never accepted a glass of water or broke bread with anyone—but made most extravagant presents of superb jewelery to all his friends, even to the royal families of Europe. His proficiency in music was marvellous; he played on every instrument, the violin being his favorite. “St. Germain rivalled Paganini himself”, was said of him by an octogenarian Belgian in 1835, after hearing the ‘Genoese maestro’. “It is St. Germain resurrected who plays the violin with the body of an Italian skeleton”, exclaimed a Lithuanian baron who had heard both.
He never laid claim to spiritual powers, but proved to have a right to such claim. He used to pass into a dead trance from thirty-seven to forty-nine hours without awakening, and then knew all he had to know, and demonstrated the fact by prophesying futurity and never making a mistake. It is he who profesied before the Kings Louis XV and XVI, and the unfortunate Marie Antoinette. Many were the still living witnesses in the first quarter of this century who testified to his marvellous memory; he could read a paper in the morning and, though hardly glancing at it, could repeat its contents without missing one word days afterwards; he could write with two hands at once, the right hand writing a piece of poetry, the left a diplomatic paper of the greatest importance. He read sealed letters without touching them, while still in the hand of those who brought them to him. He was the greatest adept in transmuting metals, making gold and the most marvellous diamonds, an art, he said, he had learned from certain Brahmans in India, who taught him the artificial crystallisation (‘quickening’) of pure carbon. As our Brother Kenneth Mackenzie has it— “In 1780, when on a visit to the French Ambassador to the Hague, he broke to pieces with a hammer a superb diamond of his own manufacture, the counterpart of which, also manufactured by himself, he had just before sold to a jeweller for 5500 louis d’or”. He was the friend and confidant of Count Orloff in 1772 at Vienna, whom he had helped and saved in St. Petersburg in 1762, when concerned in the famous political conspiracies of that time; he also became intimate with Frederick the Great of Prussia. As a matter of course, he had numerous enemies, and therefore it is not to be wondered at if all the gossip invented about him is now attributed to his own confessions: e.g., that he was over five hundred years old; also, that he claimed personal intimacy ‘with the Saviour and his twelve Apostles, and that he had reproved Peter for his bad temper’— the latter clashing somewhat in point of time with the former, if he had really claimed to be only five hundred years old. If he said that “he had been born in Chaldea and professed to possess the secrets of the Egyptian magicians and sages”, he may have spoken truth without making any miraculous claim. There are Initiates, and not the highest either, who are placed in a condition to remember more than one of their past lives. But we have good reason to know that St. Germain could never have claimed ‘personal intimacy’ with the Savior. However that may be, Count St. Germain was certainly the greatest Oriental Adept Europe has seen during the last centuries. But Europe knew him not. (TG)
Once a French nobleman said to St. Germain, “I cannot grasp the nonsense going on around you.”
St. Germain answered, “It is not difficult to understand my nonsense if you will give it the same attention you give your own, if you will read my reports with the same attention as the list of dancers at the court. But the trouble is that the order of a minuet is of more importance to you than the safety of Earth.” (AY, 451)

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