Who is the Count de Saint Germain and where does his knowledge come from?

You had to be somebody to be invited to one of Madame de Pompadour’s parties.

She was mistress and advisor to French King Louis XV, she spent her time with politicians, thinkers, artists, the rich, the famous…

Which is why she’d invited the Count de Saint Germain to her party in 1750.

The Count had arrived in Paris from the court of the Shah of Persia where he had been studying precious stones.

He dressed in black. He had diamond rings on each of his fingers, and diamonds on his shoes.

Madame de Pompadour had never heard of the Count before he arrived in France. And neither had any of her friends.

But with his tales of foreign lands, his good looks and wealth, he’d soon been welcomed into Paris’s most fashionable circles.

At the party, Madame de Pompadour introduced him to the elderly Countess von Georgy.

The Countess mentionned that she’d known a man of the same name and appearance forty years before in Venice.

‘I imagine he must have been your father,’ she said kindly.

But the Count de Saint Germain shook his head.

‘No madame,’ he replied courteously. ‘That was I myself.’

The Countess was shocked. In front of her was a man no more than 45. And the man she’d known 40 years before in Venice had been the same age.

‘Impossible!’ she cried.

‘It is not so impossible,’ smiled the Count de Saint Germain.

He told the Countess, in accurate detail, of how they’d met in Venice nearly half a century before.

Soon, wild rumours were flying around Paris.

Who was the Count de Saint Germain? And how could he be nearly 100 years old?

Before long, the king himself had heard of the count and invited him to dinner.

At the lavish banquet, the mysterious Count wouldn’t eat a thing.

Yet, he enthralled his fellow diners with his knowledge of history and his mastery of at least eight languages including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Sanskrit.

And he told them he was 300 years old.

And that he could melt diamonds…

Some thought the count was a barefaced liar.

But not the King.

As soon as he possibly could, the king gave the Count a massive suite of rooms at his Château de Chambord, some 100miles from Paris.

He also gave the count money to set up a laboratory there.

The official line was that the Count was to develop a new type of fabric dye.

But some thought the Count de Saint Germain was working on something more arcane –

The Philosopher’s Stone.

This mysterious element, or powder, said to turn base metals into pure gold, had been sought for centuries.

If such a thing were really to exist, its discovery would make someone very rich indeed…

It was also said that the Philosopher’s Stone could be used in an elixir to make its user immortal – had the Count discovered the secret for himself?

For the next 20 years, the Count de Saint Germain busied himself in his laboratories, but it’s not known if he was able to make the Stone for the King.

Louis XV died in 1774.

The Count de Saint Germain died ten years later, in 1784.

Or at least, that’s the official history.

On his death, the Count left nothing but a few items of clothing. There were no diamonds, no stones.

And strangely for such an educated man, not a single book.

Had they all been destroyed? Or had the Count taken them with him?

A year after his death, the Count de Saint Germain was apparently seen at a convention for the Knights Templar.

An ancient order, the Knights Templar are said to guard the secrets of the Holy Grail.

Just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Count was seen again, this time by French aristocrat Baron Linden.

‘In exactly 85 years people will set eyes on me again,’ the Count is said to have told him.

And with that, he left.

By the time he was seen again, it was 1873. And 85 years had passed.

But the Count de Saint Germain still looked 45-years-old.

He visited Russian aristocrat, occultist and medium Madame Blavatsky, telling her he was immortal.

And then, for many more years, the trail went cold.

Historians and experts in mysticism began to investigate the curious Count.

One, Annie Besant, claimed to have evidence he’d been born in 1610, the son of a Transylvanian prince.

And then it seem the Count was forgotten.

Until, at the outbreak of the First World War, German soldiers captured a French man in Alsace.

He was wearing black, had diamond rings on his fingers…and he refused to tell the soldiers his name.

But the man did say some very alarming things.

‘Soon will come the Antichrist,’ he told them. ‘A tyrant from the lower classes who will wear an ancient symbol. He will lead Germany into another global war in 1939, but will be defeated six years on after doing unspeakable things.’

Predictions of Hitler, the Second World War?

Could the man have been the Count de Saint Germain?

Nervous, the German officers released him.

And it seems that, before the Count’s presumed death back in 1784, he’d written a book – in code.

To this day, parts of the book remain undeciphered.

But scholars agree on one section.

We moved through space at a speed that can only be compared with nothing but itself, wrote the Count de Saint Germain. Within a fraction of a second the plains below us were out of sight and the Earth had become a faint nebula.

Was he an extraterrestrial visitor? Could this account for his agelessness and his knowledge of the future?

If we want answers to these questions, we’ll have to wait until the next time he returns.

For if history shows us anything, it’s that one day the Count de Saint Germain will return…

The stuff of legend…

While dragging his cross through the streets to Calvary, Jesus is said to have addressed an onlooker called Cartaphilus and said, ‘I will go now, but thou shalt wait until I return.’

After this, legend has it, Cartaphilus stopped ageing, couldn’t die. Instead, he wandered the Earth waiting for Christ’s second coming. While some consider the story folklore, could Cartaphilus be the Count de Saint Germain, eagerly waiting the Messiah’s return…?