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  • Napoleaon's Sorcerers: The Sophisians
  • Moshe Sluhovsky
Darius A. Spieth . Napoleaon's Sorcerers: The Sophisians. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 215.

Writing and reading about secret societies, their claims for access to esoteric knowledge, transmitted in mysterious ways from antiquity to a few initiates, their rites, and their symbols could (and often is) extremely tedious. All too often, secret societies exude self-importance and even a degree of pomposity that greatly exaggerates their actual insignificance. Who, except for a few devotees, cares much about this or that specific oath, ritual, symbol, or ceremony? And why should we care at all about a minuscule group of French Freemasons who followed an alleged Egyptian, rather than Scottish, rite, and [End Page 243] lasted only for two decades? Darius A. Spieth's Napoleon's Sorcerers focuses on one such group, the Sophisians, but succeeds in rendering the esoteric and trivial historically and culturally significant. The Sophisians, according to Spieth, epitomized the central tensions and contradictions of the late Enlightenment and of post-Revolutionary France: how to reconcile mysticism with Reason, science with Vitalism, religion with nature, antiquity with modernity, brutal colonialism with the civilizing mission, the East with the West?

The Ordre Sacré de Sophisiens was founded in Paris in 1800–1801, at the very height of French fascination with all things Egyptian. It included among its members military officers drifting back to France from the defeat in Egypt in 1799, scientists (among them the mathematician Gaspar Monge and botanists Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Comte de Lacépède), antiquarians, philologists, Egyptologists, and "Orientalists." The order also counted among its members a Creek Indian tribal leader, Greek professors from the University of Bucharest, women (among them the Prussian-born Mme de Xaintrailles, an aide-de-camp in the Army of the Rhine, who declared in her initiation that "I am a man for my country [and] will be a man for my Brethern"), and a large contingent of producers, playwrights, composers, and actors from the boulevard theaters of Paris. The theatricality, in fact, was anything but accidental. Cuvelier de Trie, the Grand Isiarque of the Sophisians, who revived the order in 1818 after a five-year hiatus, was a prolific playwright and transferred many of his theatrical props, scenographies, and special effects to Sophisians ceremonies, while at the same time staging plays that attracted Parisian attention to Egyptian and other Oriental melodramas. As Spieth points out, recruitment from the theatrical subculture enabled the society to enhance its reputation and increase its membership while at the same time keeping its own existence and practices shrouded in mystery and secrecy.

Spieth's analysis of the Sophisians is based on his discovery of the society's beautifully illuminated Livre d'or. The Golden Book of about 1819–20 is a repository of the group's "knowledge" about ancient Egypt, its constitution, the rituals to be performed during initiations, and moral principles to be followed. This and a few additional manuscripts enable Spieth to reconstruct not only the group's "Egyptosophy" but also a detailed membership list. But, as Spieth points out, the history of Egyptian Masonic lore had preceded the Sophisians. In fact, it owed its origins to no other than Giuseppe Balsamo, also known as Comte de Cagliostro, one of the most colorful charlatans in a century known for its virtuosi and charlatans. Cagliostro, an alchemist, healer, and a conjurer of spirits who styled himself as an Oriental sage, was incarcerated in the Bastille and became a persona non grata in France following his involvement in the famous Necklace Affair. The specter of Cagliostro, then, [End Page 244] haunted the Egyptian Rite, as did the defeat of the Napoleonic Egyptian campaign. But some of the scientists and soldiers who trickled back into France between 1799 and 1801 achieved the impossible and turned the fortunes of the Egyptian Rite around, even claiming that the First Consul (and soon to become Emperor) himself had founded an Isis Lodge in Cairo.

Therein lies the importance of Napoleon's Sorcerers. Spieth reminds us that the planners of the Egyptian campaign revived ancient and Enlightenment European speculative theories about Egypt as a source of all ancient...

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