Joseph Balsamo, born in 1743, who assumed the name of Comte de Cagliostro, as a magician far eclipsed his master. Like Saint-Germain, he was generally reputed to be a Jew--the son of Pietro Balsamo, a Sicilian tradesman of Jewish origin[447]--and he made no secret of his arden admiration for the Jewish race. After the death of his parents he escaped from the monastery in which he had been placed at Palermo and joined himself to a man known as Altotas, said to have been an Armenian, with whom he travelled to Greece and Egypt[448]. Cagliostro's travels later took him to Poland and Germany, where he was initiated into Freemasonry[449], and finally to France; but it was in England that he himself declared that he elaborated his famous "Egyptian Rite," which he founded officially in 1782. According to his own account, this rite was derived from a manuscript by a certain George Cofton--whose identity has never been discovered--which he bought by chance in London[450]. Yarker, however, expresses the opinion that "the rite of Cagliostro was clearly that of Pasqually," and that if he acquired it from a manuscript in London it would indicate that Pasquilly had disciples in that city. A far more probable explanation is that Cagliostro derived his Egyptian masonry from the same source as that on which Pasqually had drawn for his Order of Martinistes, namely the Cabala, and that it was not from a single manuscript but from an eminent Jewish Cabalist in London that he took his instructions. Who this may have been we shall soon see. At any rate, in a contemporary account of Cagliostro we find him described as "a doctor initiated into Cabalistic art" and a Rose-Croix; but after founding his own rite he acquired the name of Grand Copht, that is to say, Supreme Head of Egyptian Masonry, a new branch that he wished to graft on to old European Freemasonry.[451] We shall return to his further masonic adventures later. In a superior category to Saint-German and Cagliostro was the famous Swabian doctor Mesmer, who has given his name to an important branch of natural science. In about 1780 Mesmer announced his great discovery of "animal magnetism, the principle of life in all organized beings, the soul of all that breathes." But if to-day Mesmerism has come to be regarded as almost synonymous with hypnotism and in no way a branch of occultism, Mesmer himself--stirring the fluid in his magic bucket, around which his disciples wept, slept, fell into trances or convulsions, raved or prophesied[452]--earned not unnaturally the reputation of a charlatan. The Freemasons, eager to discover the secret of the magic bucket, hastened to enrol him in their Order, and Mesmer was received into the Primitive Rite of Free and Accepted Masons in 1785.[453]