In 1928, Karl Graf Kuefstein sat down to write the fourth volume of his family history. He was the old man of Greillenstein, a former ambassador and privy councillor, the kind of person who handles archives with professional care. He had access to every family paper, every letter, every scrap of documentation from the eighteenth century. He was looking for evidence of his ancestor Johann Ferdinand II’s life. Specifically, he wanted to understand the stories.
The stories said that Johann Ferdinand II had traveled to Italy, met an Italian cleric in a Carmelite monastery, and together they created ten living spirits that were sealed in glass jars. The stories said these spirits grew, ate, answered questions about the future, and were demonstrated to select Freemasons in a Vienna lodge. The stories said one escaped its jar and had to be chased around the room.
Karl Graf Kuefstein found nothing. Not in the family archive, not in any surviving papers from Johann Ferdinand’s time. He wrote: there is “not the slightest trace” of Masonic, Rosicrucian, Templar, or alchemical activity anywhere in the family’s records. Johann Ferdinand had destroyed everything before he died, a fact Karl called “a fine proof of loyal conscientiousness” to the Masonic oath of secrecy.
But the story survived. It survived because a servant wrote it all down.
The Count and the Vice Chancellor’s Shadow
Johann Ferdinand II von Kuefstein was born on December 20, 1727, and baptized at St. Michael’s church in Vienna. His full name was Johann Ferdinand Deodatus Maximilian Nepomucenus. He was the son of one of the most powerful men in the Habsburg Empire.
His father, Johann Ferdinand I (1688-1755), had risen from fifth son with no prospect of inheritance to Vice Chancellor of the Austrian Court Chancellery, Director of the Reserved Court Treasury, and eventually President-Lieutenant of the Lower Austrian Government. He served under both Charles VI and Maria Theresa. His epitaph in the Greillenstein crypt reads: “Truly a Father of the Fatherland.” He was, by every measure, a success.
The son left no such record: no distinguished government career, no diplomatic missions, no epitaph cataloguing decades of service. He married Maria Anna von Dietrichstein in 1749, in a ceremony witnessed by the Princes Liechtenstein, Auersperg, Lamberg, and Trautson, the Counts Seilern, Harrach, Colloredo, and Palffy. He inherited Greillenstein Castle and its associated estates. He ran through the money.
The Kuefstein family had held Greillenstein since 1534. It was a Renaissance castle built between 1570 and 1590 by an Italian architect, with a moat on three sides, a brewery producing a thousand buckets of beer yearly, stables for forty horses, a deer park holding eighty deer, and a pleasure garden enclosed by walls over a thousand paces around. Hans Georg IV had established a Fideikommiss, an entailed estate that could not be sold, to keep it in the family.
Johann Ferdinand II found it already burdened with debts. His income from the estates was about 12,000 florins a year. The obligations were higher. By 1758, he had retreated to the country to economize, renting out the family’s house in the Herrengasse. The family appointed financial curators over him. When he finally transferred the estates to his son in 1786, the debts had grown into a catastrophe that took his grandson Franz Seraphin an entire lifetime to repair.
What Johann Ferdinand II spent his money on, the family chronicle does not say. But external sources are less reticent.
The Masonic Career
Whatever Johann Ferdinand did in private, his Masonic career was very real and very well documented, just not in his own family’s papers.
He founded the Hochkapitel St. Pölten, a Masonic high chapter operating in the Clermont system, a French-derived rite that offered degrees far above the standard three of English Craft Masonry. The St. Pölten chapter worked degrees including Scottish Master, Elected Master, Knight of the East, Knight of the Rose Cross, Knight of the Triple Cross, and Knight of the Royal Arch. These were not symbolic titles. They implied access to what the eighteenth century called “higher secrets,” meaning alchemical and theurgical knowledge.
He served as Grand Commander and Master of the Chair of the Lodge “zur Freigebigkeit” (Lodge Royale le militaire) in Vienna, which had formed around 1761. Its members included Count Hoditz, Count Hamilton, Count Jörger, and the jurist Joseph von Sonnenfels. In 1763, the Hochkapitel issued a patent signed by Kuffstein, Thun, Haller, and Lothmann, under the seal bearing the legend: “Metam properamus ad unam.” We hasten toward one goal.
By 1766, Kuefstein was empowered as Grand Commander to authorize new lodges through deputies. The Dresden lodge addressed him in their official thank-you letter as “Grand maître de la sublime grande Loge d’Autriche.” Grand Master of the Sublime Grand Lodge of Austria. This was a real title, used in real correspondence that survives in the Dresden lodge archives.
He also claimed the title of Grand Master of Templar Province VIII, covering southern Germany, the Danube region, and extending to the Po and the Tiber. The Strict Observance system, founded by Karl Gotthelf von Hund, organized its Templar revival into geographic provinces. Kuefstein said he received his appointment in Paris, the same way Hund had received his.
By 1773, he admitted the membership had dwindled so badly he could barely assemble two or three brothers. He laid down the office. But in 1774, he was still insisting the Province existed, causing consternation in the Strict Observance lodges of Vienna and Prague.
Then he abandoned the Templar system entirely and devoted himself to what the family chronicle delicately calls “the secret sciences.”
The Source
Everything that follows comes through a specific chain of transmission, and honesty requires spelling it out.
The primary source is a manuscript written by Josef Kammerer, Count Kuefstein’s servant. Kammerer functioned as valet, cook, intendant, and above all as laboratory assistant. He was himself a Freemason, a serving brother who had risen to Master rank.
His manuscript was a hybrid: part travel journal, part income-and-expenses ledger, kept over roughly seven years from the mid-1770s to 1781 or 1782. It was in quarto format. Someone, at some unknown date, tore the manuscript in half lengthwise. Only the upper half survived, with many leaves also missing. About seventy loose sheets remained.
Around 1861, a researcher identified only as “G.B.” (probably B. von Brabbée) found these fragments in the possession of an eighty-four-year-old friend in Vienna who had discovered them in his late father’s estate. The father had owned a shop “beim Todtenkopf” on Bognergasse. G.B. was permitted to make a copy.
In 1873, Dr. Emil Besetzny, a Viennese lawyer and Freemason, published the material in Die Sphinx: Freimaurerisches Taschenbuch (available digitized at the Bavarian State Library). The article ran to forty-seven pages.
One earlier mention exists. August Siegfried von Goué (1743-1789), a jurist, playwright, and Freemason who knew Goethe from Wetzlar, wrote in his Ueber das Ganze der Maurerei (1788) that in a Viennese lodge where a Count K. was Master of the Chair, the brothers “believed they had spirits trapped in glasses.” In a later edition, Goué described visiting the Count, who showed him something in a glass of spirits that Goué took for a piece of kohlrabi. The Count insisted it was “the spirit of the Second House, cabbalistically speaking.” Goué advised patience and left.
This confirms one thing: the spirits-in-glasses story was circulating in Vienna during Kuefstein’s lifetime. Someone besides Kammerer knew about it. What follows is Kammerer’s version, as published by Besetzny.
The Monastery
According to Kammerer, Count Kuefstein met Abbé Geloni during his Italian travels, probably in the late 1770s. The meeting happened in Calabria, in a small town whose name is illegible in the surviving manuscript, at an inn called “al bomo doro” (at the golden tree). They recognized each other as Freemasons and Rosicrucians. They spent days and nights discussing the secret sciences, forgetting to eat, drink, or sleep.
Geloni was an Italian cleric. Kammerer calls him “the Italian clergyman” and says he “knew more than roasting pears.” He was an alchemist, a Cabbalist, a theurgist, and apparently a capable tailor.
No independent record of Abbé Geloni has ever been found. Not in church records, not in lodge archives, not in any source outside the Kammerer manuscript. The name may be a pseudonym, a garbled rendering, or an invention. He appears in the story and nowhere else.
The two adepts retired to a Carmelite monastery deep in the mountains. The monks received them with full ceremonial honors: vestments, monstrance, aspergillum. In the monastery’s large laboratory, they worked for over five weeks without letting the fire go out. Kammerer and an old lay brother maintained the furnace in alternating shifts. Kammerer wrote that the things he witnessed made his hair stand on end “like a hedgehog’s quills,” that he shook with fear “like a cold fever,” and that he had to pray without ceasing because he believed the Devil would carry them all off.
Within those five weeks, the two adepts produced ten spirits.
Ten Spirits in Glass
The ten were: a King, a Queen, a Knight, a Monk, an Architect, a Miner, a Seraph, a Nun, and two invisible spirits, one Blue and one Red.
The first eight were extracted one by one from a crucible using small silver tongs. Each was placed in a glass jar holding about two Maass (roughly two to three liters), described as similar to marmalade jars but “a bit slimmer and taller, but much thicker, so they could withstand a blow.” The jars were filled with pure water, sealed with a wet ox bladder that the Abbé had first consecrated and then moistened, and stamped on top with a large Sigill (possibly the Seal of Solomon) so the spirits could not escape.
At first, the eight spirits swam in their containers “almost like tiny gudgeon fish,” each no more than half a span long, about ten centimeters. The Count was discouraged, thinking the experiment had failed. Geloni laughed and told him to wait.
On a midsummer night, the four men carried the eight jars into the monastery garden, two per person, and buried them in two loads of mule dung. Every day, a friar sprinkled the heap with a special liquor prepared in the laboratory from ingredients that disgusted Kammerer so badly he nearly vomited. The Abbé quoted the old Latin phrase: “Naturalia non sunt turpia.” Natural things are not shameful. He swore on his priestly word that the same ingredients were necessary for making gold.
The dung heap fermented and steamed as if heated from below. Every three days, the two adepts went out after the monastery was quiet, burned incense, and prayed over the heap. Kammerer once heard the buried spirits “squeaking and whistling like hungry mice.” He nearly had convulsions.
After four weeks, the spirits were exhumed in an elaborate ceremony. The Abbé wore his Mass vestments, the Count sang psalms, and Kammerer swung the censer. The eight jars came out undamaged. Three days in a lukewarm sand bath followed.
The spirits had grown to about thirty centimeters. The males had grown beards (the Monk’s was “stately but bristly”). Their fingernails and toenails had grown alarmingly long, like “vulture claws.” The Count suggested trimming them, but the Abbé refused, saying it would make them angry.
Then Geloni dressed each spirit according to its station. The King received a purple mantle, crown, and scepter. The Queen, a mantle and diadem. The Knight, shield, sword, and lance. The Monk, a cowl and Mass vestments. The Architect, a trowel, compass, and square. The Abbé forcibly shaved the Monk a tonsure “the size of a lentil.” The enraged spirit bit him in the left thumb.
The Blue and Red spirits were different. Their jars appeared to contain nothing but clear water. When someone tapped three times on the seal with a small silver hammer and spoke a short prayer, the water would slowly turn sky-blue or fire-red. A face appeared, “at first as small as a hemp seed,” growing within minutes to nearly the size of a normal human face. The Blue Spirit looked “lovely and pious, like a little angel’s.” The Red Spirit was “cheese-white, impudent and ugly, like a malicious devil,” and would stick out its tongue and roll its eyes “like an epileptic.”
Care, Feeding, and Transport
Kammerer’s account of the spirits’ maintenance reads like animal husbandry notes written by a man who wished he were doing anything else.
The eight visible spirits were fed every three to four days with a pea-sized piece of rose-colored salve, scooped from a silver container with a new steel ear spoon. Their water had to be changed every eight days. During the water change, the spirits lay with closed eyes, limbs twitching weakly, “like dead,” and took hours to recover. The seal had to be re-applied each time with psalms, prayers, and hand-laying. Every detail had to be exact, “otherwise the spirits could escape through the smallest gap like witches, for whom no keyhole is too narrow.”
Alone among the ten, the Blue Spirit never needed feeding. Its water stayed permanently clear.
Feeding the Red Spirit was worse. It required a thimbleful of blood from a freshly killed animal once a week. Kuefstein personally slaughtered a chicken or pigeon in his laboratory, caught the blood in a small silver cup, and threw the carcass into the fire. What remained was given to a poor person. Kammerer refused to eat any of it. When the Red Spirit’s water was changed, it instantly turned dirty red, hissed as if boiling, and smelled of rotten eggs. Kuefstein warned that getting it on one’s hands would cause sores incurable by any physician.
The journey back to Austria was its own ordeal. Kammerer complained about border officials who wanted to rummage through everything. The expense accounts show the Count paid many gold coins in bribes to prevent inspectors from poking their iron rods into the iron-bound, tow-lined chest that held the jars. Tyrol was the worst: the local clergy had “smelled the roast” and the Count had good reason to avoid their “intended harassments.”
They arrived in Vienna around mid-November. Kammerer mentions seeing “the old Empress, who had already passed sixty.” Maria Theresa was born in 1717. The spirits had grown to nearly forty centimeters. Kammerer compared them to large lizards and pitied them because they could no longer stand upright in their jars, only stooped, which “must have made their backs ache terribly.”
Vienna: Spirits in the Lodge
Upon arriving in Vienna, Kuefstein joined a lodge that had been “properly working” for about two years, composed mostly of aristocratic brethren. They elected him Master of the Chair the following spring.
The lodge met in the Fürst Auersperg Haus, next to the Black Gate on the Schenkenstraße. (The building was later demolished; the Austrian National Bank was built on the site.) Only a narrow circle of brethren were admitted to the spirit séances. Journeymen and apprentices had to wait until they received the Master degree. Attendees swore an oath of silence that Kammerer described as more terrible than the Masonic initiation oath itself, binding them to secrecy even from brothers of other lodges.
The séances ran from 11 PM to 1 AM. At least one was held monthly. Kammerer transported the jars from Kuefstein’s residence to the lodge and back, a task he performed for fifteen months without breaking anything.
He was offered free lodging next to the lodge to serve as custodian of the spirits. He declined. At night, the spirits were “so restless and rebellious that the racket was unbearable,” and anyone alone with them could never be sure “whether they might not come out as a miserable cripple or even a dead man.”
Each spirit had a domain. The King and Queen answered questions about politics and the fates of dynasties, while the Monk and Nun handled religious matters. The Architect covered Masonic affairs; the Knight dealt with military and noble concerns. The Seraph knew events in the atmosphere, and the Miner knew events on and under the earth. Above them all stood the Blue and Red spirits, the supreme oracles. What “God in Heaven and Satan in Hell” had just done, they knew. They were “unquestionably the chief spirits,” and all the others were “nothing in comparison.”
Two witnesses are named. Count Max Lamberg, a Scottish Master and old friend of Kuefstein’s, attended twice. He found the spirits disappointing, called them “abominable toads,” and said the second session accomplished virtually nothing. Kuefstein banned him from returning. Count Franz Josef von Thun (1734-1801) was a regular and devoted attendee. Thun was a real person with a documented life: he later became a follower of Franz Anton Mesmer, set up a Mesmerism spa in Prague, claimed to have a “miraculous fluid” in his right arm, and was one of Mozart’s important patrons. Kammerer says Thun once cured him of a headache using a large horseshoe as a magnetic healing device.
Four Prophecies
Kammerer recorded several prophecies attributed to the spirits, most of them banal or untraceable. Four are specific enough to evaluate.
A three-year-old boy who wandered off during a walk in the Augarten was located by the Miner spirit, who correctly identified the child’s whereabouts. The child was recovered the next morning.
The Architect announced that a brother present at the séance, a man with a large family and limited means, was “at this very hour” being presented with twins of different sexes by his wife. The man rushed home and met the midwife at the door, holding two infants.
Less happily, the Knight warned Kuefstein that his friend Baron Johann Fries should change his lifestyle and stop visiting his wine estate at Vöslau, or he would eventually “drink himself to death” there. Kuefstein rejected the prophecy, knowing Fries as a temperate man. Kammerer does not mention the matter again.
The most famous prophecy: the King, in response to an unknown question, gave three numbers. 89, 30, 48. Nobody understood them at the time (probably 1777 or 1778). The editor G.B., writing in 1873, notes that “more than ninety years post factum,” the numbers correspond to 1789 (the French Revolution), 1830 (the July Revolution), and 1848 (the Revolutions of 1848). Kammerer, characteristically, played the numbers in the lottery. He won an ambo, a partial prize. The “blasted third number” did not come up.
Three Incidents
Three events from Kammerer’s account stand out because they involve failure and the grotesque.
The Monk’s death. Kuefstein had long sought a valuable alchemical manuscript attributed to Paracelsus, supposedly hidden in a secret compartment of the library at the Benedictine monastery of Arnoldstein in Carinthia. He consulted the Monk spirit. During the invocation, gesticulating, he knocked the jar off the table. It shattered. The Monk was fatally injured. Count Thun attempted magnetic healing. The spirit gasped, rolled its eyes, and died. Kuefstein built a small coffin from black cardboard with his own hands and buried the corpse at night, three feet deep, under an acacia tree in his garden. He “wept and sobbed like a child over his dear Monk.”
The failed Admiral. Thun urged Kuefstein to create a replacement: not another monk, since the Nun could handle religious questions alone, but an “Admiral” who would know everything happening on and under all the waters of the earth. Kuefstein worked for over a month. The silver tongs produced only a tiny creature “no larger than a young leech,” which showed no signs of viability and “miserably perished after brief squirming.” The two Counts burned the carcass and scattered its ashes. Kammerer commented, with a hint of satisfaction, that while his master was skilled, “he could not hold a candle to the Italian clergyman.”
The King’s escape. One morning, Kammerer entered the spirit cabinet to dust the jars with his peacock-feather duster. The King’s jar was empty except for water. The King was sitting on top of the Queen’s jar, “grinning maliciously,” trying to scratch off the seal with his long claws to free the Queen (or get in with her). Kammerer screamed. Kuefstein rushed in wearing his dressing gown. The King leaped from “furniture to furniture like a wild squirrel” while “screaming like Satan.” Deprived of its liquid element, the spirit eventually collapsed. Kuefstein caught it, but not before it scratched his face and especially his nose “in an ugly disfiguring manner.” The Count had to abstain from snuff for nearly fourteen days, which was hard on a passionate snuffer. The cause was traced to a carelessly applied seal.
The End
A note from 1781 in a Masonic collectanea records that Count Kuefstein, when asked by an intimate friend how things stood with his “confounded spirits,” curtly replied that he had long since “divested himself” of them and wanted nothing more to do with these “hellbrands.” His wife and his confessor had repeatedly urged him not to endanger his soul’s salvation with such blasphemous nonsense.
Johann Ferdinand II von Kuefstein died on March 20, 1789, after a prolonged illness, in his apartment in the Nostitz house on the Hohe Brücke in Vienna. He was sixty-one. His body was transported to Greillenstein for burial. His oral testament, dictated two days before death to witnesses because he was too ill to write, left everything remaining to his daughter Antonia. He noted he could leave nothing to his son Ferdinand, “because he had already received more during his lifetime than he could ever have been entitled to.”
The debts took his grandson’s entire life to pay off. Karl Graf Kuefstein, writing the family chronicle in 1928, noted with restrained bitterness that “magical flames” had consumed resources whose “smoke darkened the entire following century.”
Paracelsus and the Tradition of Making Life
Kuefstein’s spirits did not come from nowhere. The idea of creating living beings in a laboratory has a long history, and the specific method described by Kammerer, sealed vessels, horse dung as an incubator, special feeding substances, sits squarely within a tradition that goes back at least to the sixteenth century.
The recipe is attributed to Paracelsus and appears in De natura rerum, first published in 1572. Put human seed in a sealed vessel. Bury it in horse dung for forty days. Feed it with the “arcanum of human blood” for forty weeks. The result: a living but miniature human. Paracelsus called it a homunculus.
Modern scholarship complicates this attribution. Karl Sudhoff judged the whole text spurious. A 2020 special issue of the journal Ambix concluded that at least three different authors contributed to De natura rerum, and the homunculus passage is among the sections most likely forged. But the recipe’s influence was enormous regardless. It became the standard reference for alchemical artificial life, circulating through Rosicrucian and Masonic networks for centuries.
The Kuefstein story shows clear debts to this tradition: the sealed vessels, the horse dung (mule dung, in Kammerer’s version), the gradual growth, the feeding regimen. Whether Kuefstein was consciously following the Paracelsian recipe, or whether the story was shaped after the fact to match it, is impossible to determine from the surviving fragments.
The parallel tradition of the golem in Jewish mysticism offers a different model. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague reportedly formed a clay figure and animated it by inscribing emet (truth) on its forehead. The golem is physical, protective, mute. The homunculus is biological, cognitive, oracular. The two traditions share the ambition of creating life but differ on the purpose. The alchemist wanted knowledge. The rabbi wanted defense.
Kuefstein’s spirits, as Kammerer describes them, lean more toward the homunculus: they speak, they prophesy, they have distinct personalities. The Red Spirit is demonic. The Blue Spirit is angelic. They have domains of expertise, like the seventy-two spirits in the Ars Goetia. The classification system is Solomonic, not Paracelsian.
The Context: 20,000 Alchemists in Vienna
Kuefstein was not an isolated eccentric. The family chronicle, defending Johann Ferdinand’s reputation, points out that around 1784, approximately 20,000 people in Vienna were engaged in “alchemical-kabbalistic experiments.” The number may be inflated, but the broader picture is accurate.
Vienna in the 1770s and 1780s was saturated with esoteric activity. The Count of St. Germain had passed through. Cagliostro arrived and founded his Egyptian Rite. The Order of the Gold and Rosy Cross, which accepted only Master Masons and focused on alchemical practice, was active in Vienna. Its members included Count Franz Josef von Thun (Kuefstein’s séance regular), Baron Gottfried van Swieten (director of the court library), and Prince Johann Baptist Karl Dietrichstein.
The lodges included Zur wahren Eintracht, led by the metallurgist Ignaz von Born (possibly Mozart’s model for Sarastro). Mozart’s own lodge, Zur Wohltätigkeit, was down the street. Haydn, Sonnenfels, Kaunitz, the Esterházys, the Palffys, the Liechtensteins: the membership rolls of Viennese Freemasonry read like a directory of the Habsburg elite.
Emperor Joseph II tried to control the situation with his Freimaurerpatent of December 11, 1785, consolidating eight Viennese lodges into three. His mother, Maria Theresa, had earlier prohibited Masonic membership for imperial administrators, though the rule was unevenly enforced. The tide turned fully after the French Revolution. By the 1790s, Francis II banned all secret societies outright.
Kuefstein’s activities belong to the brief, strange window between tolerance and suppression, the decades when Masonic esotericism operated semi-openly in the heart of the Habsburg capital. Karl Graf Kuefstein, in 1928, concluded his discussion of his ancestor’s life with quiet resignation: “Peace to the memory of Johann Ferdinand. He was a child of his time.”
Three Side Stories
Three additional episodes from Kammerer’s account reveal the atmosphere of the experiments.
In the mountains near the Carmelite monastery, during a hunting excursion, Geloni spotted a large raptor overhead. He called out three times in a foreign language. The bird descended and lay at his feet like a dog. Geloni stroked it, spoke another word three times, and the bird flew away. He explained that any animal must obey a person who knows the name Adam first gave it in Paradise. He knew about fifty such primal names and would share some with the Count, but warned they must be memorized, never written down, or they would lose their power.
On a stormy evening in the laboratory, Geloni lit a small lamp, placed the Count and Kammerer in a circle made of a parchment strip on the floor, and forbade them to leave it “as they valued their lives.” He murmured words, extended his hand. From the lamp flame, a snake as thick as two fingers crawled out, coiled across the table, allowed itself to be caught, and vanished when his fist closed. A yellow dust remained on the table. A poisonous vapor filled the room so badly they had to throw open all windows and breathe vinegar from handkerchiefs to avoid suffocating. Besetzny’s footnote in 1873 compared this to the “Serpents de Pharaon” chemistry trick popular in Parisian parlors a decade earlier, eventually banned for health hazards.
As a reward for loyal service, Geloni transformed Kammerer’s tin travel spoon into gold. Not by melting it, but by applying a tincture and sprinkling a red powder, the classic Philosopher’s Stone procedure. The following year, Kammerer sold the golden spoon to a German goldsmith named Stieber in Trieste for four Kremnitz ducats. He felt cheated. He believed the spoon was worth at least double.
The Two Readings
The Crazy Alchemist does not resolve mysteries. We present them.
The skeptical reading goes like this. There is a hundred-year gap between the alleged events (late 1770s) and the first publication (1873). The primary source is a half-destroyed diary by a servant who was frightened, superstitious, and possibly a “monomaniac and strange enthusiast,” as the editor G.B. charitably put it. No corroboration from the diaries of named witnesses like Thun or Lamberg has been found. Abbé Geloni exists nowhere outside this one account. The prophecy of the three numbers (89, 30, 48) is suspiciously perfect and was published only after all three revolutions had occurred. The story serves an obvious function within Masonic-Rosicrucian circles: demonstrating the reality of alchemical achievement to justify continued esoteric practice. The whole thing reads like eighteenth-century lodge legend, embroidered over decades.
The other reading goes like this. Goué’s independent mention in 1788, written while Kuefstein was still alive, confirms that the spirits-in-glasses story circulated in Vienna during the period in question. Goué claims to have personally visited Kuefstein and seen something in a glass. The Kammerer manuscript was clearly not intended for publication. It is a private account book and travel diary, half of which someone tried to destroy. These are not the characteristics of a deliberate fabrication. The financial details (border bribes, the price of hair powder in Pressburg versus Vienna, the four ducats for the golden spoon) are the kind of mundane specifics that a forger would not bother inventing. Kuefstein’s Masonic career, including his titles, patents, and lodge affiliations, is independently verified. The family chronicle confirms that he destroyed all personal records of these activities before his death, which is consistent with someone who had something real to hide, not with the behavior of someone whose “experiments” were pure fiction.
G.B. himself refused to decide. He wrote that the spirits might have been kobolde, mandrake-men, salamanders, Goethean homunculi, poorly tamed costumed amphibians, or cleverly constructed Cartesian devils, but that each hypothesis had “one argument for it and perhaps ten against.” He invited the reader to “throw all this into the Orcus with a pitying smile” or to reconcile it as best they could, but warned against doing “grave, unforgivable injustice to the shades of the worthy, honest serving Brother Kammerer.”
The Castle and the Film
Greillenstein Castle still stands in Röhrenbach, in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria. The Kuefsteins have owned it for nearly five hundred years. It operates as a museum, open seasonally, and offers “Geistertouren,” ghost tours through attic spaces, secret passages, and cellar vaults. The tours reference the homunculi legend. The castle’s sandstone sphinxes on the balustrade and its Zwergengarten (dwarves’ garden) of stone gnomes give it an atmosphere that the legend fits like a glove.
The story had one notable afterlife in cinema. In 1935, James Whale directed Bride of Frankenstein, in which Dr. Septimus Pretorius shows Henry Frankenstein a collection of miniature homunculi in glass jars: a king, a queen, a bishop, a ballerina. The king escapes his jar and has to be returned. The scene parallels the Kuefstein story with specificity that goes beyond coincidence. The likely transmission route is Franz Hartmann’s 1887 biography of Paracelsus, The Life of Paracelsus, which retold the Kammerer account as a footnote. Hartmann was a German physician, Theosophist, and associate of Helena Blavatsky. His retelling brought the story from Masonic archive into occult mainstream, where a screenwriter in Los Angeles could find it forty-eight years later.
The manuscript fragments that Kammerer kept, that someone tried to destroy, that survived in a shopkeeper’s estate on the Bognergasse, that G.B. copied around 1861, that Besetzny published in 1873, that Hartmann repackaged in 1887, that ended up in a Hollywood film in 1935: the story refuses to stay buried. Like the spirits in their sealed jars, it keeps growing.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Paracelsus, De Natura Rerum (Of the Nature of Things), Book I ‘Concerning the Generation of Natural Things,’ c. 1537, posthumously published 1572
- Paracelsus, De Homunculis, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Sudhoff, Munich/Berlin, 1922-1933
- Emil Besetzny, Die Sphinx: Geheime Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlasse eines bekannten Mannes, Vienna: L. Rosner, 1873
- Geheimrat Kammerer (Count Max Lamberg’s secretary), manuscript diary entries on the Kuefstein-Geloni experiments, May-August 1775, reproduced in Besetzny 1873
- Franz Hartmann, ‘An Authenticated Account of Ten Homunculi,’ The Theosophist, vol. 17, Adyar, 1896
- Franz Hartmann, The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, Known by the Name of Paracelsus, London: Kegan Paul, 1887
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, Act II, ‘Laboratorium,’ 1832
- Abbé Geloni (Abate Geloni), Rosicrucian adept named in the Kammerer account as Kuefstein’s collaborator, Calabria/Vienna, 1773-1775
- Johann Ferdinand Graf von Kuefstein (1752-1818), correspondence and estate papers, Schloss Greillenstein archive, Lower Austria
- William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004
- William R. Newman, ‘The Homunculus and His Forebears: Wonders of Art and Nature,’ in Natural Particulars, ed. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999
- Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013
- Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, London: Heinemann, 2006
- Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, Basel: Karger, 1958, 2nd ed. 1982
- Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), Hebrew text c. 3rd-6th century CE, golem-creation passages cited as antecedent to homunculus tradition
- Christopher McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and Its Relationship to the Enlightenment, Leiden: Brill, 1992
- Arthur Edward Waite, The Real History of the Rosicrucians, London: George Redway, 1887
