New to Baphomithras? Start Here for an introduction to the main ideas, themes, and articles.
New to Baphomithras?
Start Here for an introduction to the main ideas, themes, and articles.
An exploration of the hidden esoteric side of Giacomo Casanova through Icosameron, Secret Chiefs, Saint-Germain, Murano, and the transformation of underground mysteries into modern occult and cosmic myths.
The hidden seam, the contrapuntal thread through which the entire story of Casanova, and indeed of Venice itself, begins to unfold, is his novel Icosaméron (Icosaméron ou l'histoire d'Édouard et d'Élisabeth...). Written in French and published in Prague in 1788, this monumental early work of science fiction and utopian literature represents the complete reverse side of what the world usually understands by the name "Casanova."
Icosameron: A Journey to the Center of the Earth
The story follows a brother and sister, Edward and Elizabeth, who are shipwrecked during a voyage off the coast of Norway and are drawn into a terrifying, deep whirlpool. Rather than meeting death, they find themselves within the interior of the Earth, where they discover an entire hidden subterranean world. There they spend eighty-one years in a state of perpetual youth, a number associated with the magical square of the Moon and prolonged vitality, before eventually returning to the surface. Once they do, they begin to age rapidly. The novel itself is structured as their twenty-day account of this underground kingdom, Megamicra, hence the title Icosameron, derived from the Greek expression for twenty days. In other words, long before Jules Verne.
This subterranean realm is not merely a product of fantasy. It serves as Casanova's playground for philosophical, theological, and concealed esoteric ideas. The inhabitants of the inner Earth are humanoid beings, yet they exist as androgynous twins. They are miniature in stature, hatch from eggs, possess no bones, their bodies being supported by cartilage, and communicate exclusively through music and telepathy.
Within the interior of the Earth there is no Sun. Instead, the entire realm is illuminated by a constant, diffuse red light emanating from the planetary core. There is no night, no changing seasons; time itself appears static. Their society is organized according to an almost absolute protocol. Casanova describes in remarkable detail their architecture, laws, agriculture, and diet.
At first glance, Icosameron appears to be an Enlightenment utopia, or perhaps a dystopia, in the tradition of Thomas More's Utopia or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Yet if we begin pulling at the threads from this perspective, we soon encounter a number of elements that connect perfectly with the Venetian subtext:
Escape from the Venetian Prisons and the Obsession with Enclosed Space
Casanova wrote this novel in old age while serving as a librarian in a castle in Bohemia, isolated, melancholic, and embittered by a world that had largely forgotten him. The man who had once staged a spectacular escape from the prisons of Venice here creates a world that functions as a substitute for imprisonment itself. The interior Earth of Icosameron possesses the same atmosphere of claustrophobia and artificial order that characterized the Venetian Republic, that anomaly within the feudal and monarchical landscape of medieval Europe: a façade of perfect law and beauty beneath which total control conceals itself.
Elements of Incest and “Pure Blood” (The Vampiric Subtext)
Within the subterranean world, Edward and Elizabeth become the progenitors of a new race, entering into incestuous relationships in order to populate its uninhabited regions. This obsession with the preservation of lineage, isolation from the outside world, and the creation of a new order within a closed system carries a deep and macabre undertone. In the Venetian context, it leads us directly to the patrician families who functioned as a closed caste, preserving power and resources within bloodlines while remaining largely separated from the wider world. It is, in essence, a social allegory of vampirism.
Occult Background
Casanova was a Freemason, closely associated with Rosicrucian circles, and a man who deceived much of the European aristocracy by selling them elixirs of youth and magical rituals. Icosameron contains several elements that strongly suggest a Hermetic cosmology:
- The journey through the immense whirlpool is a classic initiatory descent into the underworld (Descensus ad Inferos).
- The eternal red light of the subterranean realm recalls the alchemical Rubedo, the Red Work, the stage at which immortality or the transformation of matter is achieved.
- The idea of androgynous beings derives directly from Kabbalistic and Gnostic teachings concerning the primordial human being (Adam Kadmon) prior to the division of the sexes.
Rather than approaching Venice through its carnival, gondolas, vampire legends, and tales of the dark cults of the Venetian aristocracy, let us view it through the lens of Icosameron: Venice as an underground kingdom upon the surface of the waters. A city that was itself an anomaly within medieval feudal Europe, built upon wooden piles driven into mud, isolated within its lagoon, governed by its own rigid order through institutions such as the Council of Ten, and immersed in a perpetual twilight cast by narrow canals where sunlight seldom falls directly.
Venice functioned as Casanova's subterranean world. It was a place where masks, and therefore androgyny and the suspension of identity, formed an obligatory element of social protocol, while the energy of the city was sustained through a constant extraction of resources from the wider world. In some respects, Venice of that era resembles modern Dubai, albeit without oil and in possession of a merchant fleet instead. If Casanova's science-fictional excursion is read as a mirror of the Venetian mentality itself, we arrive at the subtle intellectual incision necessary to perceive Venice as a center of powerful occult influences.
Histoire de ma vie
Within Casanova's memoirs, we can identify several key moments where practical autobiography intertwines with theurgy and operative magic. History of My Life (Histoire de ma vie) contains fascinating accounts of his occult operations in Venice, while the celebrated episode set on Murano, one of the islands of the Venetian lagoon, together with his peculiar magical system, tears apart the illusion of rational Enlightenment culture. What exactly lies behind these events, the symbol of the Dragon, and its secret code?
A Visit to the Witch of Murano: What Led Up to It and What Actually Happened
The Murano episode, which unfolds within the context of Casanova's celebrated affair with the nun M.M. and her companion C.C., represents the culmination of his mastery of psychological and magical manipulation. Casanova was engaged in a secret and dangerous relationship with M.M., who was both the protégée and lover of the powerful French ambassador in Venice, Cardinal de Bernis. The entire social milieu surrounding Murano, where her convent was located, was permeated by libertinism, voyeurism, and espionage.
In order to maintain control over the situation, captivate the women involved, and justify his own actions, Casanova needed to present himself as a man possessing secret and supernatural powers. In his memoirs, he recounts how, in order to convince M.M. of his connection to the spiritual world, he arranged a visit to a local witch or fortune-teller on the island of Murano. The entire affair, however, had been carefully staged in advance. Before bringing M.M. to the woman, Casanova had already visited her privately, paid her a generous sum, and dictated in detail exactly what she was to say when he later appeared with his lover.
When they eventually arrived, the witch entered a trance and began revealing details from M.M.'s life that, supposedly, could have been known only to the cosmos itself. The effect was immediate. The nun became completely fascinated and increasingly subject to Casanova's influence. Casanova openly admits to this deception in his memoirs, yet beneath the charlatanism one can glimpse the essence of Venetian dark magic:
- magic as absolute stagecraft,
- magic as the direction of perception,
- magic as the complete manipulation of another person's consciousness within a labyrinth of mirrors.
The Hidden Great Dragon of Murano
In his writings and correspondence, particularly when discussing Kabbalistic operations, Casanova suggests that Murano was, in an esoteric sense, more than merely an island of glassmaking workshops and convents. It was the dwelling place of a hidden Genius Loci, a Spirit of Place manifesting itself in the form of a Dragon. Within the alchemical and Rosicrucian symbolism of the period, a Dragon dwelling in water or upon an island represents a primordial and dark power that must be mastered and brought under control.
For Casanova, Murano was an isolated energetic node within the Venetian world, a place where extreme luxury, the seclusion of nuns, secret societies, and the manufacture of glass in blazing furnaces converged into a single symbolic landscape. The latter is especially significant, for the production of glass is itself an alchemical process, the transformation of sand into light. To describe Murano as the abode of the Great Dragon was therefore to recognize it as the hidden heart of Venice's occult underworld.
Casanova's Four-Letter Magical System and the Secret Chiefs
Casanova did indeed possess and make operational use of a distinctive divinatory and magical system that he referred to in his memoirs as the Kabbalistic Pyramid or the Kabbalistic Oracle. The system was based upon numerology, geomancy, and alphanumeric substitutions. Although he frequently employed it as a tool for deceiving wealthy and credulous patrons, most notably Madame d'Urfé, whom he convinced that he could rejuvenate her and eventually reincarnate her into a male body through a series of rituals, the system itself was mathematically fascinating.
The procedure was relatively simple. The user would formulate a question. Its letters would then be converted into numbers and arranged in the form of a pyramid. Through a mathematical process of addition and reduction, the pyramid would eventually yield key numbers or four-letter roots. These numerical results would then be translated back into letters, producing cryptic yet grammatically coherent responses in either Italian or French. Variants of the same method appear among several later occult groups, making it difficult to determine whether Casanova invented the system himself or inherited it from an earlier tradition.
Casanova claimed that through this device he was not inventing answers at all. Rather, the pyramid functioned as a channel of transmission, a kind of “cosmic telegraph” connecting him to discarnate intelligences, Secret Chiefs, or spiritual genii. In the case of Madame d'Urfé, he attributed his communications to entities such as Oromasis, a spirit of fire, and maintained that he received direct instructions from an invisible brotherhood guiding the destiny of Europe.
Although Casanova frequently recounts these episodes in History of My Life with a cynical smile, fully aware that he was deceiving people, he nevertheless admits something rather unsettling: the system occasionally produced accurate answers and predictions that he himself could neither calculate nor anticipate. At a certain point, the Pyramid appeared to operate on its own, as though it had truly connected to a living egregore. Casanova was therefore not merely an observer. He was an operator. His visit to the false witch of Murano, his fascination with the Dragon of that island, and his four-letter Kabbalistic methodology all suggest that eighteenth-century Venice functioned through hidden codes and invisible mechanisms.
Casanova's life was a conscious magical performance in which he attempted, through the use of his four-letter system, to manipulate fate itself, and perhaps Venice as well. Yet behind the scenes, beyond the furnaces and shadows of Murano, the true Great Dragon, embodied by the oligarchy, the Inquisition, the Council of Ten, and the spirit of the lagoon itself, ultimately devoured him in turn, condemning him to exile and to the writing of memoirs in the gloom of Bohemia.
Casanova and the Count of Saint-Germain
Since I have already mentioned the Secret Chiefs, it is worth turning to Casanova's encounters with the legendary Count of Saint-Germain. Their paths crossed several times at the royal courts of Europe, and their relationship was a fascinating mixture of mutual recognition, professional jealousy, and deep rivalry. Both men were among the greatest manipulators of the eighteenth century, yet their styles could not have been more different.
In History of My Life (Histoire de ma vie), Casanova devotes considerable attention to Saint-Germain, leaving behind one of the most vivid and detailed portraits of this enigmatic figure. Casanova and Saint-Germain first met in Paris, within the salons of the high aristocracy, where both sought the patronage of King Louis XV and his influential mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Having only recently arrived in Paris after his spectacular escape from the Venetian prisons, Casanova found Saint-Germain already established as a dominant presence at the French court. Casanova describes him with a mixture of fascination and open skepticism:
“This extraordinary man, a born impostor, spoke without hesitation of being three hundred years old, of possessing a universal medicine, of being able to do whatever he wished with nature, of melting diamonds and combining ten or twelve small ones into a single great gem of perfect purity, all without the slightest loss of weight.”
Casanova also recounts a scene at which he was personally present. Saint-Germain took a copper coin, placed it upon glowing coals, and worked over it with a blowpipe. After a few moments, the coin appeared to have become gold. Although Casanova suspected that the entire demonstration was an exceptionally refined piece of stagecraft involving the substitution of the coin, he nevertheless admits that he was unable to discover the trick. He kept the coin afterward and later presented it to one of his lovers as a gift.
There existed a fundamental difference between Casanova and Saint-Germain in their approach to occultism and manipulation. Casanova employed magic as an instrument for achieving very tangible goals: money, women, and social advancement. He always retained a cynical awareness that he was deceiving people, exploiting their credulity for practical gain.
Saint-Germain, by contrast, cultivated an aura of absolute and timeless mystery. He never appeared to seek money. He was fabulously wealthy, adorning himself with diamonds on his fingers and even upon his shoes. He rarely ate in public, claiming to sustain himself through a special elixir, and presented himself as a genuine adept elevated above ordinary human weaknesses. Casanova was deeply irritated by the fact that Saint-Germain fascinated people far more profoundly than he did. He regarded him as a “king of impostors,” yet at the same time envied his extraordinary self-control and the flawless maintenance of his mystical aura. To borrow the language of Carlos Castaneda, Saint-Germain appeared as a perfectly impeccable nagual.
Their paths crossed once again in London. There, Casanova attempted to expose Saint-Germain before members of the English aristocracy, but Saint-Germain always seemed to remain one step ahead, protected by powerful political patrons and operating as a discreet diplomat, and quite possibly a spy, for various crowned heads of Europe.
It is particularly interesting that both men moved within many of the same secret societies of their age, from Freemasonry to Rosicrucian circles. Yet while Casanova sought personal connections and opportunities within these networks, Saint-Germain was often regarded as a figure who inspired them, or perhaps even guided them from behind the scenes. Many considered him one of the mysterious Secret Chiefs. In this sense, Casanova may be seen as the embodiment of a Venice that is aging, declining, consuming its remaining energy, sinking into debt, and ultimately being cast aside, the human and expendable element. Saint-Germain, on the other hand, becomes a walking metaphor for the archetypal vampire. He is the man who does not age, whose origins remain unknown, who appears across decades in the same form, possesses elixirs of immortality, and transforms living matter, copper into gold, small diamonds into great ones.
Their meeting in Paris may therefore be read as the moment when the classical Venetian manipulator found himself confronting something that had already surpassed all of his tricks: the true, cold, and seemingly eternal Dragon of European esotericism.
Casanova, Blavatsky, and Lovecraft
Icosameron possesses a distinctive tone: cold, cosmic, and anthropological. Decades later, echoes of this atmosphere would reappear in the Theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, with its concepts of root races and primordial androgynous beings, and later still in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, with their journeys into unknown depths and encounters with civilizations governed by laws utterly foreign to the human psyche. Yet if we examine literary history more closely, Icosameron was neither an isolated incident nor was Casanova the pioneer of this particular form of speculative fiction. Rather, he was a master synthesizer of traditions that had smoldered within the European imagination for centuries before him. Casanova took pre-existing subterranean motifs and filtered them through his own Hermetic and Enlightenment vision. The idea that the Earth was hollow and inhabited was not his invention. By the time he composed the novel in the late eighteenth century, the concept occupied a curious borderland between emerging science and esoteric speculation.
Edmond Halley, the celebrated astronomer best known for the comet that bears his name, proposed in 1692 that the Earth might be hollow and composed of several concentric spheres, each possessing its own atmosphere and luminous substance. He put forward the theory as a way of explaining anomalies in the movement of the magnetic poles. Later, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Leonhard Euler modified the concept, suggesting that an inner sun existed at the center of the Earth, providing light and warmth to advanced subterranean civilizations. Casanova drew directly upon such theories when constructing the physical framework of his underground world.
As for literary precedents, he had several clear guides who had already prepared the path before him. One example is Louis-Guillaume de Fénelon and his Relation du voyage de l'Isle d'Eutopia (1721), one of the earliest texts to employ Halley's hollow-earth theory for satirical and utopian purposes. Another important predecessor is Ludvig Holberg, whose Niels Klim's Underground Travels (Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum, 1741) tells the story of a protagonist who falls through a cavern in Norway, much as Casanova's protagonists descend through a whirlpool, and discovers the subterranean world of Nazar hidden within the Earth. There he encounters bizarre civilizations populated by talking trees and intelligent animals. Holberg's novel became one of the great European literary successes of the eighteenth century. Why, then, does Casanova still feel so Lovecraftian and so unexpectedly close to Blavatsky?
If he was not a pioneer of the genre itself, Casanova was nevertheless a pioneer in atmosphere and in the depth of his conception. Where his predecessors, such as Holberg or Swift, used fantastic worlds primarily as satirical backdrops for contemporary politics or the Church, Casanova accomplishes something quite different in Icosameron. It is here that the hidden seam connecting him to Lovecraft and Blavatsky begins to emerge. He introduces a form of radical anthropological otherness, the truly Lovecraftian element. Casanova's Megamicri are not merely humans wearing strange masks. Their biology and mode of existence are fundamentally unsettling. They possess no bones; their bodies are soft and cartilaginous. They are not born but hatch from perfectly spherical eggs. Their language is not verbal. They produce musical tones from their chests and communicate through the direct transmission of thought.
For hundreds of pages, Casanova describes their anatomy and social order with the cold, almost clinical precision of a scientist observing an alien species. This obsession with the detailed description of a non-human order is pure Lovecraftian material long before Lovecraft. And, incidentally, I cannot shake the impression of a certain resemblance between Casanova's subterranean beings and Crowley's description of LAM.
The concept of androgynous beings inhabiting the interior of the Earth also corresponds directly to a hidden doctrine that Blavatsky would later systematize. In Theosophy, the earliest human races, such as the Hyperboreans or the primordial Lemurians, existed as androgynous and spiritual beings before the fall into matter and the division of the sexes. As I have already noted, Casanova consciously projects the myth of Adam Kadmon, the primordial human being, onto the Megamicri. He situates their world within the Earth as a kind of frozen alchemical incubator.
Ultimately, I would describe Icosameron as a hybrid. It is not a literary accident in the sense of having emerged from nothing. It stands firmly within a tradition stretching from Halley and Holberg to the French libertine novel. Yet it is an accident in another sense: in its failure and in its sheer monumentality. The work consisted of five volumes and more than sixteen hundred pages. It was too expensive, too vast, and almost entirely misunderstood by its contemporaries. Readers who expected from Casanova witty memoirs, scandalous anecdotes, and salon gossip with occasional erotic embellishments instead received a massive, hermetic, philosophical-scientific cosmogony. In this respect, Casanova was a pioneer. He was among the first to treat the subterranean world not as a satirical fairy tale but as a serious, systematic study with esoteric and anthropological ambitions. That is why, when we read about Edward and Elizabeth today, we do not see the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Instead, we glimpse dark modernism, cosmic unease, and the occult anatomy of centuries yet to come.
On this occasion, a thought occurs to me that Casanova may have articulated, or at least anticipated, the occult current that would later give rise to Theosophy and much of what followed in its wake. Let us remember that Martinism and the Masonic system of the Strict Observance also introduced the concept of the Secret Chiefs. Yet neither tradition ventured as deeply as Blavatsky or Casanova. All of these Secret Chiefs remain upon the Earth, but they dwell upon its surface. The true source of magical power, however, comes from the depths, whether from the center of the Earth or from the abyss of the oceans. Only in modern times is this source relocated to the depths of cosmic space. Today, we would describe such beings as extraterrestrials. Perhaps, more accurately, they should be called proto-terrestrials. In this shift, I perceive a fundamental transformation in the way humanity visualizes the Source of Power.
Systems such as Baron von Hund's Strict Observance, the Martinism of Jean-Baptiste Willermoz and Martinez de Pasqually, and even early Freemasonry operated with the concept of the Superiores Incogniti, the Unknown Superiors. Yet their narrative suffered from a fundamentally human and geopolitical limitation. These Secret Chiefs were supposedly living individuals hidden somewhere upon the Earth's surface: surviving Knights Templar in Scotland, sages dwelling in Tibet, or mystics wandering the deserts of Arabia. The problem is that, so long as these beings remain on the surface, they are vulnerable to demystification. If they are in Scotland, why has nobody seen them? Who are they? Why not simply find them? If they are in Tibet, they remain flesh-and-blood human beings seated in meditation.
Casanova, and later Blavatsky, seem to recognize that the surface of the Earth can no longer sustain the burden of absolute supernatural authority. The Enlightenment had begun mapping, measuring, and colonizing the world. Secret societies operating on the surface were steadily losing their magical aura beneath the advance of rationalism. The location of the Secret Chiefs therefore had to be changed.
Depth, whether the center of the Earth or the trenches of the ocean, carries a particular psychological and magical charge. The interior is the place where matter is subjected to unimaginable pressure. It is the realm of alchemical maturation, where diamonds and gold are formed. By descending beneath the surface, we descend into the collective unconscious, into the primordial darkness that existed before the light of reason gave shape to the visible world.
In Icosameron, Casanova consciously draws upon this reservoir. His Megamicri are not advanced surface-dwellers but beings who have never experienced the Fall, isolated within the womb of the planet and preserved in a state of ontological childhood. This is the same current that Blavatsky would later reshape through stories of hidden subterranean sanctuaries such as Agartha and Shambhala, repositories of platinum books and the knowledge of pre-Adamic races.
With the Industrial Revolution, and especially throughout the twentieth century, humanity gradually conquered and desacralized the interior of the planet through geological drilling, submarines, and the mapping of the ocean floor. We discovered that the Earth's core consists of molten iron and nickel rather than a subterranean kingdom or the realm of fallen angels. What was the occult current to do in order to survive except relocate its gods?
Once the underworld became too accessible and too physically explicable, consciousness displaced the Secret Chiefs and the proto-terrestrials into the cosmic depths. “Angels,” “elemental spirits,” and Casanova's “Megamicri” became Pleiadians, Sirians, or Greys. The intelligences that once communicated through music and telepathy beneath the red glow of the Earth's interior were transferred into vessels hovering above our atmosphere, perhaps transmitting messages from distant stars, or lingering within multidimensional fractures, portals of uncertain geography and paradoxical physics.
Lovecraft serves here as a transitional figure, the missing link between Casanova and Blavatsky on one side and the modern UFO myth on the other. In Lovecraft's fiction, the Great Old Ones, such as Cthulhu, still sleep within oceanic abysses and buried crypts, yet they arrived there from the stars. He united chthonic depth with cosmic abyss. If we regard Casanova as an articulator of this hidden current, an interesting insight emerges.
From this perspective, Venice may be understood as the last place in Europe where that chthonic dimension remained visible. Venice is a city suspended between heaven and depth, raised upon mud and emerging from maritime darkness. Its palaces do not rest upon solid ground but upon thousands of petrified wooden piles driven into the submerged darkness below. As a child of such a city, Casanova instinctively understood that Venice drew its power from that lagoonal, proto-terrestrial depth, from what I have called the Dragon of Murano. When Venice began to decline and lose its vitality beneath the lights of Enlightenment bourgeois culture, Casanova transferred that same power into the interior of the Earth through Icosameron, anticipating, in his own way, what would later become Theosophy.
NOTE:
Originally published in Serbian. This English version is an AI-assisted translation of the original text.
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