Alessandro Cagliostro

Giuseppe Balsamo, known by the alias Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, was an Italian occultist and confidence trickster.
Cagliostro was an Italian adventurer and self-styled magician. He became a glamorous figure associated with the royal courts of Europe where he pursued various occult arts, including psychic healing, alchemy, and scrying. His reputation lingered for many decades after his death but continued to deteriorate, as he came to be regarded as a charlatan and impostor, this view fortified by the savage attack of Thomas Carlyle in 1833, who pronounced him the "Quack of Quacks". Later works—such as that of W. R. H. Trowbridge in his Cagliostro: the Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic, attempted a rehabilitation.

Biography

Origin

The history of Cagliostro is shrouded in rumour, propaganda, and mysticism. Some effort was expended to ascertain his true identity when he was arrested because of possible participation in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe relates in his Italian Journey that the identification of Cagliostro with Giuseppe Balsamo was ascertained by a lawyer from Palermo who, upon official request, had sent a dossier with copies of the pertinent documents to France. Goethe met the lawyer in April 1787 and saw the documents and Balsamo's pedigree: Balsamo's great-grandfather Matteo Martello had two daughters: Maria, who married Giuseppe Bracconeri; and Vincenza, who married Giuseppe Cagliostro. Maria and Giuseppe Bracconeri had three children: Matteo; Antonia; and Felicità, who married Pietro Balsamo. The son of Felicità and Pietro Balsamo was Giuseppe, who was christened with the name of his great-uncle and eventually adopted his surname, too. Felicità Balsamo was still alive in Palermo at the time of Goethe's travels in Italy, and he visited her and her daughter. Goethe wrote that Cagliostro was of Jewish origin, and it may be that the name "Balsamo" comes from the hebrew Baal Shem.
Cagliostro himself stated during the trial following the Affair of the Diamond Necklace that he had been born of Christians of noble birth but abandoned as an orphan upon the island of Malta. He claimed to have travelled as a child to Medina, Mecca, and Cairo and upon return to Malta to have been admitted to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, with whom he studied alchemy, the Kabbalah, and magic.

Early life

Giuseppe Balsamo was born to a poor family in Albergheria, which was once the old Jewish quarter of Palermo, Sicily. Despite his family's precarious financial situation, his grandfather and uncles made sure the young Giuseppe received a solid education: he was taught by a tutor and later became a novice in the Catholic Order of St. John of God, from which he was eventually expelled. During his period as a novice in the order, Balsamo learned chemistry as well as a series of spiritual rites. In 1764, when he was twenty-one, he convinced Vincenzo Marano—a wealthy marrano goldsmith—of the existence of a hidden treasure buried several hundred years previously at Mount Pellegrino. The young man's knowledge of the occult, Marano reasoned, would be valuable in preventing the duo from being attacked by magical creatures guarding the treasure. In preparation for the expedition to Mount Pellegrino, however, Balsamo requested seventy pieces of silver from Marano.
When the time came for the two to dig up the supposed treasure, Balsamo attacked Marano, who was left bleeding and wondering what had happened to the boy—in his mind, the beating he had been subjected to had been the work of djinns. The next day, Marano paid a visit to Balsamo's house in via Perciata, where he learned the young man had left the city. Balsamo had fled to the city of Messina. By 1765–66, Balsamo found himself on the island of Malta, where he became an auxiliary for the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and a skilled pharmacist.

Travels

In early 1768 Balsamo left for Rome, where he managed to land himself a job as a secretary to Cardinal Orsini. The job proved boring to Balsamo and he soon started leading a double life, selling magical "Egyptian" amulets and engravings pasted on boards and painted over to look like paintings. Of the many Sicilian expatriates and ex-convicts he met during this period, one introduced him to a fourteen-year-old girl named Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani, known as Serafina, whom he married 1768.
The couple moved in with Lorenza's parents and her brother in the vicolo delle Cripte, adjacent to the strada dei Pellegrini. Balsamo's coarse language and the way he incited Lorenza to display her body contrasted deeply with her parents' deep-rooted religious beliefs. After a heated discussion, the young couple left. At this point, Balsamo befriended Agliata, a forger and swindler, who proposed to teach Balsamo how to forge letters, diplomas and myriad other official documents. In return, Agliata sought sexual intercourse with Balsamo's young wife, a request to which Balsamo acquiesced.
The couple traveled together to London, where Balsamo, now styling himself with one of several pseudonyms and self-conferred titles before settling on "Count Alessandro di Cagliostro", allegedly met the Comte de Saint-Germain. Cagliostro traveled throughout Europe, especially to Courland, Russia, Poland, Germany, and later France. His fame grew to the point that he was even recommended as a physician to Benjamin Franklin during a stay in Paris.
On 12 April 1777, "Joseph Cagliostro" was admitted as a Freemason of the Espérance Lodge No. 289 in Gerrard Street, Soho, London. In December 1777 Cagliostro and Serafina left London for the mainland, after which they travelled through various German states, visiting lodges of the Rite of Strict Observance looking for converts to Cagliostro's "Egyptian Freemasonry". In February 1779 Cagliostro traveled to Mitau,, where he met the poet Elisa von der Recke. In September 1780, after failing in Saint Petersburg to win the patronage of Russian Tsaritsa Catherine the Great, the Cagliostros made their way to Strasbourg, at that time in France. In October 1784, the Cagliostros travelled to Lyon. On 24 December 1784 they founded the co-Masonic mother lodge La Sagesse Triomphante of his rite of Egyptian Freemasonry at Lyon. In January 1785 Cagliostro and his wife went to Paris in response to the entreaties of Cardinal Rohan.

Affair of the diamond necklace

Cagliostro was prosecuted in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace which involved Marie Antoinette and Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan, and was held in the Bastille for nine months but finally acquitted, when no evidence could be found connecting him to the affair. Nonetheless, he was banished from France by order of Louis XVI, and departed for England. There he was accused by French expatriate Theveneau de Morande of being Giuseppe Balsamo, which he denied in his published Open Letter to the English People, forcing a retraction and apology from Morande.

Betrayal, imprisonment, and death

Cagliostro left England to visit Rome, where he met two people who proved to be spies of the Inquisition. Some accounts hold that his wife was the one who initially betrayed him to the Inquisition. On 27 December 1789, he was arrested for attempting to found a Masonic lodge in Rome, and was imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo. He was tried and originally sentenced to death but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment at the Forte di San Leo, where he would die on 26 August 1795.

Legacy

Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco credits Joseph Balsamo with the creation of the Egyptian Rite of the Freemasons and intensive work in the diffusion of Freemasonry, by opening lodges all over Europe and by introducing the acceptance of women into the community. The idea of an "Egyptian freemasonry" was maintained in Italy by the Rite of Misraïm, founded in 1813 by the three Jewish Bédarride brothers and in France, the Rite of Memphis founded in 1838 by Jacques Etienne Marconis de Nègre; these unified under Giuseppe Garibaldi as the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm in 1881.
Cagliostro is also rumored to have received initiation into the Egyptian Rite in Naples under the guidance of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, around 1767.
Cagliostro was an extraordinary forger. Giacomo Casanova, in his autobiography, narrated an encounter in which Cagliostro was able to forge a letter by Casanova, despite being unable to understand it. Occult historian Lewis Spence comments in his entry on Cagliostro that the swindler put his finagled wealth to good use by starting and funding a chain of maternity hospitals and orphanages around the continent. He carried an alchemistic manuscript The Most Holy Trinosophia amongst others with him on his ill-fated journey to Rome, and it is alleged that he wrote it. Occultist Aleister Crowley believed Cagliostro was one of his previous incarnations.

In popular culture

Drama

Catherine the Great wrote two skits lampooning Cagliostro in the guise of characters loosely based upon him.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote a comedy based on Cagliostro's life, also in reference to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, The Great Cophta which was published in 1791.
Latvian playwright Mārtiņš Zīverts wrote the play Kaļostro Vilcē in 1967.
Literature
Alexandre Dumas, père used Cagliostro in several of his novels.
George Sand includes Cagliostro as a minor character in her historical novel, The Countess of Rudolstadt.
Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote the supernatural love story Count Cagliostro, in which the Count brings to life a long dead Russian princess by materializing her from her portrait. The story was made into a 1984 Soviet TV movie Formula of Love.
Cagliostro is featured in three stories by Rafael Sabatini, namely "The Lord of Time", "The Death Mask" and "The Alchemical Egg", which are included in Sabatini's collection Turbulent Tales.
In "The Sandman" by ETA Hoffmann. Spalanzani is said to resemble a portrait of Cagliostro by Chodowiecki.
In "The Book and the Beast", a short story by Robert Arthur, Jr., a grimoire attributed to Cagliostro causes the gruesome death of those foolish enough to examine it, until a fire destroys it.
He is mentioned in the novel Kun Lun by Kilburn Hall, where it is revealed that Alessandro Cagliostro, Joseph and Giuseppe Balsamo are just a few of the names that the time traveler Count St. Germain has used throughout history.
Friedrich Schiller started, but not finish, the novel Der Geisterseher between 1786 and 1789, concerning him.
Harry Stephen Keeler paid tribute to the magician in his novel The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro.
He is a character in Robert Anton Wilson's The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.
He is frequently mentioned Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.
Mikhail Kuzmin wrote a novella called The Marvelous Life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro.
He is a character in Psychoshop, a novel by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny.
Josephine Balsamo, a descendant of Joseph Balsamo who calls herself Countess Cagliostro, appears in Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin novels.
Cagliostro makes a number of appearances as a vampire in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series of novels.
There are numerous references to Cagliostro in the detective novel He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr, one of his Dr Gideon Fell mysteries, published by Hamish Hamilton & Harper in 1946. In this book, a French professor, Georges Antoine Rigaud, has written a history: Life of Cagliostro. An attempted murder committed in He Who Whispers is similar in technique to part of an initiation ceremony undergone by Cagliostro into the lodge of a secret society. Cagliostro Street appears as a location in Carr's 1935 novel The Hollow Man.
He is a character in the 1997 novel 'Superstition' by David Ambrose. He is an acquaintance of the fictional Adam Wyatt.
He is often mentioned in the novel Napoleon's Pyramids by William Dietrich in connection with Freemasons and ancient Egyptian artifacts.
In Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road, Star uses "Balsamo" as an alias, and refers to Giuseppe as her uncle.
William Bolitho Ryall's Twelve Against The Gods has a section on Cagliostro.