Alessandro Cagliostro

Giuseppe Balsamo (2 June 1743 – 26 August 1795), known by the alias Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, was an Italian occultist, self-styled magician and confidence trickster. He became a glamorous figure associated with the royal courts of Europe where he pursued various occult arts, including psychic healing, alchemy, and scrying. In his 1833 essay, Count Cagliostro, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) pronounced him the "Quack of Quacks".

Biography

Early life and education

Cagliostro was born Giuseppe Balsamo on June 8, 1743 in Albergheria, Palermo, Kingdom of Sicily. Several sources, including Cagliostro himself, state that he was descended from the Byzantine Greek family of Komnenos; specifically the Megas Komnenos branch, which ruled the Empire of Trebizond. Given that 'Balsamo' is a name of Greek origin, and that Albergheria was largely inhabited by people of Greek descent, Cagliostro claim to Greek ancestry seems valid. Albergheria was also known as the Jewish Quarter, which led later biographers to state that Cagliostro was at least part Jewish, despite the fact that he was from a Catholic family.

In Messina, Cagliostro met a man known only as 'Althotas'. For some time, it was thought that Cagliostro had invented him, but an investigation by the Roman Inquisition proved his statements. Althotas was an alchemist, a chemist and a physician, fluent in several languages and educated, "in the entire circle of human sciences". It was agreed that Cagliostro would become his student. Over the next three years, the pair traveled throughout Egypt then, said Cagliostro, through "all the principal kingdoms of Africa and Asia", visiting and learning from priests and alchemists. Althotas claimed that he had discovered scientific methods of producing gold and precious stones; however it was achieved, they amassed a considerable sum of money. They also obtained letters of introduction to Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, Grand Master of the Order of Saint John, a powerful Portuguese nobleman who was infatuated with alchemy and who maintained his own laboratory at his home in Malta. Here, Cagliostro stated, Althotas died and his education was complete. They were eventually caught and had to flee Rome.

From then on, the couple spent years traveling. They tried to settle in Bergamo but Cagliostro's identity was discovered; they were briefly jailed then stripped of their funds and expelled from the city. They went through Galicia, to Genoa, then Antibes, Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon, living on the proceeds of Serafina's prostitution and Cagliostro's various scams, which included the sale of 'amulets' and 'cures'.

In 1772, the Cagliostros traveled to Paris in the company of another man, known only as 'M. Duplaisir', who was likely Serafina's lover. After Cagliostro had stolen all of his money, Duplaisir urged Serafina to flee and return to her parents. She took his advice but was thwarted by her husband, who used his connections to have her arrested. While Serafina spent several months in Sainte-Pélagie Prison, Cagliostro made a considerable sum of money selling a potion to "beautify the complexion". He then went further, claiming to be in possession of the solutions offered by the Hermetic Mystery, of the Elixir of life, and of the skills of the Philosopher's stone and mesmerism. Eventually, as people discovered his fraud, he was forced to flee. With Serafina once again in tow, he fled to Brussels, across Germany and Italy and, eventually, back to his native city of Palermo. 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, (nowadays Latvia), 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.

The Affair of the diamond necklace

thumb|Satire on Cagliostro at a Masonic meeting in London in 1786, by [[James Gillray]]

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

Stage

After her experience with Cagliostro and other charlatans, Catherine the Great wrote three anti-occult plays, in German and in Russian: Der Betrüger (The Fraudster) (1785), Der Verblendete (The Deluded One) (1785) and Der Sibirische Schaman (The Siberian Shaman) (1786).
Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote a comedy based on Cagliostro's life, Der Gross-Cophta (The Great Cophta) (1791).
Latvian playwright Mārtiņš Zīverts wrote the play Kaļostro Vilcē (Cagliostro in Vilce) in 1967.

Literature

Alexandre Dumas, père used Cagliostro in several of his novels (especially in Joseph Balsamo and in Le Collier de la Reine where Cagliostro claims to be over 3,000 years old and to have known Helen of Troy).
George Sand includes Cagliostro as a minor character in her historical novel, The Countess of Rudolstadt (1843).
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.

right|thumb|Cagliostro by [[Daniel Chodowiecki]]

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 (2014), 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 did not finish, the novel Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer) 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 (1916).
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 (aka Carter Dickson), one of his Dr Gideon Fell mysteries, published by Hamish Hamilton (UK) & Harper (USA) 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 (published in the US as The Three Coffins).
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.

Music

He appears as a principal character in the 1794 opera Le congrès des rois, a collaborative work of 12 composers.
The French composer Victor Dourlen (1780–1864) composed the first act to Cagliostro, ou Les illuminés which premiered on 27 November 1810. The second and third acts were composed by Anton Reicha (1770–1836).
The Irish composer William Michael Rooke (1794–1847) wrote an unperformed work Cagliostro.
Adolphe Adam wrote the opéra comique Cagliostro which premiered on 10 February 1844.
Albert Lortzing wrote in 1850 the libretto for a comic opera in three acts, Cagliostro, but did not compose any music for it.
Johann Strauß (Sohn) wrote the operetta Cagliostro in Wien (Cagliostro in Vienna) in 1875.
The French composer Claude Terrasse (1867–1923) wrote Le Cagliostro which premiered in 1904.
The Polish composer Jan Maklakiewicz (1899–1954) wrote the ballet in three scenes Cagliostro w Warszawie which premiered in 1938.
The Romanian composer Iancu Dumitrescu (1944–) wrote the 1975 work Le miroir de Cagliostro for choir, flute and percussion.
The American composer John Zorn (1953–) composed Cagliostro for solo viola in 2015. The performer uses two bows in the right hand to play on all four strings at once throughout the work.
The opera Cagliostro by the Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968) was performed on Italian radio in 1952 and at La Scala on 24 January 1953.
The comic opera Graf Cagliostro was written by Mikael Tariverdiev in 1983.

Film

Cagliostro has been portrayed in film by:
Fryderyk Jarossy (Kaliostro, 1918)
Reinhold Schünzel (The Count of Cagliostro, 1920)
Hans Stüwe (Cagliostro, 1929)
Ferdinand Marian (Münchhausen, 1943)
Orson Welles (Black Magic, 1949)
Howard Vernon (The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, 1972)
Jean Marais (', 1973, TV miniseries)
Bekim Fehmiu (Cagliostro, 1975)
Nodar Mgaloblishvili (Formula of Love, 1984, TV film)
Nicol Williamson (Spawn, 1997)
Christopher Walken (The Affair of the Necklace, 2001)
Robert Englund (The Return of Cagliostro, 2003)
In the 1943 German epic Münchhausen, Cagliostro appears as a powerful, morally ambiguous magician portrayed by Ferdinand Marian.
The French film director Georges Méliès (1861–1938) directed the 1899 film Le Miroir de Cagliostro.
The Mummy (1932), starring Boris Karloff, was adapted from an original story treatment by Nina Wilcox Putnam titled "Cagliostro". Based on Cagliostro and set in San Francisco, the story was about a 3000-year-old magician who survives by injecting nitrates.
The villain in the 1979 animated comedy film Lupin III is Count Cagliostro.
Cagliostro and his wife, Lorenza, appear as antagonists in the 2006 anime Le Chevalier d'Eon. While Cagliostro is mostly portrayed as a bumbling money-grubber, Lorenza is shown to have arcane magic powers.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cagliostro is a sorcerer, and is mentioned often in Doctor Strange (2016). The Book of Cagliostro: Study of Time is an ancient artifact containing several dark spells. The spin-off Disney+ series What If...? mentions him as one who could break an absolute point in time. Doctor Strange read the lost books of Cagliostro and reversed an absolute point in time, much like the books' author.

Television

Cagliostro appears as a depraved sorcerer, played by Henry Daniell, in a 1961 episode of the series Thriller, entitled "The Prisoner in the Mirror".
In "Diana's Disappearing Act", a 1978 episode of the Wonder Woman TV series, a descendant of Cagliostro's (played by Dick Gautier) is the villain. Attempting alchemy, he succeeds in temporarily turning lead into gold.
A magician named Cagliostro (Jose Ferrer) is murdered in "Death Casts a Spell," a 1984 episode of Murder She Wrote.
In Episode 36 of the 2002 series The Twilight Zone, and in a remake of "The Pharaoh's Curse", an illusionist played by Xander Berkeley strives to learn the secrets behind a centuries-old illusion, which has been purportedly handed down from magicians Harry Houdini, Frederick Eugene Powell and, originally, Cagliostro.
In Samurai Jack (the seventh episode of the third season, 2020), the title character follows a quest for the crystal of Cagliostro.
Cagliostro is a swindling alchemist in the TV anime series Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ.

Comics

The Phantom comic book (based on a comic strip of the same name) featured Cagliostro as a character in the story "The Cagliostro Mystery" from 1988. written by Norman Worker and drawn by Carlos Cruz.
The third Kid Eternity comic book, published in 1946, featured Cagliostro's risen spirit.
In the DC Comics universe, Cagliostro is described as an immortal (JLA Annual 2), a descendant of Leonardo da Vinci as well as an ancestor of Zatara and Zatanna (Secret Origins 27).
In Marvel Comics' Tomb of Dracula and Dracula Lives comic books, Cagliostro is a frequent enemy of Dracula. In Iron Man #149, Cagliostro trains Doctor Doom in sorcery.
The manga Rozen Maiden gives Count Cagliostro as one of many aliases adopted by the legendary dollmaker Rozen. He was shown to be in prison whittling wood.
He is a character in Todd McFarlane's comic book Spawn. He was introduced to the series by writer Neil Gaiman. Here, Cogliostro was once a spawn of Hell bound to his duty to the daemon Malebolgia. Having freed himself of the curse through alchemy and sorcery, he is teaching Spawn to do the same throughout the series.

Video games

Cagliostro is the namesake of a playable character in the Japanese Mobile game Granblue Fantasy.
Payday 2 by Overkill and Starbreeze studios features Cagliostro's manuscript as a key story item and opens a deep mystery within the game involving secret societies, immortality and nephilims.
Cagliostro is a villain in the Spiders video game Steelrising. His penchant for magic and alternative medicine is referenced; for example, in one scene, he is shown practicing hypnosis with a pendulum.
Cagliostro is featured in Fate/Grand Order as a Pretender-class servant.
Cagliostro appears as an opponent in the card cheating game Card Shark.

Notes

References

External links

Biography from TheMystica.com, identifying him with Giuseppe Balsamo.
Biography from DJMcAdam.com, an account that just denies this hypothesis without giving a reason.
The Great Cagliostro: Master Illusionist and King of Liars