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The Last Alchemist : Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason

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June 2, 1743 | Birth of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (d. August 26, 1795), late 18^th-century roving adventurer, Freemason and alchemist who mixed with most of the major figures in Europe at that time, including Casanova, Mozart, Goethe and Catherine the Great.

There are two Cagliostros, or at least, two accounts of his life. In one popular version he was a cunning charlatan, and as such he is mainly remembered today. This version states that 'Count Cagliostro' was never his real name, but that he was born Giuseppe Balsamo to a struggling family in the Albergheria, the poor neighbourhood of Palermo, Sicily.

He travelled throughout Europe, mixing with and hoodwinking many of the great names of his times. Along the way, he amassed great wealth thanks to human gullibility, great personal charm, and proficiency in the forger's arts. His reputation as a fraud is still so entrenched, today he even shows up as a crooked Marvel Comics character.

In the other, flattering  tradition, based largely on his own memoirs, he was a nobleman and great magus.   

Cagliostro’s own account of his life

In his own writings the story is that he was born to a noble Maltese family, but reared and educated in Medina in Malta, where he was called Acharat and he lived in the palace of the Mufti Salahaym. In Medina, young ‘Allesandro’, or Acharat, was under the tutelage of Althotas (Altotas), who was a practitioner of several branches of esoteric philosophy and the sciences of the day.

Based on Cagliostro’s own account, the journal Theosophy (Vol. 26, No 12, October, 1938) records:

“When the boy was twelve years old, he and Althotas began their travels. The first stopping place was Mecca, where they lived for three years in the palace of the Cherif. On the day of their departure the aged Cherif pressed the boy to his bosom and exclaimed: ‘Nature’s unfortunate child, adieu!’

“In Egypt they ‘inspected those celebrated Pyramids which to the eye of the superficial observer appear as enormous masses of granite,’ but which, to the Adept-eye of Althotas, were holy fanes of initiation. Certain Temple-priests of that ancient land took the boy into ‘such palaces as no ordinary traveller has ever entered before.’ Finally, after wandering through Asia and Africa for three years, the two reached the Island of Malta, where they were entertained in the palace of Pinto, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. There Althotas donned the insignia of the Order, and the young wanderer assumed European dress for the first time and received from his teacher the name of Cagliostro.

“Althotas died in Malta, and Cagliostro, accompanied by the Chevalier d’Acquino, then visited Sicily and the Isles of Greece, stopped for a while in Naples, and finally reached Rome, where he made the acquaintance of Cardinal Orsini and the Pope.”    Source  

Cagliostro himself writes:

It was in the island of Malta that I had the misfortune of losing my best friend and master, the wisest as well as the most learned of men, the venerable Althotas …
  The spot where I had parted for ever from the friend who had been as a father to me, soon became odious. I begged leave of the Grand-Master to quit the island in order to travel over Europe; he consented reluctantly …
  In the capital of the Christian World (Rome) I resolved upon keening the strictest incognito. One morning as I was shut up in my apartment, endeavoring to improve myself in the Italian language, my valet introduced to my presence the secretary of Cardinal Orsini, who requested me to wait on his Eminence. I repaired at once to his place and was received with the most flattering civility. The Cardinal often invited me to his table and procured me the acquaintance of several cardinals and Roman princes …
Cagliostro, Memoirs

A less sympathetic account

As far as historians have been able to ascertain, Giueseppe Balsamo called himself count, and travelled in many countries under many different names and characters, pretending, as some would have it, to be a nobleman, or else a physician, and sometimes a juggler. With the help of his wife, it has been alleged, he cheated many people, and made a fortune by such ruses as peddling an elixir of perpetual youth and beauty. He made preposterous claims about his age and was believed by some friends to have lived forever. Balsamo/Cagliostro convinced some that he had taken part in the Biblical marriage feast of Cana (John 2: 1-11) some seventeen centuries earlier, and even to have walked with Jesus in Galilee. 

What manner of talents of persuasion he possessed, and what methods he used to convince people of such things, has been lost to history; all we know is how finely honed they must have been. We might compare him to brilliant stage magicians and confidence men of our own times (and there are many).

His background

Palermo (pictured at right in about 1745), the name of which means ‘surrounded by rocky cliffs’, was once one of the greatest cities in Europe. It was famed for the wealth of its court, and without rival as a centre of learning. It differs from most European cities, however, with its Phoenician origins and a history that helps to face it, culturally, towards the Arabian east, and North Africa.

The town had come under the rule of the Carthaginians until, in 254, the Romans made it a colony under the provincial administration in Syracuse. When the Roman Empire divided, Sicily came under the rule of the Eastern Byzantine Empire. Later came the Saracens as they were known in the West – actually Muslim forces from north Africa – who obtained possession of Palermo in 831 (and all of Sicily by 965). The Muslim rulers moved Sicily's capital to Palermo, where it remains. Throughout its Muslim period Palermo was a major city of trade, culture and learning, with at least 300 mosques. Over ensuing centuries, Palermo imbibed the cultural influences of a succession of conquerors: the Normans, Angevins, the house of Aragon and, from a decade before Giuseppe's birth, the Bourbon-ruled kingdom of Naples. It was in such a multicultural* home-town environment that Giueseppe came to affect the esoteric knowledge of Europe, Egypt and Arabia, which he later took to an admiring Continent and England.

When his father died he received a minimal education at the expense of some of his mother’s relatives. It has been said that he robbed his uncle and forged a will, and spent time in Palermo’s prisons more than once. 

Giuseppe Balsam's unusual abilities began to show themselves from his early days. In Palermo in 1764, as a youth of 21, he managed to convince a gullible silversmith named Marano that he was able to transmute base metals into gold – the old alchemical favourite. With Marano believing in the ruse, Cagliostro asked for sixty ounces of gold as payment for magickal ceremonies that would yield even more of the precious metal, and promised to reveal to Marano the location of a large treasure hidden in a cave outside Palermo. Albeit hesitatingly, Marano gave the young man the fee and was led at midnight to a field some distance from the city, where Cagliostro’s hired thugs attacked him, robbing him of his sixty ounces of gold and all the other valuables he had on him. Cagliostro soon fled Palermo. With his two accomplices, a valet and a certain Father Atansio, he first headed straight to Messina on the far side of the island, where Giuseppe’s well-to-do uncle, Joseph Cagliostro, gave them a place to stay. Soon afterwards, the young adventurer set out on his world travels.

High-tailing it to Rome during the papal reign of Pope Clement XIII (1758 - 1769), he set up practice there as a kind of salesman of charms to tourists, and then as a physician, and there he prospered. In time he met the Maltese ambassador at the Holy See, Count de Bretteville, who introduced him to Cardinal Orsini, who bestowed patronage upon him.

While in Rome, on April 20, 1768, a few weeks before his 25th birthday, the Sicilian married an extraordinarily beautiful14-year-old, Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani, whom he referred to by her middle name. 

An encounter with Casanova

Australian historian, Iain McCalman, Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, in his book Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro; the Greatest Enchanter of the Eighteenth Century (published in the USA as The Last Alchemist : Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason), relates the 1769 meeting of Mr and Mrs Balsamo (for they were not yet Count and Countess Cagliostro) with Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725 - 1798), the famous 18th-century Venetian adventurer and naughty diarist.

The legendary seducer was staying at the Three Dolphins Inn, Aix-en-Provence, France, recovering from a serious bout of pneumonia. It was at the time of the Easter carnival – Easter was March 26 in 1769 – and Casanova had recuperated enough to go girl-hunting at the revels that were being held in the town.

In McCalman’s words: 

“Casanova never forgot his first sight of the girlish pilgrim slumped in a hotel chair holding a small golden crucifix on her lap. He reckoned her age at eighteen (she was three years younger). In a soft Roman lilt, she introduced herself as Seraphina Balsamo, sounding weary when she described her recent ordeal. She and her husband, Giuseppe, had just completed the legendary pilgrimage route from Rome to Santiago de Compostela. A grimy pilgrim cloak, thick staff, and heavy oilskin enhanced her look of vulnerability. Casanova’s instinctive bedroom glance took in every detail: a fine aquiline nose, a sensual mouth, and a pleasingly ripe figure. He even noticed a tiny flaw in the otherwise perfect picture-drooping eyelids that ‘marred the tenderness of her beautiful blue eyes.’”

Casanova soon detected “a whiff of sexual calculation about the way that she pulled back her sleeves to show him the bedbug bites on her white arm”, and, although he could not be certain, the young Balsamo seemed not to be troubled by her flirtation as he sat quietly sewing onto his cloak the lacing of cockleshells that signified completion of the Compostela pilgrimage. In fact, Balsamo had already, in another place and time, connived with another man to take the sexual favours of the ravishingly beautiful Seraphina. In Rome when he was a poor immigrant looking for a way to rise above his rank, Balsamo had met a Sicilian thug and forger named Octavio Nicastro. Octavio introduced his mate Giueseppe to a rakish nobleman by the name of Marquis Agliata, a plenipotentiary to the court of Prussia. Under Agliata’s instruction, Giuseppe (who had some drawing talents) learned the noble art of forging business and military documents. Giueseppe was no fool, and he soon learned that with a skilful hand he could easily gain honours in the same way that Agliata had become a colonel.

In 1768, only weeks after they were married, Agliata invited Giueseppe and Seraphina to come with him on a ‘business’ trip to Germany; the marquis threw in a hint that he found Balsamo’s beautiful young wife extremely appealing, and that if Giuseppe was accommodating, he would make it well worth the discomfort of being cuckolded. 

As a consequence, Giuseppe impressed upon Seraphina that as God apportions gifts to all people, who must use these gifts to the advantage of others, the good Lord had given her the gift of beauty which, if she were to use it wisely to aid their material situation, it would be a venial sin at worst, and probably not even that. In May, the four (with Nicastro being the fourth), set out by coach for Germany. Actually, it was two coaches: the marquis and the beauteous 14-year-old in the fine coach in front, and Giueseppe and Nicastro squeezed into a lesser vehicle behind. The carriages stopped from time to time for the necessities of road travel, and the occasional fraud on unsuspecting Italians. They didn't get as far as Germany. In fact, they only made it as far as a village near Venice before the merry gang self-destructed, with Nicastro, jealous of the good favour Giuseppe now had with the marquis, turned over our young couple to the police, and the resourceful ‘marquis’ quickly gathered the takings and exited for parts unknown.

Giueseppe and Seraphina were released due to insufficient evidence, but now found themselves without patronage and probably not a scrap of bread. It was against this background that they set out on the most famous route in Europe, the pilgrimage route that ran through Italy, France, and Spain to the shrine of Saint James of Compostela in Galicia. It was on that route that Giuseppe knew that he could do worse than to run some scams among pilgrims and hoteliers, and nor would the charms of his child bride would not go astray. And it was on that route that, the following March, they bumped into Mr Casanova.

They spun him a yarn that they’d travelled through Italy via Sardinia and Genoa, and then moved up through France to Avignon and Montpellier, on a religious pilgrimage because only through devotion and poverty could salvation be achieved. As they had walked, they told Casanova, many generous citizens had given them more money than they really required, so they’d been disbursing money in the villages as they passed through. Surprisingly for a rogue such as Casanova, he actually fell for the spiel. In fact, the young couple had barely begun their supposed pilgrimage, having dressed in rags in Milan and walked, via Loreto, Bergamo, and Antibes, to Aix. It wasn’t very far, so Seraphina’s exhaustion was mostly a ruse.

The Venetian diarist does not tell us why he didn’t take Seraphina up on her lusty hints. It does seem out of character, as we know that he was recuperating at the Three Dolphins Inn with pneumonia that set in following an unusually unsuccessful, and quite chilly, escapade. In this, the 44-year-old Casanova had caught a cold while exposed to the cold North Wind, as he returned in an open chaise from D’Argens where he had failed to win a wager that he could deflower another early-teen beauty.

Casanova noted that the young man before him claimed to come from Naples, but the Venetian knew a Sicilian accent when he heard one. He notes in his diary that Balsamo seemed to have a brooding nature; maybe he thought better of bedding Seraphina when he guessed at the likely character of the strong youth who just a year before had knifed a waiter at the Locanda del Sol  Hotel in Rome.

Whatever the reason – perhaps he hadn't sufficiently recovered from his pneumonia after all – Casanova resisted the advances, and the next day Giuseppe and his wife tried another tack: they revealed to him the young man's skills as a forger, trying to inveigle him into some plot or other, which no doubt that had not quite thought up yet. Casanova knew that forgery would probably only win him a noose, as it had for some of his associates, so after giving them some alms, he abruptly ended his involvement with the Balsamos, immortalizing Giuseppe as “one of those lazy geniuses who prefer a vagabond life to hard work.” He also reflected that the casinos, brothels, and prisons of Europe were crammed with men of his ilk. I suppose it takes one to know one.

The Balsamos soon wound up back in Palermo, where Cagliostro was arrested by none other than Marano, the duped silversmith. Cagliostro was saved by the intercession of a nobleman, and, after cheating an alchemist out of 100,000 crowns (about $1 million) the ‘Count and Countess’ set sail for England, claiming to have discovered an alchemical secret.

In London

By July, 1776, the Cagliostros were in London, residing in rented apartments in Whitcombe Street. They lived quietly enough, but were swindled for 200 pounds by a gambler and his wife who passed themselves off as Lord and Lady Scot.

In the year 1780, they made their appearance in Strasbourg, where their fame had preceded them. Here they took rooms in a magnificent hotel, and wined and dined with all the high society people of the city with what appeared to be limitless wealth and hospitality. Both Cagliostro and Seraphina worked as physicians, dispensing medicine, advice and even money to many important people of the town.

Also in 1780, their travels took them to Warsaw, where various frauds of Cagliostro were exposed by Count August Moszynski (1738 - 1817), a wealthy alchemist (under the sponsorship of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski) who had a laboratory in his palace in Warsaw and conducted alchemical experiments.

Wherever Cagliostro travelled, he used his undoubtedly impressive knowledge of esoteric arts to pecuniary advantage, claiming to have been initiated into the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta, and to have studied alchemy, the Qabala, and magic while among them. In London he made connections with Freemasons and used these associations – and his great personal charm – to introduce himself to even more aristocratic elites throughout Europe.

Back in Paris in 1785, he was introduced to the Court of Louis XVI where his ability to manifest apparitions in mirrors drew big crowds, while Seraphina entertained “a very select company, and then in a diaphanous white costume”. The Egyptian Masonic rite that Cagliostro introduced to the court admitted both men and women and included sexual ceremonies, with initiations being conducted at midnight, with the ladies clothed in much the same manner as the Countess.  

Paris: The Diamond Necklace Affair

On August 23, 1785, Cagliostro was accused of complicity in the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ which involved Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and fanned the fires of anti-monarchism in France, leading to the Revolution four years later. 

Madame de la Motte (Lamotte), chief female player in the scandal (who was later flogged, branded and imprisoned), insisted that she had entrusted the necklace to Cagliostro, who had broken it up for sale, to “swell the treasures of his immense unequalled fortune”. She spoke of him as “an empiric, a mean alchymist, a dreamer on the philosopher’s stone, a false prophet, a profaner of the true worship, the self-dubbed Count Cagliostro!” 

Cagliostro was sent to the Bastille, but after being imprisoned for nine months he was exonerated. Manly Hall in Secret Teachings of All Ages claims  that he inscribed on the wall of his cell a remarkable prophecy: “In 1789 the besieged Bastille will on July 14 be pulled down by you from top to bottom.” After being released from prison in France, he travelled to Rome.

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Some quotes

The mistrust that mystery and magic always inspire made Cagliostro with his fantastic personality an easy target for calumny. After having been riddled with abuse till he was unrecognizable, prejudice, the foster child of calumny, proceeded to lynch him, so to speak.
Trowbridge, WRH, Cagliostro: Savant or scoundrel?: The true role of this splendid, tragic figure

This famous charlatan, the friend and successor of St. Germain, ran a career still more extraordinary. He was the arch-quack of his age, the last of the great pretenders to the philosopher’s stone and the water of life, and during his brief season of prosperity, one of the most conspicuous characters of Europe.
Mackay, Charles, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The Comte di Cagliostro is described as a man not overly tall, but square shouldered and deep of chest. His head, which was large, was abundantly covered with black hair combed back from his broad and noble forehead. His eyes were black and very brilliant, and when he spoke with great feeling upon some profound subject the pupils dilated, his eyebrows rose, and he shook his head like a maned lion. His hands and feet were small – an indication of noble birth – and his whole bearing was one of dignity and studiousness. He was filled with energy, and could accomplish a prodigious amount of work. He dressed somewhat fantastically, gave so freely from an inexhaustible purse that he received the title of ‘Father of the Poor,’ accepted nothing from anyone, and maintained himself in magnificence in a combined temple and palace in the Rue d, la Sourdière. According to his own statement he was initiated into the Mysteries by none other than the Comte de St.-Germain. He had traveled through all parts of the world, and in the ruins of ancient Babylon and Nineveh had discovered wise men who understood all the secrets of human life.
Hall, Manly P, Secret Teachings of All Ages

To the French and Russian monarchies and the Roman Catholic Inquisition, Cagliostro had been the Osama bin Laden of the 18th century … To one enemy he was a dangerous freemason; to another, an evil necromancer; to another again, a vile religious heretic.
Iain McCalman, Professor and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University; President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; author of Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro; the Greatest Enchanter of the Eighteenth Century (The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason)    Source: Turning Scholarly History into a Ripping Yarn ... (Lingua Franca, ABC Radio National (Australia)

Several months before publication my New York editor failed to persuade the marketeers in his own company that an unknown Australian author and an 18th century Italian crook, well-known only in Europe, were worthy of serious investment. They cut the US print run in half, withdrew it from the big book chains and insisted on a title change [from Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro; the Greatest Enchanter of the Eighteenth Century] to The Last Alchemist that made nonsense of my structure. They then came up with a matching cover image of the wizened alchemist with a long white beard. It was only when I fumed that Cagliostro was more like Casanova or Tony Soprano than Merlin the wizard that I managed to redeem the cover. As for the title, it joined a string of ‘last magicians’ and ‘last sorcerers’ that already featured on American publishing lists.
Iain McCalman, ibid

For 150 years Alessandro Cagliostro has been defamed as the arch-impostor of the eighteenth century. Why? Because it is claimed that Cagliostro was one of the many aliases assumed by the notorious adventurer Giuseppe Balsamo. This claim is based, first, upon the lies of Theveneau de Morande, a French spy and blackmailer who, in the words of a brilliant study by M. Paul Robiquet, was “from the day of his birth to the day of his death utterly without scruple”; and, second, upon a Life of Balsamo published anonymously in 1791 under the auspices of the Inquisition.
Source

* (As a sign of the city's multiculturalism, Palermo's website today is in Italian, French, Arabic and English.)

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