| Alessandro Cagliostro | |
|---|---|
 | |
|
Real Name |
Giuseppe Balsamo |
|
Born |
2 June, 1743 |
|
Died |
26 August, 1795 |
Origin[]
Bust of Count Alessandro Cagliostro by Jean-Antoine Houdon, c. 1786
Giuseppe Balsamo (in French usually Joseph Balsamo), known by the alias Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, was an Italian occultist.
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.
The history of Cagliostro is shrouded in rumour, propaganda, and mysticism. 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. Cagliostro himself 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.
Giuseppe Balsamo was born to a poor family in Albergheria, which was once the old Jewish Quarter of Palermo, Sicily. 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, he convinced Vincenzo Marano of the existence of a hidden treasure buried several hundred years previously at Mount Pellegrino. The young man's knowledge of the occult, would be valuable in preventing the duo from being attacked by magical creatures guarding the treasure. In preparation for the expedition, 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, in the mind of Marano, 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.
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. He met one ex-convict 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 Family 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 couple left. At this point, Balsamo befriended Agliata, who proposed to teach Balsamo how to forge official documents. In return, Agliata sought sexual intercourse with Balsamo's wife, a request to which Balsamo acquiesced.
The couple traveled together to London, where Balsamo, 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 1777, "Joseph Cagliostro" was admitted as a Freemason in London. In December Cagliostro and Serafina left London for the mainland, after which they travelled through various German states. In 1779 Cagliostro traveled to Mitau, (nowadays Latvia), where he met the poet Elisa von der Recke. In 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 1784, the Cagliostros travelled to Lyon. On December of that year they founded the co-Masonic mother lodge La Sagesse Triomphante of his rite of Egyptian Freemasonry at Lyon. In 1785 Cagliostro and his wife went to Paris in response to the entreaties of Cardinal Rohan.
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 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.
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, 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.
Public Domain Appearances[]
All published appearances of Alessandro Cagliostro before January 1, 1929 are public domain.
Some Notable Appearances are listed below:
Public Domain Literary Appearances[]
- Joseph Balsamo, Le Collier de la Reine
- The Countess of Rudolstadt (1843)
- "The Sandman" by ETA Hoffmann
- The Ghost-Seer (1786-1789)
- The Marvelous Life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro
Public Domain Theatrical and musical appearances[]
- The Great Cophta (play), by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1791)
- Le congrès des rois (1794)
- Cagliostro, ou Les illuminés by Victor Dourlen
- Cagliostro by William Michael Rooke
- Cagliostro by Adolphe Adam
- Cagliostro by Albert Lortzing
- Cagliostro in Wien by Johann Strauß (Sohn)
- Le Cagliostro by Claude Terrasse
Public Domain Movie appearances[]
- Kaliostro (1918)
- The Count of Cagliostro (1920)
- Le Miroir de Cagliostro (1899)
Public Domain Comic Appearances[]
- True Comics #78
- Kid Eternity #3
Notes[]
- Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco credits to Balsamo 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.
- 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.
- Occultist Aleister Crowley believed Cagliostro was one of his previous incarnations.