The imposter Alessandro Cagliostro: a star of the 18th century – Society

A mystery surrounds his origins in Palermo or Malta as well as his death in the papal dungeon in the fortress of San Leo near San Marino, which is hardly guaranteed. The secret that always shrouded him was also the consistent “business model” of the adventurer, conman, alchemist and magician Alessandro di Cagliostro, who cast a spell over all of Europe in the run-up to the French Revolution. As fearless as he was impudent, he sometimes offered mysterious tinctures and ointments as a quack, in other places he held secret spiritistic séances and then again large, spectacular esoteric magic shows, in which he presented himself as a “gold maker” and discoverer of the almighty “philosopher’s stone” or as a messenger presented from the afterlife and the past. He always garnished his performances with the erotic flair of his beautiful wife Seraphina. If he was caught in some swindle and even had to serve a few days in prison, he always managed to quickly gather a new community around him who was willing to pay in other places.

The factual rumor that his real name was Giuseppe Balsamo and that he came from a poor family in Palermo who left him to the Fatebenefratelli monastery in Caltagirone, where he learned medicine and biology as a pharmacist’s assistant, did him no harm. In 1768 he married the daughter of a belt maker in Rome, and from then on they traveled through Europe as the Cagliostro couple. They must have met Giacomo Casanova in Aix-en-Provence, who, himself a charlatan, immediately saw through Cagliostro: “His quite engaging face, which betrayed enterprise, impudence, mockery and villainy.” This is what Casanova noted in his memoirs, judging the man who wore a robe with scallop shells sewn on; he was “one of those work-shy geniuses who prefer a vagrant life to work”.

In the Age of Enlightenment he conjured up the power of the irrational

In fact, a new type of adventurer was on the move in the Ancien Régime, who evoked the opposing power of the irrational in the midst of the triumph of the Enlightenment. According to contemporaries, Cagliostro was not a particularly attractive man. Nevertheless, rich widows pressed their fortunes on him, and some fainted at his performances. When he dared to get too close to the center of power in Paris in the circle of Cardinal Rohan and was involved in the famous affair about the necklace of Queen Marie-Antoinette, he caused a sensation, but was acquitted and after nine months from the Bastille dismiss. A crowd accompanied him through the streets singing like a folk hero who had uncovered the decadence of feudalism.

He had scarcely left Paris when he was eagerly awaited in London. He performed there, too, and he spun a fabulous legend about his origins. He was born in Malta as a son of a noble family, grew up in the palace of a mufti in Medina with his own tutor, who introduced him to oriental languages ​​and herbalism. In England he became more interested in Freemasonry. He was admitted to the “Esperanza” lodge and immediately set about reorganizing the Masonic system, which would accept him everywhere as a “brother”, according to his taste. He invented a mysterious “Egyptian Rite”, which also allowed the admission of women – a revolution.

So Cagliostro cultivated the aura surrounding him as a grand master. But when he wanted to found a lodge in the center of the Inquisition in Rome, he heralded his own downfall. In 1791 he became a victim of the last great Inquisition and witch trials of the Holy Office as a “Masonic heretic”.

On the basis of the files of the show trial, the biography of the Jesuit Father Giovanni Barberini about “Life and Deeds of Giuseppe Balsamo” was created, to which Johann Wolfgang Goethe also referred when he was researching Cagliostro’s origins in Palermo. As late as 1792, Goethe gave a lecture on this at the Weimar Friday Society, shortly after he had had the comedy “Der Großkophta” performed, which revolved around the collar affair. Friedrich Schiller had already worked on the subject during Cagliostro’s lifetime in the serial novel “Der Geisterseher”, in which he dealt primarily with the role of the Freemasons as the precursors of the French Revolution. Cagliostro can still be found quoted as a seducer and conjurer in the devilish whisperer Mephisto.

The “emissary of the French Revolution,” as the indictment put it, fared badly in Rome. Dressed in penitential robes, he was escorted from Castel Sant’Angelo to the church of Santa Maria by two rows of priests and monks, and he had to give thanks for having his death sentence commuted to “eternal imprisonment” in the fortress of San Leo. There Cagliostro did not have an easy life in the solitary cell in the deep well shaft until he was declared dead on August 26, 1795 after an alleged stroke. He was officially buried right there. But when Napoleon’s troops went looking for it in 1797, they found only an empty sarcophagus.

So had he been able to cheat his fate one last time? Again and again he is said to have started escape attempts. Once the Roman newspapers even reported an impending attempt at liberation by friendly revolutionaries with an armada of Montgolfièren. Did he survive only in the novels and stories of his disciples? Or at least in a waltz in Johann Strauss’ operetta “Cagliostro in Vienna”? Certainly as the high priest Sarastro in Mozart’s “Magic Flute”.

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