Alessandro Cagliostro

Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (June 2, 1743 Palermo, Sicily - August 26, 1795 San Leo, Province of Pesaro and Urbino) was the alias for the charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo, an Italian traveller, occultist and Freemason.

Origin

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, on official request, had sent a dossier with copies of the pertaining 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 Felicitá who married Pietro Balsamo. The latter couple's son was Giuseppe Balsamo who was christened on the name of his greatuncle and eventually adopted his surname too. Pietro Balsamo was the son of a book-seller, Antonino Balsamo, and had declared bancruptcy before dying at age 44. Felicitá Balsamo was still alive in Palermo when Goethe gathered these facts there.

Cagliostro himself stated at the process following the Affair of the diamond necklace to have 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 initiated into the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta, with whom he studied alchemy, the Kabbalah and magic, but this is nothing more than the usual mystical background assumed by impostors and charlatans of all times. Goethe classifies this as "silly fairy-tales".

Early life

He was born to a poor family in Palermo, Sicily. Balsamo was a criminal who, in his most famous crime, claimed aptitude in alchemy to swindle a man out of his gold.

Travels

What is known of Cagliostro is that he became well-known in Naples and later Rome, where he met and married his wife Lorenza Feliciani. They travelled together to London, where he was initiated into Freemasonry, possibly by the Comte de Saint-Germain. He adopted as his secret sign the symbol of Ouroboros; the snake that bites its own tail. He soon founded the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry in The Hague, which initiated men and women in separate lodges and had an influence on the foundation of the masonic Rite of Misraim. He travelled throughout Russia, Germany, and later France, spreading the influence of the Egyptian Rite and also claiming to be a magnetic healer of great power. His fame grew to the point that he was even recommended as a physician to Benjamin Franklin during a stay in Paris.

Affair of the diamond necklace

He was prosecuted in the affair of the diamond necklace which involved Marie Antoinette and Louis René Édouard, cardinal de Rohan, and was imprisoned in France for fraud. He 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 asked to leave France, and left for England. Here he was accused by Theveneau de Morande of being Giuseppe Balsamo, which he denied in his Open Letter to the English People, forcing a retraction and apology from Morande.

Betrayal and imprisonment

Cagliostro left England to visit Rome, where he met two people who asked him to initiate them into the Egyptian Rite. However, they proved to be spies of the Inquisition. Some accounts hold that his wife was the one who initially betrayed him to the Inquisition. On December 27, 1789, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Soon afterwards he was sentenced to death on the charge of being a Mason. The Pope changed his sentence, however, to life imprisonment in the Castel Sant'Angelo. After attempting to escape he was relocated to the Fortress of San Leo where he died not long after.

He was an extraordinary forger. In his autobiography, Giacomo Casanova narrates an encounter with Cagliostro who was able to forge a letter of 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.

In fiction

• Alexandre Dumas, père used Cagliostro in several of his novels.
• The Phantom comic book featured Cagliostro as a character in the story "The Cagliostro Mystery" from 1988, written by Norman Worker and drawn by Carlos Cruz.
• 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 the Image comic book series Spawn, a mystic entity known as Cogliostro is the mentor of Spawn.
• Caligostro has been played in film by Orson Welles (Black Magic, 1949), Howard Vernon (Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, 1972) and Christopher Walken (The Affair of the Necklace, 2001).
• Cagliostro is a character in Robert Anton Wilson's The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.
• Cagliostro is frequently alluded to in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.
• Mikhail Kuzmin wrote a novella called The Marvelous Life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro (1916).
• Cagliostro appears as a criminal mastermind bent on upsetting the world economy with lead bars temporarily turned to gold in the Wonder Woman episode "Diana's Disappearing Act".
• Cagliostro is Dracula's arch-foe in Marvel Comics' Tomb of Dracula series, Marie Laveau's lover and an enemy of Doctor Strange.
• Cagliostro is a character in Psychoshop, a novel by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny.

Links and references

• Biography from TheMystica.com, identifying him with Giuseppe Balsamo.
• Biography from DJMcAdam.com, an account that just denies this hypothesis without giving a reason.
• Biography from The Psychic Investigator.de:Alessandro Cagliostro

el:Αλεσάντρο Καλιόστρο es:Cagliostro fr:Joseph Balsamo gl:Alessandro Cagliostro hr:Alessandro Cagliostro it:Cagliostro nl:Alessandro Cagliostro ja:カリオストロ pl:Alessandro di Cagliostro pt:Cagliostro ru:Александр Калиостро scn:Alessandru Cagliostru fi:Alessandro Cagliostro sv:Alessandro Cagliostro

Wikipedia information about Alessandro Cagliostro This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alessandro Cagliostro". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.