Count Cagliostro: The Real Story of Giuseppe Balsamo

Who Cagliostro was

Iain McCalman, whose biography of him appeared in the United States as The Last Alchemist, calls the puzzle of Cagliostro his “ascension into culture”: how a small-time Sicilian became a figure everyone from Goethe to the Inquisition felt they had to answer. This article follows the record first and the legend second.

The necklace, the Bastille and the letter

In 1785 a fraud over a diamond necklace broke open in Paris. At its centre stood Cardinal Louis de Rohan — and beside him, as a trusted friend, Cagliostro, who had lived for months in the cardinal’s palace at Saverne after they met in Strasbourg. He was arrested and spent about nine months in the Bastille; one Swiss study says eight.

In court he offered a defence memoir that was soon published in English. In it his parents were noble and Christian, he had grown up in the palace of a mufti in Medina, travelled through Asia and Africa and been initiated into the highest mysteries of Egypt. On 31 May 1786 the court acquitted him, and on 1 June he walked free.

On 2 June a man named Bernard wrote from Palermo to the Paris police: the count was the Palermitan Giuseppe Balsamo. Cagliostro was banished from France and went to London. From that week on, the question that followed him was not whether he had stolen a necklace — he had not been found to — but who he was.

The boy from the Albergheria

He was born in the poor Albergheria quarter of Palermo. His father, Pietro Balsamo, the son of a ribbon merchant, went bankrupt and died young. At about thirteen the boy entered a monastery of the Brothers of Mercy at Caltagirone, a nursing order, where by the Swiss historian Dominik Heitz’s account he picked up the rudiments of chemistry and medicine. He left after two years; back in Palermo came petty frauds and, eventually, flight.

The surname was not pure invention. His great-aunt Vincenza Martello had married a Joseph Cagliostro and stood godmother at his baptism; he took his first name from her husband and later, abroad, the surname too. The title of count was his own addition. On 20 April 1768 he married Lorenza Feliciani in Rome, and a year later Giacomo Casanova met the young couple at an inn in Aix-en-Provence.

The Grand Copt and his Egyptian rite

The turn came in London in 1777, when he was admitted to the Espérance lodge, listed by the Museum of World Freemasonry in Riga as Lodge No. 289. What he built from it was his own: an “Egyptian” rite he presented as the original Freemasonry, founded by the prophets Elijah and Enoch, with himself among its highest living representatives — the Grand Copt. Unlike most lodges of the day, his rite admitted women through adoption lodges.

In 1779 he spent about three months in Mitau, in Courland, in the circle of the young writer Elisa von der Recke, and founded an adoption lodge for it. Her diary recorded his teaching that the disciples of Elijah never die but are taken up alive to heaven. Eight years later she published a book against him. That one woman documented both the enthusiasm and the break is what makes her account valuable.

From 1780 he lived in Strasbourg and practised as a physician, treating the poor for nothing, according to the historian Hakan Baykal. Between 1781 and 1788 he stayed several times in Basel with the silk-ribbon manufacturer Jacob Sarasin, whose family credited him with the recovery of Sarasin’s wife Gertrud.

Goethe plays detective

In April 1787 Goethe was in Palermo. At dinner he heard that a local lawyer, working for the French ministry, had drawn up Balsamo’s family tree from baptism records and marriage contracts. Goethe read the manuscript and asked to meet the family. Passing himself off as an Englishman bringing news of the son, who had just gone from the Bastille to London, he climbed the stairs of a poor house near the Cassaro.

He found a pious widowed mother and a sister, Signora Capitummino, who told him her brother still owed her fourteen ounces for pawned goods she had redeemed when he fled. Goethe thought of paying the sum himself and decided he could not afford it on the road.

That second line is the most honest sentence in the whole affair: the man of reason, out to expose a fraud, deceived the fraud’s family to satisfy his curiosity. Goethe turned the material into a prose comedy, Der Gross-Cophta, which failed on stage in 1791.

Rome and San Leo

In 1789 Cagliostro was in Rome and founded a lodge there — in the pope’s city, in the year of the Revolution. At the end of the year he was arrested; according to Britannica, his wife had denounced him to the Inquisition as a heretic, magician and Freemason. In 1791 he was sentenced to death, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

He was taken to the fortress of San Leo, on a rock in the Apennines near Rimini, and died there on 26 August 1795, after two strokes according to Baykal. A digest of the Roman trial records was soon in print. It is a key source, and it is also the prosecution’s.

Three layers of one man

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