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

286 Pages·2004·1.02 MB·English

by  Iain Mccalman

The Last Alchemist

c o u n t c a g l i o s t r o,
m a s t e r o f m a g i c i n t h e
a g e o f r e a s o n
y

Iain McCalman
To David and Verity, my Father and Mother
c o n t e n t s
y

acknowledgments vii
Prologue: The House of Balsamo ♦ 1
1. Freemason ♦ 17
2. Necromancer ♦ 49
3. Shaman ♦ 75
4. Copt ♦ 105
5. Prophet ♦ 143
6. Rejuvenator ♦ 175
7. Heretic ♦ 207
Epilogue: Immortal ♦ 233
notes 247
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
I have incurred more than my usual quantum of debts in writing this book.
It could not have been done without the kindness and expertise of friends
who obtained sources for me abroad that I was unable to reach myself, and,
on occasion, translated these as well. Natalie Adamson and Serge Kakou
deserve special mention here. Others have helped me to translate documents
from Italian and German or have checked and improved my own transla-
tions in French. I thank them for their generosity and skill. They are Glenn
St. John Barclay, Caroline Turner, Bruce Koepke, Susanna von Caemmerer,
Mary Caliri, Mike Ovington, and Gino Moliterno. To Gino, special thanks
for his enthusiastic support throughout and his expert advice on Cagliostro’s
career in film. Christa Knellwolf not only translated important documents
from the German for me but also gave me the benefit of her expertise on
Goethe. Simon Burrows and his wife furnished me with documents I could
not otherwise have obtained and Simon gave unstintingly of his expertise
on Théveneau de Morande and his milieu. I look forward to his own biog-
raphy of Théveneau before long. My thanks to John Docker for putting me
onto Walter Benjamin’s wonderful reflections on Cagliostro.
Georgina Fitzpatrick has my heartfelt thanks for her help with occa-
sional translations, editing the final stages of the book, and searching out
permissions for pictures. Having someone so skilled and patient during the
birth throes of a book is a tremendous comfort. My thanks, in turn, to the
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Australian Research Council for helping to fund such a treasure. Lindy Shultz
has also been generous with her skills and advice about layout and picture
scanning. Owen Larkin has helped to hunt down potential pictures for the
cover. Heather McCalman gave me important early encouragement.
Archivists and librarians have helped me in many ways, especially in the
Australian National University; the Australian National Library; the Biblio-
thèque nationale de France; the Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal; the Archives
Nationales; the British Library; the British Museum; the Bodleian Library,
Oxford; the Ashmolean Library, Oxford; Torre Abbey, Torquay; the Hunt-
ington Library, California; the Archivio de Pesaro; the Staat Archivs in Basel;
and the Bibliothèque de la ville de Strasbourg.
To my friend and agent Mary Cunnane, I owe an enormous debt. She
gave me the courage and inspiration to attempt the book, and she trained
me patiently in how to overcome some academic bad habits. Thanks to my
co-agent Peter McGuigan, whose zest, enthusiasm, and advice have proved
indispensable at the U.S. end. Dan Conaway of HarperCollins was a won-
derful editor; his enthusiasm, patient hard work, and talent have greatly
improved the book.
I would also like to thank my friends and acquaintances in Palermo
whose warmth and passion for Cagliostro inspired me to write the book.
They are Ninetta Cangelosi, Nelida Mendoza, Sebastian, and the Patron of
the Ristorante Le Conte de Cagliostro.
Finally, I would like to thank Kate Fullagar, to whom I owe most of all.
She has read every draft and given me unending support, encouragement,
advice, and insight. I hope this book lives up to your faith.
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p r o l o g u e
The House of Balsamo
The greatest enchanter of the eighteenth century deserved better than
this, I thought, looking at the house of Count Cagliostro, magician, alchemist,
healer, and Freemason. It was a hole bashed high in the side of a crumbling
building, halfway along a tiny market lane in Palermo, Sicily. Behind the
jagged brick outline you could dimly see the shell of a room, a dusty and
derelict cave. The alley stank of urine.
It would be hard to find a sorrier memorial for someone who’d once
been a household name throughout the western world, a magician whom
monarchs had courted, bishops had feared, artists had painted, doctors
had hated, and women had craved. A notice at the entrance told me that
the alley’s original name, vicolo delle Perciata, had been changed to via conte
di Cagliostro, and it gave a minimal summary of Count Cagliostro’s won-
drous life.
Giuseppe Balsamo, born in this street in 1743 and educated at the nearby
church school of San Rocco, left Palermo at age twenty to visit North Africa,
the Levant and the Mediterranean. Adopting the name of Count Cagli-
ostro, he traveled throughout Europe for a decade, performing magical
wonders, healing the poor, and founding branches of his Egyptian Masonic
movement. Acquitted of swindling after being imprisoned in the Bastille
I a i n M c C a l m a n
in 1785, he was captured by the Roman Inquisition in 1789 and died
in 1795.
His enemies would have been delighted at the neglect of his house.
There’d been plenty of them: Casanova, the greatest lover of the age, was
bitterly jealous of him; Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, wanted to
strangle him; Johann von Goethe, the most revered of Germany’s writers,
was driven almost mad by hatred of him; King Louis XVI of France perse-
cuted him as a dangerous revolutionary; Queen Marie-Antoinette wanted
him locked permanently in the Bastille for involving her in a diamond
necklace swindle; and Pope Pius VI accused him of threatening the sur-
vival of the Catholic church.
I’d come twelve thousand miles from Australia to see a hole in the wall,
the sad remains of the life of Count Cagliostro. What had I hoped to find —
a footprint, a ghost, some clue to his mystery? As a historian, I wanted of
course to answer the question that’s been asked by every one of his previ-
ous biographers, and many of his contemporaries as well. Was Count Cag-
liostro a sinner or a saint —the worst scoundrel of his age or a great occult
healer? His biographers, most of them Italian, French, and German, usually
came down strongly on one side or the other, but it seemed to me that he
might have been both.
His enemies called him a coarse, shallow charlatan, but he’d somehow
survived the harsh eraser of history. You can still see Cagliostro today in sci-
ence fiction movies like Spawn or in dramatic costume movies like The A⁄air
of the Necklace. At least half a dozen films have been made about his life — in
Russia, in America, in Germany, in Italy, and in France. In the last two coun-
tries, he still features in television cartoons, comics, pop music, and pulp
novels. More highbrow consumers encounter him as Sarastro in Mozart’s
famous opera The Magic Flute, or in Johann Strauss’s operetta Cagliostro in Wien.
Cagliostro’s many attackers also presented another enigma. The Roman
Inquisitor Monsignor Barberi, who spent fifteen months interrogating Cag-
liostro in the Castle of Sant’Angelo, posed it in 1791:
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