Though he enthralled the aristocracy of Europe with tales of his supposed Oriental origins, the man known as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro actually began life under much less auspicious circumstances.

In truth, he was born Giuseppe Balsamo in the destitute Jewish quarter of Palermo, Sicily around 1743.  Little is known of his life until the age of twenty-five, when he married Lorenza Felliciani – the well-educated daughter of bankrupt noble family.  Taking for themselves, quite illegitimately, the titles of Count and Countess Cagliostro, they set out across the continent as mystics for hire.  Soon they were fetching vast sums for appearances in the courts of European nobility, where they performed the usual parlor tricks of 18th century itinerant magicians: fortune telling, alchemy, and the occasional feat of necromancy.

In doing so, the Count endeared himself to a great number of prominent figures, not all of whom accepted his “enhanced” biography wholesale; Goethe, in his Voyage in Italy, writes: “I answered that indeed, in the eyes of the public, he posed as aristocrat of high birth, but that to his friends he liked to acknowledge his humble origin.”

By the time the couple reached France in the 1770s, Cagliostro’s own reputation preceded him.  Upon appearing for the Cardinal Louis de Rohan, he supposedly engineered a diamond of tremendous size through alchemical means; the prelate’s own jeweler would later value the stone at twenty-five thousand livres.  So taken was Rohan with the magician’s perceived gifts that he would later commission a bust of the Count for his study, bearing the inscription: To Divine Cagliostro.

With his popularity in France at all-time high, it was there that Cagliostro founded the Egyptian Lodge of Freemasonry - claiming that he procured secret knowledge from a “curious manuscript” and baited his followers with promises of immortality.  In truth, his life-extending formula was little more than a blend of common mystical tropes and crude 18th century medical practices, such as the consumption of heavy metals.

Cagliostro’s penchant for influence peddling soon caught up with him, however.  He was imprisoned in the Bastille for nine months following accusations that he had collaborated in a plot to steal a necklace intended for Marie Antoinette.  The “Affair of the Necklace” ended when he was released due to insufficient evidence.  According to popular accounts of his release, ten thousand cheering Parisians greeted him at the prison gate and triumphantly carried him down him down the Boulevard Saint-Antoine.  Nonetheless, the Count and Countess still found themselves banished from France and, in 1791, moved onto Rome, where he opened a branch of his Egyptian Lodge.

The seat of Catholicism and papal authority, however, wasn’t as tolerant of occultists as libertine-era France; the Count and Countess were both arrested on charges of heresy and sorcery and sentenced to death.  Lorenza, who had chartered her own, all-female branch of the Egyptian Lodge while in Rome, was spared, after issuing a full “confession” and agreeing to live out her days in a nunnery.  Cagliostro’s own sentence was eventually commuted to life, and he died, imprisoned in the Fortress of San Leo, not long after.

For some though, Cagliostro lived on; like many other arcane hucksters of the alchemical era, he was said to have obtained immortality and revered as an “Ascended Master” by many subsequent teachers of arcane philosophy. To others, he was the very embodiment of the occult swindler. It’s a role in he has inhabited repeatedly ever since, in everything from the works of Alexandre Dumas to the films of Orson Welles, who played the Count in 1949’s Black Magic.

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Tags: 1743, 1791, 18th Century, 18th century medical practices, Affair of the Necklace, alchemism, alchemist, Alexandre Dumas, Black Magic, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Catholicism 1780s, Catholicism 18th century, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, Count Cagliostro, Divine Caglisotro, Egyptian Lodge of Freemasonry, European History, Fortress of San Leo Marche, France 1770s, Giuseppe Balsamo, Lorenza Felliciani, magicians, Marie Antoinette, necromancy, Orson Welles, The Bastille