Count Cagliostro: Palermo Swindler, Grand Copht and the Diamond Necklace

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Count Alessandro Cagliostro was born Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo in 1743, the son of a bankrupt family that claimed descent from Byzantine nobility. Sent to a seminary and then a Benedictine convent, he learned chemistry, herbalism and medicine from the convent apothecary. Back in Palermo he forged theater tickets and wills, earning the nickname Beppo the Cursed, and at 17 he lured a superstitious goldsmith into an olive grove for a demonic treasure ritual, beat him and fled with 60 ounces of gold. In Messina he took the name Count Cagliostro and studied with the alchemist Althotas, who records of the Roman Inquisition show was real. In Malta they impressed Grand Master Manuel Pinto da Fonseca with false-bottomed crucibles that seemed to make gold.

In Rome Cagliostro married the 14-year-old Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani, who later testified that he forced her to seduce wealthy men while he forged bills of exchange; when she tried to escape in Paris in 1772 he had her imprisoned without trial. In 1777 he founded his own Egyptian Masonry as the Grand Copht, promising a 40-day regeneration that would extend life for millennia. In Strasbourg he won over Cardinal de Rohan, which landed both men in the Bastille for nine months over the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. Acquitted but banished, he was exposed by Goethe, who found his poor family in Palermo. Arrested by the Inquisition in Rome in December 1789, he died in a cell on August 26, 1795, aged 52.

• Cagliostro sold a beauty potion called the Extract of Saturn alongside his elixir of life.
• Journalist Charles Théveneau de Morande published exposés in London after Cagliostro refused to pay blackmail.
• His lodge rituals had children stare into globes of water to channel angels.
• Seraphina confessed his full record to the Inquisition and died in a convent at 43.
• He fooled Giacomo Casanova with a forged letter and later appeared in the novels of Alexandre Dumas.