In January 1785,
Cagliostro and his wife
went to
Paris
in response to the entreaties of
Cardinal Rohan.
Affair of the diamond necklace
Satire on Cagliostro at a Masonic meeting in London in 1786, by James Gillray
Cagliostro was prosecuted in
the Affair of the Diamond Necklace
which involved
Marie Antoinette and Prince Louis de Rohan,
and 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 banished
from France
by order of Louis XVI,
and departed for England.
There he was accused by French expatriate
Theveneau de Morande
of being Giuseppe Balsamo,
which he denied
in his published Open Letter
to the English People,
forcing a retraction
and apology from Morande.
Betrayal, imprisonment, and death
Cagliostro
left England
to visit Rome,
where he
met two people
who proved to be
spies of the Inquisition.
Some accounts hold that
his wife was the one
who initially betrayed him to
the Inquisition.
On 27 December 1789,
he was arrested and imprisoned in
the Castel Sant'Angelo.
Soon afterwards
he was sentenced to death
on the charge of being a Freemason.
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.
Legacy
Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco credits to Balsamo the creation of the Egyptian Rite of the Freemasons and intensive work in the diffusion of Freemasonry, by opening lodges all over Europe and by introducing the acceptance of women into the community.
Cagliostro was an extraordinary forger.
Giacomo Casanova,
in his autobiography,
narrated an encounter
in which
Cagliostro was able
to forge a letter by 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.
He carried an alchemistic manuscript The Most Holy Trinosophia amongst others with him on his ill-fated journey to Rome and it is alleged that he wrote it.
Occultist Aleister Crowley believed Cagliostro was one of his previous incarnations.
Cultural references
Fiction
Catherine the Great wrote two skits lampooning Cagliostro in the guise of characters loosely based upon him.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote a comedy based on Cagliostro's life, also in reference to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, The Great Cophta (Der Gro;-Coptha) which was published in 1791.
Alexandre Dumas, p;re used Cagliostro in several of his novels (especially in Joseph Balsamo and in Le Collier de la Reine where he claims to be over 3,000 years old and to have known Helen of Troy).
George Sand includes Cagliostro as a minor character in her historical novel, The Countess of Rudolstadt (1843).
Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote the supernatural love story Count Cagliostro where the Count brings to life a long dead Russian princess, materializing her from her portrait. The story was made into a 1984 Soviet TV movie Formula of Love.
Cagliostro is prominently figured in three stories by
Rafael Sabatini:
"The Lord of Time", "The Death Mask" and "The Alchemical Egg",
all of which are included in
Sabatini's collection
Turbulent Tales.
He is mentioned in the story The Sandman by ETA Hoffmann where Spalanzani is said to look like a painting of Cagliostro by Chodowiecki.
He is mentioned in the story
The Book and the Beast
by Robert Arthur, Jr.
A conjuring book attributed to him causes the gruesome death of any man foolish enough to examine it, until a fire destroys the book.
He is mentioned in the novel
It Happened in Boston?
by Russell H. Greenan.
The narrator is reading the life of Cagliostro when he has his first reverie.
He is mentioned in the novel
Kun Lun
by Kilburn Hall (2014)
where it is revealed that
Alessandro Cagliostro, Joseph and
Giuseppe Balsamo
are just a few of the names that
time traveler
Count St. Germain
has used throughout history.
He is mentioned in the book
The Red Lion-The Elixir of Eternal Life
by Maria Szepes
Friedrich Schiller
wrote an unfinished novel
Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer)
between 1786 and 1789 about Cagliostro.
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.
The Kid Eternity comic book featured Cagliostro's risen spirit in issue 3 (1946).
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).
Cagliostro is a character in
Robert Anton Wilson's
The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.
Cagliostro is frequently alluded to in