4 Modified by Benjamin from Das Puppenspiel vom Doktor Faust (Leipzig: Höfer, 1914), 5–6.
5 See Luther, Tischreden (1566), in Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden, vol. 1 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1912), no. 1059, 534–5.
6 The Zimmern Chronicle, quoted in Johann Scheible, Das Kloster, vol. 5: Die Sage vom Faust (Stuttgart: J. Scheible, 1847).
7 This translation is from Goethe, Faust I, trans. Peter Salm (New York: Bantam, 1985), lines 1238–48, 77–9.
8 Hanswurst, a traditional jester character in German-speaking comedy and a predecessor figure for Kasper (see “Berlin Puppet Theater”), appears in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German puppet plays based on the story of Dr. Faust.
9 See Das Puppenspiel vom Doktor Faust, 60–1.
10 Ibid., 65–6.
CHAPTER 19. Cagliostro
Today I want to tell you about a great swindler. By great I mean not only that the man was hugely unconventional and brazen in his swindling, but also that he carried it out flawlessly. His prowess for fraud made him famous across all of Europe; he was revered by tens of thousands, almost as a saint; during the years 1760 to 1780, his portrait could be found everywhere — on engravings, paintings, busts. He performed his séances, miracle cures, alchemies, and rejuvenation treatments in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. This was an epoch when, as you know, people were particularly skeptical of all forms of irrational tradition, claimed to want to follow only their own free minds, and, in short, should have been especially well protected from men such as this Cagliostro. At the end of the broadcast we’ll say a few words about how he managed to be so successful in spite of this, or rather because of it.
To this day no one knows exactly where Cagliostro came from, but one thing is certain: he did not come from where he claimed he did, namely Medina, or, for that matter, anywhere in the Orient; most likely he hailed from Italy, or perhaps Portugal. Of Cagliostro’s youth, one thing is clear: he was first trained as a pharmacist while, on the side, he taught himself all sorts of useless skills such as grave digging, counterfeit handwriting, panhandling, and the like. He never lingered anywhere for too long. He ended his life just as he began it: as a wanderer. Of all his stops, none was more important than London, where he arrived for the first time around 1750. It was there that he learned of the Freemasons and was most likely admitted to the order. His experiences in London, the strange and mystical tests to which he was subjected — some of you are perhaps familiar with the “Magic Flute,” with its fire trial and water trial, two masonic rituals — left a lasting impression on his fantasy worlds and his works of imagination. Cagliostro’s life goal was to do something extraordinary with Freemasonry. The actual Freemasons were a society that had nothing at all to do with magic, instead pursuing goals that were part humanitarian and part political. These were closely related, as their political activities were directed against the vicious tyranny of many European rulers of the time, as well as, of course, against the pope. But these comparatively prosaic ambitions could not satisfy Cagliostro. He wanted to found a new Freemasonry, a so-called Egyptian Freemasonry, a sort of magic society whose laws he plucked out of thin air. Yet his goals were more ambitious. As opposed to the hostile approach of the real Freemasons, Egyptian Freemasonry was meant to treat the pope in a friendlier manner. Cagliostro wanted to reconcile the Freemasons with the pope, and thereby acquire, as the arbiter of these two forces, the highest power in Europe.
As successful as this extraordinary man was all over Europe with his various schemes — which these days couldn’t get him from Magdeburg to Berlin — he occasionally ran into people who were not so easily fooled. And I don’t mean the physicians, who, wherever he showed up, would vigorously hound him, not so much because they knew he was a fake, but out of professional jealousy. Cagliostro operated according to an old charlatan’s trick; that is, wherever he settled for a while, he made sure it was known that he would treat the poor for free. And he kept his promise without fail. But on the sly he let on to the many genteel people who also sought his medical help just how impoverished he was by his selfless philanthropy: the prosperous and the high-born were positively honored when he accepted their gifts. When I speak of people who could see through him, I don’t mean just the doctors or the countless esteemed scientists and philosophers he encountered in his life who saw through his tricks. No, in order to speak frankly of Cagliostro, and wholly without reservation, it took a very pragmatic man, and it’s surely no accident that one of the most hostile, but also sharpest and most insightful portraits that we have of Cagliostro’s appearance and demeanor comes from a well-traveled salesman:
I’ve never seen such a shameless, pushy, self-important charlatan. He’s a short, plump, extremely broad-shouldered, round-headed fellow with black hair, a neck that’s fat and stiff, a thick forehead, bold and finely curved eyebrows, black, glowing, milky and constantly rolling eyes, a somewhat bent, finely curved and broad nose, round, thick, disjointed lips, a strong, round, protruding chin, a round, steely jaw: an auburn-skinned thoroughbred with a forceful and resounding voice. He is the miracle man, the spirit conjurer, the humanitarian doctor and helper who has lived lavishly in these parts for many years without anyone ever knowing where he gets his money. One cannot help but wish that all the transfixed adulators who surround him could witness a man take the trouble to adopt the same shameless character with him and to treat him as despicably as he does others; they would soon perceive what a miserable creature the empty braggart really is, as he has neither the natural gifts nor the education to hold his own against such a man for even a few minutes. And of course the man would have to be physically strong, in case it should be necessary to suspend the monstrous knave out the window with one hand and hear his final confession before he plummets to the ground.1
You see that this honest salesman does not mince his words. But he’s taking it a bit too far; for it’s no accident that during the first forty years of his life Cagliostro never met his match. There has been a great deal of speculation as to the cause of this superiority. Many believe it was the power of his gaze; no one he looked at could resist it. And there’s also the fact that people back then were fundamentally hungry for such experiences. The more they distanced themselves from the Church, the clergy and all the rest, the more interested they were in any form of natural magic power, which in those days was thought to derive from a so-called magnetism found in people, and even more in animals. And what Cagliostro lacked in knowledge and education, he made up for with an exceptional knack for the theatrical. Hearing a description of just one of his lectures, delivered in all the cities he visited, is enough to make us understand the huge audiences he attracted.
In an almost pitch-black hall with walls covered in black velvet, he stood on a type of throne under a brocade canopy, wearing a black robe and a black hat with an enormous brim. Before stepping onto the dais, however, he strode through the so-called Street of Steel, a corridor created by two rows of his most distinguished followers, crossing their raised swords over the central aisle. The candles, which only dimly lit the room, stood on candelabras in groups of seven or nine — numbers to which Cagliostro attached particular significance. Then there was the smell of incense wafting from copper vessels, and the play of lights in a large water-filled carafe from which Cagliostro himself foretold the future, or where he delivered prophecies through a child. The lectures themselves began with him producing an esoteric parchment roll from which he read off a hodgepodge of incantations, ways of turning coarse cloths into silk, methods for transforming small gems into jewels the size of a hen’s egg, and so forth.