You might be wondering, what did Cagliostro want from all this? It is unlikely that someone who merely wanted to live the good life, to eat and drink well, would be able to muster the power and imagination to captivate Europe for twenty years with his fabulous inventions. Cagliostro attached at least as much importance to the imaginary eminence of the Freemasons and to power as he did to money. But that’s not all. No man can live for decades under the spell of fantastical ideas, holding forth about eternal life, the philosopher’s stone, the seventh book of Moses, and other kindred secrets that he claimed to have discovered, without believing them at least to some degree himself. Or, better put: Cagliostro certainly didn’t believe what he told people, but you can be sure that he believed that his power to make his fantastical lies seem credible was in reality worth as much as the philosopher’s stone, eternal life, and the seventh book of Moses put together. And that’s the crux at which his lies contain a kernel of truth. Cagliostro’s enormous strength actually derived from his belief in himself, his belief in his powers of persuasion, his imagination, his knowledge of human nature. This faith in himself must have grown so strong that it became something like a secret religion, quite different from the one he taught his students.
This is precisely what Goethe found so very interesting about the man; as you have learned in school or soon will, he wrote a play about him, Der Großkophta [The Grand Cophta]. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Goethe himself once played the role of Cagliostro, and not for the public, but for Cagliostro’s family. In his Italian Journey he recounts how he was sitting in a tavern in Palermo when the conversation turned to Cagliostro and his poor relatives; how he, Goethe, expressed his wish to meet the family of this extraordinary man; how this proved difficult and, indeed, only possible if Goethe pretended to have seen Cagliostro himself and to be carrying greetings from him to his loved ones; how this encounter awakened great hope in the family, causing Goethe to reproach himself for his little game; and how finally, to alleviate his bad conscience, after returning to Weimar, he sent a large sum of money to the poor family, which everyone believed to have been a gift from Cagliostro.2
You will notice that I have not told you much about Cagliostro’s actual life. And this is how I’d like it to remain, because every single one of his stops involves so many entanglements that telling his life story would take a great tome. In any case, his life ended like the jug of the story, which went to the well so often that it broke. After thirty years Cagliostro had reached the point that wherever he went, old and very unpleasant stories lay dormant, waiting only for his arrival to be reawakened on people’s lips. His stops grew shorter and shorter, and by the end he was constantly on the run. A respected newspaper, The European Courier, played an important and curious role in this decline, as I will now relate in closing.3 Among the multifarious medicinal and chemical absurdities that Cagliostro sought to promote was the story of the pig. He wrote somewhere that in Medina, where famously he claimed to be from, the people got rid of the lions, tigers, and leopards by fattening up pigs with arsenic and then shooing them into the woods where they were devoured by the wild animals, who died from the poison. Morande, the publisher of The European Courier, took up the matter and ridiculed it. This infuriated Cagliostro, who then presented Morande with a peculiar challenge. On September 3, 1786, he printed a leaflet inviting Morande to a feast on November 9, where together they would eat a piglet fed as they were in Medina, while betting 5,000 guilders that Morande would die from it, but he himself would remain healthy. Now, it’s quite a lot to propose to someone that he will die and on top of that lose 5,000 guilders on a bet. As you can imagine, Morande had no interest in taking up the offer. Instead he compiled a collection of disparaging facts and rumors about Cagliostro and published it in his European Courier. In the end Cagliostro fled to Rome, although because of his connection to the Freemasons, he couldn’t have chosen a place where he would have felt less safe. His friends were quick to inform him of the Inquisition’s intention to jail him, but Cagliostro was tired and stayed put. In 1789, Pope Pius VI had him arrested and imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo while he was tried by the Inquisition. Most of what we know today about Cagliostro derives from this trial, which seems to be have been conducted with great accuracy but also with astounding leniency. Nevertheless, it concluded unsurprisingly with a death sentence for heresy. In 1791, however, the pope reprieved Cagliostro and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. A few years later, although it’s unclear exactly when, he died in the San Leo prison in Urbino.
There’s much to learn from this story if you are so inclined. You could take the easy way out and simply say: there’s a fool born every minute. But on closer examination, the essence of Cagliostro’s story holds a more important truth.
At the beginning I spoke of the Enlightenment, an age in which people were very critical of the traditions of government, religion, and the Church, and indeed, we can be thankful for the great strides made during this period in terms of freedom and culture. It was precisely during this free and critical Age of Enlightenment that Cagliostro was able to turn his artistry to such advantage. How was this possible? Answer: precisely because people were so firmly convinced that the supernatural world did not exist, they never took the trouble to reflect upon it seriously and thus fell victim to Cagliostro, who led them to believe in the supernatural with a magician’s finesse. Had their convictions been weaker and their powers of observation stronger, they wouldn’t have succumbed. This is another lesson from the story: in many cases, powers of observation and knowledge of human nature are even more valuable than a firm and correct point of view.
“Cagliostro,” GS, 7.1, 188–94. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt on February 14, 1931. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced the broadcast, with a variant title, for February 14, 1931, from 3:20–3:50 pm: “Youth Hour, ‘Der Erzzauberer Cagliostro [The Arch-Magician Cagliostro].’ Talk by Walter Benjamin.”
1 From “Der Pseudo-Graf Cagliostro (Aus dem Tagebuch eines Reisenden, Straßburg, 1783)” [The Pseudo-Count Cagliostro (From the Diary of a Traveler, Strasbourg, 1783)], Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (December 1784), 536–9. See also: Der Erzzauberer Cagliostro: Die Dokumente über ihn nebst zwölf Bildbeigaben, ed. Johannes von Guenther (Munich: G. Müller, 1919), 185–7.
2 For Goethe’s account of Cagliostro and meeting his family, see Italienische Reise, in Goethes Werke, vol. 10 (Gera: C. B. Griesbach, 1897), entry for 13 and 14 April, 1787, 312f (Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer [London: Penguin, 1992], 247f). Goethe’s play Der Großkoptha [The Grand Cophta], a satire on Cagliostro’s life and his involvement in the so-called Affair of the Diamond Necklace, was completed in 1791.