Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt00135)

--- In theosophy_talks_truth@yahoogroups.com, "netemara888" 
<netemara888@y...> wrote:

 

The Crook
with a Great Soul 
John Rickard 


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Iain McCalman 
THE SEVEN ORDEALS OF COUNT CAGLIOSTRO:
THE GREATEST ENCHANTER OF
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Flamingo, $29.95pb, 384pp, 0 7322 7397 8 


YOU HAVEN'T HEARD of Count Cagliostro? Well, chances are, if 
HarperCollins has anything to do with it, you will. Iain McCalman's 
book comes with enthusiastic endorsements from Simon Winchester, 
Peter Conrad and Peter Gay. And it must be said that there is a 
sense in which the Count — 'the greatest enchanter of the eighteenth 
century', as McCalman salutes him — is alive and well: a Google 
search on the Internet brings up more than 4000 results. Indeed, the 
starting point for McCalman's skilfully entertaining account of 
Cagliostro's career as magician, alchemist, healer and Freemason is 
the puzzle of this after- life, or what he calls 
Cagliostro's 'ascension into culture'. The irony is that this book 
is likely to ensure that the enchanter casts his spell on a new 
audience. For it is an extraordinary tale. 

Born Guiseppe Balsamo in Palermo in 1743, and educated in a Catholic 
seminary for orphaned children, he briefly became a novice in a 
monastery before taking to the streets, and then the world. Having 
acquired some convenient skills in chemistry and drawing, and, 
courtesy of the monastery, a knowledge of ancient Egyptian and Greek 
magical theory, Balsamo developed a career that took him the length 
and breadth of Europe. Reinventing himself as Count Cagliostro, he 
became a controversial celebrity. The drama of his life has a cast 
of eighteenth-century stars: Casanova, Catherine the Great and Marie-
Antoinette all have roles. The part that Cagliostro played in 
the 'diamond necklace affair', which presaged the collapse of the 
ancien régime, allowed him to insinuate himself into the mythology 
of the French Revolution. William Blake saw him, McCalman tells us, 
as 'a figure of countercultural resistance', while for Thomas 
Carlyle his success was a symptom of Europe's social decadence that 
belied any claims for the late eighteenth century being an age of 
reason. 

What did Cagliostro have going for him? Carlyle, perhaps drawing on 
Houdon's bust of the Count, sees only the corrupt façade of an 
impostor: 


A fat, snub, abominable face; dew-lapped, flat-nosed, greasy, full 
of greediness, sensuality, oxlike obstinacy: a forehead impudent, 
refusing to be ashamed; and then two eyes turned up seraphically 
languishing, as in divine contemplation and adoration … 

This was 'perhaps the most perfect quack-face produced by the 
eighteenth century'. Compare this with the description offered by 
Baroness Henriette-Louise d'Oberkirch, 'a fine-boned Protestant 
aristocrat', McCalman assures us, who only just managed to avoid 
falling under Cagliostro's spell. His eyes 'were indescribable, with 
supernatural depths — all fire and yet all ice'. His voice 
caressed 'like a trumpet veiled in crêpe', while his haughty 
manner 'at once attracted and repulsed you, he frightened you and at 
the same time inspired you with an insatiable curiosity'. Many 
others attested to the power of his presence, the effect being 
heightened by an often-dramatic unpredictability of behaviour. 

Cagliostro acquired a very handy partner in Seraphina, 'a ravishing 
fourteen-year-old' when he married her in Rome. The Count was 
totally besotted with his young wife, but this did not prevent him 
from encouraging her to use her gift of beauty to advance their 
joint interests. Seraphina became an essential part of the 
Cagliostro project: she would also, in the end, be the agent of its 
demise. 

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Cagliostro's career is his 
involvement with Freemasonry. McCalman depicts Cagliostro as 
initially joining a lodge in London as 'a needed diversion', but he 
soon began to appreciate how he could use Freemasonry for his own 
purposes. His lodge adhered to the Rules of the Strict Observance 
Rite, which, although originating as a Scottish breakaway group with 
Stuart sympathies, had found fertile ground in parts of Europe, 
developing, along the way, a penchant for Rosicrucian occultism. And 
there was the added attraction that the lodge he encountered was 'a 
lodge of adoption', which included women in a parallel organisation, 
so that Seraphina could be co-opted to the cause. If you have ever 
wondered how women managed to infiltrate Sarastro's lodge in The 
Magic Flute, considering it, as I did, a case of operatic licence, 
stand corrected: Mozart was inspired by Cagliostro when he created 
the High Priest. 

Not only did this brand of Freemasonry suit Cagliostro right down to 
the ground, it also provided him with a network of contacts that he 
could exploit in his European travels. In St Petersburg, however, he 
seriously miscalculated in his attempt to win the favour of 
Catherine the Great, not appreciating that she, like the Church of 
Rome, was opposed to Freemasonry, seeing it as potentially 
subversive of social and political order. He and Seraphina were 
forced to move on, as they often were when their luck ran out, but 
there always seemed to be fresh fields to conquer. 

While Cagliostro was pursuing his Masonic odyssey — along the way 
effortlessly assuming the identity of the 'Great Copt', a legendary 
high priest of ancient Egyptian Free- masonry — he was also 
practising his considerable skills as a healer. Often, when he 
descended on a city, he would cause a stir by opening a healing 
clinic for the poor where he freely dispensed his remedies. His 
apparent success would then attract the attention of the afflicted 
rich who, when cured, would become useful patrons. McCalman 
acknowledges Cagliostro's achievement in healing, pointing out that, 
by the standards of the day, his 'medical knowledge seemed as 
much "scientific" as magical'. He was also adept at picking up on 
new fads, such as Mesmer's use of magnetic forces, which fitted 
nicely with his own conduct of spiritualist séances. 

His spectacular career came to an end in Rome. Seraphina, tired of 
their peripatetic existence, and having also returned to the Church, 
dobbed him in to the Inquisition, which tried him for heresy. 
Cagliostro was dispatched to spend the rest of his days in a remote 
prison fortress, the authorities increasingly concerned that French 
revolutionaries might seek to engineer his escape. In this Gothic 
hell-hole, he seemed to descend into madness, while retaining an 
extraordinary capacity to unnerve and alarm his gaolers. He died in 
1795; two years later, the revolutionary armies took the fortress. 
Legend has it that the officers of the Polish legion ordered his 
remains dug up: 'picking up his whitened skull, they filled it with 
wine and toasted his memory.' It was an appropriately Gothic 
gesture, but it could also be taken to symbolise the resurrection of 
the enchanter. 

There is a sense in which Cagliostro defies biography. His life was 
a performance and perhaps only with Seraphina (who, incidentally, 
was an embarrassment to Rome and was banished to a convent) did he 
allow the mask to drop. Yet McCalman is able to present the 
performance with a masterful deployment of the available sources. 
Little attempt is made to explain Cagliostro in psychological terms. 
Rather, the story of his life is told in a way that the Count 
himself might well have approved, cunningly organised in a symmetry 
of 'seven ordeals', the number itself having an appropriate magical 
and mystical resonance. At one level, it takes on the character of 
a 'ripping yarn', or perhaps an eighteenth-century road movie, but 
we are always conscious of the tastes and susceptibilities of an 
increasingly troubled society, which made his career possible. And 
here, of course, McCalman's earlier work on the radical underworld 
of this era serves him well. 

The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro is written with earthy 
economy: there is a certain cool swagger to the narrative. One 
character is described as seeing Cagliostro and his crew as 'these 
scumbags', while one of the Count's colleagues is 'a theosophical 
groupie'. Seraphina is even pilloried by her critics for trying 'to 
vamp every man she met'. 

McCalman confesses that he feels 'a strange affinity' with 
Cagliostro, and wonders whether this might be because, having spent 
his first eighteen years in Africa, he shares with the Count 'a 
bogus African identity'. This strikes me as fanciful, but there can 
be no doubt that Cagliostro has found in McCalman a worthy 
interpreter and advocate. At the end, however, he seems almost 
reluctant to pronounce judgment, as if the performance itself should 
be sufficient, and, returning to the birthplace of Giuseppe Balsamo 
in Palermo, takes brief refuge in the popular image there of the 
enchanter as 'a flawed local hero'. One of his Sicilian friends puts 
it this way: 'Cagliostro may have been a crook, but he had a great 
soul.' 

  
 
 
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE/JULY 2003
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