The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  If Titus Oates had any redeeming features, history does not record them. The same cannot be said of Alessandro, Count Cagliostro (1743–95). He too was a liar and a charlatan, but he became a genuine celebrity all over late eighteenth-century Europe. Magician, Freemason, alchemist, forger, spiritualist, and healer, he inspired both Goethe’s Faust and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It’s hard to think of another historical figure whose story also links Pope Pius IV, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Casanova, and William Blake.

  Born Giuseppe Balsamo in one of the poorest parts of Sicily, he lost his father while still a child. His mother couldn’t afford to educate him, so at the age of fifteen, with the help of relatives, he was sent to a nearby monastery. The Fatebenefratelli, or “Do-Good Brothers,” were Augustinian monks famed for their network of hospitals. Medicine and chemistry were well taught and Giuseppe was a gifted pupil, spending his free time in the library, poring over books of occult lore. But he was still a Sicilian street brat at heart and—rather like Oates—foulmouthed, belligerent, and lazy. During mealtime readings of the lives of the saints, he swapped their names for those of notorious Palermo prostitutes. The monks rapidly tired of these games and let him go. Bright and unscrupulous, he settled into a life of petty crime and soon became a gang leader. Using what he’d learned in the monastery, he was also able to pose as a convincing alchemist. In this guise he convinced a goldsmith called Marano that he had sold his soul to the devil and could locate a cave in the mountains stuffed full of gold, but that first he would need sixty ounces of the precious metal to perform some expensive preliminary magic. The venal and credulous Marano fetched the money and, at midnight, set out for the hills, where he was promptly ambushed by six of Giuseppe’s accomplices dressed as devils armed with pitchforks and, according to the terrified merchant, blowing blue and red flames. They beat and robbed him and left him for dead. Giuseppe pocketed his share of the cash and left Palermo, never to return.

  The attention to detail is impressive. The costumes weren’t strictly necessary for the robbery, but they gave life to a tale that was told and retold and that always left Marano looking a fool. This imaginative approach to crime—with the victims appearing to deserve their comeuppance—was to become Giuseppe’s trademark.

  Arriving at Messina on the other side of the island, he lodged with his well-to-do uncle, Joseph Cagliostro, before swiftly making off with some of his money and his surname. As Giuseppe Cagliostro, he set out on a series of escapades in Egypt and Turkey in the company of a mysterious adept called Althotas, an alchemist who spoke several Eastern languages. To fund their travels, they hawked a chemical formula devised by the old magician that supposedly transformed rough fibers of hemp so they appeared to be silk. These could be sold to merchants at a profit, a rather more practical alchemy than turning base metal into gold.

  By 1765 he was in Malta, in the service of the secretive Knights Hospitaller, Europe’s richest and most powerful charitable institution. The Grand Master was himself an alchemist, and Giuseppe’s training as an apothecary came in handy: He ground medicine during the day and concocted his own potions in the evenings. After three years, he decided it was safe to return to Italy and, in 1768, surfaced in Rome, carrying letters of recommendation from the Grand Master himself. These secured him the patronage of Cardinal Orsini, whose secretary he became. Rome had a thriving Sicilian community: sharp-witted, resourceful immigrants keen to make money, from whom Giuseppe learned how to forge paintings and antiquities and sell them to tourists. At the same time, he put his medical skills to good use, presenting himself as a physician and peddling the fruits of his Maltese experiments: an “elixir of life” that was said to delay the aging process.

  Not long after he arrived, he fell in love with and married a fourteen-year-old Roman girl called Lorenza Serafina Feliciani, from a poor family. She was both heart-stoppingly beautiful and more than a match for her husband in cunning. Without her, Giuseppe Balsamo might never have promoted himself to the giddy heights of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. They were a brilliant team—he was handsome, charismatic, and ruthless; she was prepared to do anything to achieve a life of luxury and privilege. Giuseppe used her charms to entrap wealthy men whom he could then blackmail. On meeting the consummate con man, the Marquis of Agliata, he went even further, trading his wife’s sexual favors in return for instruction in how to forge official documents. Soon he could produce letters of credit, wills, army commissions, even titles. A string of new identities followed. Styling themselves “the Colonel and Mrs. Pelligrini,” they met Casanova. He was captivated by them but warned them to be careful: Forgery was a risky business and carried the death penalty. He needn’t have worried: Rome was already becoming too small and the Inquisition too suspicious. The Pelligrinis disappeared and the Count and Countess di Cagliostro took Europe by storm.

  Over the next two decades, they lived and worked in France, England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Russia, and Poland. In Germany they met another great impostor, the Count de Saint Germain, who made a decent living by claiming to be two thousand years old. As ever, Cagliostro listened and learned. In Strasbourg, he encountered the fashionable theory of animal magnetism and incorporated it into his act. In London, the chance discovery of an old manuscript inspired him to revive the ancient Egyptian Order of Masons, publicizing it as a return to the authentic roots of Freemasonry. Renting a house on Sloane Street, he billed himself as the “Grand Coptha.” Serafina was the Grand Priestess, able to transfer the eternal spirit simply by breathing on a person’s cheek. The order not only admitted women to the lodge, it also held elaborate ceremonies in which participants of both sexes wore nothing but diaphanous robes. Acolytes were taught the names of seven secret angels to ease their path to earthly riches and immortality. Polite London society was mesmerized and subscriptions poured in.

  The basic business plan was the same wherever they went. Arriving in a city, they rented grand and luxurious rooms and announced the establishment of a brand-new school of medicine and philosophy. The services they offered wove together Masonry, alchemy, animal magnetism, and Giuseppe’s trusty elixir of life—with an unmistakable background throb of sex. Cagliostro led the healing and the rituals; the Countess sat looking ravishing and offering a direct connection to the spirit world, like some elegant piece of mystical wireless technology. As one Parisian chronicler remarked:

  There was hardly a fine lady in Paris who would not sup with the shade of Lucretius; a military officer who would not discuss war with Caesar, Hannibal or Alexander; or an advocate or counsellor who would not argue legal points with Cicero.

  Premium services such as the elixir and the spirit consultations had to be paid for, but the healing was free and open to all. This was a brilliant marketing ploy: once the news spread, the sick and the poor queued up at the premises, adding philanthropy to the Cagliostros’ burgeoning reputation. What’s more, the treatments seemed to work. In Strasbourg more than fifteen thousand people claimed they had been cured; in Bordeaux the crowd greeting their arrival was so vast the local militia had to be deployed; and in Lyon, Cagliostro fever led to the building of a vast new Masonic temple to house his Egyptian Rite.

  As is the way with fads, the excitement soon faded. Most of the cures came from the placebo effect, from people’s own belief in the magical powers on offer. Once that started to waver, the success rate dwindled and Cagliostro was forced to make even more extreme claims: that he could travel in time; he had been with Christ at the wedding at Cana; he could make himself invisible. When business started to fall off, it was time to move on.

  This served them well for several years, and they amassed quite a fortune. Then things started to go seriously awry. Cagliostro’s attempt to seduce Catherine the Great with a love potion was a hopeless failure. She declared him a fraud and a menace and had him thrown out of Russia. In London a team of tricksters, intent on relieving him of his alchemical formulas, took advantage of his ignorance of English law and summonsed him f
or debt. Much of the money he had made inducting men and women into his Egyptian order went to bribe his way out of debtor’s prison. In France, his friend Cardinal de Rohan became embroiled in the affair of the diamond necklace implicating Marie Antoinette. Without a shred of evidence, Cagliostro was thrown into the Bastille. Even there he left a lasting impression: Graffiti he scrawled on his cell wall was said to have predicted the Bastille would be “pulled down” in 1789.

  Ejected from France, almost bankrupt and tired of their rootless and increasingly hazardous travels, Serafina persuaded Cagliostro to return to Rome. It was a terrible mistake. The Inquisition had Freemasonry in its sights and the great illusionist was caught trying to recruit two papal spies into his Egyptian order. To save herself, Serafina testified against him. Cagliostro received a death sentence, but after an audience with the pope, this was commuted to life imprisonment. The unique life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count di Cagliostro, ended in a stone box high up in the fortress of San Leo, near Urbino. For four years, his only connection with the outside world was through a tiny trapdoor. Tormented by his captors, starving and louse ridden, he gradually lost his mind and died of a stroke in 1795. As a heretic, he was refused the last rites and buried in the grounds of the castle in an unmarked grave. So many people refused to believe the news that Napoleon was forced to commission an official report, detailing beyond doubt that Cagliostro—inventor of the elixir of life—really was dead.

  Some years earlier, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had visited Sicily, fascinated by rumors that Cagliostro wasn’t really a count at all, but a jumped-up guttersnipe from Palermo. He tracked down Cagliostro’s mother, who was living with her daughter and two grandchildren crammed into a one-room apartment. Rather touchingly, they were thrilled to hear that their Giuseppe had done so well for himself, but disappointed that he hadn’t thought to help them. Goethe later sent them some money but the visit proved far more valuable for him. The idea of a man whose life is based on a lie and who claims to possess supernatural powers found its niche in history many years later in his great play Faust. Cagliostro’s journey from poverty, to fame and riches, to penury and disgrace has an undeniably mythic quality. Even today, some people make claims for him as a great seer, with the courage and energy to do what few of us manage: to dream up a better life for himself and then to live it. Just as Oates had exploited people by playing on their nameless fears of impending doom, Cagliostro tapped into the common sense that there is more to life than meets the eye; that what happens to us is driven by unseen forces. It may be that he succeeded because people wanted to believe him.

  Cagliostro never admitted his humble origins and most impostors never do. Some are unveiled by others; some move through a succession of disguises; very few unmask themselves. One who did was George Psalmanazar (1679–1763), who first appeared in England in 1704, feted as a prince of Formosa, the first from his remote land (modern-day Taiwan) ever to visit Europe. It was the culmination of several years roaming the Continent trying on personalities. The first of these was as an Irish pilgrim on his way to Rome—the pilgrim’s cloak gave him the right to beg for money—but people’s knowledge of Ireland proved to be annoyingly widespread, so he developed a new persona: that of a “heathen” from Japan, fond of swearing and eating heavily spiced raw meat and sleeping upright in a chair. In Germany, he enlisted as a mercenary, using his leisure to methodically build up corroborative evidence of his new identity: a “Japanese” alphabet of twenty characters that read from right to left; the rules of “his” language and pagan religion; and a calendar of twenty months. By the time he reached the Netherlands in 1701, he had adjusted his point of origin to the even more obscure Formosa and called himself Psalmanazar, a name he had borrowed from the biblical Assyrian king Shalamaneser, adding the foregoing P for a natty alien flourish.

  In Holland he met an ambitious young Scottish army chaplain called Alexander Innes. One of the legacies of the anti-Catholic paranoia that Oates had left in his wake was a deep antipathy to the Jesuits. They were believed to run a secret international spy ring designed to undermine Protestantism and make converts at every turn. Psalmanazar said he had been tricked into leaving his homeland by a Jesuit in disguise, which had left him with a strong aversion to Catholicism. Whether or not Innes believed him, he at once saw a chance for professional advancement. Here was a potentially high-profile convert in the opposite direction. Now all that was needed was for him to be received into the Church of England. The plan worked. The bishop of London was thrilled by the heathen-turned-Anglican and proudly introduced him to the great and the good of London society. Not only was Innes lavishly praised for having brought about the conversion, he also retained the lucrative rights to Psalmanazar’s public appearances, exhibiting him as a glamorous “royal” to a paying audience.

  Given that even educated English people of the time knew next to nothing about the Far East (and even less about the island of Formosa), Psalmanazar was able to get away with some madly outlandish claims. Its capital Xternetsa, he revealed, was presided over by the Emperor Meriaandanoo and men went naked except for a decorative plate of silver or gold covering their sexual organs. Though now reformed, he himself had once been a cannibal, because in Formosa it was legal to eat adulterous wives. Men did not generally marry until they reached fifty, but thereafter did so as often as possible because a supply of baby boys was in constant demand as live sacrifices to their god, who appeared sometimes as an elephant, sometimes as an ox. Psalmanazar wore a snake around his neck because, he explained, that was how Formosans kept cool. Within a year he had produced a book that became an immediate bestseller. A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan, painted elaborate pictures of Formosan life, language, and culture. It was ingenious, sensational, and entirely bogus.

  Some were dubious from the beginning. Psalmanazar went head to head with Jean de Fontenay, a Jesuit who had actually spent time in Formosa, who asked him why his skin was so fair. He responded by saying that Formosan royalty lived underground. He was invited to speak to members of the Royal Society, where the astronomer Edmund Halley challenged him vigorously. Halley inquired if sunlight ever shone directly down the chimneys of Formosan houses. Since the island was near the equator it was logical that at certain times of year it would do so, but Psalmanazar said it didn’t. Then, sensing a trap, he added, “Formosan chimneys are almost always built at crooked angles and containing bends.”

  By 1707 the Formosan craze was over. Psalmanazar’s attempts to capitalize on his fame by marketing a brand of lacquer that he called “white Formosan work” failed to catch on, and after brief stints painting ladies’ fans and working as a clerk to an army regiment, he decided to devote himself to writing. In 1717 he confessed to his friends that the whole thing had been a fraud. It’s a testament to his true character that he wasn’t ostracized. Far from it: The “pretended Formosan” settled quite easily into life as a jobbing member of Grub Street. Already fluent in Latin, he learned Hebrew and his contributions to several large encyclopedias were praised for the accuracy of their research, particularly when describing the customs and culture of ancient peoples. He even produced a corrective article on Formosa, this time basing it on fact. The young Dr. Johnson counted him a close friend, enthusiastically stating that his company was “preferable to almost anyone else.” When Boswell asked him if he ever mentioned Formosa, Johnson replied he was “afraid even to mention China” and as for opposing so learned and devout a man: “I should as soon think of contradicting a Bishop!”

  Psalmanazar’s final act of contrition was to write his memoirs. Published after his death, they throw light on his unfathomable decisions to construct and then deconstruct his Formosan identity. Though he never reveals his true name—and no one has ever been able to do so since—he does say that he was born into a poor family in southern France and was educated by Jesuits, and that his father left home when he was young. Psalmanazar’s troubles bega
n when he was sacked as a tutor to a rich family for refusing the sexual advances of the mistress of the house. His “prodigious” gift for languages offered a way out and a chance to earn a living as someone else. Fastening on Formosa afforded him “a vast scope to a fertile fancy to work upon.” In another age, with his talent for finegrained invention, he might have made a superb fantasy novelist.

  Unlike Oates and Cagliostro, Psalmanazar was, in the end, a truthful man. He underwent a religious experience after reading William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), an eighteenth-century self-help manual that also changed the life of his friend Dr. Johnson. Law’s mystical work advised surrender to God on the grounds that God’s wisdom is beyond rational inquiry. This new philosophical outlook, coupled with a deep absorption in his scholarship, somehow released Psalmanazar, enabling him to come to terms with what he called the “vile and romantic account” that had briefly made him famous. He reinvented himself as a pious and respected English man of letters, his last and happiest persona. But there is in the memoirs, written in his eighties, still a mischievous twinkle in his eye: “I never met with, nor heard of any one, that ever guessed right, or any thing near it, with regard to my native country.” His last secret—who he really was—he took with him to his grave.

  Almost half a century later, another example of self-appointed foreign royalty came to light in the West Country in the exotic persona of Princess Caraboo (1791–1864).