Charlatan, magician, and adventurer who enjoyed enormous success in Parisian society in the years preceding the French Revolution.
Cagliostro travelled to all major European cities, selling an "elixir of long life", summoning up the dead (who, he said, revealed the future to him), and reading the future in the water of a carafe. He also claimed the power to make gold and diamonds from other substances.
He married the Roman beauty Lorenza Feliciani, called Serafina, and in 1776 they appeared in London as Count and Countess Cagliostro.
After 1785, when he moved to France, he became involved in the radical masonic movement and introduced an Egyptian masonic sect that he himself had conceived.
His career of deceit often brought him into conflict with the law. Implicated with the Cardinal de Rohan in the scandal known as the Affair of the Diamond Necklace (1785-86), he spent nine and a half months in the Bastille prison and then was banished from France.
In 1789 he was arrested in Rome after his wife denounced him to the Inquisition. He was tried for attempting to organize freemasonry in Italy and sentenced to death.
Later that sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in the fortress os San Leo in the Apennines.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment