Alessandro Cagliostro
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"This element of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by George W. M. Reynolds's Faust and the Demon and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf."--Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft |
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Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (June 2, 1743 Palermo, Sicily - August 26, 1795 San Leo, Province of Pesaro and Urbino) was the alias for the charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo, an Italian traveller, occultist and Freemason.
In fiction
- Alexandre Dumas, père used Cagliostro in several of his novels.
- Caligostro has been played in film by Orson Welles (Black Magic, 1949), Howard Vernon (Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, 1972) and Christopher Walken (The Affair of the Necklace, 2001).
- Cagliostro is a character in Robert Anton Wilson's The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.
- Cagliostro is frequently alluded to in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.
- Mikhail Kuzmin wrote a novella called The Marvelous Life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro (1916).
Occult tricks a la Cagliostro
More scandals followed and Casanova moved on to Venice where he made his way by defrauding wealthy socialites with occult tricks a la Cagliostro. ...