The Book of the Dead

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 for 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-