Books
Who was that masked man?
by Simon Cunliffe
THE SEVEN ORDEALS OF COUNT CAGLIOSTRO, by Iain McCalman (Flamingo, $34.99)
ITALIAN SOCIAL CRITIC AND AUTHOR Umberto Eco has a theory about Count Alessandro Cagliostro. He relocates the great 18th-century enchanter in the postmodern milieu of our modern age – preying on people’s psychological uncertainty and moral bewilderment. It is in California rather than Europe that his descendants emerge, "a hodge-podge of new age gurus, Internet clairvoyants, necromantic exorcists, pseudo Rosicrucians and latter-day Knights Templars".
But Eco is not the only one to have had his intellect or imagination stirred by the mysterious count. Walter Benjamin believed that Cagliostro’s role as a bearer of magic made him a titan in the history of Western culture – "an underground messiah and a genius of disorder preaching creative irrationality in a repressive world". For Thomas Carlyle he was a "quack genius", possessed of a "vulpine astucity", who had burst into Europe at a moment of extreme social decadence.
He has appeared as a muse to William Blake, a character in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, as the subject of Alexandre Dumas’s popular historical romance Joseph Balsamo and in Hollywood – in Black Magic (1949) starring Orson Welles.
Who was this man? Born Giuseppe Balsamo into the poorer quarters of Palermo in 1743, Cagliostro proves a rewarding subject for Iain McCalman, who takes us through a series of episodic biographical reconstructions of an extraordinary life. Hence the "seven ordeals" of the title, in which we learn about freemasonry, necromancers, alchemy and 18th-century religion and politics.
Whatever else he was – "spiritual seeker, a mystic and healer guided by a deeper purpose; or a charlatan, an opportunist, a con man", as McCalman puts it – the count did spin in the orbit of history, a satellite of influence in the courts of Russia, France, Italy and England during a period of social and political foment.
Catherine the Great pursued him out of Russia and King Louis XVI of France had him thrown into the Bastille. He was incarcerated as a heretic by the Inquisition and denounced by his jealous sometime acquaintance Casanova.
But McCalman’s telling of the tale is too frequently caught between the drag of non-fiction and the exigencies of narrative technique, straining for effect and flagging under its baggage of detail. Then there are the appalling images. An idea "exploded like a rocket in Giuseppe’s mind"; Elisa’s "moist eyes were fixed devotedly on the older man", and so on.
Stylistic quibbles aside, McCalman has patiently and painstakingly unravelled the life and times of a fabulous character. Yet it was not until the final chapter, in which Cagliostro’s legacy – historical, cultural, philosophical – is disinterred, that I really began to care.
