Who was Count Cagliostro? Was he a great healer and mystic or a dangerous charlatan whose ideas threatened to undermine the monarchies of France and Russia? Either way, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro was one of the most visible and influential men of the 18th century, overcoming poverty and humble birth to become the darling — and bane — of upper-crust Europe.
Iain McCalman brings Cagliostro and his world to life in The Last Alchemist, an outstanding work of cultural history. McCalman reveals the real person behind Cagliostro’s dazzling façade — the man who inspired Mozart and Goethe, who led an exotic form of Freemasonry, and who was banned from Russia and arrested by the Inquisition — the man who Thomas Carlyle described as “a genius of disorder waging a lone war against rational discipline.”
Iain McCalman is an internationally renowned cultural historian and director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He is author or editor of seven scholarly works, including the widely acclaimed Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 and, most recently, The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age.
“Perceptive, intelligent, and — by no means least — immensely entertaining.” — Washington Post
Who was the mysterious Count Cagliostro? Depending on whom you ask, he was either a great healer and mystic or a dangerous charlatan whose revolutionary notions and influences threatened to undermine the monarchies of France and Russia. Whatever else he was, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, the leader of an exotic brand of Freemasonry, was indisputably one of the most influential and notorious figures of the latter eighteenth century, overcoming poverty and an ignoble birth to become the darling -- and bane -- of upper-crust Europe.
Internationally acclaimed historian Iain McCalman has not written a work of biography in the strictest sense; rather, he uses seven key "episodes" in Cagliostro's political and spiritual evolution to provide a dazzling panoramic portrait of eighteenth-century European culture and history. McCalman documents how Cagliostro crossed paths -- and often swords -- with the likes of Catherine the Great, Marie Antoinette, and Pope Pius VI. He was a muse to William Blake and the inspiration for both Mozart's The Magic Flute and Goethe's Faust. LouisXVI had him thrown into the Bastille for his alleged involvement in what would come to be known as "the affair of the necklace." Yet in London, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg, he established "healing clinics" for the poorest of the poor, a radical notion at that time; and his dexterity in the worlds of alchemy and spiritualism won him acclaim among the nobility across Europe.
But it was his progress through the rites of Egyptian Freemasonry -- including the Illuminati, a genuinely conspiratorial secret society dedicated to the overthrow of established religion and monarchy -- that was both his highest achievement and his undoing. In 1791, on the order of Pope Pius VI, Cagliostro was arrested for heresy. He spent the last five years of his life in solitary confinement in an Italian prison, where he died in 1795.
"Engagingly told .the stories fly as quickly and colorfully as scarves from a magician's sleeve." -- Sacramento Bee
"A rip-roaring biography." -- Providence Journal-Bulletin
" [A] fascinating biography . recounts the astounding adventures of [a man] both revered and reviled by ... eighteenth-century celebrities." -- Booklist
"Iain McCalman writes history which has the teasing, exciting psychological ambiguity of the best fiction."--Peter Conrad, author of MODERN TIMES, MODERN PLACES
"Perceptive, intelligent and -- by no means least -- immensely entertaining"--Washington Post
"Gracefully weaves in the politics and passions of the age....Cagliostro is [an] extraordinary figure."--New York Times
"[A] fascinating life.... Smoothly written, deeply researched, and persuasively argued."--Peter Gay, author of FREUD
"[A] rich, fantastic, devilishly romantic book ... utterly absorbing ... a charming puzzle from beginning to end."--Simon Winchester, author of KRAKATOA
"A lively bio [that] opens the files on a fascinating character--a con man for the ages."--Kirkus Reviews
"An enlightening account of the career of one of the most famous charlatans of the 18th century."--Publishers Weekly
