Madame Blavatsky on Count Alessandro di Cagliostro

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages on a reputation. The mention of Cagliostro's name, she begins, produces a twofold effect — with one party a sequence of marvellous events emerging from the shadowy past, with the modern progeny of a too realistic age, wonder if not contempt. People are unable to understand that this enchanter and magician, read charlatan, could ever legitimately have made the impression he did on his contemporaries.

The defence is built on witnesses rather than on assertion. A brother Mason is quoted saying that Cagliostro, like Prince Bismarck and some Theosophists, might well be called the best abused and most hated man in Europe. Against the fashion of loading him with opprobrious names she sets two names that are hard to dismiss: Schiller and Goethe were among his great admirers and remained so until their deaths — and Goethe, travelling in Sicily, devoted considerable labour to collecting information about Giuseppe Balsamo in his supposed native land, writing his play The Great Kophta out of those notes. The epigraph from Smollett states the principle the article is really about: that to send the injured away unredressed degrades and defiles.

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