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| The Seal of Cagliostro: A Snake Pierced by an Arrow (wilsonsalmanac.com) |
We are sure to make enemies of the Houdini conventional-wisdom gang today, as we state with certainty the newest revelation to come out of our original research: one of Harry's greatest heroes was the man castigated as the arch-charlatan of the ages, the scalawag occultist and black-magic spiritualist known as the Count de Cagliostro.
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| Cagliostro, bust by Houdon |
Harry’s favorite spot in his home library (“I live in a library,” he once wrote) was right under the portrait of Cagliostro.
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| Cagliostro looks over Harry's shoulder while he works. (Appleton Historical Society) |
The crown jewel of his book collection was not his priceless set of Abraham Lincoln letters, nor his autographs of all the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence.
It was his unique, complete and original file of the Diamond Necklace Affair, a scandal considered by many to be the proximate cause of the French Revolution. It tainted Marie Antoinette and her husband King Louis XVI. Two of its key actors were Cagliostro and his stunning wife, Seraphina.
The Countess has gone down in history as the quintessential femme fatale. The name Cagliostro has become synonymous with charlatanism and chicanery. According to Harry’s friend Sax Rohmer, Houdini frequently visited Cagliostro’s house in Paris and removed floorboards and wall panels in order to discover the secret of the Count’s most renowned seance, the Banquet of the Dead.
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| Cagliostro's Paris home, the Palais d'Orvilliers |
This house is still standing on the rue St. Claude. According to the eyewitness Marquis de Luchet, it was the site of the famous “Cenacle de Treize,” a dinner party to which Cagliostro had invited six noblemen as guests. The table was set for thirteen.
“Kindly choose six of our illustrious departed whom you would wish to join us for dinner,” Cagliostro asked. As their names were mentioned, the apparitions of the Duc de Choiseul, the Abbe de Voisenon, Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Alembert and Voltaire appeared, took the seats assigned to them, and conversed with their hosts through dinner!
Conventional wisdom insists that Houdini would oppose Cagliostro and all he represents. But the truth is quite the opposite, as we learn in an interview Harry gave to Helen Bullitt Lowry in The New York Times Magazine in August, 1926:
“Do you regard an impostor like Cagliostro as severely as you do the spiritualists of our day?” I ask him curiously.
“No,” is his answer. “There was not any honest way at that time for an honest wonder-worker to make a living. Nor was the spiritualist of that age breaking the civil law as he is today.”
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(Images via Google unless otherwise noted.)
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