By Israel Cagliostro Oxman
On Halloween night, October 31, 1926, Harry Houdini died in Detroit. A hundred years have now passed, and the world still remembers him as the great enemy of fraud: the man who exposed fake mediums, sat in dark séance rooms with a flashlight in his pocket, and testified before Congress against those who sold false hope to grieving families.
So here is a riddle worthy of the master himself. Why did the greatest debunker of the twentieth century choose to work every day under the watchful eyes of the most famous “charlatan” of the eighteenth?
The answer is a story about admiration, obsession, a stolen royal necklace, and a dinner party for the dead.
The man history called a quack
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro was born Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo, Sicily, in 1743. He crossed Europe as a healer, alchemist, Freemason, prophet and wonder-worker. Kings received him. Aristocrats begged for his elixirs. Crowds followed his carriage. Then the Church, the courts and the pamphleteers turned against him, and his name became shorthand for fraud. He died in 1795, a prisoner of the Inquisition in the fortress of San Leo.
For two centuries, “Cagliostro” meant “impostor.” You would expect Houdini, the crusader against impostors, to despise him. He did the opposite.
The portrait over the favorite chair
Houdini once wrote that he lived in a library, and he meant it. His home in Harlem held one of the largest private collections on magic, spiritualism and the occult ever assembled. He bought rare books, posters, letters and engravings with the same hunger other men reserve for gold.
In that library he had one favorite place to sit and work. It was directly beneath a portrait of Cagliostro. A surviving photograph, held by the Appleton Historical Society in Houdini’s hometown in Wisconsin, shows exactly that: Houdini at work, and the Count looking over his shoulder.
Think about what that means. Every letter he wrote, every escape he planned, every exposé he drafted against the mediums of his day, he wrote under Cagliostro’s gaze.
The crown jewel of the collection
Houdini owned treasures that would make any collector dizzy, including Abraham Lincoln letters and autographs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Yet according to researcher David Saltman of The Houdini File, none of these was the true crown jewel.
That honor went to a complete, original file of documents on the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. This was the scandal of 1785 that shook the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and which many historians see as one of the sparks of the French Revolution. A fabulous necklace was obtained through forged letters and a woman disguised as the Queen. The Cardinal de Rohan was humiliated, the Queen’s reputation was destroyed, and the Countess de la Motte was branded and imprisoned.
Two of the central figures were Cagliostro and his beautiful wife, Seraphina. The Count was arrested and thrown into the Bastille. In 1786 he was acquitted, yet expelled from France. Houdini’s interest in Cagliostro led him straight into this web of intrigue, and he collected its paper trail with devotion.
The Banquet of the Dead
Cagliostro lived in Paris in an elegant mansion on the rue Saint-Claude, the Palais d’Orvilliers. The house still stands. According to an eyewitness, the Marquis de Luchet, it was the setting of Cagliostro’s most legendary séance.
He invited six noblemen to dinner and set the table for thirteen. Then he asked his guests to name six illustrious dead men they would like to dine with. As each name was spoken, the story goes, the departed appeared and took his seat: the Duc de Choiseul, the Abbé de Voisenon, Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Alembert and Voltaire. They talked with the living all through the meal.
Now comes the part every magician loves. According to Houdini’s friend, the novelist Sax Rohmer, Houdini visited that house in Paris many times. He even removed floorboards and wall panels, searching for the secret behind the Banquet of the Dead. Was he looking for trapdoors, hidden passages, a concealed assistant? Rohmer did not say what Houdini found. Perhaps that is the most magical part of the story.
This is the detective at work. Not to destroy the legend, but to understand it from the inside, the way only a fellow professional can.
“There was not any honest way”
In August 1926, two months before his death, Houdini sat for an interview with Helen Bullitt Lowry of The New York Times Magazine. She asked him directly whether he judged an impostor like Cagliostro as harshly as the spiritualists of his own day.
His answer was no. In Cagliostro’s age, he explained, there was no honest way for an honest wonder-worker to earn a living. And the spiritualist of that era was not breaking the civil law, as the frauds of 1926 were.
In one sentence Houdini drew the line that every serious magician still lives by. Wonder itself is not a crime. Mystery is not a lie. The crime begins when you exploit someone’s grief and tell them your trick is a real message from their dead mother. Cagliostro, in Houdini’s eyes, was a performer born too early, before the stage existed for men like him.
What the escape artist saw in the alchemist
I believe Houdini recognized himself in Cagliostro. Both were outsiders who reinvented themselves. Balsamo became a Count; Erik Weisz, the rabbi’s son from Budapest, became Harry Houdini. Both understood that a performer sells not tricks but legends. Both made audiences feel, for one moment, that the impossible was real.
The difference was the frame. Houdini performed on a stage and told the audience it was entertainment. Cagliostro performed in salons and let the world believe it was a miracle. Houdini fought the dishonest frame all his life, yet he never stopped loving the art inside it.
A personal note from a modern Cagliostro
I began performing magic in Tel Aviv at the age of twelve, fifty years ago, and I have performed under the name Cagliostro for most of that journey. In 1983 I paid tribute to Houdini with my own escapes: hanging upside down in a straitjacket from a burning rope above the Tel Aviv Museum plaza, and escaping from a water-torture cell. The newspapers called me “the Israeli Houdini.”
Only years later did I discover how deeply the two names were bound together. The man I honored with my escapes spent his working hours under the portrait of the man whose name I carry.
One hundred years after Houdini’s death, his lesson still holds. Keep the wonder. Keep the mystery. And always tell your audience the truth: what they are about to see is magic, and that is exactly why it is wonderful.