Occult historian Lewis Spence comments in his entry on Cagliostro that the swindler put his finagled wealth to good use by starting and funding a chain of maternity hospitals and orphanages around the continent.

He carried an alchemistic manuscript The Most Holy Trinosophia amongst others with him on his ill-fated journey to Rome and it is alleged that he wrote it.

Occultist Aleister Crowley believed Cagliostro was one of his previous incarnations.

Cultural references

Fiction

Catherine the Great wrote two skits lampooning Cagliostro in the guise of characters loosely based upon him.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote a comedy based on Cagliostro's life, also in reference to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, The Great Cophta (Der Gro;-Coptha) which was published in 1791.

Alexandre Dumas, p;re used Cagliostro in several of his novels (especially in Joseph Balsamo and in Le Collier de la Reine where he claims to be over 3,000 years old and to have known Helen of Troy).

George Sand includes Cagliostro as a minor character in her historical novel, The Countess of Rudolstadt (1843).

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote the supernatural love story Count Cagliostro where the Count brings to life a long dead Russian princess, materializing her from her portrait. The story was made into a 1984 Soviet TV movie Formula of Love.

Cagliostro is prominently figured in three stories by

Rafael Sabatini:

"The Lord of Time", "The Death Mask" and "The Alchemical Egg",

all of which are included in

Sabatini's collection

Turbulent Tales.

He is mentioned in the story The Sandman by ETA Hoffmann where Spalanzani is said to look like a painting of Cagliostro by Chodowiecki.

He is mentioned in the story

The Book and the Beast

by Robert Arthur, Jr.

A conjuring book attributed to him causes the gruesome death of any man foolish enough to examine it, until a fire destroys the book.

He is mentioned in the novel

It Happened in Boston?

by Russell H. Greenan.

The narrator is reading the life of Cagliostro when he has his first reverie.

He is mentioned in the novel

Kun Lun

by Kilburn Hall (2014)

where it is revealed that

Alessandro Cagliostro, Joseph and

Giuseppe Balsamo

are just a few of the names that

time traveler

Count St. Germain

has used throughout history.

He is mentioned in the book

The Red Lion-The Elixir of Eternal Life

by Maria Szepes

Friedrich Schiller

wrote an unfinished novel

Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer)

between 1786 and 1789 about Cagliostro.

The Phantom comic book

featured Cagliostro as a character in the story

The Cagliostro Mystery

from 1988, written

by Norman Worker

and drawn

by Carlos Cruz.

The Kid Eternity comic book featured Cagliostro's risen spirit in issue 3 (1946).

In the DC Comics universe, Cagliostro is described as an immortal (JLA Annual 2), a descendant of Leonardo da Vinci as well as an ancestor of Zatara and Zatanna (Secret Origins 27).

Cagliostro is a character in

Robert Anton Wilson's

The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles.

Cagliostro is frequently alluded to in

Umberto Eco's novel

Foucault's Pendulum.

Mikhail Kuzmin

wrote a novella called

The Marvelous Life of Giuseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro (1916).

Cagliostro is a character in

Psychoshop,

a novel by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny.

Josephine Balsamo, a descendant of Joseph Balsamo who calls herself Countess Cagliostro, appears in

Maurice Leblanc's

Arsene Lupin novels.

Cagliostro makes several cameo appearances as a vampire in

Kim Newman's

Anno Dracula novels.

The manga

Rozen Maiden

reveals Count Cagliostro to be merely one of many different aliases adopted by the legendary dollmaker Rozen. He was shown to be in prison whittling wood.

There are numerous references to Cagliostro in

the detective novel

He Who Whispers

by John Dickson Carr

(aka Carter Dickson),

one of his Dr. Gideon Fell mysteries,

published by Hamish Hamilton (UK) & Harper (USA) in 1946.

In this book, a French professor, Georges Antoine Rigaud, has written a history: Life of Cagliostro. Also an attempted murder committed in He Who Whispers is similar in technique to part of an initiation ceremony undergone by Cagliostro into the lodge of a secret society.

There is a passing and utterly inconsequential reference to Cagliostro in

Hilary Mantel's

1992 novel

A Place of Greater Safety.

Cagliostro is a character in the 1997 novel,

'Superstition'

by David Ambrose;

Cagliostro is an acquaintance of the fictional character, Adam Wyatt.

Cagliostro is a Playable character in

the Japanese Mobile game

Granblue Fantasy.

Cogliostro is a character in

Todd McFarlanes's comic saga

Spawn,

introduced to the series

by Neil Gaiman

to give greater depth to the curse of spawn.

Cagliostro was once a spawn of Hell bound to his duty to the daemon Malebolgia, and manages to free himself of the curse through alchemy and sorcery, teaching Spawn to do the same throughout the series.

He is often mentioned in the book

Napoleon's Pyramids

by William Dietrich

in connection with Freemasons and ancient Egyptian artifacts.

In Glory Road, Star uses

"Balsamo"

as an alias, and refers to Giuseppe as her uncle.

Music

He appears as a principal character in the

1794