This book is about the life of Alessandro Cagliostro (real name Giuseppe Balsamo) who was born in Palermo in 1743, studied alchemy and sold elixirs and potions all over Europe, and became the rage of Paris society as they flocked to his seances. He was a practitioner of hypnotism and telepathy, magic, precognition and spiritualism & psychic healing and propagator of a new "Egyptian Rite" in Europe. After various misadventures he was imprisoned in the Bastille and then banished from France, only to be betrayed to the Inquisition, eventually dying in prison in the Fortress of San Leo in 1795.