A few drops of the 'Wine of Egypt', taken at the prescribed phase of the moon, rejuvenate the body and restore lost youth.
The “Wine of Egypt” was the branded elixir Cagliostro sold alongside the regeneration regimen. The period biographer W. R. H. Trowbridge records the sales legend in detail: Cagliostro gave “a great lady” a vial of “the precious liquid” with instructions to take two drops when the moon entered its last quarter, and the surrounding anecdote held that the elixir had “rejuvenated thirty years” the maid who drank it by mistake. The claim is classified at a testimonial endpoint, because its support is anecdote and advertising legend rather than any measured outcome, and as refuted: the elixir’s composition was never disclosed, no rejuvenating constituent is known, and one of the imposture charges the case against Cagliostro rests on (as Trowbridge frames it) is that he manufactured his remedies “with the object of defrauding the public by attributing to them fabulous properties which he knew they did not possess”.
Appears in
Sources
- Cagliostro: The Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic — Trowbridge WRH. *Cagliostro: The Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic.* London: Chapman and Hall, 1910.
- The Life of Joseph Balsamo, commonly called Count Cagliostro — *The Life of Joseph Balsamo, commonly called Count Cagliostro.* London, 1791. English translation of the Roman Inquisition's official biography *Compendio della vita e delle gesta di Giuseppe Balsamo* (Rome: Reverenda Camera Apostolica, 1791), extracted from the proceedings of the Holy Office against Cagliostro.