Whatever else Cagliostro was, he was the author of a masonic innovation with one genuinely radical feature. His Egyptian Rite, elaborated from about 1784 and seated in lodges at Lyon and Paris with himself as Grand Copht, admitted women to full initiation in parallel lodges, at a time when regular freemasonry excluded them entirely; his wife Serafina presided as Grand Mistress, and the Parisian lodge drew noblewomen of the first rank. The rite promised more than sociability: its higher workings aimed at physical and moral regeneration, and its seances employed a child seer, the colombe, who gazed into a carafe of water to report visions of angels, a practice reaching back through folk scrying and forward to the mediumship of the following century.
Contemporary accounts of the seances, hostile and sympathetic alike, agree on the theatre: the white robes, the perfumes, the invocations of the seven angels. The rite was the summit of his career and the instrument of his destruction. It made him famous enough to be swept into the Diamond Necklace affair on no evidence, and it furnished the Roman Inquisition, when he rashly attempted to plant a lodge in the papal city, with the charge of freemasonry on which he was condemned in 1791. The Egyptian Rite did not entirely die with him at San Leo: its rituals were printed, plundered and revived, and the Memphis and Misraim rites of the next century claimed its inheritance.