Born in April, 1725, the name of Giovanni Jacopo Casanova is more likely to be uttered in ambivalent tones of jealousy if not rapt admiration in matters concerning the infamous Italian's reputation for being a master of seduction and a unrepentant devotee of the opportunistic sexual liaison rather than of things magical.

However, despite an early sickly childhood, an episode with a witch to help cure a periodic nosebleed may have triggered an awakening influence to the psychical makeup of the future debonair adventurer who by all accounts seemed to possess natural occult powers.

The young Giovanni was trotted off to a local witch by his grandmother to help stop the bleed. Already a pale anemic child, he was weakening steadily, and his very life was understood to be in danger. After locking the boy into a wooden box, the woman muttered some noisy incantations, burned some potions and powders, filling the air with a repugnant smoke which she gathered into a large sheet she then wrapped around the frail child.

Then she predicted that a beautiful lady would come visit him that night. Sure enough, a dazzling fairy emerge d from the huge fireplace in his room to rub a mysterious ointment on his head with her soft steady hands, speaking to him in a language he did not understand.

Whether the feverish lad dreamed in his sleep this appointment with destiny or indeed had been visited by a spiritual form can only be speculated. But the next day his symptoms began to subside and within a month they had vanished completely. Casanova grew strong into health becoming an increasingly precocious lad who developed a keen enthusiasm for the feminine members of his species.

After a series of raucous misadventures, awkward indiscretions, and other swarthy acts conspicuous of his breed of honest scoundrel, Casanova was soon amazing others and most of all himself with his natural flair for the theatrical and the prophetic.

Stints in the church, the army, the minstrel, and a loud-mouthed if rather harmless street gang all proved unworthy of this young cavalier's clever energies. Most of his life he considered both himself and his remarkable traits, counterfeit and a hoax, noting with his usual candor, "I saw how easy it must have been for the ancient heathen priests to impose upon ignorant and therefore credulous mankind."

Making the acquaintance of a government official who suffered a stroke on the way home in a gondola, Casanova immediately took advantage of the situation to introduce himself as a medic. When the ailing senator's two closest friends suggested that Casanova go home, he replied in full seriousness, "If I go he will die. If I stay, he will recover."

The senator, M. Bragadin, nearly succumbed to a mercury poultice applied by his own physician earlier that night. Observing his gradually diminishing life signs, Casanova removed the pack from the senator's chest and cleansed his ailing upper body, whereupon the patient soon fell into a peaceful slumber.

The next day, the physician resigned the case and left the senator in Casanova's care. Full of newly found vigor, Casanova proceeded to quote medical sources he had never studied, and then prescribed the correct treatment of rest and diet, on authority of his remarkable instincts.

Of course the implications of his amazing recovery did not go unnoticed by this well-heeled patient. In Casanova's words, "M. de Bragadin, who had the weakness to believe in the occult sciences, told me one day that, for a young man of my age, he thought my learning too extensive, and that he was certain that I was the possessor of some supernatural endowment."

An intuitive young rascal at best thus far in his life, Casanova, not one to doubt the manifestations of fate, admitted to the senator that he was a Kabbalist and possessed the Key of Solomon. Paid handsomely for his oracular pronouncements, he entertained the senator's house until he took off to launch his first major swindle as a magician, a deception which involved a magnificent knife, purportedly the same knife or sword that St. Peter used to cut off the ear of the high priest's servant in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The knife was supposed to help Casanova locate buried treasure scattered throughout the papal estates. First there was a little two step. To make grander his illusion, Casanova, wasting none of his theatrical pretense, conjured up a need for its magical sheath, which the magician secretly fashioned out of an old boot.

He followed with some hocus pocus map readings, naming the village of Cesena he had recently seen written on a letter to his "client", as important, and then consulting an oracle he had constructed of numbered cards made into pyramids. His reading suggested that the treasure his client was looking for was buried near the Rubicon which, of course, ran through Cesena.

His clients, an elderly farmer and his son, became totally convinced they were dealing with a sorcerer. In Cesena, Casanova was introduced to a wealthy peasant, where he soon hatched another plot to locate buried treasure for a client. Because the peasant, George Franzia, had a young virgin daughter, she would become essential as the main focus of the scam he devised which included the mutual bathing of virgin and magician in a series of purifying rites.

Finally after days of seductive preparations the moment came for the divining of the buried treasure. While he was arranging his magical circle on the sod, uttering barbarous words, a thunderstorm began to brew noisily into the sky overhead. With the special St. Peter's knife in one hand, a scepter in the other, garbed in a long white robe and a crown upon his head, he pranced around the circle three full times and then jumped into the middle, as the first crack of lightening and thunder dagger the eyes, ears, and credulity of all present.

Covering all the bases, Casanova explained to Franzia later that the seven spirits guarding the treasure had made him agree to delay unearthing it. He instead presented the man with a long document describing the exact location and the bounty of treasure his act was originally supposed to uncover.

While these were certainly con artist activities, it is true that Casanova did seem to possess an uncanny ability to make predictions, a sixth sense that made him say or do the right thing. When some of his more absurd prophecies can to pass, he was always returned to the awe he felt at the spontaneous thunderstorm of the treasure hunt mentioned earlier.

Once according to his own notions, when he wrongly executed a consultation of the pyramid oracle, the answer struck him as completely irrelevant and absurd, but it proved correct. His knack for knowing things mysterious to others began to suffer in his late thirties when he fell for yet another woman beyond his means. This time he failed miserably, and with this failure, his confidence escaped him.

Giovanni Casanova, lover and charlatan, sorcerer and memoirist, died in London at the age of seventy-three.