Read Ebook: The Old and the New Magic by Evans Henry Ridgely Carus Paul Author Of Introduction Etc

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Ebook has 1133 lines and 115714 words, and 23 pages

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Introduction by Dr. Paul Carus ix

History of Natural Magic and Prestidigitation 1

The Chevalier Pinetti 23

Cagliostro: A Study in Charlatanism 42

Ghost-making Extraordinary 87

The Romance of Automata 107

Robert-Houdin: Conjurer, Author and Ambassador 123

Some Old-time Conjurers 160

The Secrets of Second Sight 188

The Confessions of an Amateur Conjurer 201

A Day with Alexander the Great 215

A Twentieth Century Thaumaturgist 237

A Gentleman of Thibet 254

Magicians I Have Met 271

The Riddle of the Sphinx 318

Treweyism 331

THE OLD AND THE NEW MAGIC

INTRODUCTION.

BY DR. PAUL CARUS.

The very word magic has an alluring sound, and its practice as an art will probably never lose its attractiveness for people's minds. But we must remember that there is a difference between the old magic and the new, and that both are separated by a deep chasm, which is a kind of color line, for though the latter develops from the former in a gradual and natural course of evolution, they are radically different in principle, and the new magic is irredeemably opposed to the assumptions upon which the old magic rests.

Magic originally meant priestcraft. It is probable that the word is very old, being handed down to us from the Greeks and Romans, who had received it from the Persians. But they in their turn owe it to the Babylonians, and the Babylonians to the Assyrians, and the Assyrians to the Sumero-Akkadians.

While the belief in, and practice of, magic are not entirely absent in the civilization of Israel, we find that the leaders of orthodox thought had set their faces against it, at least as it appeared in its crudest form, and went so far as to persecute sorcerers with fire and sword.

We read in the Bible that when the Lord "multiplied his signs" in Egypt, he sent Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh to turn their rods into serpents, that the Egyptian magicians vied with them in the performance, but that Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods, demonstrating thus Aaron's superiority. It is an interesting fact that the snake charmers of Egypt perform to-day a similar feat, which consists in paralyzing a snake so as to render it motionless. The snake then looks like a stick, but is not rigid.

How tenacious the idea is that religion is and must be magic, appears from the fact that even Christianity shows traces of it. In fact, the early Christians looked upon Christ as a kind of magician, and all his older pictures show him with a magician's wand in his hand. The resurrection of Lazarus, the change of water into wine, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the healing of diseases by casting out devils, and kindred miracles, according to the notions of those centuries, are performed after the fashion of sorcerers.

Goethe introduces the belief in magic into the very plot of Faust. In his despair at never finding the key to the world-problem in science, which, as he thinks, does not offer what we need, but useless truisms only, Faust hopes to find the royal road to knowledge by supernatural methods. He says:

"Therefore, from Magic I seek assistance, That many a secret perchance I reach Through spirit-power and spirit-speech, And thus the bitter task forego Of saying the things I do not know,-- That I may detect the inmost force Which binds the world, and guides its course; Its germs, productive powers explore, And rummage in empty words no more!"

Faust follows the will o' the wisp of pseudo-science, and so finds his efforts to gain useful knowledge balked. He turns agnostic and declares that we cannot know anything worth knowing. He exclaims:

"That which we do not know is dearly needed; And what we need we do not know."

And in another place:

"I see that nothing can be known."

But, having acquired a rich store of experience, Faust, at the end of his career, found out that the study of nature is not a useless rummage in empty words, and became converted to science. His ideal is a genuinely scientific view of nature. He says:

"Not yet have I my liberty made good: So long as I can't banish magic's fell creations And totally unlearn the incantations. Stood I, O Nature, as a man in thee, Then were it worth one's while a man to be. And such was I ere I with the occult conversed, And ere so wickedly the world I cursed."

To be a man in nature and to fight one's way to liberty is a much more dignified position than to go lobbying to the courts of the celestials and to beg of them favors. Progress does not pursue a straight line, but moves in spirals or epicycles. Periods of daylight are followed by nights of superstition. So it happened that in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century the rationalism of the eighteenth century waned, not to make room for a higher rationalism, but to suffer the old bugbears of ghosts and hobgoblins to reappear in a reactionary movement. Faust continues:

The aim of man is his liberty and independence. As soon as we understand that there are no spooks that must be conciliated by supplications and appeased, but that we stand in nature from which we have grown in constant interaction between our own aspirations and the natural forces regulated by law, we shall have confidence in our own faculties, which can be increased by investigation and a proper comprehension of conditions, and we shall no longer look beyond but around. Faust says:

"A fool who to the Beyond his eyes directeth And over the clouds a place of peers detecteth. Firm must man stand and look around him well, The world means something to the capable."

This manhood of man, to be gained by science through the conquest of all magic, is the ideal which the present age is striving to attain, and the ideal has plainly been recognized by leaders of human progress. The time has come for us "to put away childish things," and to relinquish the beliefs and practices of the medicine-man.

The old magic is sorcery, or, considering the impossibility of genuine sorcery, the attempt to practise sorcery. It is based upon the pre-scientific world-conception, which in its primitive stage is called animism, imputing to nature a spiritual life analogous to our own spirit, and peopling the world with individual personalities, spirits, ghosts, goblins, gods, devils, ogres, gnomes and fairies. The old magic stands in contrast to science; it endeavors to transcend human knowledge by supernatural methods and is based upon the hope of working miracles by the assistance of invisible presences or intelligences, who, according to this belief, could be forced or coaxed by magic into an alliance. The savage believes that the evil influence of the powers of nature can be averted by charms or talismans, and their aid procured by proper incantations, conjurations and prayers.

The world-conception of the savage is long-lingering, and its influence does not subside instantaneously with the first appearance of science. The Middle Ages are full of magic, and the belief in it has not died out to this day.

The old magic found a rival in science and has in all its aspects, in religion as well as in occultism, in mysticism and obscurantism, treated science as its hereditary enemy. It is now succumbing in the fight, but in the meantime a new magic has originated and taken the place of the old, performing miracles as wonderful as those of the best conjurers of former days, nay, more wonderful; yet these miracles are accomplished with the help of science and without the least pretense of supernatural power.

The new magic originated from the old magic when the belief in sorcery began to break down in the eighteenth century, which is the dawn of rationalism and marks the epoch since which mankind has been systematically working out a scientific world-conception.

In primitive society religion is magic, and priests are magicians. The savage would think that if the medicine-man could not work miracles there would be no use for religion. Religion, however, does not disappear with the faith in the medicine-man's power. When magic becomes discredited by science, religion is purified. We must know, though, that religious reforms of this kind are not accomplished at once, but come on gradually in slow process of evolution, first by disappointment and then in exultation at the thought that the actualities of science are higher, nobler and better than the dreams of superstition, even if they were possible, and thus it appears that science comes to fulfil, not to destroy.

Science has been pressed into the service of magic by ancient pagan priests, who utilized mechanical contrivances in their temples to impress the credulous with the supernatural power of their gods.

The magic lantern, commonly supposed to be an invention of the Jesuit Kircher, in 1671, must have been secretly known among the few members of the craft of scientific magic at least as early as the end of the middle ages, for we have an old drawing, which is here reproduced, showing that it was employed in warfare as a means of striking terror in the ranks of the enemy. We have no information as to the success of the stratagem, but we may assume that in the days of a common belief in witchcraft and absolute ignorance of the natural sciences, it must have been quite effective with superstitious soldiers

While magic as superstition and as fraud is doomed, magic as an art will not die. Science will take hold of it and permeate it with its own spirit, changing it into scientific magic which is destitute of all mysticism, occultism and superstition, and comes to us as a witty play for our recreation and diversion.

It is an extraordinary help to a man to be acquainted with the tricks of prestidigitateurs, and we advise parents not to neglect this phase in the education of their children. The present age is laying the basis of a scientific world-conception, and it is, perhaps, not without good reasons that it has produced quite a literature on the subject of modern magic.

It might seem that if the public became familiar with the methods of the magicians who give public entertainments, their business would be gone. But this is not the case. As a peep behind the scenes and a knowledge of the machinery of the stage only help us to appreciate scenic effects, so an insight into the tricks of the prestidigitateur will only serve to whet our appetite for seeing him perform his tricks. The prestidigitateur will be forced to improve his tricks before an intelligent audience; he will be obliged to invent new methods, but not to abandon his art.

Moreover, it is not the trick alone that we admire, but the way in which it is performed. Even those who know how things can be made to disappear by sleight of hand, must confess that they always found delight in seeing the late Alexander Herrmann, whenever he began a soir?e, take off his gloves, roll them up and make them vanish as if into nothingness.

It is true that magic in the old sense is gone; but that need not be lamented. The coarseness of Cagliostro's frauds has given way to the elegant display of scientific inventiveness and an adroit use of human wit. Traces of the religion of magic are still prevalent to-day, and it will take much patient work before the last remnants of it are swept away. The notions of magic still hold in bondage the minds of the uneducated and half-educated, and even the leaders of progress feel themselves now and then hampered by ghosts and superstitions.

We believe that the spread of modern magic and its proper comprehension are an important sign of progress, and in this sense the feats of our Kellars and Herrmanns are a work of religious significance. They are instrumental in dispelling the fogs of superstition by exhibiting to the public the astonishing but natural miracles of the art of legerdemain; and while they amuse and entertain they fortify the people in their conviction of the reliability of science.

In speaking of modern magic, we refer to the art of the prestidigitateur, and exclude from its domain the experiments of hypnotism as well as the vulgar lies of fraud. There is no magic in the psychosis of an hysterical subject, who at the hypnotizer's suggestion becomes the prey of hallucinations; nor is there any art in the deceptions of the fortune-teller, whose business will vanish when the public ceases to be credulous and superstitious. The former is a disease, the latter mostly fraud. Magic proper is produced by a combination of three factors: legerdemain proper, or sleight of hand; psychological illusions, and surprising feats of natural science with clever concealment of their true causes. The success of almost every trick depends upon the introduction of these three factors.

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