



Produced by deaurider, RichardW, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)







[Illustration: MIEUSEMENT, phot. à Blois LECESNE, éditeur

ROBERT-HOUDIN]


 THE OLD AND THE NEW MAGIC

 BY
 HENRY
 RIDGELY
 EVANS

 ILLUSTRATED

 D’rum hab’
 ich mich der
 Magie ergeben!

 INTRODUCTION
 BY
 DR. PAUL
 CARUS

 CHICAGO
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LIMITED. LONDON
 1906


 COPYRIGHT 1906
 BY
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
 CHICAGO

[Illustration]




SKETCH OF HENRY RIDGELY EVANS.


“Henry Ridgely Evans, journalist, author and librarian, was born in
Baltimore, Md., November 7, 1861. He is the son of Henry Cotheal and
Mary (Garrettson) Evans. Through his mother he is descended from the
old colonial families of Ridgely, Dorsey, Worthington and Greenberry,
which played such a prominent part in the annals of early Maryland.
Mr. Evans was educated at the preparatory department of Georgetown
(D. C.) College and at Columbian College, Washington, D. C. He
studied law at the University of Maryland, and began its practice
in Baltimore City; but abandoned the legal profession for the more
congenial avocation of journalism. He served for a number of years
as special reporter and dramatic critic on the ‘Baltimore News,’ and
subsequently became connected with the U. S. Bureau of Education, as
one of the assistant librarians. In 1891 he was married to Florence,
daughter of Alexander Kirkpatrick, of Philadelphia.”—National
Cyclopedia of American Biography.

 Mr. Evans is an ardent student of folk-lore, masonic antiquities,
 psychical research, and occultism. Many of his writings have been
 contributed to the Monist and Open Court. He is the author of a work
 on psychical research, entitled “Hours with the Ghosts,” published
 in 1897, and many brochures on magic and mysticism, etc.




TABLE OF CONTENTS


                                                                 PAGE

 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

{ix}




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.

_Imga_ in Akkad meant priest, and the Assyrians changed the word to
_maga_, calling their high-priest _Rab-mag_; and considering the
fact that the main business of priests in ancient times consisted in
exorcising, fortune-telling, miracle-working, and giving out oracles,
it seems justifiable to believe that the Persian term, which in
its Latin version is _magus_, is derived from the Chaldæan and is
practically the same; for the connotation of a wise man endowed with
supernatural powers has always been connected with the word _magus_,
and even to-day magician means wizard, sorcerer, or miracle-worker.
{x}

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.

[Illustration: SAUL AND THE WITCH OF ENDOR. (After Schnorr von
Carolsfeld.)]

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. {xi}

[Illustration: JESUS CASTING OUT DEVILS (After Schnorr von
Carolsfeld.)

Symbolizing Christ’s power even over demons, according to the view of
early Christianity.]

[Illustration: CHRIST WITH THE WAND.

From a Christian Sarcophagus.†

† Reproduced from Mrs. Jameson’s and Lady Eastlake’s _History of our
Lord_, London, 1872, Longmans, Green & Co., Vol. I., pp. 347 and 349.]

{xii}

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 (who, we must remember, recruited their ranks
from the lowly in life) 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.

[Illustration]

The adjoined illustration, one of the oldest representations of
Christ, has been reproduced from Rossi’s _Roma Sotterranea_ (II,
Table 14). It is a fresco of the catacombs, discovered in the St.
Callisto Chapel, and is dated by Franz Xaver Kraus (_Geschichte
der christlichen Kunst, I, p. 153_) at the beginning of the third
century. Jesus holds in his left hand the scriptures, while his right
hand grasps the wand with which he performs the miracle. Lazarus
is represented as a mummy, while one of his sisters kneels at the
Saviour’s feet.

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!”

{xiii}

[Illustration: MOSES AND AARON PERFORMING THE MIRACLE OF THE SERPENTS
BEFORE PHARAOH

(After Schnorr von Carolsfeld.)]

[Illustration: THE EGYPTIAN SNAKE NAJA HAJE MADE MOTIONLESS BY
PRESSURE UPON THE NECK

(Reproduced from Verworn after Photographs.)]

{xiv}

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 (expressing here
Goethe’s own ideas) continues:

 “Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,
  That no one knows how best he may escape.
  What though the day with rational splendor beams,
  The night entangles us in webs of dreams.
  By superstition constantly ensnared,
  It spooks, gives warnings, is declared.
  Intimidated thus we stand alone.
  The portal jars, yet entrance is there none.”

{xv}

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 {xvi} 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