Magic, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography. Albert A. Hopkins
Table of Contents
By Henry Ridgely Evans.
I.
Far back into the shadowy past, before the building of the pyramids, magic was a reputed art in Egypt, for Egypt was the “cradle of magic.” The magicians of Egypt, according to the Bible chronicle, contended against Aaron, at the court of Pharaoh. The Hebrew prophet “cast down his rod before Pharaoh and before his servants, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.” [Exodus vii. 10, 11, 12.]
The late Robert Heller, prestidigitateur, traveler in the Orient, and skeptic, once told me that he had seen this feat performed in Cairo many times by the Dervishes. The rods actually were serpents and hypnotized to such an extent as to become perfectly stiff and rigid. When thrown upon the earth and recalled to life by sundry mystic passes and strokes, they crawled away alive and hideous as ever. Said Heller: “It was in the open air that I saw this strange feat performed. Transferred to the gloomy audience chamber of some old palace, where the high roof is supported by ponderous stone columns painted with hieroglyphics, where rows of black marble sphinxes stare at you with unfathomable eyes, where the mise en scène is awe-inspiring—this trick of the rods turning into serpents becomes doubly impressive, and indeed to the uninitiated a miracle.”
In the British Museum is an Egyptian papyrus, which contains an account of a magical séance given by a certain Tchatcha-em-ankh before King Khufu, B.C. 3766. In this manuscript it is stated of the magician: “He knoweth how to bind on a head which hath been cut off, he knoweth how to make a lion follow him as if led by a rope, and he knoweth the number of the stars of the house (constellation) of Thoth.” The decapitation trick is thus no new thing, while the experiment performed with the lion, undoubtedly a hypnotic feat, shows hypnotism to be old.
The art of natural magic, then, dates back to the remotest periods of antiquity. It was an art cultivated by the Egyptian, Chaldean, Jewish, Roman, and Grecian priesthoods, being used by them to dupe the ignorant masses. Weeping and bleeding statues, temple doors that flew open with thunderous sound and apparently by supernatural means, and perpetual lamps that flamed forever in the tombs of holy men, were some of the thaumaturgic feats of the Pagan priests. Heron, a Greek mechanician and mathematician, who lived in the second century before Christ, wrote several interesting treatises on automata and magical appliances, used in the ancient temples. Colonel A. De Rochas, in an interesting work, Les Origines de la Science, has given in detail Heron’s accounts of these wonderful automata and experiments in natural magic. St. Hippolytus, one of the Fathers of the early Christian Church, also described and exposed in his works many of these wonders.
Magic is divided, according to old writers on the occult, into: White magic, Black magic, and Necromancy. Modern magic, or conjuring, is divided by Robert-Houdin into five classes, as follows:
1. Feats of Dexterity. The hands and tongue being the only means used for the production of these illusions.
2. Experiments in Natural Magic. Expedients derived from the sciences, and which are worked in combination with feats of dexterity, the combined result constituting “conjuring tricks.”
3. Mental Conjuring. A control acquired over the will of the spectator; secret thought read by an ingenious system of diagnosis, and sometimes compelled to take a particular direction by certain subtle artifices.
4. Pretended Mesmerism. Imitation of mesmeric phenomena, second-sight, clairvoyance, divination, trance, catalepsy.
5. Mediumship. Spiritualism or pretended evocation of spirits, table-turning, rapping and writing, mysterious cabinets, etc.
In the Middle Ages magic was greatly in vogue and we read strange stories of ghosts, goblins, and gnomes in the literature of that period. Shriveled old women were burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft, monks in their gloomy cells wrestled with Satan and the powers of darkness, and grimy alchemists toiled day and night over the red fires of their furnaces, seeking in vain for the talismanic philosopher’s stone and wondrous elixir of life. With the aid of the concave mirror, magicians of the period were able to produce very fair ghost illusions to gull a susceptible public. Benvenuto Cellini chronicles one in his fascinating autobiography.
Cellini, as guileless as a child in matters of science, desiring to study sorcery, applied to a Sicilian priest who was a professed dabbler in the occult art. One dark night they repaired to the ruins of the Coliseum, at Rome; the monk described a circle on the ground and placed himself and the great goldsmith within its mystic outlines; a fire was built, intoxicating perfumes cast on it, and soon an impenetrable smoke arose. The man of the cowl then waved his wand in the air, pronounced sundry cabalistic words, and legions of demons were seen dancing in the air, to the great terror of Cellini. The story of this spirit séance reads like an Arabian tale, but it is easily explainable. The priest had a brother confederate concealed among the ruins, who manipulated a concave mirror, by means of which painted images were thrown on the smoke. Later on Nostradamus conjured up the vision of the future King of France for the benefit of the lovely Marie dé Médicis. This illusion was accomplished by the aid of mirrors adroitly secreted amid hanging draperies.
II.
The history of magic would be incomplete without a sketch of Cagliostro, the arch-necromancer of the eighteenth century, who filled all Europe with his fame. Novels and plays have been founded on his strange career, as witness Goethe’s “Grand Cophta” and Alexander Dumas’ “Memoirs of a Physician.” Thomas Carlyle has remorselessly dissected the character of Cagliostro in an immortal essay, “Count Cagliostro,” which makes fascinating reading. Cagliostro like Nostradamus, and others of that ilk, as the Scotch say, was a pretender to magic and sorcery. He manufactured elixirs of life, raised the shades of the illustrious dead, pretty much after the fashion of our modern spirit mediums; told fortunes, predicted lucky numbers in the lottery, transmuted metals, and founded occult lodges of Egyptian Masonry for the regeneration of mankind. Joseph Balsamo—for such was the Count’s real name—was born of poor parents at Palermo, Sicily, in the year 1743. He received the rudiments of an education, and a smattering of chemistry, at a neighboring monastery, and then started out to fleece mankind. He began by forging theater tickets, after that a will; then he robbed a goldsmith named Marano of a sum of money. Balsamo pretended that a secret treasure lay buried in a certain rocky chasm just outside the city of Palermo, and that he, for a consideration, was able to unearth the gold by means of certain magical incantations. Poor Marano like a susceptible gudgeon swallowed the bait, hook and all, paid the contingent fee, and accompanied by the amateur sorcerer (it was Balsamo’s first attempt in the necromantic line) paid a visit on a certain dark night to the lonely spot where the treasure lay hid from mortal gaze. Joseph drew a magic circle of phosphorus on the earth, pronounced some spells in a peculiar gibberish known only to himself, which he denominated Arabic, and bade the goldsmith dig away for dear life. Marano went vigorously to work with pick and spade. Suddenly terrific yells were heard, whereupon a legion of devils (Joseph’s boon companions with cork-blackened visages) rushed from behind the rocks, pounced upon the goldsmith, and nearly beat him to death with their pitchforks. The enchanter, in order to escape the vengeance of the furious Marano, was compelled to flee his native city. In company with a Greek, Althotas, he visited various places—Greece, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Rhodes, Malta, Naples, Venice and Rome. According to his own account, he studied alchemy at Malta in the laboratory of Pinto, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and St. John. At Rome he married a beautiful girl, Lorenza Feliciani, daughter of a girdle maker, who proved of great assistance to him in his impostures. They travelled