The Old and the New Magic. Henry Ridgely Evans

      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}

      MOSES AND AARON PERFORMING THE MIRACLE OF THE SERPENTS BEFORE PHARAOH

      (After Schnorr von Carolsfeld.)

      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