Magic (parlor)

“ But the magic of which I speak is of a far more subtle and deeply refined nature, and those who possess it are alone in life, save when by some rare chance they meet their kind. Those who are deeply and mysteriously interested in any pursuit for which the great multitude of all-alike people have no sympathy, who have peculiar studies and subjects of thought, partake a little of the nature of the magus. Magic, as popularly understood, has no existence, it is a literal myth—for it means nothing but what amazes or amuses for a short time. ”

“ They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and shew him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.
The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of the uniformity of nature, but in its misapprehension of the particular laws which govern the sequence of natural events. ”

“ So far the History of Magic has been presented as annals of a thing prejudged, or as chronicles—less or more exact—of a sequence in phenomena, seeing that no one believed that Magic belonged to science. ”

“ He simply gave orders and caused all things to appear and to be made,—sun, moon, stars, wind, mountains, animals.
In many of the primitive stories, magic is the means by which the most wonderful effects are produced. It was believed that a magician could bring [45] about any effect he desired by the mere use of his will, and often without any visible symbol of magic power. Sometimes, however, magic wands were used, and sometimes ceremonies were performed for the purpose of producing magical results. ”

“ First, let me observe that the definition of magic here adopted does by no means coincide with that of Professor Frazer, though, like his, it rests upon the method of compulsion as the distinguishing characteristic. That, however, is not because of any faith by primeval man in the invariable order of nature or in the inevitable sequence of cause and effect. The compulsion of magic, as I understand it, is wielded by, and dependent upon, the personal orenda of the magician, either directly or through the medium of the powerful and uncanny beings whom he succeeds in bringing into play. ”

“ People go to magical entertainments to be mystified by the pretended sorcery of the magician, and when they learn by what absurdly simple devices a person may be fooled, they look with indifference at the more ambitious illusions of the performer. Palmistry is the very foundation stone of prestidigitation. No magician, unless he confines himself to mechanical tricks, can do without it in a performance. ”

“ We carelessly assume that the narratives of such displays describe performances of magic : we have decided that there is no such thing as magic, therefore the narratives must have been false, the persons whom they refer to, imposters. But supposing that magic, of old, was simply the science of magi, of learned men, there is no magic, in the modern sense, left in the matter. ”

“ It is difficult to separate the practice of magic arts from the manifestation of a ghost's or spirit's power in possession; because a man may use some magic means to bring the possession upon himself, as in the case of prophecy, and also because the connexion between the unseen powerful being and the man, in whatever way the connexion is made and works, is that which makes the wizard. ”

“ Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. ”

“ But however the power of which we are speaking (a power accorded to special physical temperament) may or may not be accounted for by some patient student of nature, I am persuaded that it is in that power we are to seek for whatever is not wholly imposture, in the attributes assigned to magic or witchcraft. It is well said, by a writer who has gone into the depth of these subjects with the research of a scholar and the science of a pathologist, ‘that if magic had exclusively reposed on credulity and falsehood, its reign would never have endured so long ”

“ Now, if you sit perfectly silent for a long time and look at the sea, or the sky, or the running water of a river, something happens to you—a sort of magic. Not the violent magic that makes the kind of adventure that I have been telling you about, but a kind of gentle but very strong inside magic, that makes things clear and shows you what things are important, and what are not. ”

“ Magic has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors. There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of producing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people—with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice—that Magic is an absurdity. ”

“ It is very easy to make a mistake in magic, for it is a most complicated science.
By the time he had read through the two hundred pages devoted to the word Sleep, the venerable wizard was very uneasy, but he was a persevering person and he did not abandon his endeavours. ”

“ Here begins the great point of the dispute as to that branch of magic which we call natural magic. The objectors may tell us, that they will freely own that there may be an existence of spirits, that there may be an existence of witches, that by a divine power men may be influenced so far as to have a communication with good spirits, and that from thence they may become spiritual-divine magicians, they will likewise, perhaps, as freely grant, that by the intervention of a demon, things preternatural may be brought about by persons who have studied the demoniacal magic ”

“ The ultimate root of the word Magic is unknown, but proximately it is derived from the Magi, or priests of Chaldea and Media in pre-Aryan and pre-Semitic times, who were the great exponents of this system of thought, so strangely mingled of superstition, philosophy, and scientific observation. The fundamental conception of magic is that of the spiritual vitality of all nature. ”

“ They say, that the persons, who contend for the magic art, own, that all that is brought about by magic, is by the assistance and help of a spirit, and that consequently what is effected by it must be preternatural; now, they say, it is a thing inconsistent, by a natural power, to bring about a preternatural effect; therefore, there can be no such thing as natural magic, which has within itself the efficacy of destroying those acts done by magicians in the diabolical. ”

“ Passing now to the subject-in-chief of this preface, it is affirmed as follows in the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic:— (1) There is a potent and real Magic, popular exaggerations of which are actually below the truth. (2) There is a formidable secret which constitutes the fatal science of good and evil. (3) It confers on man powers apparently superhuman. (4) It is the traditional science of the secrets of Nature which has been transmitted to us from the Magi. (5) Initiation therein gives empire over souls to the sage and full capacity for ruling human wills. ”

“ VIII. What is remarkable is, that if ever any one laughed at magic, it must certainly be the author in question—since all his book only tends to prove that there are no witches, and that all that is said of them is merely foolish and chimerical. But what appears surprising is, that at the same time he maintains that while in truth there are no witches, but that there are enchantresses or female magicians; that witchcraft is only a chimera, but that diabolical magic is very real. ”

“ Thus, if magic be deduced immediately from elementary processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an error into which the mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests on conceptions which the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have yet attained to, it becomes probable that magic arose before religion in the evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend nature to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and enchantments before he strove to coax and mollify a coy, capricious, or irascible deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice. ”

“ The power which is used for the one end is equally potent for the other.
For Death-magic, as we have seen, it is essential that the person working magic should believe that he has the power, and that others also should believe him to have it; and all that is necessary is that the magician should put forth the power that he possesses; and this he does by means of words and gesture-language. ”

“ But in general the name of magic and magician is now taken in these days in an odious sense, for an art which produces marvelous effects, that appear above the common course of nature, and that by the operation of the bad spirit. ”

“ The white magic busied itself with good spirits, the black magic with the bad ones. Magicians, therefore, who operated by the aid of the devil, and even in medicine called in the assistance of the devil, were called “necromancers.” For the first time magic became amalgamated with certain philosophical speculations and also with Christian-dogmatic constituents. ”

“ Then, after a little, he told me that one of his objects was to initiate me into certain mysteries of white magic, to teach me how to construct the magic mirror in which the majority of persons could glance through space, see and talk with the dead, and in all things, save a few, have an unerring guide through life. ”

“ Yet our material has conclusively shown that the history of magic is bound up with the history of science as well as with folk-lore, primitive culture, and the history of religion. Sometimes our authors have spoken of natural magic, but I rather wonder whether there could well be any other kind, since man must always reckon with his natural environment. It is not without reason that the Magi stand out in Pliny’s pages not as mere sorcerers or enchanters but as those who have gone farthest and in most detail—too curiously, in his opinion—into the study of nature. ”

“ But this profession of magician, which sprang from priesthood, has largely promoted superstition in medicine, and was particularly instrumental in bringing it into extraordinary repute. It is our intention to concern ourselves a little more minutely with magicians and magic.
§2. The Spread of the Word “Magic.”—How and when magic was transplanted from its Oriental home to the Occident can not be determined with certainty; for the Greeks, as well as all antique peoples, probably all nations, had a belief in ghosts and demons, in fortune-telling, and in sorcery. ”

“ Magic is the science of the ancient magi; and the Christian religion, which silenced the counterfeit oracles and put a stop to the illusions of false gods, does, this notwithstanding, revere those mystic kings who came from the East, led by a star, to adore the Saviour of the world in His cradle. They are elevated by tradition to the rank of kings, because magical initiation constitutes a true royalty; because also the great art of the magi is characterised by all adepts as the Royal Art, as the Holy Kingdom—Sanctum Regnum. ”

“ Sitting one morning on the verandah, an aged magician approached and asked permission to perform some of his tricks. As I was in a humor to be amused, I told him to go ahead. He asked me to loan him the walking-stick which I carried. He waved this over his head two or three times and exclaimed: ‘No good; too big; can’t do,’ and handed the stick back to me, which, as I grasped it, changed into a loathsome, wriggling snake in my hand. Of course, I immediately dropped it. The magician smiled, picked up the snake by the middle, whirled it around in the air, and handed it back to me. ”

“ When do you find people in books going on like that? They just say ‘This is magic!’ and behave as if it was. They don’t go pretending they’re not sure. Why, no magic would stand it.”
“Aunt Dorothea once told me that all magic was like Prince Rupert’s drop,” Mavis owned: “if once you broke it there was nothing left but a little dust.” ”

“ This prince, abandoned to luxury and indolence, reduced the science of the Magi to the level of one of his courtesans. What purpose did marvels serve if they failed in ministration to pleasure? Compel, O enchanters, compel the winter to produce roses; double the savour of wine; apply your power over the light to make the beauty of women shine like that of divinities. The Magi obeyed and the king passed from intoxication to intoxication. ”

“ For it was believed that he who possessed the true name possessed the very being of god or man, and could force even a deity to obey him as a slave obeys his master. Thus the art of the magician consisted in obtaining from the gods a revelation of their sacred names, and he left no stone unturned to accomplish his end. When once a god in a moment of weakness or forgetfulness had imparted to the wizard the wondrous lore, the deity had no choice but to submit humbly to the man or pay the penalty of his contumacy. ”

“ In magic a suggestion is made orally, or by dramatic action, or most often in both ways together, that is held ipso facto to bring about its own accomplishment. A certain conditionality attaches to the magical operation, inasmuch as each magician is subject to interference on the part of other magicians who may neutralize his spell by a counter spell of equal or greater power; nevertheless, the intrinsic tone is that of a categorical assertion of binding force and efficacy. ”