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THE OLD AND THE NEW MAGIC

INTRODUCTION. BY DR. PAUL CARUS.

Table of Contents

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.

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}

JESUS CASTING OUT DEVILS (After Schnorr von Carolsfeld.)

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

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.

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.)

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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 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 {xvii}