Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/225

Rh WHITE MAGIC.] M AGIO 207 MAGIC, WHITE. Under this head is included the art of performing tricks and exhibiting illusions by aid of apparatus, excluding feats of dexterity in which there is no deception, together with the performances of such auto maton figures as are actuated in a secret and mysterious manner. Conjuring by prestidigitation, or sleight of hand, independently of mechanical apparatus, is referred to under LEGERDEMAIN. Whether or not the book of Exodus makes the earliest historical reference to this natural magic when it records how the magicians of Egypt imitated certain miracles of Moses &quot;by their enchantments,&quot; it is known that the Egyptian hierophants, as well as the magicians of ancient Greece and Rome, were accustomed to astonish their dupes with optical illusions, visible representations of the divinities and subdivinities passing before the spectators in dark subterranean chambers, From the descriptions of ancient authors we may conjecture that the principal optical illusion employed in these effects was the throwing of spectral images of living persons and other objects upon the smoke of burning incense by means of concave metal mirrors. But, according to the detailed exposure of the tricks of the magicians given by Hippolytus (Ref. Om. Hxr., iv. 35), it appears that the desired effect was often produced in a simpler way, by causing the dupe to look into a cellar through a basin of water with a glass bottom standing under a sky-blue ceiling, or by figures on a dark wall drawn in inflammable material and suddenly ignited. The flashes of lightning and the rolling thunders which sometimes accompanied these manifestations were easy tricks, now familiar to everybody as the ignition of lycopodium and the shaking of a sheet of metal. The ancient methods described by Hippolytus (iv. 32) were very similar. Spectral pictures or reflexions of moving objects, similar to those of the camera or magic lantern, were described in the 14th and 16th centuries. Thus, in the House of Fame, bk. iii., Chaucer speaks of &quot;appearances such as the subtil tregetours perform at feasts &quot; pictorial representations of hunting, falconry, and knights jousting, with the persons and objects instantaneously disappearing; exhibitions of the same kind are mentioned by Sir John Mandeville, as seen by him at the court of &quot; the Great Chan &quot; in Asia ; and in the middle of the 16th century Benvenuto Cellini saw phantasmagoric spectres projected upon smoke at a nocturnal exhibition in the Colosseum at Rome. The existence of a camera at this latter date is a fact ; for the instrument is described by Baptista Porta, the Neapolitan philosopher, in his Magia Naturalis (1558). And the doubt how magic lantern effects could have been produced in the 1 4th century, when the lantern itself is alleged to have been invented by Athanasius Kircher in the middle of the 17th century, is set at rest by the fact that glass lenses .were constructed at the earlier of these dates, Roger Bacon, in his Discovery of the Miracles of Art, Nature, and Magic (about -1260), writing of glass lenses and perspectives so well made as to give good telescopic and microscopic effects, and to be useful to old men and those who have weak eyes. Towards the end of last century Comus, a French conjuror (the second of the name), included in his entertainment a figure which suddenly appeared and disappeared about 3 feet above a table, a trick explained by the circum stance that a concave mirror was among his properties ; and a contemporary performer, Robert, exhibited the raising of the dead by the same agency. Early in the present century Philipstal gave a sensation to his magic lantern entertainment by lowering unperceived between the audience and the stage a sheet of gauze upon which fell the vivid moving shadows of phantasmagoria. A new era in optical tricks began in 1863 when John Nevil Maskelyne, a Cheltenham artist in jewellery, invented a wood cabinet in which persons vanished and were made to reappear, although it was placed upon high feet, with no passage through which a person could pass from the cabinet to the stage floor, the scenes, or the ceiling ; and this cabinet was examined and measured for concealed space, and watched round by persons from the audience during the whole of the transformations. The general principle undoubtedly was this : if a looking-glass be set upright in the corner of a room, bisecting the right. angle formed by the walls, the side wall reflected will appear as if it were the back, and hence an object may be hidden behind the glass, yet the space seem to remain unoccupied. This principle, however, was so carried out that no sign of the existence of any mirror was discernible under the closest inspection. Two years later the same simple principle appeared in &quot; The Cabinet of Proteus,&quot; patented by Tobin and Pepper of the Polytechnic Institution, in which two mirrors were employed, meeting in the middle, where an upright pillar concealed their edges. In the same year Stodare exhibited the illusion in an extended form, by placing the pair of mirrors in the centre of the stage, supported between the legs of a three-legged table having the apex towards the audience ; and as the side walls of his stage were draped exactly like the back, reflexion showed an apparently clear space below the table top, where in reality a nran in a sitting position was hidden behind the glasses and exhibited his head (&quot;The Sphinx&quot;) above the table. The plane mirror illusion is so effective that it has been reproduced with modifications by various performers. In one case a living bust was shown through an aperture in a looking-glass sloping upward from the front toward the back of a curtained cabinet ; in another a person stood half-hidden by a vertical mirror, and imitation limbs placed in front of it were sundered and removed ; and in another case a large vertical mirror was pushed forward from a back corner of the stage at an angle of 45 degrees, to cover the entrance of a living &quot;phantom,&quot; and then withdrawn. Maskelyne improved upon his original cabinet by taking out a shelf which, in conjunction with a mirror, could enclose a space, and thus left no apparent place in which a person could possibly be hidden. Pie introduced a further mystification by secretly conveying a person behind a curtain screen, notwithstanding that, during the whole time, the existence of a clear space under the stool upon which the screen is placed is proved by performers con tinually walking round. And the illusion reached its height when he revealed or &quot;vanished&quot; a succession of persons out of a light shell obelisk or &quot; Cleopatra s Needle,&quot; with a sheet of paper interposed between this cover and the stool it stood upon, thus intercepting the apparently only avail able avenue of approach. The principle of reflecting by means of transparent plate-glass the images of highly-illu minated objects placed in front, so that they appear as if among less brilliantly lighted objects behind the glass, was employed in the &quot; ghost &quot; illusions of Sylvester, of Difcks and Pepper, of Robin, and of some other inventors, the transparent plate-glass being, in some cases, inclined for wards so as to reflect a lime-lighted object placed below the front of the stage, and in other arrangements set vertically at an angle so as to reflect the object from a lateral position. Among the acoustic wonders of antiquity, fabled or real, were the speaking head of Orpheus, the golden virgins, whose voices resounded through the temple of Delphi, and the like. Hippolytus (iv. 4) explains the trick of the speaking head as. practised in his day : the voice was really that of a concealed assistant who spoke through the flexible gullet of a crane. Towards the close of the 10th century Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II.) constructed (says