In Mexico the preparation for acts of magic seems to have been downright intoxication; at least we learn from Acosta, in his Hist. nat. y moral de los Indias (lv.), that the priests, before sacrificing, inhaled powerful perfumes, rubbed themselves with ointments made of venomous animals, tobacco and hempseed, and finally drank chica mixed with various drugs. Thus they reached a state of exaltation in which they not only butchered numbers of human beings in cold blood, and lost all fear of wild beasts, but were also able to reveal what was happening at a great distance, or even future events. We find similar practices, also, nearer home. The Indians of Martha's Vineyard had, before they were converted, their skillful magicians, who stood in league with evil spirits, and as pawaws discovered stolen things, injured men at a distance, and clearly foretold the coming of the whites. The pious Brainert gives us full accounts of some of the converted Delawares, who, after baptism, felt the evil spirit depart from them, and lost the power of magic. One, a great and wicked magician, deplored bitterly his former condition, when he was a slave of the evil one, and became, in the good missionary's words: "an humble, devout, hearty, and loving Christian." It is more difficult to explain the magic of the so-called Archbishop Beissel, the head of the brotherhood at Ephrata, in Pennsylvania, who, according to contemporary authorities "oppressed by his magic the father and steward of the convent, Eckerling, to such a degree, that he left his brethren and sought refuge in a hermit's hut in the forest! The spirits of departed brethren and sisters returned to the refectory at this bishop's bidding; they partook of bread and meat, and even conversed with their successors. There can be no doubt that Beissel, abundantly and exceptionally gifted, possessed the power to put his unhappy subordinates, already exhausted by asceticism of every kind, into a state of ecstasy, in which they sincerely believed they saw these spirits, and were subjected to magic influences. That such power has by no means entirely departed from our continent, may be seen in the atrocities perpetrated at the command of the negroes' Obee, of which well-authenticated records abound in Florida and Louisiana, as well as in Cuba.
The Indo-Germanic race has known and practised black magic from time immemorial, and the Vendidad already explains it as an act which Ahriman, the Evil Spirit, brought forth when overshadowed by death. In Egypt it flourished for ages, and has never become entirely extinct. Jannes and Jambres, who led the priests in their opposition to Moses (2. Tim. iii. 8), have their successors in our day, and the very miracles performed by these ancient charmers have been witnessed again and again by modern travelers. Holy Writ abounds with instances of every kind of magic; it speaks of astrology, and prophesying from arrows, from the entrails of animals, and from dreams; but, strangely enough, the charming of serpents and the evil eye are not mentioned, if we except Balaam. The Kabbalah, on the contrary, speaks more than once of the evil eye (ain hara), and all the southern nations of Europe, as well as the Slavic races, fear its weird power.
The eye is, however, by no means employed only to work evil; by the side of their mal occhio the Italians have another gift, called attrativa, which enables man, apparently by the force of his eye only, to draw to himself all whom he wishes to attract. The well-known Saint Filippo Neri thus not only won all whom he wished to gain over, by looking at them, but even dogs left their beloved masters and followed him everywhere. Cotton Mather tells us in his "Magnolia" that quakers frequently by the eye only—though often, also, by anointing or breathing upon them—compelled others to accompany them, to join their communion, and to be in all things obedient to their bidding. Tom Case, himself a quaker, certainly possessed the power of overwhelming those at whom he looked fixedly for a while, to such a degree that they fell down as if struck with epilepsy; once, at least, he turned even a mad bull, by the force of his eye, till it approached him humbly and licked his hand like a pet dog. Even in our own age Goethe has admitted the power of certain men to attract others by the strength of their will, and mentions an instance in which he himself, ardently wishing to see his beloved one, forced her unconsciously to come and meet him halfway. (Eckermann, iii. 201.)
It avails nothing to stigmatize a faith so deeply rooted and so universal as mere superstition. Among the mass of errors which in the course of ages have accumulated around the creed, the little grain of truth, the indubitable power of man's mind to act through the eye, ought not to be overlooked.
It is the same with the magic known as such to the two great nations of antiquity. If the Greeks saw in Plato the son of Apollo, who came to his mother Perictione in the shape of a serpent, and in Alexander the Great the son of Jupiter Ammon, they probably intended merely to pay the same compliment to their countrymen which modern nations convey by calling their rulers Kings and Kaisers "by the Grace of God." But the consistency with which higher beings came to visit earth-born man in the shape of favored animals, is more than an accident. The sons of God came to see the daughters of men, though it is not said in what form they appeared, and the suggestion that they were the "giants upon the earth," mentioned in Holy Writ, is not supported; but exactly as the gods came from Olympus in the shape of bulls and rams, so the evil spirits of the Middle Ages appeared in the shape of rams and cats. A curious instance of the mixture of truth and falsehood appears in this connection. It is well-known that the Italians of the South look upon Virgil as one of the greatest magicians that ever lived, and ascribe to his tomb even now supernatural power. The poet himself had, of course, nothing whatever to do with magic; but his reputation as a magician arose from the fact that, next to the Bible, his verses became, at an early period, a favorite means of consulting the future. Sortes Virgilianæ, the lines which upon accidentally opening the volume first met the eye, were a leading feature of the art known as stichomania.
The story of the greatest magician mentioned in the New Testament has been thoroughly examined, and the main features, at least, are well established. Simon Magus was a magician in the sense in which the ancients used that term; but he possessed evidently, in addition, all the powers claimed by better spiritualists, like Home in our day. A native of Gitton, a small village of Samaria, he had early manifested superior intellectual gifts, accompanied by an almost marvelous control over the minds of others. By the aid of the former he produced a lofty gnostic system, which crumbled, however, to pieces as soon as it came into contact with the inspired system of Christianity. His influence over others led him, in the arrogance which is inherent to natural man, to consider himself as the Great Divine Power, which appeared in different forms as Father, Son, and Spirit. He professed to be able to make himself invisible and to pass, unimpeded, through solid substances—precisely as was done in later ages by Saint Dominic and other saints (Goerres. Mystic, ii. 576)—to bind and to loosen others as well as himself at will; to open prison doors and to cause trees to grow out of the bare ground. Before utterly rejecting his pretensions as mere lies and tricks, we must bear in mind two facts: first, that modern jugglers in India perform these very tricks in a manner as yet unexplained, and secondly, that he, in all probability, possessed merely the power of exciting others to a high state of exaltation, in which they candidly believed they saw all these things. At all events, his magic deeds were identical with the miracles of later saints, and as these are enthroned in shrine and statue in Rome, so the Eternal City erected to Simon Magus, also, a statue, and proclaimed him a god in the days of Claudius! Another celebrated magician of the same race, was Sedechias (Goerres. Mystic, iv. ii. 71), who lived in the days of Saint Louis, and who, once, in order to convince the skeptics of his day of the real existence of spirits, such as the Kabbalah admits, ordered them to appear in human form before the eyes of the monarch. Instantly the whole plain around the king's tent was alive with a vast army; long rows of bright-colored tents dotted the lowlands, and on the slopes around were encamped countless troops; whilst mounted squadrons appeared in the air, performing marvelous evolutions. This was probably the first instance of those airy hosts, which have ever since been seen in various countries.
The Christian era gave to magic phenomena a new and specific character; what was a miracle in apostolic times remained in the eyes of the multitude a miracle to our day, when performed by saints of the church—it became a crime and an abomination when the authors were laymen, and yet both differed in no single feature. The most remarkable representative of this dual nature of supernatural performances is, no doubt, Dr. Faust, whom the great and pious Melanchthon states to have well known as a native of the little village of Knittlingen, near his own birth-place, and as a man of dissolute habits, whom the Devil carried off in person. His motto, which has been discovered under a portrait of his (Hauber's "Bibl. Mag."), was characteristic of his faith: Omne bonum et perfectum a Deo, imperfectum a diabolo. His vast learning, his great power over the elements, and the popular story of his pact with the Evil One, made him a hero among the Germans, of whose national tendencies he was then the typical representative. Unfortunately, however, nearly every Christian land has had its own Faust; such was, for instance, in Spain the famous Dr. Toralba, who lived in the sixteenth century, and by the aid of a servile demon read the future, healed the sick, traveled through the air, and even when he fell into the hands of the Inquisition, obtained his release through the Great Admiral of Castile. Gilles de Laval, who was publicly burnt in 1440, and Lady Fowlis, of Scotland, are parallel cases.
One of the most absurd ceremonies belonging to black magic, was the well-known Taigheirm, of the Scotch Highlands, a demoniac sacrifice evidently handed down from pagan times. The so-called magician procured a large number of black cats, and devoted them, with solemn incantations, and while burning offensive incense of various kinds, to the evil spirits. Then the poor victims were spitted and slowly roasted over a fire of coals, one after the other, but so that not a second's pause occurred between the death of one and the sufferings of the next. This horridly absurd sacrifice had to be continued for three days and nights, during which the magician was not allowed to take any food or drink. The consequence was, that if he did not drop down exhausted and perish miserably, he became fearfully excited, and finally saw demons in the shape of black cats who granted him all he desired (Horst. "Deuteroscopia," ii. 184). It need hardly be added that in the state of clairvoyance which he had reached, he only asked for what he well knew was going to happen, and that all the fearful visions of hellish spirits existed only in his overwrought imagination. But it will surprise many to learn that such "taigheirms" were held as late as the last century, and that a place is still shown on the island of Mull, where Allan Maclean with his assistant, Lachlain Maclean, sacrificed black cats for four days and nights in succession. The elder of the two passed for a kind of high-priest and chief magician with the superstitious islanders; the other was a young unmarried man of fine appearance, and more than ordinary intelligence. Both survived the fearful ceremony, but sank utterly exhausted to the ground, unable to obtain the revelation which they had expected; nevertheless they retained the gift of second sight for their lives.
It must not be imagined, finally, that the summoning of spirits is a lost art; even in our day men are found who are willing to call the departed from their resting-place, and to exhibit them to the eyes of living men. The best explanation of this branch of magic was once given by a learned professor, whom the Prince Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick II., sent for from Halle, in order to learn from him how spirits could be summoned. The savant declared that nothing was easier, and supported his assertion by a number of actual performances. First the spectator was prepared by strong beverages, such as the Egyptian sorcerers already used to employ on similar occasions, and by the burning of incense. Soon he fell into a kind of half-sleep, in which he could still understand what was said, but no longer reflect upon the sense of the words; gradually his brain became so disturbed, and his imagination so highly excited, that he pictured to himself images corresponding to the words which he heard, and called them up before his mind's eye as realities. The magician, protected against the effects of the incense by a sponge filled with an alcoholic mixture, then began to converse with his visitor, and tried to learn from him all he could concerning the person the latter wished to see, his shape, his clothes, etc. Finally the victim was conducted into a dark room, where he was suddenly asked by a stern, imperious voice: "Do you not see that woman in white?" (or whatever the person might be,) and at once his over-excited imagination led him to think that he really beheld what he expected or wished to see. This was allowed to go on till he sank down exhausted, or actually fainted away. When he recovered his consciousness, he naturally recollected but imperfectly what he had seen while in a state of great excitement, and his memory, impaired by the intermediate utter exhaustion and fainting, failed to recall the small errors or minute inaccuracies of his vision. All that was left of the whole proceeding was a terrifying impression on his mind that he had really seen the spirits of departed friends.
Such skillful manœuvres were more than once employed for sinister purposes. Thus it is a well-known historical fact that the men who obtained control over King Frederick William II., after his ascension to the throne, and held it for a time by the visions which they showed him, employed means like these to summon the spirits he wished to see. The master in this branch of black magic was undoubtedly Joseph Balsamo, the Count Cagliostro of French history. He was neither a magician in the true sense of the word, nor even a religious enthusiast, but merely an accomplished juggler and swindler, who had acquired, by natural endowment, patient study, and consummate art, a great power over the minds of others. He played upon the imagination of men as upon a familiar instrument, and the greatest philosophers were as easily victimized by him as the most clear-sighted women, in spite of the natural instinct which generally protects the latter against such imposition. His secret—as far as the summoning of the spirits of the departed is concerned—has died with him, but that enlightened, conscientious men candidly believed they had been shown disembodied spirits, is too well established by memories of French and Dutch writers to be doubted. In the meetings of his "lodges of Egyptian Freemasons" he, as Grand Cophtha, or those whom he had qualified by breathing upon them, employed a boy or a girl, frequently called up at haphazard from the street, but at other times carefully prepared for the purpose, to look into the hand or a basin of water. The poor child was, however, first made half-unconscious, being anointed with the "oil of wisdom," no doubt an intoxicating compound, and after numerous ceremonies, carried into a recess called the Tabernacle, and ordered to look into the hand or a basin of water. After the assembly had prayed for some time, the "Dove," as they called the child, was asked what he saw. Ordinarily he beheld first an angel or a priest—probably the image of Cagliostro himself in his sacerdotal robes—but frequently also monkeys, the offspring of a skeptical imagination. Then followed more or less interesting revelations, some utterly absurd, others of real interest, and at times actual predictions of future events. Cagliostro himself, during his last trial before the Inquisition of Rome, while readily confessing a large number of impostures, stoutly maintained the genuineness of these communications and insisted that they were the effects of a special power granted by God. His assertion has some value, as the shrewd man knew very well how much more he was likely to gain by a prompt avowal than by such a denial; his wife, also, although his accomplice in former years, and now by no means disposed to spare her quasi-husband, always stated that this was a true mystery which she had never been able to fathom. If we add to these considerations the fact that numerous masters of lodges, even in Holland and England, obtained the same results, and that they cannot all have been impostors or deluded victims, there remains enough in these well-established phenomena to ascribe them to a mysterious, magic power. (Compendio della vita, etc. di G. Balsamo, Roma, 1791.) It is in fact quite evident that the unfortunate juggler possessed in a very rare degree a power akin to that practised by a Mesmer, a Home, and other men of that class, without having the sense to understand its true nature or the ambition to employ it for other than the lowest selfish purposes. Trials of magicians, who have conjured up the dead and compelled them to reveal the future, are still taking place every now and then; in the year 1850 not less than four men, together with their associates, were accused of this crime in enlightened Germany, and the proceedings in one case, which occurred in Munich, created no small sensation.