Review: The old and the new magic

The old and the new magic by Henry Ridgely Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written in the wordy style of the time, and maybe telling stories that are a little too neat and include more of the writer's rather jolly and self-satisfied voice than I personally would prefer. Inclined to list the effects that the magician under discussion produced (sometimes just by name, as if every reader would know what the cigarette-paper trick is, for example), more than telling us how they were done, which is what I was mainly hoping for, and also to devote a lot of the space to biographical details of the magicians. But it does have some "how the trick is done" content, with diagrams - you need to make sure, if you're getting an ebook edition, that it has the illustrations, because they're essential.

The "old" magic of the title is the magic used by priests and shamans to fool credulous primitives into believing in divine miracles. There are some illustrations and examples, all from pagan temples, of apparatuses that cause doors to open, trumpets to sound, and water or even milk to flow out of statues, usually when a fire is lit on the altar or lamps are lighted to provide heat which drives some hydraulic/pneumatic mechanism. Unlike more modern skeptics, the author doesn't go up against current religions, apart from spiritualism, which was already notorious for fakery and deception. He's clearly a Freemason, based on multiple references, as were many of the magicians he discusses - including Cagliostro, who he denounces as an obvious fraud. He also recounts visiting a supposed Tibetan mystic with a friend in order to debunk him, though the man seems to have had very little success and hardly needed debunking.

The "new" magic is that which is practiced overtly for entertainment, with acknowledgement that it's based on the practiced manipulation of scientific principles to fool the onlookers, who have consented to be fooled. In other words, the "old" magic is deceptive and the "new" magic is honest.

The content tends to ramble a bit, without an obvious plan. The best nonfiction books have a clear theme and stick to it; this one is partly about the difference between frauds using conjuring tricks and illusions to claim real supernatural powers and avowed entertainers using the same tricks, but it's also about the lives of magicians, and also about how they did some of their tricks (while others are described but not explained, sometimes because the author doesn't know how they were done).

It could have been better if it had had more focus, but I did enjoy it, and it pointed me to other authors in the same general space who I intend to read at some point.

View all my reviews