When the high priest Aaron, older brother of Moses, cast down his staff before Pharaoh in the Old Testament, it suddenly became a serpent. According to Henry Ridgely Evans, who wrote the introduction to Albert A. Hopkins’ Magic (1897) — a massive handbook for amateur magicians and their scientific skeptics — this was a stage illusion, one still performed by contemporary dervishes in Cairo. Aaron’s rod, it turns out, was a serpent all along, “hypnotized to such an extent as to become perfectly stiff and rigid”, and, when thrown to the earth, it was resuscitated with “sundry mystic passes and strokes”. In their attempts to disenchant the mystical, Evans and Hopkins make the real world all the more extraordinary.
The subtitle of this book, “stage illusions and scientific diversions”, speaks to the remarkable exchange that took place between magic and science in the nineteenth century. Many of the tricks written up here first appeared in Scientific American and its French equivalent, La Nature.
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