The Conjuror's Magazine [IAPSOP]

Periodical:	*The Conjuror's Magazine*

Summary:	From Pat Deveney's database: Conjuror's Magazine, The. Or, Magical and Physiognomical Mirror. Other titles: The bound volumes of the journal were entitled: The Conjuror's Magazine, or the Complete Fortune Teller, including the Art of Palmistry, &c., &c. 1791-1793 Monthly London, England. Language: English. Publisher: Printed for W. Locke. Succeeded by: Astrologer's Magazine and Philosophical Miscellany 1/1, August 1791-July 1793. 50 pp., 4 x 7. The subtitle was omitted after November 1792. The journal included regular "Select Philosophical Amusements" (how many hands of whist must be dealt before a person receives the same cards? etc.), astrological notes (including a horoscope of George III), explanations of dreams, anecdotes of Kenelm Digby, etc. It also had a question and answer section and a section on curious machines (with a prize awarded for the best), including machines to read concealed letters or numbers and one to see through a board, and also published the physiognomic essays of Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801). The issue for May 1792 has "Proposals for instructing Pupils in Spiritual Knowledge, including a plan for commencing Societies or Colleges for receiving instruction," in which the poet William Gilbert offered to teach "Astrology and Spirit, with the nature and use of Talismans" for 5 guineas per head for classes up to 12, and 150 pounds a year for individual lessons, a proposal discussed by Mark Perugini, "An Eighteenth Century Occult Magazine: And a Query As to William Blake," The Bibliophile (September 1908): 86-89.
Other Sources:	Bodleian Library; NYL; LOC.
Issues:	Conjurors Magazine V1 Index 1791-1792
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N1 Aug 1791
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N2 Sep 1791
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N3 Oct 1791
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N4 Nov 1791
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N5 Dec 1791
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N6 Jan 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N7 Feb 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N8 Mar 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N9 Apr 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N10 May 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N11 Jun 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V1 N12 Jul 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V2 Index 1792-1793
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N1 Aug 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N2 Sep 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N3 Oct 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N4 Nov 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N5 Dec 1792
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N6 Jan 1793
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N7 Feb 1793
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N8 Mar 1793
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N9 Apr 1793
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N10 May 1793
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N11 Jun 1793
	Conjurors Magazine V2 N12 Jul 1793
Claude-Generated Themes:	The Conjuror's Magazine was a monthly miscellany of the early 1790s and the oldest periodical in this part of the archive, published a generation before Mesmerism reached the English public and more than half a century before Spiritualism. Its contents show that a commercial market for occult reading was already fully formed. Astrology is its largest department and a technical one: readers are taught to find the apheta and the hyleg, and worked figures are cast for questions as practical as the fate of a ship, read through its rudder, its floor and its belly with the significators swift in motion and well placed. Around that run reprints and summaries from the older magical literature — the secrets of art and nature ascribed to Albertus Magnus, the life and work of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy and hermetic philosophy — together with a standing department of remarkable apparitions, and, in its final year, engravings copied from Lavater with plate lists that read the character of a face and the conformation of a head. It is the eighteenth-century ancestor of everything that follows it in this collection. Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:	Astrology \| Palmistry and Chiromancy \| Popular Occultism