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From Pat Deveney's database:
Mahatma. Despite its promising title, this is a stage-magic journal, but the close relationship with phenomenal spiritualism is obvious in the advertisements for magical apparatus. It also featured a series of articles on the development of American prestidigitation by Henry Ridgely Evans, who was himself a trained magician. Rowell's American Newspaper Directory for
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| Mahatma V4 1900 | |
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Mahatma, published in 1900, is not what its title suggests, and the discrepancy is instructive about the period. It is the American professional conjurers' monthly — the trade paper of working stage illusionists — and its magic is theatrical, not ceremonial. The surviving issue is full of the ordinary business of a trade press: an offer to reprint back numbers so that subscribers can complete their files, thanks to a New York doctor for compiling a typewritten index of the paper, and a note that Green, the Merry Wizard, is combining business with pleasure among the pleasure resorts of Canada. Where the paper touches this archive's usual subjects, it does so professionally rather than devotionally: mediums, seances and the spirit cabinet appear because the conjuring trade followed Spiritualism closely, exposing its physical effects and reproducing them as stage turns, and mesmerism appears because stage hypnotism was a standard act. On the nineteenth-century fringe, magic meant the conjurer at least as often as it meant the mage, and a performer might bill himself as a mahatma for the same reason he might bill himself as a wizard. Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description. |
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| Stage Magic and Conjuring |
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