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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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Read from 1900, The Mahatma is — despite its occult-sounding title — a STAGE-MAGIC trade journal, the professional conjurers' paper. Its 'magic' is theatrical illusion: performers, tricks, tours and obituaries of fellow artists ('a blow to the profession'). This is a genuine term-of-art trap the bulk tag fell into: the paper belongs to show-business, the world of the working illusionist, not to occultism or mesmerism. A useful reminder that on the nineteenth-century fringe 'magic' meant the conjuror as often as the mage. Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description. |
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