International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals

   

Periodical: Mahatma

Summary:  From Pat Deveney's database:

Mahatma.
The Only Paper in the United States devoted to the Interests of Magicians, Spiritualists, Mesmerists, etc.
1895-1906 Monthly
New York, NY. Language: English.
Editor: Walter G. Peterkin, editor and publisher.
Corporate author: Society of American Magicians1/1, 1895-1906, with a hiatus between November 1895 and February 1898.

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 1900 says the journal was spiritualist and was started in 1898 and had a circulation of less than 1,000.

Other Sources:
Issues:Mahatma V4 1900
Claude-Generated Themes:   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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