Classical antiquity
prehistory
classical antiquity
Early Middle Ages
Late Middle Ages
16th century
17th century
18th century
19th century
Performance for the Pharaoh
The first record of a magician is in an Egyptian papyrus roll (the Westcar papyrus). We even know his name: Djedi who decapitated a goose in front of King Cheops 2600 years B.C. and put the head back with a magic spell.
After this, Cheops lets Djedi predict his future. As a reward Djedi gets 1000 loaves of bread, 100 jugs of beer, a beef and ... 100 bunches of leeks! He is also allowed to live in the palace of the prince.
Helping the gods
In Persia around 540 BC priests were caught taking the sacrificed food for the gods through a secret door from a sealed temple. By sprinkling ash on the floor and following the tracks the next day, the people discovered their secret.
In Alexandria stood a hollow statue of a god. A priest crawled into it and could make the statue speak. In a temple in Pompeii the secret speaker could hide in a hidden passageway. In the ruins of a temple in Alba (Italy) there even is a control room. From there a network of pipes begun so that the sounds of the gods seemed to come from everywhere.
It must really have seemed like a divine power to the viewer at the time. But secretly they were overwhelmed by the theatrical magic tricks of the Priests!
Greeks and Romans
In addition to the "religious" magicians mentioned above, there were also magicians in classical antiquity who showed their skills as entertainers. In ancient Greece in a theatre in Oreus there was even a bronze statue of the magician Theodorus. He held a small stone - a "psephoi" - in his hand. These were often used for conjuring and that's why magicians were called "psephopaiktes". Their Roman colleagues were called Praestigiatores (Praestigiator means trickster).
The Greek writer Alciphron writes in the 2nd century A.D. about a magician at the break of a theatre play in the 4th or 5th century BC:
"A man came forward who set up a table with three legs and placed three small cups (pasopsidas) on it. Under the cups he put some small white stones, as you find them on the side of a rapid river. One moment he hide one of them under each cup and the next moment (I don't know how) they were all under one cup and then he let them disappear completely from under the cups and they came out between his lips. Then he swallowed them and pulled some bystanders forward and pulled one stone out of a man's nose, another out of a man's ear and yet another out of a man's head. After he picked them up again he let the stones disappear out of sight. A very sleigt of hand gentleman!"
End of an era
We are approaching the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity. The bishop Augustine who lived at that time (4th/5th century) around the Mediterranean Sea suddenly speaks less fondly of magicians:
"And so people watch closely and pay close attention to the magician who freely admits using tricks.
(…)
Victory always goes to skill as well as knowledge of the truth. Those who always seek the truth on the outside will never find it. When asked what is better, truth or deceit, we answer with one voice that truth is better and yet we have sunk so low that we stick more to jokes and games -in which deceit and not truth delight us- than to the rules of truth itself".
