The Magicians’ Tricks Exposed

… He takes a sheet of paper and asks the man who has come with a question to write out, in water alone, whatever he wants to put to the demons. Then he folds the paper up, hands it to the boy, and sends him off to burn it, so that the rising smoke may carry the writing to the demons. While the boy is carrying out that order, the sorcerer first strips off equal portions of the paper, and on several more of them he pretends to write the names of demons in Hebrew letters. Then he burns the incense the Egyptian magicians call kyphi, holds these strips up over the incense, and carries them off. The sheet the questioner actually wrote on he lays on the coals and burns. [a]

Then, looking as though a god had seized him, he rushes into a corner of the room and lets out a loud, harsh cry that no one can make out … and all those present … calling on the demon Phren. When the others have come in and are standing around him, he flings the boy down and says a great deal over him, partly in Greek and partly in what passes for Hebrew — the incantations magicians ordinarily use. The boy then sets off to make the inquiry. Meanwhile, inside, there is a bowl full of water; the sorcerer drops blue vitriol into it and dissolves the drug, sprinkles the mixture over the paper that was supposedly wiped clean, and forces the lurking, hidden letters back into the light. From them he learns what the questioner wrote.

If a man writes with vitriol in the same way and then fumigates the sheet with ground gall nut, the hidden letters come out plainly. If he writes with milk, then chars a sheet of paper, grinds it up, sprinkles it on and rubs it over what was written in the milk, that comes out too. Urine does the same, and fish sauce, and the juice of spurge, and the juice of a fig. Once he has learned the question this way, he works out beforehand how he ought to answer. Then he orders those present to come in holding laurel branches, shaking them, shouting, and calling on the demon Phren. And it does suit these people to call on him: it is only right that they should beg from demons the very thing they will not supply out of themselves, since they have lost their own wits. The disorder of the shouting and the racket keeps them from following what he is supposed to be doing in secret. What that is, it is now time to tell.

There is a great deal of darkness in the room. He says that mortal nature cannot look at divine things — that being in conversation with them is enough. He lays the boy face down, sets two of those little tablets at each of his sides, the ones with supposed Hebrew letters written on them as names of demons, and says he will put the rest into the boy’s ears. That statement is necessary, so that some instrument can be placed beside the boy’s ears, through which he can signal anything he likes. First he makes a sound, to frighten the boy; second he makes a humming; and third he speaks through the instrument the words he wants the boy to say, and the outcome of the matter as he sees fit. Then he makes everyone present keep still, and tells the boy to report what he heard from the demons.

The instrument set beside the ears is a natural one: the windpipe of long-necked cranes, or storks, or swans. If none of these is at hand, there are manufactured ones as well. Ten small bronze pipes, fitting into one another and tapering to a narrow point, serve nicely, and through them he speaks into the ear whatever he wishes. The boy, hearing it in terror as words spoken by demons, says it out loud when he is told to. Or a man may wrap a wet hide around a rod, dry it, draw it together and fasten it, and then pull the rod out so that the hide is shaped like a pipe; it does the same thing. And if none of these is available, he takes a book, draws it open from the inside, stretches it out as far as he needs, and gets the same result.

If he knows in advance who is coming with a question, he is all the readier for anything. And if he also learns the question beforehand, he writes it out with the drug, and, having it prepared, he is thought the more capable for having written out plainly the very thing being asked. If he does not know it, he guesses, and produces something ambiguous and many-sided that will bear more than one interpretation, so that the oracle, meaningless to begin with, will do for a range of outcomes, and when things fall out, the prediction may be thought to match what happened. Then he fills a basin with water and lets the paper down into it as if it were blank, throwing in blue vitriol at the same time; for in this way the written sheet floats up bearing the answer. The boy, for his part, has terrifying visions, and often: the sorcerer freely lands blows on him to keep him frightened.

He throws frankincense on the fire and works this way as well. He wraps a lump of what is called mined salt in Etruscan wax, cuts a lump of frankincense itself in two, puts a grain of the salt inside, glues it back together, sets it on the burning coals and leaves it there. As it burns through, the salt leaps up and creates the impression of some strange sight taking place. Indigo laid in the frankincense produces a blood-red flame, as we said earlier. He makes a blood-red liquid by mixing wax with alkanet and, as I said, putting the wax into the frankincense. And he makes the coals move by laying flaky alum underneath: as it dissolves and swells up like bubbles, the coals move.

They put on their display of differently colored eggs like this. Pierce the top at both ends, draw out the white, dip the egg again, and put red ochre into the one and writing ink into the other. Then stop up the holes, plastering them with fine shavings of eggshell worked up with fig juice. [i] Those who make lambs cut off their own heads go about it this way. He secretly smears the animal’s throat with a caustic drug, sets a sword beside it, and leaves it there. The lamb, wanting to scratch, presses against the blade, and in rubbing itself is cut open; it very nearly severs its own head. The drug is bryony and adarce and squill, mixed in equal parts. So that he will not be seen carrying the drug, he carries a double box made of horn: the open compartment holds frankincense, the hidden one the drug. He also puts quicksilver into the ears of the animal that is going to die — and that is a deadly drug. [j]

As for goats: if a man plasters up their ears with wax salve, they say the goats die a little later, their breathing blocked — for this, they claim, is the passage by which the breath drawn in by breathing reaches them. And a ram dies, they say, if someone bends its head back facing the sun. They set a house on fire by smearing it with the fluid of a certain sea creature called the dactylus. The preparation made with brine is very useful too. It is sea foam boiled in an earthenware jar with sweet ingredients; if you bring a lit lamp near it while it seethes, it snatches the fire and blazes up — and yet, poured over a man’s head, it does not burn him at all. If you sprinkle powdered frankincense on it while it seethes, it blazes far more. And it works better still if he takes a little sulfur as well. [k]

Thunder is produced in a number of ways. Stones, a good many of them and unusually large, are rolled down slopes along planks and drop onto sheets of bronze, and make a noise very like thunder. Or they wind a thin cord around the thin board that fullers use to press cloth, then pull the cord away with a whirr and spin the board, and as it whirls it gives off the sound of thunder. That is how these farces are played. [l]

I will set out others as well, which the people they are played on take for great feats. They put a cauldron full of pitch on burning coals, and when it boils up they plunge their hands in and are not burned; and they walk on coals of fire with bare feet and are not scorched. He sets a pyramid of stone on the hearth and makes it catch fire, and out of its mouth it sends a great volume of smoke, and fiery at that. He lays a linen sheet over a basin of water, throws a quantity of burning coals on top, and keeps the sheet from burning. And after making the house dark, he claims he can bring in gods or demons; and if anyone asks him to show Asclepius, he calls on him with these words:

When he has left off this mockery, a fiery Asclepius appears on the floor. Then he sets a basin full of water in the middle, calls on all the gods, and they arrive: anyone standing by who bends over the basin will see them all, and Artemis leading her baying hounds. We will not shrink from giving the account of these men either, and how they set about it. He puts his hands into the cauldron of pitch as though it were seething — but he has thrown in vinegar and natron and wet pitch, and lit a fire under the cauldron; and the vinegar, mixed with the natron, takes in a little heat and stirs the pitch so that bubbles rise to the surface and give the mere appearance of boiling. He has also washed his hands in brine beforehand, again and again, which is why it does not burn him much even when the pitch really is boiling. And if he mixes myrtle and natron and myrrh with vinegar, smears it on, and washes his hands in brine repeatedly, he is not burned; and he does not burn his feet, provided he has smeared them with isinglass and salamander. [p]

As for the pyramid burning like a torch though it is stone, the reason is this. It is Cretan earth, molded into the shape of a pyramid, but its color is that of a milk-white stone, and it is prepared as follows. He soaks the lump in plenty of oil, sets it on coals and bakes it, soaks it again and burns it a second and a third time and many times over, and so makes it able to burn even if it is drenched in water; for it holds a great deal of oil in itself. The hearth lights itself while the magician bustles about, because there is quicklime burning underneath instead of ashes, and fine frankincense in quantity, and … and oiled chips of pine torchwood, and hollow gall nuts with fire inside them. After a delay he makes the pyramid send smoke out of its mouth by putting fire into a gall nut, wrapping it round with tow, and blowing into the mouth. As for the linen cloth laid around the basin, on which he sets the coals, it would not burn because of the brine underneath — and because the cloth itself had been soaked in brine first and then smeared with egg white and moist alum. And if a man mixes the juice of houseleek and vinegar into these and coats the cloth long beforehand, then once it has been steeped in the preparation it stays altogether fireproof.

Now that we have briefly set out the powers of the secret arts practiced among these men, and shown how easy their method is once you know it, we do not want to keep quiet about this either, since it is necessary: how they loose seals and hand back the sealed letters with the actual seals on them. They melt pitch, resin, sulfur, and asphalt in equal parts, shape the mixture into a lozenge, and keep it by them. When it is time to open a small tablet, they wet their tongue with oil, anoint the seal from it, warm the drug over a moderate fire, and press it onto the seal; they leave it there until it has set completely, and use it in that state as a stamp. They say that wax itself with pine resin does much the same, and so do two parts mastic with one part dry asphalt. Sulfur by itself works reasonably well, and so does flower of gypsum thinned with water and gum — and that mixture is the best of all for sealing molten lead as well. The one made with Etruscan wax and refuse of resin and pitch and asphalt and mastic and powdered marble, all boiled together in equal parts, is better than the other preparations I have named, though the one made with gypsum is no worse. This, then, is how they go about loosing seals, trying to learn what is written inside. [t]

I hesitated to set these devices down in the book, seeing the danger that some scoundrel might take his opening from it and try them. But concern for the many young men who could be kept safe has persuaded me to teach them and give the warning openly, for protection’s sake. For just as one man will use them to learn evil, so another will learn them and be on his guard — and the magicians themselves, those ruiners of life, will be ashamed to ply their trade. Once they learn that we have taught these things beforehand, they may perhaps be held back from their madness. And so that a seal may not be loosed this way, let a man mix pig fat and hair into the wax and seal with that.

Nor will I keep silent about that other piece of knavery of theirs, the divination by basin. They fit up a closed room, smear the ceiling with kyanos for the occasion, bring in vessels of kyanos as well, and set them up high. In the middle, on the ground, a basin is placed full of water, and the reflection of the kyanos falling on it makes it look like the sky. The floor also has a hidden opening in it, and the basin rests on that: the basin has a bottom of glass, though the basin itself is stone. Underneath, unnoticed, is a room, and the accomplices gather into it, dress themselves in the shapes of whatever gods and demons the magician wants to display, and show themselves. The dupe, looking down at them, is thunderstruck by the magicians’ cunning, and from then on believes everything they are likely to tell him. He makes a demon burn by drawing on the wall whatever figure he likes and then secretly coating it with a drug mixed as follows: … Laconian, and Zacynthian asphalt. Then, as if caught up in prophetic frenzy, he brings the lamp toward the wall, and the drug flares up and burns. [v]

To make a fiery Hecate seem to run through the air, he contrives it this way. He hides an accomplice in whatever place he chooses, takes his dupes aside, and talks them round, telling them he will show them the fiery demon riding through the air. He urges them to guard their eyes the instant they see the flame in the air, to cover themselves and fall on their faces until he himself calls them; and after giving them these instructions, on a moonless night, he speaks in verse like this:

While he is saying this, fire is seen carried through the air; and the spectators, shuddering at the strangeness of the sight, cover their eyes and throw themselves on the ground without a word. But the greatness of the trick is managed like this. The accomplice I mentioned, the one who was hidden, hears the incantation stop, and then takes a kite or a vulture wrapped round with tow, sets it alight, and releases it. The bird, panicked by the flame, is carried upward and flies all the faster; and these fools, seeing it, hide themselves as though they had seen something divine. But the winged creature, whirled about by the fire, is carried down wherever it happens to reach, and burns now houses and now farmyards. Such is the foreknowledge of the magicians. [y]