The existence of magic has an extended and various history and has fascinated many people for more than 2,500 years now. The first recorded magic act was by a magician known as Dedi who performed his stunts in Ancient Egypt sometime in 2,700 B.C.
He is attributed with the early cups and balls magic trick. While there is some debate over whether he actually performed this trick or not. He was renowned for giving rise to birds back to life by first decapitating them and then rejoining their heads back again.
The cups and balls magic trick, using stones and small vinegar cups, was certainly done in Roman times between 50-300 A.D. by a cluster of magicians called the Acetabularii. It is also within this period that sleight of hand-of-hand tricks was acted.
Over the centuries later, that form of magic has been used to entertain people at fairs and events, but it was also used by fraud magicians to trick people out of their money possessions.
Gradually, magic became correlated with the occult and as an outcome, fell into humiliation. Magicians were believed to be sorcerers and witches; they were not authorized and accordingly, they were harmed by the church and the councils.
Sometime later, the publication of two books helped to dispel the notion that magic and witchcraft were correlated. In the year 1584, Reginald Scot printed The Discoverie of Witchcraft to attempt and dispel ideas of witchcraft, but although he accomplished this by disclosing many of the magicians’ mysteries, not lucky enough, magicians were then thought of as tricksters.
Sometime in 1655, Thomas Ady published A Candle in the Dark and wrote that acknowledging magic was correlated to witchcraft as a result of people’s ‘foolish imagination’.
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The Evolvement Of Magic
Magic went on to develop over the decades later. Around the early 1800s, Richard Potter came to be the first stage magician in the United States of America. Some of his tricks comprised passing coins through a table, breaking and restoring broken watches and placing his hand in a bowl of molten lead. NOT A TRICK TO BE TRIED AT HOME!
Magic deliberately returned into favour, and the onset of the 1800s also saw magic being introduced to the big stage. Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin is the founding father of modern magic shows. He took magic from the street onto the stage for people’s entertainment.
Since then it has become a staple act in many art shows. Some other popular names include Harry Houdini, who performed some extraordinary escape acts including being tied in chains and placed in a locked and weighted box that was submerged in water. Without any help, Houdini freed himself from his underwater prison to return to the surface.
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