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MIRRORS AND MAGIC
developing conflict which ended in either tragedy or comedy and moved the audience to sympathetic tears or laughter. But the earliest moving pictures were, like those of today, two-dimensional spectacles; they had no substance, and their effects, far from depending upon the power of the actor, were often produced without the aid of living persons; they sought to arouse no emotions but those of astonishment, terror, and awe, and the terror they hoped to inspire was not the cathartic terror of the drama caused by participation in another's suffering, but a nightmarish terror of the unknown. For these first productions, visions summoned up by sorcerer-priests, aimed at presenting phenomena beyond the grasp of the human mind.
Pliny the Elder relates that the god Hercules would regularly show himself, gigantic in stature, among the vapours of the fire kindled in his temple at Tyre; Aesculapius often displayed himself to his worshippers at Agrigento, while the temple at Enginium, also in Sicily, was so celebrated for apparitions of the two divinities Hera and Aphrodite that the shrine became a place of seasonal pilgrimage. Iamblichus informs us that it was the priests, who were also magicians, who were responsible for these appearances, and that they were always accompanied by smoke and vapours; he describes one occasion in particular when a conjurer named Maximus produced a monstrous figure of Hecate who made an overwhelming impression on an audience already trembling with fear by laughing aloud with heaving shoulders and diabolical grimaces.
It has long since been known that these illusions were created by means of various metal mirrors, most commonly of silver. In the collection of the Barnes brothers at Mousehole there is a curious convex metallic mirror that came from Japan and was once one of the staple instruments in the cabinet of a magician. The mirror is circular and about 5 in. in diameter; it has a knob in the centre of the back by which it can be held, and on the rest of the back are circles stamped in relief with a border of Greek key design. If you look into its highly polished convex face you will see an image, more like a minutely detailed enamelled portrait than a reflection, of your own features about half their natural size. This mirror has the astonishing property that when you reflect the rays of the sun from its polished surface the image of the ornamental border and the circles stamped on the back is seen distinctly upon the wall of the room.
Sir David Brewster explains that 'the spectrum in the luminous area is not
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