I was just having this crazy dream. New York City was about to be overrun by an army of zombies. And Spider-Man, a.k.a. Peter Parker was there, only he’d been turned into some kind of monster. He looked kinda like his Iron Spider costume with the extra arms, only the extra arms were more like tentacles. And now he was leading the army of zombies. And so it was up to me to stop them, and by the way I’m Spider-Man, a.k.a. Miles Morales. And I was doing kinda OK, I’d just had this angry confrontation with Peter where I was like, “Man, why’d you have to go and get turned into a monster? I used to look up to you!” And then I stole the magic sword that I guess had summoned the whole zombie army in the first place, and then I found out the sword could cast any magic spell I wanted, only it could never cast the same spell twice. And then I thought, “Man, that’s just a ripoff of the Staff of One from Runaways.” But then I thought, “No way, that ‘never cast the same spell twice’ thing must be older than that. Where’d that trope come from, anyway?”
I’m not sure where it originates, but it’s a thing in Piers Anthony’s* Apprentice Adept* series - an Adept can only use a particular spell once, although minor variations would work fine. For instance, the main character’s spells work by music and rhymes, but he has to change the words to get the same effect next time. He can’t just create a spell-song that always has the same effect. The first book was in 1980, but I think Anthony also used the same thing earlier in Xanth, but haven’t read those.
Anyone writing fiction about magic has to include some restriction or there would be no story. The ones I read seem to use the idea that casting spells etc, takes a lot of energy so has to be used with caution.
The Dying Earth stories by Jack Vance (which inspired D&D’s spellcasting system) is probably the ur-example. Mages in that setting cast spells by memorizing a series of syllables and then reciting them aloud, and once the spell is cast the memory is erased from their mind and they have to memorize it again if they want to use the same spell.
The last example doesn’t fit; if the mage re-learns the spell then he can cast it again and again.
I still do not know the answer to where the idea first appeared (some old fairy tale?), but it occurs in Gösta Berlings Saga (1891) for instance, so forget about later centuries for the origin.
Xanth isn’t quite the same: In Xanth, the rule is (or at least, is supposed to be: Anthony was sloppy about it) that everyone has one spell they can cast (called a “talent”), and no two people have the same spell, but typically each person can cast their one spell as much as they’d like. Though even there, there were some that were more versatile than others: For instance, one character had the ability to make a pink spot appear on a wall, and another had the ability to make illusionary holes appear on the floor, but there was also a character who had the talent to make whatever illusions she wanted, who could therefore replicate the effects of either of the first two, if for some reason she wanted to. The people with highly powerful or versatile talents were called “magicians”, and unsurprisingly held the highest status in society (for instance, the law required that the King must be a magician).
