Michael Mangan - Performing Dark Arts. a Cultural History of Conjuring (2007)

Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of ConjuringBy Michael Mangan

Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality.

It brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by examining it in the context of performance studies, and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts in which their performances were received, and the meanings which they have attracted.

‘This is an erudite book which wears its scholarship lightly and is a pleasure to read. Complex theoretical frameworks are introduced in ways that will make them accessible to the general reader, and the book’s argument opens up new implications and applications for the study of magic as performance...’ – Roberta Mock, Department of Theatre and

Performance, University of Plymouth

intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com

Performing

Michael Mangan holds the Chair in Drama at Exeter University. His main research interests lie in theatre and society – more specifically, he has published in the subjects of theatre and gender, Shakespeare and Renaissancetheatre, the cultural history of popular performance, and contemporary British theatre. He has also worked as a playwright, a director, a literary manager, a dramaturg and an actor.

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ISBN 978-1-84150-149-90 0

Performing Dark Arts

A Cultural History of Conjuring

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Performing Dark Arts

A Cultural History of Conjuring

Michael Mangan

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First Published in the UK in 2007 byIntellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UKFirst Published in the USA in 2007 byIntellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USACopyright © 2007 IntellectAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-84150-149-9 / Electronic ISBN 9781841509853 / ISSN 1753-3058

Series: Theatre and ConsciousnessSeries editor: Daniel Meyer-DinkgräfeAlready published in the series:Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and FuturePotential (2005)

Cover Design: Gabriel SolomonsCopy Editor: Holly SpradlingTypesetting: Planman Technologies

Printed and bound by HSW Print, UK.

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Contents

Preface and acknowledgements vii

Introduction: magic and performance ix

Chapter OneBinaries: early attitudes to conjuring 1

Chapter Two‘The evil Spirit has a hand in the Tricks of these Jugglers’:conjuring and Christian orthodoxy 19

Chapter Three‘Fire and faggot to burn the witch’? Conjuring between belief and unbelief in early modern England 31

Chapter FourOn the margins: criminals and fraudsters 62

Chapter FiveOn the boundaries of the human 76

Chapter SixActing and not-acting: Robert-Houdin 97

Chapter SevenBefore your very eyes: life, death and liveness 116

Chapter EightNarrative ambiguity and contested meanings:interpreting Harry Houdini 140

Chapter NineMediums and the media 162

Chapter TenMagic, media and postmodernism 172

Endnotes 196

Bibliography 233

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Preface and acknowledgementsThis project started in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at theUniversity of Wales, Aberystwyth, with a suggestion from my editor, DanielMeyer-Dinkgräfe. It ended at the University of Exeter, not only with this book butalso with the accompanying play The Inner Child’s Compendium of Magic(available on DVD from the Arts Documentation Unit, Exeter EX4 6JA UK). Onthe way it passed through De Montfort University, Leicester. In all of these places,and elsewhere, I have received invaluable help from friends and colleagues. Somehave lent me books, videos and other magical material. Others have pointed me indirections that I would not otherwise have travelled in. Still others have offeredthoughts, criticism, suggestions, feedback and many other kinds of professionaland personal support.

I had ventured into the field of magic history a few years before, and a sectionof Chapter Three appeared, in a much earlier version, in Performance Research1: 3 (1996). This has now been significantly changed and updated. A section ofChapter Eight was first given as a keynote paper at the conference What AMan’s Gotta Do? Masculinities On Stage, UNE @ Shafston, Brisbane (April2004). That original paper is to be included in a forthcoming volume of thesame name, based on the conference proceedings and edited by AdrianKiernander. I have received valuable advice and encouragement from the editorsof both these publications. Sections of the book have also been delivered atresearch seminars and public talks in Exeter and Bristol.

Of the individuals who have helped me in various ways, I am particularlygrateful to Roland Clare for being in at the start; to Zara and Rachael for theirunfailing support; to Sarah Dadswell for the Magic Circle deck of cards and forher insightful thoughts on Indian conjurors; to Gabriella Giannachi, LesleyWade, Tess Buckland, Jon Primrose, Mike Wilson for pointing out to me and/orlending me books and other resources; to David Ian Rabey for suggestions aboutJonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; to Derren Brown for an impromptuinterview in a school corridor; to John and Patrick Mangan for the trip to the siteof Houdini’s plane flight at Digger’s Rest; to Roberta Mock for her insightfulcriticisms; and to Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe for his careful and encouragingeditorial work.

I am grateful, too, to various groups of people who have made the experienceof working on the history of magic easier, richer and more pleasurable: to thosemembers of the production teams with whom I worked on the BBC’s six-partHistory of Magic series, who astounded and inspired me with their commandof a complex field of research; to the original cast of The Inner Child’sCompendium of Magic: Jane Milling, Chris McCullough, Bella Merlin, JamesMcLaughlin, Steve Cockett, Lucy Mitchell and Lizzie Pennington, and, inparticular, Sarah Goldingay, who designed and produced the show and was a

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continual source of stimulating ideas. Thanks, too, to the Drama ResearchCommittee of Exeter University and the Theatre, Film and Television StudiesDepartment at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, both of whom contributedto the research costs; to the staff and curators of the various libraries andcollections which I have consulted – in particular those at the British Library,Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Wales, ExeterUniversity Library, the Harry Price Collection and the Bill Douglas Collection.I owe a special debt to José Antonio Gonzalez, aka Marko, the Panamanianmagician whom I have never met but whose online archive, The LearnedPig Project, is an essential resource for all those interested in the history andpractice of magic.

PERFORMING DARK ARTS

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Introduction: magic and performanceThe first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic andbooks of magic… Magicians, as we know from Jonathan Strange’s maxim, willquarrel about any thing, and many years and much learning has been applied tothe vexed question of whether such and such a volume qualifies as a book ofmagic. But most laymen find they are served well enough by this simple rule:books written before magic ended in England are books of magic, books writtenlater are books about magic. The principle, from which the layman’s rule ofthumb derives, is that a book of magic should be written by a practisingmagician, rather than a theoretical magician or a historian of magic.

Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell1

Any good trick is accomplished by our imagination. Any great trick involves ourown beliefs about the meaning of life.

Burger and Neale2

‘Sometimes such are called conjurers…’Most words change their meanings over time, but some are particularly slipperyand hard to pin down. This is not always a bad thing. On the contrary, it may bethat these are the words that point us towards areas where something importantis happening on a cultural level. Words which have the most complex, or evencontradictory nuances and connotations, are, perhaps, most likely to be thosewords which refer to things that a culture deems important.3 The words withwhich this study is centrally concerned – ‘conjuror’, ‘magic’ and ‘magician’ –belong to this group. We use them today in everyday speech to refer to aperformer of illusions on the stage or on the street, but in other contexts theymean a practitioner of darker arts. Broadly speaking, before the eighteenthcentury the terms ‘magician’ and ‘conjuror’ (like the words ‘wizard’ and‘warlock’ and their female counterpart ‘witch’) were reserved for those whopractised, or were seen to practise, the black arts, while terms such as ‘juggling’and ‘legerdemain’ referred to the entertainer. As one early writer on magic,conjuring, juggling and witchcraft put it: ‘Sometimes such are called conjurers…Sometimes jugglers are called witches. Sometimes also they are calledsorcerers’.4 In current use, both ‘conjuror’ (or ‘conjurer’) and ‘magician’ areused to refer to one who performs tricks and sleights in order to entertain.American usage tends to prefer ‘magician’; British English tends towards‘conjuror’ – but both are acceptable.5 The degree of semantic complexity, andeven confusion, which we find in these terms is significant, not least because itreminds us that the conjuror constantly confronts us with questions of our ownbeliefs about the world.

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Although the ambiguity of ‘magic’ will be an important theme in whatfollows, it is important to be clear from the outset that this is a book abouttricks, staged illusions, prestidigitation and legerdemain, not about spells,charms or grimoires. I should establish, too, at this point that I am not writingas a magician, as a member of the Magic Circle, or even as a halfway competentconjuror. I am an actor, a playwright, a theatre director, a performer in othermodes, but the two or three magic tricks I can competently perform may amazemy friends, but only if they are being kind to me. I am writing as a historian ofperformance, and the questions I shall be asking are those which arise from theacademic discipline of performance studies.

Performance studies is a comparatively new discipline, and one which is inmany ways still finding its feet. It draws on drama and theatre studies, onanthropology, history and sociology; journals such as The Drama Review,Performing Arts Journal, Performance Research and Studies in Theatre andPerformance have, over the past decade or so, published groundbreaking studieswhich have explicitly or implicitly begun to delineate the field and procedures,but there is not yet a settled research methodology, nor even agreement as to thelimits of the discipline’s subject matter. According to Richard Schechner, whohas done more than anyone to establish and define the field, performance

must be construed as a ‘broad spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ of human actionsranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performingarts (theatre, dance, music) and everyday life performances to the enactmentof social, professional, gender, race and class roles, and on to healing (fromshamanism to surgery), the media and the internet… [T]here is nohistorically or culturally fixable limit to what is or is not ‘performance.’ Alongthe continuum new genres are added and others are dropped. Theunderlying notion is that any action that is framed, presented, highlightedor displayed is a performance.6

As a definition this may seem – some argue that it is – unconscionably broad.Yet, as I intend to show, this breadth is particularly appropriate to the study ofmagic. If conjuring seems at first to relate only to what Schechner calls ‘popularentertainments’ (perhaps symbolized by the classical picture of the magician inevening wear pulling a rabbit out of a hat) a little reflection forces us to start toadd other images which resonate with key words from Schechner’s list. Ritual,for example, is evident not only in the performance of the stage or parlourspiritualist who claims to summon up the voices of the dead, but also, on a moremundane level, in the performances of most conjurors. These are frequently‘ritualized’ in their form (traditionally including magic words, props and gestures)and often appear to effect changes in the real world. We see magic-as-play in themany magic sets and compendiums of magic which are marketed for children.


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Magic is, of course, a long-standing component of theatre, not only insofar asmagicians have performed in theatres for the last two centuries, but also in thatstage illusions are incorporated into many plays: the medieval European theatrefeatured magic tricks such as the conjuring of Moses in the medieval mysteryplays, the Elizabethans saw Faustus and Prospero conjure on the early modernstage, the Victorian theatre employed magical illusions such as Pepper’s Ghost,while Maskelyne used short one-act ‘plays’ and sketches as vehicles for hisconjuring tricks. Magic-as-healing is evident not only in shamanic practices,but also in the mountebanks of the Renaissance, the medicine shows of thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in present-day crossoversbetween stage hypnotism and hypnotherapy. Magic and the media is anotherwell-established connection: we see it in the way in which late nineteenth-century magicians’ acts influenced the development of the early cinema, inHoudini’s manipulations of print and film media, in the recurrent tensionbetween liveness and mediatization in contemporary conjuring, and in the wayin which the Internet has recently become one of the main homes of magic incontemporary culture.

At the same time, cultural historians have become increasingly interested,since the 1970s, in the concept of performance as a way of analysing everyday life.Whereas cultural history in the 1950s and 1960s tended to see social interactionsin terms of a dramaturgical model based on social ‘scripts’ and structural rules,an increasing focus on ‘culture as a series of recipes for carrying out“performatives”’ has led to an emphasis on improvisation rather than on cultureas a set of fixed rules.7 Thus performance, both in its literal sense and as ametaphorical way of understanding social interaction, has become an increasinglyimportant topic in academic inquiry.

The permeable boundary between what is and is not performance isimportant, too, to my particular approach to the study of magic. The focus ofthis study is on the popular entertainer, and as I say, the book is not intended tobe an anthropological or historical study of magical practices in their moreefficacious sense. Nonetheless, these practices and beliefs form an importantbackdrop to the whole issue of magic as performance, and to the questions offiction and reality which the performance of magic raises. So Schechner’sdefinition of performance as ‘any action that is framed, presented, highlightedor displayed’ is one which invites precisely the kind of investigation which I amproposing: one which crosses the borders between the stage and everyday life,just as magic itself crosses – repeatedly – those borders.

I shall be asking questions, then, about some of the things which historiansof magic have traditionally explored in the past, but I also ask some questionswith which they have not particularly been interested: questions, for example,about gender, about epistemology, about the insights which a consideration ofmagic can give us into other aspects of a culture or a historical period. My

INTRODUCTION: MAGIC AND PERFORMANCE

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subject matter is not only the performances of individual magicians themselvesbut also the context in which their performances were received. I am interestednot only in magic but in ideas about magic and the meanings of magic. Whatkinds of pleasure does it offer the spectator? Why did people go to see conjurorsat certain key points in the past? Why do they still do so today? What kind ofplace did the performance of magic have in relation to broader cultural beliefsand practices? How, at various historical moments, has magic been perceivedand understood? How has it operated as a metaphor in different cultures? Mostof all: what are the meanings which magic as performance has attracted?

These are the kinds of questions which the book will be asking. In order toanswer them, I shall be drawing on the work of performance theorists such asRichard Schechner, Victor Turner, E. T. Kirby, John F. Kasson and PhilipAuslander, as well as on that of historians of magic such as Edwin Dawes andMilbourne Christopher. I will be looking at the conjuror in fiction as well as inreal life, and I will be drawing parallels between the art of the magician and thewritings of poets, polemicists, playwrights, psychoanalysts, philosophers,theologians and film-makers. Underlying this cultural history of magic is onebasic assumption: that cultural meanings are not universal, that they changewith time and are contingent upon their historical circumstances.

Universals and boundariesIn order to demonstrate the implications of this last point, let us take a fairlysimple example: that of the classic illusion of ‘Sawing a Woman in Half ’.According to most accounts, this was first performed in London in 1921 by theBritish illusionist Percy Thomas Tibbles, who worked under the stage name of‘Selbit’.8 What links can be made between the date of Selbit’s sawing trick andthe comparatively recent legislation which had been passed, allowing for partialfemale suffrage in the United Kingdom?9 Does Selbit’s sawing routine (whichwas a huge success in its day as well as becoming one of the iconic images of theconjuror’s act itself) represent some kind of social subconscious in revengefulmood? Does its misogynist violence represent, on some level of codification, abacklash against the perceived threat of growing female social, political andeconomic power? It could certainly be interpreted this way.10 The stories whichmagicians tell gain resonance from the other stories which surround them, andto interpret the meaning of Selbit’s trick we may well want to stress its relationto narratives of female emancipation in the early twentieth century, and, byextension, to the larger pattern of cultural misogyny (visible, too, in films, plays,novels), which inscribes the woman as the victim, as the passive figure who isacted upon rather than acting, who is the subject of persistent patterns ofmale/female violence and abuse. Thus, on what Roland Barthes termed the levelof myth, Selbit’s trick is doing some very powerful cultural work. ‘Myth’,according to Barthes


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…has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, andmaking contingency appear eternal… Myth does not deny things, on thecontrary its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makesthem innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification…11

The sawing in half of a woman certainly ‘does not deny’ cultural misogyny.On the contrary, it performs it and celebrates it. And by presenting it asentertainment, it also naturalizes it. We could say that this particular trick hasbeen particularly successful in this respect. It has become so famous, and sucha ‘natural’ part of the image of the conjuror – as iconic as the rabbit and the tophat – that it is easy for an audience to forget, ignore or repress its own awarenessof the violence which it enacts. It makes the idea of mutilating a woman (inBarthes’ somewhat ironic inflection of that term) ‘innocent’.

This, though, is not the end of the story. Sawing a woman in half is anillusion which has taken place not once, in 1921, but repeatedly in the acts ofcountless conjurors since then. Repetition, after all, is one of the key features(some might argue, the defining feature) of performance. And just as asuccessful play, opera, symphony or dance will be performed at a historicalmoment at or near to its composition, but then repeated in later years, by latergenerations, with varying degrees of faithfulness to or deviation from theoriginal production, so it is with conjuring tricks: ‘Sawing a Woman in Half ’exists both as a particular historical event, deriving meaning from the culturalconditions surrounding the moment of its first performance, and also as arepeated routine. Indeed, its enduring popularity means that it has become astaple – even an iconic – trick of a certain kind of magic show for the greaterpart of a century, from the ‘sawing rage’12 of the 1920s onwards. So when itwas performed for the first time in 1921, it may have carried a particularmeaning which was very specific to its culture – in this case the sub-text of ageneral bourgeois backlash against the achievements of the female suffragists.The specific social and cultural conditions which created those meanings havenow changed (though a convincing argument could also be made that a morerecent anti-feminist backlash means that they are not so far away as they oncewere!) and as a result that particular meaning may have become less dominant.Thus, Selbit performing the trick to an audience in 1921 may mean one thing;another magician performing the same (or similar) trick in 2005, might meansomething rather different. Here, for example, is Eugene Burger’s account ofthe illusion as he perceives it, writing in the 1990s.

Sawing a woman in two can be horrible or humorous. It can also be holy.Saying this I have not forgotten that it is both witnessed and performed assexist. Even so, it is, in essence, holy. My assumption is that this twentiethcentury trick is our leading example of what magic is about, an example that


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has roots as old as magic itself. The theme is death and rebirth… Thehorror remains, as does the humour, but both performer and audience arealso given the opportunity to participate in the holy. A real magic show isnot an arena for secular distraction, but a relatively safe place for us to experience the sacred.13

Burger substitutes a different interpretive frame, one which depends less on thegender politics of the historical moment when the trick was first performedthan on its persistence as an archetype of the ‘twentieth century trick’. In thisreading of the trick’s meaning the original (misogynistic) meanings have notbeen entirely obliterated, but they seem to have faded, while other kinds ofmeanings have been attached, meanings dependent on seeing contemporarymagic as somehow partaking of the ‘sacred’.

My point is not to argue which of these readings is ‘correct’.14 It is toillustrate the way in which the same trick means different things in differentcontexts. Historical distance from the original moment of performance affectsmeaning. So does the way a particular trick is transformed and re-presented.In another cultural context, the ‘same’ trick is re-packaged for a differentaudience, with rather different results. And so in the mid-twentieth centurywe see a rather different style of sawing a lady in half exhibited by Mark Wilsonon his American television shows. Wilson presented the routine in a way whichminimized any sense of threat and played down the sense that this is in anyway a violent act. In order to understand how the tricks have evolved, and the meaning of their evolution, we need to take into account the historicaldimension which relates them to the expectations and receptive capacities of their audience. To the fact, for example, that Wilson was performing forthe newly popular medium of commercial television, on a show whose targetaudience was the family, whose content and mood was strictly controlled bythe sponsors and advertisers whose product it was designed to sell. We couldgo further and talk about the broader cultural climate of 1950s America inwhich Wilson developed his television act. This was a time of highconservatism and high consumerism, a time which saw the growth of thesuburbs, the establishment of television as the dominant medium, and acultural optimism which was still in part a reaction against memories of thehorrors of World War II, the Holocaust revelations, the devastation ofHiroshima, and the tensions of the cold war. Under these conditions, theinherent violence of the sawing routine needed to be de-emphasized for goodcultural reasons. In order to play at cutting a person in half as part of familyviewing at that time, the routine had to be made acceptable to the schedulers,whose primary aim is to sell the products which the programmes ‘carry’. MarkWilson’s implied audience was a nuclear American family, sitting in thecomfort of their comparatively affluent home, engaged in the shared


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pleasurable activity of watching television together. The picture, of course, isan idealized one, but idealized archetypes are the bricks from which televisionschedules are built, and they become the norms which determine programmestyle and content.

This is a particularly important point to make in relation to this book and itshistorical argument. Meanings change. They change according not only tothe intentions of the producer/practitioner but also to the social contexts ofproduction and reception, and according to the available interpretive contexts.And they can change according to the uses that different producers and differentinterpretive communities make of them.

But if meanings are not universal, nonetheless, certain themes recur. Onetheme to which I shall return frequently in this book is that stage magic regularlyperforms what Una Chaudhuri (in another context) has described as ‘boundarywork’.15 The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, theuncanny, the marvellous, the grotesque is effectively one which challenges thespectator’s sense of reality, which brings him or her up against their ownassumptions about how the world works. It tests the spectator’s perceptionsagainst the cognitive structures which allow those perceptions to make sense. Atits extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits ofthe human.

If this sounds as if it is making too extravagant a claim for what is, after all,a fairly low-status performing art, let me add that these challenges, these tests,to everyday reality are not always cataclysmic. Indeed, their effect may beconservative rather than revolutionary. When the card the spectator selectsdisappears from one place and reappears in another, she may – in most casesshe certainly will – simply settle for the fact that some kind of sleight of handor substitution is going on, and that while she cannot see how it has been done,the laws of physics have not been broken. Most conjurors, it should be added,would completely approve: few have any wish to suggest that they are messingwith the paranormal – and since they have engineered the illusions, they knowfor a fact that they are not. Boundary work in this sense can often bereassuring: it is often a matter of confirming one’s sense of those boundaries.But the point is that magic has no point unless it offers up – however light-heartedly, however insincerely – the possibility that those boundaries mayindeed be breached.

Lies, damned lies and conjurors’ autobiographies:writing about magic

MM: It’s a fine line, isn’t it, between what a magician, a conjuror, does as askilled performer and just lying? Especially on television, where you have suchcontrol over what the audience sees. You could simply lie about everything – but


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then there would be little for us, the audience, to admire. So a magician wantsto avoid just lying, doesn’t he?DB: Yes. Absolutely.

Interview with Derren Brown, Bristol 1996

Everything I’ve ever told you is a lie. Including that. Peter Cook as the Devil inBedazzled

Most histories of magic are written by practising conjurors or magicaltechnicians. Some of the best of them, such as Milbourne Christopher’sentertaining and lucid Illustrated History of Magic and Edwin Dawes’ The GreatIllusionists,16 benefit greatly both from the encyclopaedic knowledge of thededicated enthusiast and from the technical knowledge of the practitioner andperformer. Others seem rather to be hampered by their position within themagic community: by codes of silence, by internal quarrels about who firstinvented which trick, by the need for self-promotion – and some of the greatestmagicians are the worst offenders in this last respect!

There are several good histories already in existence. Those just mentioned,Dawes’ The Great Illusionists and Christopher’s Illustrated History of Magic, tellthe story of magic, illusion and conjuring from the earliest days through to themid-twentieth century. Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant17 brings the storymore or less up-to-date with thoughtful reflections on modern magicians. RickyJay’s Talking Pigs and Fireproof Women18 looks at the stranger outreaches ofmagical showmanship. Between them, these works map out the territory which Iexplore in this book. Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale’s Magic and Meaning isnot strictly a history of magic, but it contains a series of provocative and intelligentreflections on the philosophical aspects of magic past and present. David Blaine’sMysterious Stranger19 has become a bestseller in the last couple of years. Theseare all eminent figures in the world of Magic in their own right: Christopher andBlaine have had stellar careers as professional conjurors; Steinmeyer is one ofthe world’s leading designers of magic illusions; Dawes is the official historianof the Magic Circle. These books are largely written for a market which straddlesthe general reader and the practising professional or amateur conjuror.

There has also been a growing interest in magic among academic researchersin recent years. In the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and theLeverhulme Trust have both funded research projects investigating conjuring.The results are beginning to be seen: for example, Philip Butterworth’s detailedand scholarly Magic on the Early English Stage, which develops some of his earlierideas from articles in Theatre Notebook, is an excellent large-scale study of therelationship between Tudor ‘jugglers’ and the early modern theatre.20 The kindredart of ventriloquism has been the subject of a brilliant monograph by Steven


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Connor.21 And if the history of magic has attracted attention, so has the psychologyof magic: respected academic psychologists such as Richard Wiseman and PeterLamont have published books and papers on this; and Lamont, who is also ahistorian, has published book-length studies of the Indian Rope Trick and of theVictorian medium D. D. Home.22 There is significant overlap between the worldsof academia and of conjuring: Lamont and Wiseman are both former professionalconjurors, while Edwin Dawes is by profession a professor of biochemistry.

It is notable, too, the extent to which professional magicians, far more thanother artists, are fascinated with the history of their own art form. On the wholeit is not professional dancers who write deeply researched histories of dance,nor do rock stars write great histories of rock music; actors tend not to havewritten good histories of the theatre (although some directors have). Butmagicians do… Perhaps there are inherent similarities between the typicalmindset of the historian and that of the conjuror. Certainly many conjurors areproto-historians – antiquarians, in that eighteenth-century sense of collectorsof books and artefacts from the past. Harry Houdini was a prime example –collecting obsessively, buying up other specialist collections competitively. Inthe UK the British Library and University of London Library have benefitedfrom this: the Evanion Collection and the Harry Price Collection respectivelyare valuable resources for the researcher.23 Equally important, perhaps,magicians make good historians because they are able to negotiate some of theinherent problems of writing magic history.

Writing about the history of magic does present certain unique problems. Inthe first place there are the kinds of problem which any performance historianhas to deal with – those related to the central problem of the ephemeral natureof performance. Before we attempt any realistic account of how any aspect ofperformance – whether acting, juggling, directing, dance, singing, stage design,popular theatre – has operated in the past, we are forced to accept that we areengaging with ghosts and echoes of a vanished event. The performances whosesignificance we are trying to recapture took place in a context which can neverfully be re-created: their meaning existed in the engagement of a specificmoment, the moment of performance. It arose from the immediacy of theencounter between this particular performer and this particular audience, anencounter which took place in that foreign country which is the past. We cannotvisit, we cannot experience it directly, we can only put together a sense of whatit must have been like from a jigsaw of documentary sources: video recordings,photographs, performers’ memoirs, interviews, newspaper reviews, andperformance documents such as prompt books, posters, programmes, stagediagrams and scripts.

Even with the best will in the world, such documents will be of variablereliability. The publicity photograph may show an image which never appeared inthe performance itself and the theatrical poster almost certainly will! The


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newspaper review may be biased or ignorant. The actor’s reminiscence may beself-serving or faulty. We will often have little confidence in the source material;sometimes we may have too much. Traditionally the academic discipline of dramaand theatre studies has been dominated by study of the dramatic text: this isbecause (among other reasons) the verbal text, out of all of these documentarysources, has usually been the richest, the most engaging, the most immediate.Read with skill, it brings a sense of the presence of the event – so much so thatsometimes it has been mistaken for the event itself. We have a full (if disputed)text of Hamlet. This is invaluable because it means that the play (or a version ofit) can live again and again for each new generation as part of that powerfuldialogue with the past which is the basis of the staging of classic plays. Invaluabletoo, when we are performing that very different act of historical imagination:trying to understand what an audience might have experienced in, say,Shakespeare’s Globe. It is the best evidence we have; and even the scholarlyarguments about the text are helpful in refining our sense of that originalperformance. But it is not the performance itself. It does not bring into our livesthe full, sweaty, noisy, confusing experience of the Globe in 1601, nor the presenceof Richard Burbage swinging round to an audience and asking them for the firsttime that question of being and not-being. And some might argue that perhapsthis is just as well. Perhaps no actual performance would ever be able to live up tothe richness of the imagined performance of generations of Shakespeare-lovers.Perhaps Burbage himself, with his antique acting style, would disappoint us.Perhaps if we were able to choose between retaining possession of the verbal textand being allowed a time-machine journey to an afternoon at the Globe in 1601,we would do well to keep the words and dispatch the live performance to thedustbin of history. But since we are unlikely to have that choice, we do well toremember the distance that exists between the fossil record of a theatrical event,which is the verbal text, and the immediacy of that past event itself.

The further one moves away from the literary tradition of dramatic theatre,from the authored play with a published text, the more reliant one becomes onthe surrounding fragments and ephemera: the programmes, playbills, memoirs,adverts, reviews. With popular forms, such as music hall, vaudeville, stand-upcomedy or magic, these are particularly few and far between, since it hastraditionally been seen as less important to provide any kind of permanentrecord of popular cultural forms. Thus, as I say, even with the best will in theworld it makes such forms hard to reconstruct imaginatively. But when we aredealing with magic and magicians we are not necessarily dealing with the bestwills in the world. More to the point, we are not dealing with those who see it intheir own interests to tell the truth about themselves and their art. Magicians’own accounts of their performances are sometimes valuable, but rarely entirelyreliable. Even enthusiastic collectors of magic books, such as Gary Brown andMichael Edwards, admit that


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though entertainment was their business, magicians from magic’s GoldenAge produced numerous autobiographies that were less than entertaining.Partly a product of the writing style of the day, as well as the result of a lives[sic] of deceit and exaggeration, these works tend to be ponderous, slow-moving accounts which make claims of dubious historical value.24

Traditionally, the task of the historian has been to separate truth about the pastfrom fiction, falsehood or misunderstanding. Traditionally, the task of themagician has been to confuse, to falsify, to create illusions – to lie. ‘Magicians’,as Sara Crasson puts it,

lie by the very nature of what they do… Magicians lie about their origin, theirnationality, their education. They lie about what they are doing onstage whenthey say they are putting the ball under the cup or in the pocket… Magicianstell you their equipment came from some exotic flea market, from theirancestors, from the attic of a haunted house. Lies, more lies. They talk aboutfantastic feats they have performed. Still more lies. And when they retire andwrite their memoirs, they lie there, too…25

Crasson tells only part of the story. Researchers into magic (myself included) canalso report great openness and generosity both from individual conjurors and frominstitutions such as the Magic Circle. But the culture of secrecy and misdirectionis real, and it presents particular problems for the historian of magic performance.

It should be added that recent modes of historiography, particularly thosetaking on a postmodern flavour, are deeply sceptical about the possibility ofrecovering any kind of absolute truth about the past. They see value, too, in thefictions which the past creates about itself: in its self-images, its propaganda andits self-delusions. Thus the myths which magicians create about themselves, themisperceptions, the ideas about magic, are all grist to the mill. Even so, it can bea very fine line between chronicling the myths of the past and simply being takenin by them, and by a tradition of professional entertainers who guard their secretsfiercely, and for whom misdirection is an essential source of their power.

The most realistic way to think about magicians’ own accounts of their lives,careers and tricks is to consider them as extensions of their stage acts – as aparticular kind of ‘performative writing’. This concept of ‘performative writing’is one which, in performance studies and contemporary literary theory, hasdeveloped a specific meaning, whereby the written text is made to function in amore expressively performative manner.26 (This may or may not result in anactual performance. For many practitioners and proponents of performativewriting, the written text ‘choreographed through space across a sequence ofpages’27 is the performance.) Drawing on influences as diverse as poetry, fictionalprose, graphic design, alternative literacies and live art, and having a close


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connection with contemporary French écriture, performative writing lies betweenthe critical and creative and has elements of both. It arises partly as a response tothe challenge of performance studies’ brief to explore performativity in all itssocial manifestations, and partly in response to a broadly postmodern tendency todissolve apparent oppositions – in this case the opposition between that which iswritten and that which is performed.

Thus performative writing is most often associated with the aesthetics of thecontemporary avant-garde, and with that of contemporary critical theory.28 It isnot usually attached to something as mainstream as a conjuror’s routine, nor assternly positivist as an encyclopaedia. Yet in an important sense, the EncyclopaediaBritannica contains, in its entries on magic, some superb early examples ofperformative writing – writing which functions in a performative manner, in anarea between the creative and the critical. If one of the trademarks of theconjuror’s stage act is that he does one thing while appearing to do another, theencyclopaedia entries are precisely analogous to the stage performance.

Britannica entries on magic have, for the most part, been written bypractising professional conjurors. Why should they not be? Who better to speakwith authority about the topic, to provide the definitive and truthful accountwhich an encyclopaedia implicitly promises its readers? The problem is that, asI have already suggested, professional conjurors have a relationship with thetruth which is at best ambiguous. This is not just to do with the age-old questionof ‘revealing the secrets’. The writer of the entry can be judicious enough aboutthat – deciding which, if any, conjuring tricks are well enough known for theirexposure to present little or no threat to himself or his colleagues. The issue ismore to do with a deeper contradiction between two types of discourse. If thediscourse of the encyclopaedia typically claims objectivity and transparency, thediscourse of the conjuror is typically designed to deceive, to distract, to misdirect –and ultimately to enhance the prestige, the mystique of the speaker.

The entries on ‘Magic’ in the 1926 (13th) edition of the EncyclopaediaBritannica were written by Harry Houdini, and they had the basic effect ofpresenting a history of magic in which everything was shown to lead up toHoudini himself. A more recent edition of Britannica rather shamefacedlyadmits that there is something rather graceless about Houdini’s ‘failing toname even a single previous practitioner of his art’. It goes on to say:

Even a superficial reading of this article, written for the Thirteenth Edition(1926), conveys the inescapable conclusion that Harry Houdini’s view of thetopic was focused on two matters. The first was the debunking of the then-fashionable spiritualists; the second was Houdini.29

What seems to be one thing is in fact another. What appears to be a history ofmagic is in fact another elaboration of the Myth of Harry Houdini. It is not just


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that Houdini was an egoist – although in his intensely complicated way, he was.It is that for Houdini (as for most magicians) the function of public language isto convey a sense of his own special powers or skills. The magician’s actdepends upon such a sense: people go to see him precisely because of thosespecial powers. And Houdini, of course, being the supreme myth-maker andself-publicist that he was, was hardly going to let an opportunity like writing thedefinitive encyclopaedia article slip by him. Because the very fact of theencyclopaedia’s implicit claims of objectivity, authority and truthfulness work tohis advantage: they provide a perfect kind of misdirection, a backdrop againstwhich the textual performance of Harry Houdini can take place. Many othermagicians have written Histories of Magic whose actual aims were subtlydifferent from, and far more self-interested than, their stated ones: but fewhad as welcoming a stage to perform their texts on as Houdini had in theEncyclopaedia Britannica.

One who did was another Britannica contributor, John Algernon Clarke,whose contribution on ‘Magic, White’ for the 9th edition of the encyclopaediawas, as Jim Steinmeyer puts it ‘a wry bit of showmanship that should never havegot past the encyclopaedia’s editors’.30 In fact, Clarke was not a showman at allbut an inventor. Among his inventions was one of the most popular magic tricksof the age. In the 1870s, Clarke worked with John Nevil Maskelyne – at the timethe dominant personality in the world of English stage conjuring – on ‘Psycho’,one of the many automata that were so popular in Maskelyne’s stage shows at theEgyptian Hall in Picadilly. Psycho was the most famous of these. A small andobviously mechanical figure, Psycho was dressed in oriental costume and saton a small box, isolated by a glass cylinder so that the audience could see thatno strings, wires or electrical cables were involved. The box itself was far toosmall to contain an assistant. Psycho appeared to be able to do mathematicalcalculations and answer questions by pointing to or moving cards; he was alsoable to play whist, picking out the correct card for each play between his thumband forefinger, displaying it to the audience, and handing it to Maskelyne to play.Psycho’s clockwork mechanism was actually controlled by a combination of ahidden operative, compressed air or gas and a set of bellows: George Cooke,Maskelyne’s assistant, was hidden backstage where he could see the cards andworked a small bellows which moved the hand by manipulating the air pressurein the cylinder.31

Clarke’s Britannica entry on ‘Magic, White’ may well have been co-authoredby Maskelyne himself. It not only writes the history of magic so as to stress theimportance of Maskelyne and Cooke, the Egyptian Hall and Psycho, it alsodisingenuously claims that Psycho ‘appears to be perfectly isolated from anymechanical communication without… [and that] what the mysterious means ofconnection are has not been discovered’.32 This was quite untrue: an 1876magazine article by William Pole had described the mechanism correctly, and


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newspapers and magic journals had repeated Pole’s exposé.33 The secret ofPsycho was pretty much common knowledge. Clarke’s article, however, goes onto say that while it was true that the joint inventors had ‘patented a method ofcontrolling the speed of clockwork mechanism by compressed air or gas… it isnot known whether the principle obscurely described in the specification wasapplicable in any way to the invisible agency employed in Psycho’. Theencyclopaedia article effectively becomes part of the act – an extension of thepatter by which the conjuror shapes the audience’s experience of the trick.Maskelyne and Clarke firmly deny that the trick is done with compressed air –and they make their assertion (as Houdini would later do) in a forum whoseprobity is usually taken for granted. William Pole’s explanation is discredited,and the reader/audience is sent away looking for other explanations. The ‘liedirect’ is not, perhaps, the most subtle kind of misdirection – but in this casethe blatancy of the untruth, and the authority of the context in which it appears,means that it is unusually effective.

It is also rather witty. Whereas Houdini’s self-advertisements in his entryappear merely opportunistic, Clarke is playing a rather more subtle game withhis reader. He includes his own name twice in his Britannia essay – not onlysigning the article but also naming himself in it as the joint inventor of Psychoand the pneumatic mechanism. Since it is clearly impossible for him both tohave patented the device (as inventor) and to be ignorant of its working (asauthor of the article), the alert reader will deduce that there must be some ironyat play. As with all the best performative writing, there is a marked element ofplayfulness about Clarke’s entry.

Performing Dark ArtsThe aim of this monograph, then, is to throw light on some aspects of conjuringby looking at them in the context of performance studies and to throw light onaspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring.It will attempt to pick a way through the labyrinthine paths of dubiousdocumentation in order to explore the changing meanings of the conjuror’s artfrom earliest times to the present day. It will focus, in the main, on figures andevents which previous historians such as Dawes and Christopher have alreadyestablished as landmarks in the long and complicated history of magic:practitioners such as Robert-Houdin, Harry Houdini and Georges Méliès; eventssuch as the Bottle-Conjuror hoax; and publications such as Scot’s Discovery ofWitchcraft.34 And it will follow a broadly chronological approach – although,since the book also has a thematic dimension, there will sometimes be overlapsbetween one chapter and another in terms of historical periods.

Chapter One will look at the prehistory of conjuring over a very widechronological sweep and at the vexed question of roots and origins. Questionsof origins are frequently discussed in performance studies, and most histories


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of conjuring place the origins of the art in ancient Egypt. The story of theconjuror Dedi at the court of King Khufu has become the typical starting pointfor histories of conjuring. I will be examining traditional explanations of theroots of the art in order to explore the relevance of shamanic traditions to thehistory of conjuring.

The Christian Church has always had a deep distrust of conjuring: eitherdismissing it as trickery or associating it with devilish practices. From scripturaltimes onwards, Judaeo-Christian prophets, scholars and priests have pointedout the difference between ‘real’ miracle workers (inspired by the one trueGod) and the phoneys, fakes and mere conjurors. Chapter Two examines the wayin which the Biblical narrative of Moses and Aaron’s ‘conjuring’ in Pharaoh’scourt has been interpreted; at the way in which Christian orthodoxy hastraditionally constructed a dichotomy between the true and the false wonder-worker; and at the way in which ‘juggling’ (conjuring) became a polemical termat the time of the Reformation.

Chapter Three deals with the emergence of the conjuror in the early modernperiod – the earliest historical period for which we have solid documentaryevidence. As well as looking at the relationship between the ‘street-conjuror’ andthe emerging professional theatre, the chapter will explore the way in which, inan age when belief in ‘real’ magic was prevalent, Tudor and Stuart ‘jugglers’negotiated the potentially difficult relationship between magic as entertainmentand magic as efficacy. The chapter will focus on contemporary accounts ofconjuring – in both senses of the word – in some of the books about bothwitchcraft and legerdemain which were beginning to be published in the period.

Chapter Four is about the conjuror as trickster and covers a period from theearly seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. During thesecenturies the conjuror enjoyed a fairly dubious social status and was oftenclassed with rogues, vagabonds and ‘coney-catchers’. As this chapter illustrates,the common view was not entirely wrong, and extracts from early seventeenth-century plays give entertaining examples of the dishonest juggler at work. Foreighteenth-century culture, however, there was something quite fascinatingabout crime and criminals: this is an age in which highwaymen and thieves suchas Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin could become local heroes, while the satiresof writers such as Gay and Swift turned the criminal into an icon of the age. In asimilar way, in the writings of these satirists, the conjuror becomes a metaphorfor an increasingly uncertain culture, while the famous hoax of the ‘Bottle-Conjuror’ translated some of Gay’s and Swift’s literary fantasies into reality.

Another kind of hoax but of a more ambiguous nature was that of the talkinganimals which became particularly popular during the ‘long eighteenth century’.Chapter Five looks at these together with automata such as von Kempelen’s‘Mechanical Turk’, which professed to be able to perform human functions bymechanical means. I argue that both of these acts perform a kind of ‘boundary


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work’ which was of particular significance in the period of the Enlightenment.By blurring the distinctions between animal and human on the one hand, andbetween machine and human on the other, the talking animals and intelligentmachines, which became a part of the repertoire of eighteenth-centuryillusionists, were asking important questions about what it meant to be human –questions which, as I suggest in the final sections of the chapter, continue to berelevant today.

Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin is the subject of Chapter Six. Three aspects ofthe ‘father of modern magic’ are explored in detail: first of all his re-definitionof the art of conjuring – not only through his own impressive performances butalso through his writings about the art, and his much-quoted epithet about aconjuror being an actor playing the part of a magician, a phrase which is re-visited in the light of questions about the nature of acting itself. The chaptertakes another look, too, at the famous story of Robert-Houdin and theMarabouts: the incident in Algeria where the conjuror was commissioned by theFrench foreign office to put on a display of white man’s magic in order to aidthe French colonialist enterprise. Finally it explores the way in which Robert-Houdin’s role playing permeates not only his stage performance but also hiswritings.

Conjuring seems to depend more than most arts upon the live presence of theperformer, yet there is a strong relationship between the conjuror’s act and therise of the early motion picture industry. Chapter Seven charts the history of thisrelationship, including its pre-history in early visual illusions such as the magiclanterns and phantasmagorias of previous centuries. It analyses that relationshipin the context of current debates within performance studies about the natureand the importance of ‘liveness’ as a concept, but also looks at ways in which therelationship prompted – and was nurtured by – conjurors’ and film-makers’fascination with the way in which these new visual media enabled them toexplore images of life and death. By way of development of this idea, the chapterlooks in detail at the impact of the major contributor to the crossover betweenmagic and the movies: Georges Méliès.

Chapter Eight again focuses largely on a single performer: Harry Houdini.Like Robert-Houdin (whom he first revered and later rejected), Houdini was aperformer who never really stopped performing. Picking up on points madeearlier in this introduction, this chapter analyses the way in which the myth ofHarry Houdini was created by Houdini himself and by the media which hemanipulated so successfully, but also at various kinds of interpretations whichthat myth has generated. It explores ways in which Houdini has been analysedby cultural historians with an interest in gender.

Continuing the Houdini theme, Chapter Nine looks at Houdini’s engagementwith spiritualists towards the end of his career – and places that in the contextof the wider debates about spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early


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twentieth centuries. It examines the tradition of stage spiritualism made famousby practitioners such as the Fox Sisters and the Davenport Brothers and itsrelationship to the spiritualist movement; and it analyses the contradictoryattitudes towards such contact with the dead expressed by the scientificestablishment.

The final chapter discusses the relationship between the conjuror and themass media in the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. It focuses inparticular on the issue of postmodernism and compares the way in whichmagicians have traditionally blurred the line between truth and reality with therelativism of the postmodern world-view, characterized by the hyper-real, bythe ‘precession of simulacra’, and by a distrust of the rational, and in which therejection of traditional epistemological distinctions, hierarchies and categoriesmeans that the real and the imaginary continually collapse into each other. Itexamines the uses which conjurors have made of television and considers indetail the work of contemporary illusionist David Blaine.

‘…and that’s magic!’Throughout this book I have tried – not always entirely successfully – to resistthe temptation to make pronouncements about ‘what magic is’. Nonetheless, anincident which occurred between the completion of the penultimate and finaldrafts of this book prompts me to offer at least an anecdotal definition.

Derren Brown is currently one of the UK’s most successful magicians, withseveral television series and specials to his credit. His technique of ‘MindControl’ is a stylish re-working of the traditional mentalist’s act whichfrequently leaves volunteers and victims convinced that he does indeed possessspecial psychic powers, and the journal of the paranormal, Fortean Times, hasrun several features on him. Early in the gestation period of the book, at a timewhen Brown was still virtually unknown, I had been introduced to him byRoland, a mutual friend who lives in Bristol. A few years later we had met upagain and Brown had been kind enough to allow me to conduct an impromptuinterview with him (a quotation from which appears earlier in this chapter).Soon after completing the manuscript of this book, I visited Roland; at the endof the visit he drove me to the station to catch my train. As we drove, we talked.He asked me how the book was going; I replied that I had finished it. Hesuggested that Brown (whom Roland had not seen for quite a while) might beinterested in seeing it; I agreed that it would be courteous to send him a copyand that I would do so… And so we continued, chatting generally about Brown’srecent stellar career. Our conversation about him had hardly ended whenRoland, still in the car, received a call on his mobile phone. It was Derren Brown,calling from London. That in itself seemed an extraordinary coincidence, butwhen Brown went on to say, apparently out of the blue, ‘Oh, yes – I’d be veryhappy to look at the manuscript of your friend’s history of conjuring, although


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I’m rather busy at the moment. Goodbye’, it appeared for all the world as if themodern mentalist had indeed read our minds.

Brown’s phone call touched unwittingly on one of the central themes of thisbook: those unstable points of intersection between that which is known to beillusion and that which is thought to be uncanny. One aspect of the pleasure thatan audience takes in magic is its impulse to believe – on some level, howevertemporarily and however provisionally – that something extraordinary, impossibleor marvellous has been witnessed. For just a fraction of a second my responseto Brown’s phone call was to suspend all my disbelief about conjurors and howthey create their illusions. Only then did the rational mind kick in and start toseek a more mundane explanation. But the good magic trick frequently derivesits effect from the fact that the ‘magical’ explanation of what has taken placemay seem – temporarily at least – as plausible as the actual (and rational)explanation. It may be hard for a rationalist to believe that Derren Brown reallypossesses some kind of psychic sense. But it is also pretty hard to swallow whatactually happened: that while Roland and I were talking in the car, Roland hadquite inadvertently dialled a number on the mobile phone in his pocket; and thatof all the numbers stored on his mobile, the one which was dialled was that ofDerren Brown; and that Brown, picking up the phone, had then heard aconversation about him on which he could then capitalize by calling back andseeming to have read our minds over a distance of a hundred miles or more. For,as I suggested before, a good conjuror is never off duty. The weaving of themystique and the myth continues offstage as well as on: we shall see this in moredetail in several of the chapters below. And one of the conjuror’s most potent toolsis his ability to blur the distinction between what is and what is not ‘performance’.


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Chapter One

Binaries: early attitudes to conjuring

Originary mythsWhat are the roots of conjuring? Is it even possible to ask such a question? Itis certainly true that the lack (or at least the very fragmentary and ambiguousnature) of any documentary evidence makes it difficult to do more thanspeculate about the roots of conjuring. It is worthwhile doing so, however, sincethe stories we tell about origins are an integral part of how we understand thepresent.

In fact, the literature of conjuring is ready enough to supply answers to thequestion of origins – and Egypt features prominently in most accounts. Earlywriters were pretty much unanimous that the origins of conjuring – or ‘juggling’as it was called in the early modern period – could be traced back to the timewhen

[c]ertain Egyptians banished their country (belike not for their goodconditions) arrived here in England, who being excellent in quaint tricks anddevices, not known here at that time among us, were esteemed and had ingreat admiration, for what with strangeness of their attire and garments,together with their sleights and legerdemains, they were spoke of far andnear, insomuch that many of our English loiterers joined with them and intime learned their craft and cozening… These people, continuing about thecountry in this fashion, practising their cozening art of fast and loose andlegerdemain, purchased to themselves great credit among the countrypeople, and got much by Palmistry and telling of fortunes.35

According to the standard historical account in the early modern period theoriginal jugglers are ‘Egyptians’. But ‘Egyptians’ is actually an ambiguous word: onthe one hand it has its modern meaning of an inhabitant or native of Egypt.On the other hand it is the origin of the word ‘gypsy’ – and in common usage thetwo ideas merge into one another, as the distinction between place of origin andtravelling subculture becomes blurred. The gypsies and travellers, marginalizedand exotic in appearance and language, become identified with the criminalsubculture of the sixteenth century with ‘their craft and cozening’.

There may be some truth to this. Gypsies – travellers – have traditionally hadan important role to play in popular culture.36 For the settled majority thisethnic minority has always, like the magician, represented something a littlebeyond the boundaries of accepted knowledge, custom and common sense. Itseems to have been in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that gypsies first

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made their impact on the European consciousness. The first record of theirappearance in the British Isles is in 1505 in Scotland,

…in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer. They presented themselves toJames IV as pilgrims, their leader being lord of ‘little Egypt’… In England, thiscategory of persons was first recorded in 1514 in the form of an ‘Egyptian’woman who could ‘tell marvellous things by looking into one’s hands’… Oneorigin for this Egyptian label, both in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europeis, according to Clébert, that well before Gypsies or ‘Tsiganes’ were publiclyrecorded in western Europe (in the fourteenth century) ‘all mountebanks andtravelling showmen found themselves dubbed “Egyptians”’.37

The social identity of gypsies, then, seems bound up from the very beginningwith both magic and performance. The gypsy genealogy of conjuring is only partof the story, however. Another version of the theory that the art of conjuringis Egyptian in origin looks back to a much earlier period – that of the OldTestament. Thomas Frost, author of one of the first detailed histories of conjuring,begins there:

As Egypt was the cradle of the sciences, so it is in Egypt that we find the firstinstances of the practice of the arts by which the senses of the observer havebeen, from time immemorial, deluded and imposed upon.

That the practitioners of magic had attained a high degree of skill as early asthe epoch of the Pharaohs is shown by the Biblical account of the wonderswhich they were able to display in competition with Aaron. We read in thatremarkable narrative that ‘Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and beforehis servants, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh called the wise men andthe sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner withtheir enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod, and they becameserpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.’ The trial of skill betweenthe Hebrew and the Egyptian magicians was well contested at the outset, andin its progress must have been one of intense and growing interest to thepeople of both nationalities.38

The story of Aaron’s rod (to which we will return in the next chapter) featuresin most histories of magic. But a different kind of case for the Egyptian originsof conjuring was bolstered by a discovery made by nineteenth-centuryEgyptologists. The earliest accounts of magic tricks that we have today comefrom the document known as ‘p.Westcar’, or the Westcar Papyrus – named afterHenry Westcar, who acquired it in Egypt round about 1824–5. The text isfragmentary and incomplete and is written in hieratic (i.e. cursive handwritten)


2


rather than hieroglyphic script, and it seems to originate from the MiddleKingdom period of Ancient Egypt history, round about 1700 to 1800 B.C.E. It hasbeen the subject of scholarly debate, and many different translations, ever sinceWestcar passed the papyrus to German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius. Amongthese fragments is the frequently told story of Dedi (or Djedi) and the Pharaoh.It is the incident which most modern histories of magic take as the starting pointof magic as performance. Here is a fairly typical version of the story:

The first magic exhibition took place almost five thousand years ago whenCheops, the pharaoh who presided over the building of the Great Pyramidsummoned a magician named Dedi to his palace. He was said to be able torestore decapitated heads… The pharaoh wanted to see Dedi do his fameddecapitation, so he offered the magician a condemned prisoner, but Dedirefused to decapitate a human victim. Instead he randomly chose a goose fromthe pharaoh’s menagerie. He grabbed the goose’s body with one hand andwith the other pulled its head off. He then extended his arms, demonstratingthat the goose’s head was no longer connected to its body. Then he laid thegoose’s limp body on the floor, walked a few paces away, and set the head downon the ground. After everyone could observe that the decapitated goose wasdead, he put the body under one of his arms and walked back over to the headand picked it up. He pushed the lifeless head onto the body and suddenly thegoose squawked, full of life, and ran around the room.39

The particular re-telling of Dedi’s performance which I have just quoted,suitably coloured and angled towards his own style, is by the successfulcontemporary illusionist David Blaine. Like most historians of magic who referto the story, Blaine treats Dedi’s decapitation routine as ‘The first somewhatreliable account of an actual magician’s performance being presented solely asan amusing entertainment’.40 And, indeed, five thousand years later, the sametrick of decapitating and restoring the head of a fowl can be seen performed byBlaine himself on TV and video.41 He does it in his own very streetwise style, onthe streets of a downtown area of an unnamed American city, to an audienceof passers-by rather than to a Pharaoh in his own court, but it is certainly thesame trick.

There is, in fact, something quite ‘staged’, and rather knowing, aboutBlaine’s echo of this, one of the earliest recorded conjuring tricks. The videoperformance is driven, at least in part, by Blaine’s own sense of intellectualshowmanship: he is very aware (often ironically) of his own relation to hisheritage as a conjuror, and a large amount of his act relies on intertextualquotation and reference to earlier feats of previous generations. Even so, thefive-thousand-year span between the two performances is significant. Not manyof the performing arts can point to routines with so long a shelf life. The

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decapitation feat (‘one of the oldest in the bag of magician’s tricks’,42 accordingto Milbourne Christopher) appears to be a perennially popular illusion.

But although the trick is substantially the same, its meaning will not remainconstant. Magic tricks and illusions take place in the minds of spectators asmuch as they do in the hands of the prestidigitator – and this has severalconsequences. Spectators bring to performance a set of assumptions about howthe world is, how it operates, the limits of possibility within that world, the placeof performance within it, the limits of performance – and so on. An illusion suchas the above performed within a culture which officially acknowledges the abilityof humans to influence natural processes by means such as religious ritual willhave a very different meaning from the same illusion performed in one whichofficially believes this to be impossible. Blaine, on the streets of America at theend of the twentieth century, positions himself as an entertainer rather than asan occult practitioner, and his actions are received accordingly. The audienceexperience a momentary shock, followed by laughter, relief, admiration. We maynot know how it was done, but we are impressed. It’s a clever trick.

But how appropriate is it to project our contemporary experience of the street-conjuror’s illusion back in time, to read Dedi’s decapitation as ‘the first somewhatreliable account of an actual magician�s performance being presented solely asan amusing entertainment’? One of the recurring themes of the book will bethe interplay between the two apparently separate categories of magic which isperceived as performance or entertainment and the magic which is perceived asmanifestation of the occult or paranormal. Where does Dedi’s performance lie inthis nexus?

The answer is quite complex. Problems of translation and interpretationhave been compounded because the Westcar papyrus is incomplete and possiblycorrupt, with key sections of the text missing. The extant text is written in ajerky and fragmented style, possibly that of someone unskilled in such writing.It has even been suggested that it was written by ‘a child [who] was learning[hieratic script] in school and attempting to copy it.’43 More to the point, thePapyrus itself is telling stories which are set in a distant past. The charactersinclude Prince Hordadef – one of the main narrators of the stories in thepapyrus – and his father King Khufu (better known nowadays by the Greek formof his name, Cheops). Khufu lived and ruled in the early twenty-sixth centuryB.C.E., and commissioned the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. By the timethe manuscript was written – about a thousand years later! – Khufu himself waseffectively a mythical character.

If we look at the context in which Dedi’s decapitation routine is placed in themanuscript, we begin to get a slightly different picture. First of all, there is the wayin which Dedi is introduced into the narrative. It is interestingly ambiguous. KingKhufu has been listening to tales of magic from the past – tales of a scribe whomakes a wax crocodile that comes to life to punish an adulterer, and of another


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with the power to divide the waters of a lake. Then his son offers to introduce himto a present-day magician.

Prince Hordadef stood before the king, and he said: ‘Your Majesty has heardtales regarding the wonders performed by magicians in other days, but I canbring forth a worker of marvels who now lives in the kingdom.’

King Khufu said: ‘And who is he, my son?’

‘His name is Dedi,’ answered Prince Hordadef. ‘He is a very old man, for hisyears are a hundred and ten. Each day he eats a joint of beef and fivehundred loaves of bread, and drinks a hundred jugs of beer. He can smite offthe head of a living creature and restore it again; he can make a lion followhim; and he knows the secrets of the habitation of the god Thoth, whichYour Majesty has desired to know so that you may design the chambers ofyour pyramid.’44

In the context of the Westcar narrative, then, Dedi looks at first like a muchmore ‘real’ figure than the mythical heroes of the stories Khufu is listeningto: he is, after all, living in the ‘present day’ and Hordadef offers to bring him intothe King’s presence. But when Hordadef starts to describe him, Dedi turns intoyet another miraculous figure – more bizarre, in fact, than the comparativelyhumdrum chief scribes of long ago. He is a hundred and ten years old and heeats five hundred loaves of bread and drinks a hundred jugs of beer a day! Evenmore significantly, he is credited with divine knowledge – he ‘knows the secretsof the habitation of the god Thoth’. This is something which particularlyinterests Khufu: Dedi is summoned to the court.

The decapitation routine which Blaine describes (and re-creates) involvesjust one goose. The account in the Westcar papyrus describes Dedi buildingup to a rather more impressive climax. Refusing to decapitate a humanprisoner, Dedi first performs the trick on a duck; then he repeats it with agoose; finally ‘King Khufu then caused a cow to be brought in, and its headwas cut off. Dedi restored the animal to life again, and caused it to follow him.’Geese and ducks are comparatively simple subjects for the decapitation trick.The performer relies largely on the natural instinct of a fowl to tuck its headunder its wing; he then provides a false head to substitute for the real one.Cows, which lack both wings and any instinct to hide their head under them,are somewhat trickier…

After performing the decapitation trick, Khufu quizzes Dedi about thisknowledge. Dedi answers with all the ambiguity of a practised soothsayer:

His Majesty then spoke to the magician and said: ‘It is told that you possessthe secrets of the dwelling of the god Thoth.’


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Dedi answered: ‘I do not possess them, but I know where they are concealed,and that is within a temple chamber at Heliopolis. There the plans are kept ina box, but it is no insignificant person who shall bring them to Your Majesty.’

‘I would fain know who will deliver them unto me,’ King Khufu said.

Dedi prophesied that three sons would be born to Rud-dedit, wife of the chiefpriest of Ra. The eldest would become chief priest at Heliopolis and wouldpossess the plans. He and his brothers would one day sit upon the throne andrule over all the land.

King Khufu�s heart was filled with gloom and alarm when he heard theprophetic words of the great magician.45

Dedi pleases the king, however, and is duly rewarded: ‘thereafterwards [he]dwelt in the house of the Prince Hordadef. He was given daily for his portion anox, a thousand loaves of bread, a hundred jugs of beer, and a hundred bunchesof onions.’

Quite apart from the munificence of Dedi’s fee, the context of the decapitationtrick suggests that this is by no means simply an account of a ‘magician�sperformance being presented solely as an amusing entertainment’. On thecontrary, the Dedi of the Westcar papyrus is a prophet, a sage, and a priest-likefigure who knows the secrets of the gods. The story which is told about him is setaround with religious and mystical apparatus which is clearly taken with completeseriousness by Khufu, Hordadef and their court – and as far as we can tell, by thewriter(s) of the papyrus, one thousand years later, as well. The decapitationroutines which he performs are merely a demonstration – a token of his abilities.What he is really there for is to prophesy to the King.

Dedi himself may or may not have existed; the performance in front ofPharaoh may or may not have taken place. But whether it did or not, it is wrappedup – like the tales of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights – in a concentric seriesof narratives-within-narratives, each of which refers us back to an earlier era.The Westcar papyrus itself comes to us from 25 centuries ago. The writer of thatpapyrus tells of Khufu, who lived more than a thousand years before that – andin that narrative Khufu listens to tales from a time even longer ago. These taleseffectively frame Dedi’s performance and give it meaning. When Khufu seesDedi’s performance with the duck, the goose and the bull, he concludes that heis in the presence of a magician as great as – or greater than – those in the fables,and he goes on to ask his advice about the building of the pyramids.

And what meanings are we to make of it? Historians of magic tend to read theDedi story as if it were an event which really took place. And, since historians ofmagic are a sceptical bunch, with little or no time for supernatural explanations,and since they know how the trick of decapitating a bird is done, they quitereasonably attribute that technique to Dedi. One of two readings is now possible.


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Either the whole performance was analogous to a modern conjuring show, witheverybody knowing that it is all an illusion and enjoying the fact; or else Dedi wasfooling his audience, using techniques which street magicians still use today, intobelieving he had supernatural powers.

Clearly, the context of the story precludes the first interpretation. The royalaudience is not there just to watch a clever prestidigitator (a ‘magician’sperformance being presented solely as an amusing entertainment’). It is, or ratherit believes it is, witnessing an engagement with the supernatural. The secondinterpretation, then, that what was produced as sleight of hand was received as thesupernatural, is more plausible – but it is also problematic. According to thisinterpretation, Dedi becomes a sophisticated manipulator of a gullible (or at leasta credulous) royal audience. In a rebuttal of what they call the ‘economico-political’ theory, Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale draw attention to the factthat in most contemporary accounts of the origins of conjuring there is anunderlying assumption that ‘these earliest conjurors were really unscrupulouscharacters; what we call con men… [who] were promoting their deceptions andlies… for their own personal gain’.46 It is an assumption which contains a strongelement of anti-clericalism. They cite as typical examples James Randi’scharacterization of early conjuring as being ‘the carefully guarded weapon of thepriesthood, by which it was used to establish a belief in supernatural powersamong an uninformed public’,47 and Milbourne Christopher’s account of earlyconjurors, which goes as follows:

Ancient religious wonder-workers played on the superstition of their followers byperforming impressive feats. The temple ritualists, medicine men, soothsayers,and oracles employed the same basic principle – misdirection to divert attentionfrom the method to the effect – as the conjuring entertainers who candidlyadmitted that they were only human. Of course, those who claimed to be theintermediaries of the gods, and those who could ‘prove’ their claims with theirfeats, often attained positions of great power and influence. Rulers knelt beforethem and offered bountiful sacrifices to the deities they represented.48

Burger and Neale are sceptical of this account of priests, oracles and ‘templeritualists’ wilfully and cynically deceiving their neighbours, but it has a longhistory. Albert Hopkins’ great Victorian treatise Magic: Stage Illusions, SpecialEffects and Trick Photography contains a chapter concerned with the ‘TempleTricks of the Greeks’ which shows, with detailed diagrams, how many ofthe apparently supernatural effects of the temples of Classical and Hellenic Greecewere achieved by sophisticated mechanical devices using the same principles ofengineering – hydraulics, mechanics, steam pressure – which lay behind theindustrial might of nineteenth-century western capitalism. Thus milk and wineflowed from altars, sacred flames lit spontaneously, doors into the gods’ holy


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places opened magically by themselves, and water changed into wine – all bymeans of clever technology, operated by the priests of the temple in order tomaintain their own power and influence. Comparing the mechanisms of lustralvases in the Greek temples to those of vending machines in 1889, he concludes:

The mechanism is almost identical with that shown in the modern device;in fact this ancient vase… is the prototype of all modern automatic vendingmachines, and simply serves as the proof of the truth of the saying, ‘There isnothing new under the sun’.49

But Hopkins’ book itself is based on far older sources. Much of what hedescribes is based directly on the writings of Heron (or Hero) of Alexandria, theGreek geometer and inventor who flourished in the first century A.D., and wasthe inventor of the ‘aeolipile’, the first known steam-driven engine. Heron’swritings on mechanics and pneumatics contain much of what we know about theengineering of the ancient Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations.Heron was every bit as sceptical as Hopkins, and his books contain many detailedexplanations of how the temple priests performed their apparently miraculouseffects. Two hundred years or so later, Bishop (later Saint) Hippolytus, one of theFathers of the early Christian Church, wrote a work called Philosophumena, orThe Refutation of All Heresies, in which he lists and refutes all the heresies ofthe pagans. This contains sections on the illusions of pagan priests, showing howthey performed such miracles as plunging their hands into burning pitch;bringing about spontaneous combustion through incantations or (a trick wellknown to theatrical special effects departments) creating the effect of thunder:

Thunder is produced is very many ways. For very many large stones rolled froma height over wooden planks and falling upon sheets of brass make a noise likethunder. And they coil a slender cord round the thin board on which the wool-carders press cloth, and then spin the board by whisking away the string whenthe whirring of it makes the sound of thunder. These tricks they play thus.50

From Heron and Hippolytus through to nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryhistorians of magic such as Hopkins, Christopher and Randi, then, this imagepersists: of the priests, soothsayers, medicine men and oracles of earlier (or more‘primitive’) civilizations as skilful prestidigitators, deliberately deceiving believersfor personal power or influence. Nor are such anecdotes confined to the pre-Christian era. For example, in sixteenth-century England there was the famous‘Rood of Grace’ at Boxley Abbey in Kent – a ‘cross bearing an image of a crucifiedChrist that was capable of moving’.51 The abbey became an important place ofpilgrimage because of the apparent holiness of the Rood, but when the abbey wassacked at the time of the Reformation it was discovered by the jubilant reformers


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that the monks had been deceiving the people, and that ‘the thing was worked bywires through little pipes’.52

It is the context of this, and other tales of trickster-priests, that the story ofDedi is most usually understood: if he is not simply a hired entertainer (and heis clearly not), then he becomes one of these cynical tricksters. The problem isthat this interpretation tends to treat the Westcar account of Dedi and thePharaoh as if it were something like a reliable eyewitness account of an ancientconjuring routine. Of course, it is anything but. Rather it is generically related tothose tales of wonder to which King Khufu is listening – surreal tales which (likeScheherazade’s) are set in a semi-mythical past and which have their own orderof truth. This suggests that we need to read the story in a rather different way,one which takes account of its fictional, quasi-mythical aspects. By this I do notmean we should simply dismiss it as a falsehood: rather that we need to considerjust what kind of truth it articulates. The story of Dedi and the Pharaoh is notitself a myth, but the kind of truth to which it lays claim is closer to that of myththan it is to that of documentary – a truth which is not dependent on the apparentfacts of the story, and whose value is not diminished if these are shown to befalse. The cultural work it does may be in part aetiological – it explainssomething about the origins of the Great Pyramid. It is also partly ontological, ofthe order of myth which locates events in a sacred past, a time of origins whichis separate from the present, but with which – through the myths themselves –the present can make connections. Myths make connection with this real andsacred time.53

Burger and Neale are right to question the ‘economico-political’ theory of theorigins of conjuring, and its universal ‘presumption that the earliest magicians(the priests or temple ritualists) were scoundrels (and worse!)’54 – although,there were indeed plenty of these. However, the grounds on which they mounttheir critique of the economico-political theory of origins are not ones which Iwould necessarily share. ‘Can the origin of magic be exhaustively explained’, theyask, ‘simply by introducing the categories of political power and economicwealth?’55 Perhaps not; even so, I would resist any reading which assumes thatpower and wealth are unimportant in a consideration of what conjuring andmagic are all about. At heart, in fact, conjuring is all about power – of one sort oranother. The problem, however, is that power and its workings are complexphenomena, changing in form along with the historically specific circumstancesin which they are embedded.

Shaman/showmanThe more important insight which lies at the heart of Burger and Neale’scritique is that the relationship between belief and disbelief need not be that ofmutually exclusive binary opposition. It could even be, as they suggest, that ‘theseemingly alien conjunction of belief and disbelief may well be quite standard


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human behaviour’.56 In order to explore this notion, and its implications morefully, we need to consider the relation between the entertainer and the priest,the showman and the shaman.

The story of Dedi brings us to one of the key explanations of the roots ofconjuring: that it is a remnant of magic in that other sense of the word –efficacious magic, magic performed in the belief that it will affect things in theeveryday world. Edmund Wilson articulated elegantly this sense that the art ofthe conjuror contains a level of hidden symbolism which links us, too, with asacred past. Writing in the 1940s (not one of the greatest or most glamorousages of stage conjuring) Wilson sees a deeper level of meaning in thiscomparatively low-status branch of showbiz. There is, he says:

…more to these feats and to our pleasure in them than we are likely to beconscious of. Some of the tricks that have lasted longest and become fixed inthe popular imagination must be the remnants of fertility rites. The wand isan obvious symbol, and has its kinship with Aaron’s rod and the Pope’s staffthat puts forth leaves in Tannhäuser. Its production of rabbits and flowersfrom a hat has become the accepted type-trick of conjuring. And themagician who escapes from the box: what is he but Adonis and Attis and allthe rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise?57

The idea that inherent in the tricks of the modern conjuror are echoes offertility rites, puts the conjuror’s act, too, on the level of myth. The conjurorwho pulls the rabbit or the flowers from the hat, or escapes from the box, ismaking a connection, however unconscious, with that sacred and ideal time ofprimordial origins.

Moreover, Wilson’s reference to ‘Attis and Adonis and all the rest of the corngods that are buried and rise’ reminds us that the routines of the conjuror andthe illusionist impinge on a special relationship which theatre anthropologyhas traditionally emphasized, between performance and magic. PerformanceStudies has a fascination – often a rather uneasy fascination – with roots andorigins. Questions about the origins of theatre, of course, pre-date PerformanceStudies as such, and disciplines such as classical studies and anthropology havealso offered answers to the question of where theatrical performance comes from.There are broadly two schools of thought. The first sees theatre and drama asbeing essentially imitative and having evolved from religious rituals which wereoriginally created as symbolic enactments of natural phenomena or forces. Thepalaeolithic cave paintings, dating from between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C.E., inthe cave of Les Trois Frères in southern France are frequently cited as evidence ofsuch rituals. These masked figures, wearing animal masks and skins, seem tobe performing some kind of sacred dance. Ritualistic performances such as thesecomprised symbolic actions intended supernaturally to influence or transform the


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material world, to promote fertility, or to celebrate the annual cycle of the seasons.The purpose of these ritualized performances was to imitate natural forces andthereby to control them, bringing them down to something more approaching ahuman scale. From these imitative dances – eventually – grew theatre as weunderstand it.

An alternative strand of theories, though, locates the roots of theatre inshamanistic58 rituals – those trance ‘performances’ which give the shamanaccess to the spirit world, where he or she meets with, and is possessed by,spirits. The shaman’s journey is typically a healing one, and what is broughtback from the spirit world is to be shared with the tribe or an individual. Thepurpose of the ritual is to manifest an actual supernatural presence to theaudience – most often in the service of performing a healing act on behalf of anindividual or the community. Unlike the dancers in the nature-worship rituals –who are understood to be symbolically representing a natural or supernaturalforce – the shaman is believed to be embodying it, and making it fully andactually manifest to the audience/congregation.59

Paradoxically, however, the components of the shamanic ritual, which caninclude dancing, acrobatics, juggling, fire-walking and fire-eating, sometimeslook very much like those of the modern popular entertainer. For example,Margaret Lantis, in her study of Alaskan shamans, recorded a range of sleight-of-hand tricks including sword-swallowing; escapology; knives or spears beingdriven into the body without injury; beads being swallowed and then recoveredfrom another person’s ear; and tricks with string that is cut and then restored.60

Walter Hoffman’s accounts of the Algonquin shamans include ventriloquismand descriptions of a routine in which a bear’s claw hangs upside down on aninverted mirror (held in place by a secret daub of wax).61 The spiritual task ofthe shaman, which is to manifest ‘an immediately present reality of a differentorder’,62 does not preclude the use of precisely those techniques of sleight ofhand which a modern-day conjuror would learn.

In anthropological literature there is a story which has become almost iconic.First recounted by Franz Boas from a fragment which he had obtained, itconcerns a Kwakiutl Indian named Quesalid, from the Vancouver region ofCanada.63 Quesalid is a sceptic who does not believe in the powers of sorcerersand shamans of his own culture. Accordingly, he inveigles his way into becominginitiated as a shaman precisely in order to expose them and their conjuringtricks. He quickly learns that, as he suspected, most of what they do consists ofsleight of hand. One particular trick which is used in curing the sick involvesconcealing a small tuft of down in the corner of the shaman’s mouth: theshaman produces this at the dramatic moment, covered in blood (from his owngums or tongue, which he has bitten) and announces that this ‘bloody worm’ isin fact the disease which he has removed from the patient’s body.64 Quesalid isready to expose the shamans for the frauds that they are. Before he can do so,


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however, he is asked to treat a sick person who has dreamed that Quesalid willheal him. Using the trickery he has been taught, he performs the requisiterituals, and the treatment

…was an outstanding success. Although Quesalid came to be known fromthat moment on as a ‘great shaman’ he did not lose his critical faculties. Heinterpreted his success in psychological terms – it was successful ‘because he[the sick person] believed strongly in his dream about me.’65

But increasingly complex encounters lead Quesalid to re-think further hisinitial scepticism. Seeing other shamans at work using techniques differentfrom his own, he becomes increasingly convinced that there are various modesof supernatural healing, and that some are less false than others. In particular,he is appalled and disgusted by those shamans who diagnose and claim to curetheir patients without actually producing the ‘disease’ – the material object,such as the bloody tuft, which has been ‘removed’ from the patient’s body.Moreover, he repeatedly finds that his cures work where his competitors’ do not.Gradually, as his own fame grows, he modifies his original position. Hecontinues to expose ‘fakes’, but

his original attitude has changed considerably. The radical negativism ofthe free thinker has given way to more moderate feelings. Real shamans doexist. And what about him? At the end of the narrative we cannot tell but itis evident that he carries on his craft conscientiously, takes pride in hisachievements, and warmly defends the technique of the bloody down againstall rival schools. He seems to have completely lost sight of the fallaciousnessof the technique which he had so disparaged at the beginning.66

Is there a contradiction in Quesalid’s position? From a purely positiviststandpoint, certainly there is. Yet anthropological literature is full of stories ofencounters between anthropologists and shamans, in which the anthropologistpoints out that the shaman is simply using sleight of hand in order to performhis miracles, and the shaman replies, effectively, so what? The technique of theshaman operates within a mental framework where belief and disbelief are notmutually exclusive binary oppositions.

Is this where conjuring comes from? Are we to hear, in the performance ofthe theatrical conjuror or the street magician, a plaintive echo of the shamanperforming rituals for the benefit of the tribe? An influential article by E. T. Kirbyin The Drama Review (1974) located the roots of contemporary popularentertainment – ventriloquism, puppetry, conjuring and escape acts, acrobatics,fire-eating, clowning and so on – in the shamanic experience. Making a roughdistinction between the ‘drama’ and popular entertainment, Kirby argues that


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[a]t their origin, popular entertainments are associated with trance andderive from the practices of trance, not of childhood play or imitation. Theydo not seek to imitate, reproduce or record the forms of existent social reality.Rather, the performing arts that develop from shamanist trance may becharacterized as the manifestation, or conjuring, of an immediately presentreality of a different order, kind, or quality, from that of reality itself.Shamanist illusionism, with its ventriloquism and escape acts, seeks to breakthe surface of reality, as it were, to cause the appearance of a super-realitythat is ‘more real’ than the ordinary.67

Kirby’s suggestion is echoed and developed by Rogan Taylor in his fascinatingand provocative book The Death and Resurrection Show, which draws on well-documented shamanic traditions from Siberia to the Americas and showsparallels between the ecstatic journey of the shaman and the functions of allkinds of contemporary performance. He speculates, ‘based on a combination offacts and circumstantial evidence’,68 on the process by which shamanism becameshow business.

The tribal audience certainly would not have arrived at the shaman’s healingséance in the expectation of being mildly amused or merrily entertained.They came to witness, and to take part in, something powerful and sacred.They expected to experience their religion in action. But if it is true thatshowbusiness as we know it has derived directly from the performances ofthe ancient shamans, then there must be a process or a combination of historicalcircumstances which isolated the showbiz elements in such performances,and detached them from their originally-integrated positions as parts of agreater whole: the shamanistic world view.69

He is particularly interested in the possibility that this shamanistic descentmanifests itself most powerfully in popular culture, rather than in high or officialculture:

But the people’s entertainment, that constant rival of official displays of powerand grandeur, was provided by the travelling players, the low-caste or out-castegroups who had never whole-heartedly entered society and stopped travelling.It is among them that showbusiness has its natural roots. Popularentertainment is a form of ‘petrified shamanism’. It is petrified in both senseof the word: it is a hard, shiny shell which surrounds, conceals and protects agreat mystery. It is also a fearful response in that it recognises that this mysteryat its heart has become taboo and dangerous to promote. Consequently thereare probably quite direct and profound connections between the magicalperformances of shamans and those types of entertainment which have always


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belonged to the ordinary people. These modern forms of showbusiness,the clown shows, pantomime, the circus, popular music and streetperformances, are steeped in magical history. They offer an alternativeculture, a counter-culture, to the official blandishments of civilised society.70

Taylor is writing in the years before Cultural Studies had seriouslyproblematized this rather romantic picture of a popular culture which offers abeneficial imaginative alternative to official culture. He also overstates his case:art fulfils various kinds of functions, not all of them derived from the shamanichealing journey to the Underworld, and some forms are more susceptible to thismode of analysis than others. Even so, his account is a plausible one, and hisconcentration on popular cultural forms strengthens his argument.

The direct and profound connections which Taylor hypothesizes between themagical performances of shamans and contemporary popular entertainmentshould have a particular resonance for the art of conjuring. After all, the mostfamous definition of a conjuror, coined by Robert-Houdin, is that he is ‘an actorplaying the part of a magician’.71 And while many modern entertainers would seekto distance themselves from the image of the shaman or the mystic, others workhard to foreground that connection. At the beginning of the twentieth century, forexample, Carter the Great, wearing his turban, would talk of his meetings withEastern fakirs, creating a background narrative suggesting secret knowledge andinitiation into ‘real’ magic. More recently, David Blaine, in his autobiographicalMysterious Stranger, from which his version of the Dedi story quoted above istaken, draws on a wide range of religious and mythical symbolism and stresses hisencounters with shamans from tribal cultures.

Taylor substantiates his argument by reference to well-documentedethnographic and anthropological studies of various tribes, both nomadic andsettled, which effectively show the process of evolution from shamanism intoshow business in action. The most compelling of these accounts comes fromIvan A. Lopatin’s study of the social life and religious beliefs and practices of theKitimat Indians of British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century.72

Lopatin describes how a Kitimat shaman, in order to gain recognition of hisprofessional status, had to establish a social status based not only on theacquisition of material goods, but also on his skill and generosity as a host; hewas expected to throw parties and provide entertainment for his guests – oftenwith the aid of other shamans:

Because of their many-sided talents, shamans were invited by hosts atpotlatches [parties] to entertain their guests. Two, three, or even moreshamans would perform ‘Kamlanies’ (séances) merely for the purpose ofdisplaying their powers. They vied with one another in their singing, dancing,play, wit and eloquence. They recited long poetic narrations of their


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supernatural adventures in the company of their ‘ashutas’ (spirits) andperformed shamanistic tricks. They walked with bare feet in the fire, ate theglowing embers, drove knives into their bodies. In this case the shamansserved as prestidigitators, jugglers and acrobats, their performances beingnothing more than stage play.73

Further, if a Kitimat shaman lost status because, for example, of failed cures,one way in which he could repair his damaged reputation was to take partagainst other shamans in public contests of skill.

The use of jugglery among the shamans aggravated the contest for prestige.When one of the shamans entertained his audience by performing tricks, theothers strove with all their might to detect these tricks and prove to theaudience that they had been deceived by the juggling shaman. Sometimesthey performed their own tricks in order to out-juggle their rival. Success insuch a contest depended mostly upon the shaman’s assistants. They acted ashis accomplices and spies.74

The Kitimat Indians in the early twentieth century occupied an intermediateposition in which old beliefs were still important, but at the same time ‘suchperformances, made on demand for less than sacred purposes, are readilydeteriorating into caricatures’.75

It is possible to see this (as Taylor here seems to see it)76 simply as evidenceof a decline within the Kitimat tribal structure and belief system: a deteriorationover time from an ancient dignified tradition into the conditions of mere showbusiness. But as a model for a broader understanding of the relationship betweenthe shaman of the tribal society and the entertainer-magician of the industrialsociety, it leaves too much unexplained. Admittedly, it fits well with the kindof standard theatre history which traces drama from ritual origins to secularcomedy and tragedy. However, it does not do justice either to the shamanicdimension of popular culture or to the extent to which tribal shamanism itselfdepends on showmanship. Both in contemporary and in ancient societies,elements of shamanism and conjuring, of ritual magic and entertainment, arewoven together into a more complex pattern than this linear chronological modelwould suggest.

Magic, efficacy and entertainment There are, however, alternatives to the standard socio-Darwinist account of theorigins of theatre, which sees it as having ‘descended’ directly from religiousrituals of the past, mutating into a secular art form in the process. In recentyears, following the work of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, it has beenmore common to focus on synchronic rather than diachronic processes, and


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to explore the complex webs of interrelationships between ritual and theatrewhich exist at any one time in a culture; or, to adopt Schechner’s terminology,between those performances whose end is ‘efficacy’ and those whose end is‘entertainment’.77

Efficacy/ritual stands at one end of a continuum of performance. It involves theexpectation of results; is linked to an absent Other [often in the form of god[s] orspirits]; relates to symbolic time; suggests that the performer is possessed, in atrance or somehow imbued with power; the audience’s role is participatory, itbelieves uncritically in the reality of what is presented and is implicated in an actof collective creativity. Entertainment/theatre exists at the opposite end of thespectrum. Its purpose is fun, there is no absent Other necessary and the focus ison the here and now. The performer is in control and not linked to anysupernatural power, while the audience observes and appreciates (often critically)rather than participates.

What Schechner’s model emphasizes is the interplay between efficacy andentertainment. It is not a simple chronological progression (or ‘descent’) fromone to the other, but a changing and dynamic relationship in which bothelements are always present to some extent (even if, sometimes, one of them isonly vestigially so). The key image is that of a ‘braid’.

[T]heater history can be given an overall shape as a development of a braidedstructure continuously interrelating efficacy (ritual) and entertainment(theater). At each period in every culture one or the other is dominant – oneis ascending while the other is descending. Naturally, these changes are partof changes in the overall social structure of a culture… For Western theatre,at least, I think it can be shown that when the braid is tight – that is whenefficacy and entertainment are both present in nearly equal degrees – theaterflourishes.78

Thus, for example, not only is theatre and theatre-going inherently ritualisticof itself, but even the most intensely efficacious ritual contains an element of‘theatricality’, of entertainment – witness the centrality of dance and song in thework of the shaman. The periods in the European cultural tradition at which theperformative braid of efficacy and entertainment has been drawn the tightestinclude the Elizabethan/Jacobean period and the present day. In our own day adeclining mainstream commercial theatre coexists (and sometimes conflicts)with a resurgent theatre of efficacy which includes such manifestations asparatheatrical and experimental performance events with various levels of ritualintention; political, applied and direct-action theatre; and performativetherapies such as dramatherapy, psychodrama, sociodrama, forum theatre andso on. In the early modern period the tendency was in the opposite direction:declining traditions of ‘efficacious performances’ (represented by liturgical plays,


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church ritual and court ceremony) impacted with an emergent theatre ofentertainment (popular entertainments, fairground shows and the performancesof travelling players and musicians) in a convergence which resulted in the richmixture of the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage.

The stage illusionist, the vaudeville or street-corner conjuror, embodiessome of the strengths, but also some of the paradoxes and contradictions of theinterplay between performance as efficacy and performance as entertainment.For the conjuror is one thing pretending to be another. This is entertainmentmasquerading as efficacy; and it is the exploitation of the ambiguity between thetwo which lies at the heart of the stage magician’s art. Like the shaman, thestage illusionist blurs the distinctions between the two, makes magic intoperformance, and performs magic in the process. Objects appear, vanish,reappear in unexpected places; bodies are dismembered then miraculouslyrestored to wholeness again; or else the conjuror himself ‘dies’ in a locked chestor coffin, only to return from the underworld unharmed. The conjuror and theshaman both perform ‘the death and resurrection show’.79

The conjuror’s social function may be less complex than the shaman’s,lacking for the most part any professed healing or cohesive power.80 Theconjuror’s act, however, is more multi-layered than the shaman’s in thissense: that the latter depends on leading an audience/congregation into asecure belief (usually shared by the shaman him- or herself) in the performer’s‘supernatural’ powers, in the certainty that the shaman stands on the thresholdbetween two worlds: the natural world and the supernatural. The conjuror,on the other hand, performs highly ritualized routines which both invoke andalso disavow the supposition of supernatural influence. The performance oftheatrical magic typically exploits an ambiguous space between the disturbing/exciting possibility that what an audience is seeing might genuinely flout thelaws of nature, and the reassuring/disappointing awareness that it probablydoes not – that it is all really done by sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors, andthe arts of deception. Conjurors and writers on magic tend to take strong moralpositions on this: for example, Henry Hay, author of ‘the acknowledged classictext for conjurors, both beginning and advanced’ tells the trainee magicianthat

conjuring is the art – let’s say the game – of entertaining by tempting aparticular audience to accept, temporarily, minor infractions of natural law. Ifyou ask them to accept permanently – to believe – you are a charlatan, amessiah, perhaps both; not a prestidigitator.81

And this is the essential rhetorical manoeuvre which is involved in theillusionist’s act. We are asked to take pleasure in ambiguity, ambivalence andcontradiction: not in the conviction that the performer is really able to defy


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natural laws, but in the tension between this imaginative possibility and thecontradictory reassurance that he cannot. This tension between belief andunbelief, between the frame of the fiction and the awareness that it is a frame,is also a major part of the rhetoric of the theatre. But it is a tension which is notalways stable – and indeed, a tension which is not always under the control ofthe performer. There are times when ambiguity collapses under pressure.


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Chapter Two

‘The evil Spirit has a hand in theTricks of these Jugglers’: conjuringand Christian orthodoxy

In the previous chapter, I argued that the relation between entertainment andefficacy, between magic as performance and ‘real’ magic, is a complex one. Inthis chapter, I shall examine some of the ways in which religious commentatorsin various ages have sought to ignore that complexity, and to insist on clear-cutdistinctions between the true wonders which belong properly only to God, andthe false wonders of heathens. Given the Christian church’s deep-seatedambivalence towards all kinds of theatrical display, it is perhaps not surprisingto discover that one of the ways in which theologians have discredited thesupernatural claims of rival belief systems is by dismissing their wonder-workers and priests as mere tricksters. In the writings and thought of manyearly Christians on the subject, ‘performance’ is assigned a negative value.

When, for example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Christianmissionaries began to make regular contact with the shamans of the ‘heathenbarbarians’ whom they were intent on converting, they treated them with amixture of tolerance and contempt. Louis Hennepin, for example, one of theFranciscan friars who explored the upper Mississippi valley in the lateseventeenth century describes them as follows.

There’s no nation but what have their Jugglers, which some count Sorcerers:but ‘tis not likely they are under any Covenant, or hold communication with theDevil. At the same time, one may venture to say, that the evil Spirit has a handin the Tricks of these Jugglers, and makes use of them to amuse these poorPeople, and render them more incapable of receiving the Knowledge of the trueGod. They are very fond of these Jugglers, tho they cozen them perpetually.82

‘Jugglers’ here is used in the Renaissance sense, to mean what we would calla conjuror or illusionist. Certainly Hennepin has no doubt that these ‘jugglers’(whose feats included rain-making, healing and creating good luck for thehunters) were nothing but dishonest performers – tricksters, who ‘cozen [theirpeople] perpetually’.

It is significant that Hennepin is not interested in branding these jugglers asDevil worshippers. (Indeed, to do so would, in some ways, be detrimental to hisargument, for it would grant them greater power: it is a more astute move tolabel them as frauds). Yet neither does he see them as totally innocent on that

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score; and his argument that the non-Christian wonder-workers are in someway complicit (however unwittingly) with the Devil, since the Devil makes useof them to distract their audiences from knowledge of the true God, articulatesan ancient problematic.

‘Moses was a juggler’Miracles have traditionally been seen by the church as a vivid way ofdemonstrating the active interest which God takes in human affairs. However,their usefulness as a proof of God’s existence, or at least of his partiality to onefaith community over another, is limited by the fact that miracle-working is alsoclaimed by other religions. Judaeo-Christian thought, as a result, has always hadwithin it a strong tradition of de-bunking rival miracle workers. From scripturaltimes onwards, prophets, scholars, scribes and preachers have been eager topoint out the difference between ‘real’ miracle workers, those inspired by theone true God; and the phoneys, the fakes, the mere conjurors.

The process starts in some of the earliest scriptural writings. In the myth ofExodus, so central to both Judaism and Christianity, Moses is portrayed not onlyas a spiritual leader but also as an agent of divine miracle-working. When he andhis brother Aaron take on the task of effecting the liberation of the Israelitesfrom their captivity in Egypt, they go before Pharaoh armed with miracles.

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron ‘When Pharaoh says to you “Perform amiracle”, then say to Aaron, “Take your staff and throw it down before Pharoahand it will become a snake.”’

Then Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lordcommanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials,and it became a snake.

Pharaoh summoned the wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magiciansalso did the same things by their secret arts. Each one threw down his staffand it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.83

Moses and Aaron are manifesting the power of the one true God (Moses hasearlier been coached by God himself to perform the transformation ‘so thatthey may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham,the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob – has appeared to you.’)84 Pharaoh’swonder-workers, on the other hand, are ‘sorcerers and… magicians’ whomanaged their inferior effects ‘by their secret arts’. Different interpretersunderstood these secret arts in different ways, of course, but by theRenaissance it was a commonplace assertion that the Egyptian court magicianswere mere tricksters, using sleight of hand. The sixteenth-century writerReginald Scot, for example, cites authorities approvingly: ‘[a]nd yet (as Calvine


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saith of them) they were but Jugglers. Neither could they doe, as manysuppose. For as Clemens saith; These Magicians did rather seem to doe thesewonders, than work them indeed.’85

This is the view most frequently found in histories of conjuring, wherePharaoh’s conjurors frequently feature, along with their compatriot Dedi, assome of the earliest recorded examples of prestidigitators. There are evenaccounts of how the trick might have been done. Writing in 1898, Henry RidgeleyEvans recounts the familiar biblical anecdote, telling how, ‘[f]ar back into theshadowy past, before the building of the pyramids, magic was a reputed art inEgypt, for Egypt was “the cradle of magic”. The magicians of Egypt, accordingto the Bible chronicle, contested against Aaron at the court of Pharaoh.’86

Provocatively, however, Evans goes on to relate how he had been told by RobertHeller, ‘prestidigitateur, traveller in the Orient and skeptic’, how he had seen thesame trick performed in Cairo by the ‘Dervishes’.

The rods actually were serpents, and hypnotized to such an extent as to becomeperfectly stiff and rigid. When thrown upon the earth, and recalled to life bysundry mystic passes and strokes, they crawled away alive and hideous as ever.Said Heller ‘It was in the open air that I saw this strange feat performed’.Transferred to the gloomy audience chamber of some old palace where the highroof is supported by ponderous stone columns painted with hieroglyphics,where rows of black marble sphinxes stare at you with unfathomable eyes, wherethe mise-en-scène is awe-inspiring – this trick of the rods turning into serpentsbecomes doubly impressive, and indeed, to the uninitiated, a miracle.87

At first sight Evans and Heller (who is characterized as a ‘skeptic’) seem tobe repeating the usual binary opposition between true miracles and trickery. Oncloser reading, however, they appear to be suggesting something rather differentfrom the classic Christian interpretation. Rather than distinguishing betweenthe true miracle and the false illusion, it is now left to the reader to infer thatAaron, too, might have been working with hypnotized snakes in order to performwhat seems like a miracle ‘to the uninitiated’.

Evans presents the case tactfully enough. Although the academic theology ofhis day, in the wake of Enlightenment materialism, had largely abandoned anyserious reliance on scriptural miracles as a philosophical foundation for the proofof God, nonetheless the churches, faced by the increasing secularisation ofnineteenth-century thought, were unwilling completely to relinquish miraclenarratives which, in the popular imagination, provided a steadfast anchor for faith.Heller’s implication that Aaron, too, was effectively performing a conjuring trickstrikes deep into the problematic relationship between the performing conjurorand Christian doctrine. Three hundred years earlier, a similar suggestion wasenough to get a man killed.

THE EVIL SPIRIT HAS A HAND IN THE TRICKS OF THESE JUGGLERS

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By the time he was in his late twenties, the Elizabethan playwright ChristopherMarlowe had a reputation for being a dangerous atheist. His most famous play,Doctor Faustus, integrates popular performing traditions and theological debate,and while it is actually rooted in orthodox Christian debates about sin andrepentance, its demonic theme may well have contributed to Marlowe’s growingreputation. At any rate, in 1593 he was arrested on charges of holding and utteringtreasonable and atheistic opinions and put on trial before the Star Chamber, thejudicial arm of the Privy Council. A government ‘informer’, Richard Baines, wasgiven the task of preparing the case against him, and on the basis of hearsayevidence and some doubtfully attributable documents, presented to the court a‘Note concerning the opinion of one Christopher Marly [sic] concerning hisdamnable judgment of religion and scorn of Gods word’, which accused him,among other things, of voicing the beliefs

[t]hat Moses was but a juggler and that one Heriots, being Sir W. Raleigh’sman, can do more than he.

That Moses made the Jews to travel forty years in the wilderness, which journeymight have been done in less than one year, ere they came to the promised land,to the intent that those who were privy to most of his subtleties might perish,and so an everlasting superstition remain in the hearts of the people.

That the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe. That it wasan easy matter for Moses, being brought up in all the arts of the Egyptians,to abuse the Jews, being a rude and gross people. That Christ was a bastardand his mother dishonest.88

Baines is not the most credible of witnesses: it is not certain that Marloweexpressed any of these opinions, even in his cups. But the point is thatthese blasphemies are thinkable, even for post-Reformation Christians. Thepatriarchal prophet is compared unfavourably to a juggler in the household of acontemporary nobleman.89 Like Evans and Heller, Marlowe (or Baines’ versionof Marlowe) is impressed with ‘the arts of the Egyptians’ and attributes much ofMoses’ skill to having learned his conjuring from them. Two further pointsattributed to Marlowe suggest just how dangerous all this thinking could be –where it could lead to. Christ himself becomes implicated – not as a trickster butas a bastard, and Mary his mother is accused of whoredom – a different kind of‘juggling’ in Renaissance slang. Even more damaging is the conclusion thatthese conjuring tricks are all in the service of political and ideologicalmanipulation. Moses led the children of Israel into the wilderness because heneeded to wait for all those who knew the secrets of his conjuring to perish:only then would he be able to found the nation of priest-rulers who could rely onthe superstition of the people to act as an instrument of their own oppression.


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‘The first beginning of religion was’, Marlowe damningly suggests, ‘to keepmen in awe’. Marlowe was never convicted of atheism: he died, in suspiciouscircumstances, knifed to death in a Deptford tavern by one of Elizabeth’sgovernment agents.

The early church: Hippolytus’ Philosophumena and Simonthe MagicianMarlowe turned the orthodox dichotomy on its head, casting Moses, rather thanPharaoh’s magicians, as the ‘juggler’. But this polemic dichotomy between thetrue and the false miracle worker, in which the latter is equated with a streetconjuror, goes back into the roots of the Christian Church. In the third centuryA.D., Hippolytus, Bishop, Saint and Martyr and one of the fathers of the earlyChristian Church, describes in detail many of the deceptions practised by falsemagicians of the early centuries of the Christian era.

And he (i.e. the magician) taking some paper, orders the enquirer to writedown what it is he wishes to enquire of the daemons. Then he having foldedup that paper and given it to the boy, sends it away to be burned, so that thesmoke carrying the letters may go hence to the daemons. But while the boyis doing what he is commanded, he first tears off equal parts of the paper, andon some other parts of it he pretends that the daemons write in Hebrewletters. Then having offered up the Egyptian magician’s incense called Cyphi,he scatters these pieces of paper over the offering…90

This is the beginning of a long and involved description of a conjuring trickin which the false magician – a pagan or a heretic: it is not always clear which –manipulates the uneducated masses, tricking them into a belief in his supernaturalpowers by a sequence of misdirections, substitutions, scientific cheats, andsleights of hand. The complex routine which Hippolytus describes is one inwhich this magician convinces the crowd that he can predict their questions,and communicate with – and control – spirits and daemons. He substitutes onepiece of paper for another, appears to burn the ‘message’ to the daemons, butlater glimpses the writing by secretly applying a chemical solution of copperas(sulphate of iron) to its ashes. He creates a disturbance amongst the spectatorsto distract them from seeing his secret actions, he produces the dramaticoff-stage sound effect of thunder by rolling large stones over wooden planks, andhe primes his assistant to speak in the voices of daemons, giving answers toquestions whose content (or so it seems) he cannot possibly know. Once morethe copperas comes in useful, as a secret ink which – at the right moment –displays the answers to the questions on what seemed to be blank paper…

Hippolytus warms to his theme, exposing other tricks of conjurors: plungingtheir hand unscathed into boiling water is effected by preparing it first with


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vinegar and soda so that it bubbles at a temperature well below boiling point.Conjuring up spirit visions in bowls of water is achieved by carefully preparingboth the vessels and the room in which they are viewed. Smoke and mirrorsallow the conjuror to bring the moon and stars into the room. The appearanceof a fiery daemon in the air is managed by the more gruesome method of havingan accomplice coat a bird – a hawk or a kite – with tar, set fire to it, and let it go.

And the bird scared by the flame is carried into the height and makes veryspeedy flight. Seeing which, the fools hide themselves as if they had beheldsomething divine. But the winged one whirled about by the fire, is bornewhither it may chance and burns down now houses and now farm-buildings.Such is the prescience of magicians.91

The dry contempt of the last sentence is characteristic of Hippolytus’ attitudenot only towards these magicians, but towards all purveyors of heresies. But forHippolytus, as for many of the church fathers, magicians posed a particularproblem since they claimed precisely the kind of supernatural power which wasso central to the church’s hold over the popular imagination: the power toperform miracles. It was essential for the early church to assert and maintain anabsolute distinction between the truth of the Christian miracle worker and thefalsehood of the pagan magician or sorcerer. The ‘unmasking’ that Hippolytus isundertaking here – his insistence that the pagan wonder-workers are merelyfrauds, whose effects can be explained away in purely rational terms, and interms of deliberate deception practised on a gullible public, is part of a battle forthe very survival of the early church.

He also, clearly, enjoys what he is doing. Showing the audience how it is doneis a pleasure as well as a duty – despite the inevitable and predictable misgivingsabout the dangers of publishing such knowledge:

These contrivances I shrank from setting out in the book, seeing that someill-doer taking hints from them might attempt (to practise) them. But nowthe care of many young men capable of salvation has persuaded me to teachand declare them for the sake of protection (against them). For as one willuse them for the teaching of evil, so another, by learning them will beprotected (against them) and the magicians, corruptors of life as they are, willbe ashamed to practise the art. But learning that the same (tricks) have beentaught beforehand, they will perhaps be hindered in their foolishness.92

Hippolytus’s attack on the magicians is usually dated at about 220 A.D.Certainly, the mention of apparently recently having taken responsibility for the‘care of many young men’ suggests that he is writing soon after he has beenelected one of two ‘Bishops of Rome’ in 218 A.D. – in a bitter schism which saw


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the papacy split, and a prolonged rivalry between himself and other claimantsto the papal throne. It is in this context that he writes, in Greek, thePhilosophumena, the ‘Refutation of all Heresies’ which will become his mostinfluential work. It is a long and systematic theological argument in which heattempts to demonstrate that the various current Christian heresies which soconcerned the early church, can be traced back to their roots in false paganphilosophies.

In it he catalogues and classifies the various philosophers of the classicalGreek world, dividing them in to natural philosophers, ethicists, dialecticians etc.He surveys their works in order to show where they deviate from teachings of thetrue church, discrediting them where possible or showing how any truths theyhappen to have stumbled upon are mere forerunners of the fuller truths of theChristian message. It is a careful work of scholarship in which he painstakinglyuntangles what philosophers actually said from what was attributed to them bylater interpreters. Thus he chronicles previous debates about whether Platobelieved there to be one God, or ‘many Gods without limitation’.93 He writesmainly about the ancient Greeks, but also includes ‘Brachmans’ (sic) of India andthe Druids of the Celts. In Book IV he takes a particular swipe at ‘the diviners andmagicians’ – which include not only the conjurors we have just encountered butalso astrologers, ‘metoposcopists’ (who tell a man’s character or fortune from hisface), mathematicians, star diviners and neo-Pythagoreans. More importantly,surveying the current corpus of beliefs and heresies, he attempts to winnow outthe true from the false in contemporary religious teaching. He critiques thevarious writers and teachers of the third century – teachers such as Simon Magus,Valentinus, Basilides, Saturnilus, and sects such as the Sethians, the Naassenesand the Docetists.

This, we should not forget, was at a time when the nature of Christian beliefwas intensely controversial. As a result the church itself was undergoing frequentsplits and schisms: as we have already seen, Hippolytus himself played animportant part in these controversies. The debates and political manoeuvrings ofthe early church amounted to a protracted ideological battle for the soul ofChristendom itself. Early Christianity was not a single body of stated and agreedknowledge but a site of ongoing dialectics in which certain beliefs eventuallycame to predominate over others. The various belief systems which the dominantgroup within the church Fathers came to denounce as heresies included Arianism(which asserted that Christ was not coequal with God); Gnosticism (whichheld that man might be liberated by his own knowledge); Pelagianism (whichdenied original sin); Nestorianism (according to which Christ had two natures:one moral, one divine); and Monophysitism (which denied the humanity ofChrist).

In Hippolytus, the demonizing of those who hold or promote heretical beliefsis often associated with the concept of ‘magic’. Of these figures, the most


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prominent, and the one most remembered by the church in later years, wasSimon Magus – Simon the Magician. Simon was a ‘man who had practisedsorcery in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria’. This is how we firstcome across him, in the Acts of the Apostles,94 which was probably writtenbetween 63 and 70 A.D. Here he is credited with having had a great following inSamaria. ‘They followed him because he had amazed them for a long time withhis magic’.95 He converts to Christianity and is baptized by Philip, but in seeingthe miracles of the Apostles Peter and John, ‘he offered them money and said“Give me also this ability so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receivethe Holy Spirit.” Peter answered “May your money perish with you, because youthought you could buy the gift of God with money. You have no part or sharein this ministry because your heart is not right before God.”’96

Simon Magus, then, is a fringe figure: someone who begins as an outsider, acompetitor to the Christian tradition. The apparent wonders which he performsin Samaria before conversion are contrasted with the true miracles of theApostles. He practises ‘sorcery’ and ‘magic’. Yet he does convert – but only tobe shown up even more sharply for the opportunist that he is. His attempt tobuy the power of the Holy Spirit is inappropriate (to the point of damnation) andhe is expelled from the ministry because ‘his heart is not right before God’.Already tinged with the charge of charlatanism and trickery, he is seen to be init for all the wrong reasons, even when in the presence of the true spirit. He isthe archetype of the false magician – the conjuror as trickster, fraudster, power-tripper and profiteer. In the Middle Ages and early modern period, his namelater gives rise to the English word ‘simony’, meaning the buying and selling ofecclesiastical privileges such as pardons and benefices.

If Simon appears in the canonical Acts of the Apostles, the earliest of the NewTestament texts, written about 30 to 40 years after the crucifixion, he alsoappears in the second-century Acts of Peter, where his story is elaborated in somedetail. The Acts of Peter is one of the five Apocryphal books of Acts (the othersare Paul, John, Andrew and Thomas) excluded, along with additional Gospelsand Epistles, from the New Testament canon – which was established by variousCouncils in the first few centuries of the history of the Christian Church. TheApocryphal Acts are composed partly of stories which parallel and echo ordevelop the stories in the canonical Acts of the Apostles; partly of materialapparently derived from contemporary oral tradition; and partly of romanticadditions. The most recent and authoritative editor of the The Acts of Peter says:

As with many other apocryphal Acts, it is the product of popular piety. Suchliterature seems to have been influenced to a greater or lesser extent by theunorthodox teachings of the day, and this influence was responsible forprejudicing the early fathers against the work. More significant, perhaps, is thatthe use of these Acts by heretics ensured its removal from official church lists.97


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But although Gnostics and other heretical sects may have made use of TheActs of Peter, and may even have influenced its composition through their partin ‘popular piety’, the Acts is not a Gnostic text. Indeed, Simon Magus – who iselsewhere credited by the church Fathers as being one of the main teachers ofGnosticism (accounts of his teachings are given in works by Justin Martyr andIrenaeus98) is once more represented as evil personified.

Although it never made it into the canon of scripture, the Acts of Peter is a finefolkloric tale of the battle between Good (represented by Saint Peter himself)and Evil (represented by Simon). Much of the Acts of Peter is, in fact, an accountof the contest between Simon Magus and [Simon] Peter for the heart and soulof Rome itself. The writer of the Acts of Peter repeatedly insists that SimonMagus is a fake. He manages to fool some of the people of Rome but ‘they thatwere firm in the faith derided him. For in dining chambers he made certainspirits enter in, which were only an appearance, and not existing in truth.’99

The rivalry between Simon Magus and Peter eventually takes the form of apublic competition in which Simon claims he will prove his own power by flyingabove the city.

And already on the morrow a great multitude assembled at the Sacred Way tosee him flying. And Peter came unto the place, having seen a vision (or, to seethe sight), that he might convict him in this also… So then this man standingon an high place beheld Peter and began to say: Peter, at this time when I amgoing up before all this people that behold me, I say unto thee: If thy God isable, whom the Jews put to death, and stoned you that were chosen of him, lethim show that faith in him is faith in God, and let it appear at this time,if it be worthy of God. For I, ascending up, will show myself unto all thismultitude, who I am. And behold when he was lifted up on high, and all beheldhim raised up above all Rome and the temples thereof and the mountains, thefaithful looked toward Peter. And Peter seeing the strangeness of the sightcried unto the Lord Jesus Christ: If thou suffer this man to accomplish thatwhich he hath set about, now will all they that have believed on thee beoffended, and the signs and wonders which thou hast given them through mewill not be believed: hasten thy grace, O Lord, and let him fall from the heightand be disabled; and let him not die but be brought to nought, and break hisleg in three places. And he fell from the height and brake his leg in threeplaces. Then every man cast stones at him and went away home, andthenceforth believed Peter.100

Simon is a deeply ambiguous figure in Christian folklore. A shadowy figurein the canonical texts, he comes into his own in the Apocrypha. But there andelsewhere there are so many stories, and such different stories, told about himthat it seems likely that the historical Simon (for whose existence there is


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substantial evidence) may have transmuted, in legend, into an amalgam ofseveral figures and narrative patterns from the period. Many of the stories abouthim derive from the turbulent days of the early church, when conflicting sectsstruggled for power – or for survival. Amongst these was the Gnostic sect ofSimonianism – which revered Simon as a God-prophet equal to Jesus himself,and which wove about him a powerful, surreal and erotic mythology.

In the beginning from the First God (who is held to be Simon himself)leaped forth the First Thought. She created the angels and powers, the world,and man, but was afterward held captive by the powers, and passing throughdifferent human bodies finally became manifest in a prostitute. Her namewas Helen. To free her, Simon, the First God, appeared as a man. He camealso to offer salvation to men.101

The accepted Roman accounts, on the contrary, either demonize him as ‘theangel of satan’,102 or else dismiss him as a mountebank and a charlatan, or both.Here, Simon, the conjuror, becomes the abjected Other. But taken as a whole,Simon is a much more complex – and for many Christians a deeply disturbing –figure who haunts the origins of orthodox belief.

‘A spurious piece of legerdemain’: the ReformationFrom its earliest days, then, Christian orthodoxy has tended to identify‘juggling’ with evil and with the Devil. The kind of magic which involvesinvoking spirits, and the kind which involves trickery are both regarded withsuspicion: both are the domain of the Father of Lies.

And if the past-tense miracles of scriptural and apocryphal narrative wereproblematic in one sense for the Renaissance, the present-tense ‘miracles’ ofliturgical practice have repeatedly posed problems of another kind. For post-Reformation Europe in particular, the question of the relationship betweenmagic-making and true religion was a vexed one. Keith Thomas has famouslycharted the relationship between Religion and the Decline of Magic, but withinthe cultural practices of religious communities themselves the relation betweenritual and magic was loaded with political meanings. Thus, in the sixteenthcentury, Protestantism ‘presented itself as an attempt to take the magicalelements out of religion’.103 In order to do this, it simultaneously characterizedthe opposition as superstitious, obsessed with endowing ‘physical objects withsupernatural qualities by special formulae of consecration and exorcism’.104

Thus, ‘magic’ became, in a theological context, a dirty word and one of the mostpotent and efficacious insults which had been flung at the Catholic Church atthe time of the European Reformation was the charge that, as Calvin said,Catholics saw the Eucharist as a kind of magical incantation or magic trick –itself a form of idolatry. The insult stuck: in the early eighteenth century


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non-conformist polemicists such as Daniel Defoe were still condemningCatholicism as ‘one entire system of anti-Christian magic’.105

Alizon Brunning sums up the way in which the

…association of the trickster figure with Catholic priests has a long heritagein anti-Catholic polemic. According to Reformers ‘Protestant derogation ofthe mass as play made the priest a juggler’; the transubstantiation of theEucharist could never really happen so priests were therefore actors andconjurors who pretended or cheated their audience in a form of makebelieve. As Keith Thomas points out, ‘What was transubstantiation but aspurious piece of legerdemain… the pretence of a power plainly magical, ofchanging the elements in such a sort as all the magicians of Pharaoh couldnever do, nor had the face to attempt the like, it being so beyond all credibility.’In A Discourse Concerning the Sacrament of the Lordes Supper [c1550]Nicholas Udall attacks ‘the iugling sleytes of the Romish Babylon’ and, asAxton suggests, maintains that ‘Christ is no iugler neither doth he mock ordaly with our senses… such iugling castes as the adversaries would have herein the matter of the sacrament.’ The anxiety about the possibility of materialtransformation becomes effaced and ameliorated when attackers resort to themore comforting accusation that such ritual is simply a performative actwithout material efficacy. Theatre, as Paul Whitfield White points out, hadbecome ‘a metaphor to expose the hypocrisy, deceitfulness and spiritualemptiness of the wicked usually associated with Roman Catholicism.’106

Which takes us back to Christopher Marlowe and his claim that ‘Moses wasa juggler’. Later, according to his accuser Baines, Marlowe goes on to saysomething even more shocking: ‘That if there be any God or any good religion,then it is in the Papists’ because the service of God is performed with moreceremonies, as elevation of the mass, organs, singing-men, shaven crowns, etc.That all Protestants are hypocritical asses.’107 Marlowe overturns all the expectednorms of conventional Protestant English thought – not only by asserting apreference for the Catholic rite, but because of the grounds of this preference.He rejects the notion of deep spiritual truth in favour of the theatrical pleasuresof the conjuring tricks themselves. Marlowe’s sensibility – or the sensibilityattributed to him – is shockingly postmodern when it comes to religion. Thereality is that of the surface, the value of the ritual is in its performativity.

Traditional Christian attitudes towards conjurers are deeply ingrained. Theyinvolve a strict (if moveable) binary opposition between the true miracle workerand the false ‘magician’, or ‘sorcerer’. In insisting on such a binary oppositionthe Church is playing for high stakes, since the false miracle workers representpossible alternative traditions to Christianity itself! But anthropological studiesof shamanism from the nineteenth century onwards suggest a different model,


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one in which performativity and efficacy are not opposed but complementary,and in which ‘belief ’ takes a subordinate place to both. It is this towards whichMarlowe gestures so subversively in his scandalous preference for the Catholicrite. If there is ‘any God or any good religion’ then it is to be found in theshowman rather than the shaman – and specifically in the juggling showmanshipof the Catholic mass. This is heresy indeed.


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Chapter Three

‘Fire and faggot to burn the witch’?Conjuring between belief and unbeliefin early modern England

Jugling is now become commonSamuel Rid108

Efficacy and entertainment: conjuring devils on the early modern stageIn Chapter One we looked at questions of origins and the roots of performancein both ‘magical’ (or shamanic) and mimetic practices. In early modernEngland these two traditions continued to play a part in defining the role of thejuggler, or practitioner of legerdemain. On the one hand, witchcraft beliefs werestill prevalent, and ‘real’ magic a feature of everyday reality in the beliefs of manypeople. On the other hand, the sixteenth-century street conjuror or illusionistsaw the rise of a form of popular entertainment which would both compete withand incorporate his own form of wonder-working, as jugglers’ routines becameincorporated with increasing frequency into the dramas of the early modernstage. Indeed, the evolving professional theatre – in the process of inventing itsown kind of ‘magic’ – was fascinated with the idea of magic in the folkloricsense. Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights produced scores of plays aboutwitchcraft and about ghosts, fairies and magicians. Of course, plays from theMiddle Ages onwards contain a range of magical illusions, or references tomagical illusions, of one kind or another. Medieval mystery plays, for example,featured the staff/serpent transformation routine in the Wakefield cycle play ofPharaoh, where Moses changes his staff into a serpent and back again.109 But theElizabethan and Jacobean theatre saw a dramatic increase in the use of illusionson stage, and a growing interest in magic that is not confined to Biblicalmiracles.110

On a symbolic level the magician is in many ways a prototypical, if paradoxical,Renaissance figure. He is a representative of the new world of learning ofRenaissance culture, and Italian neo-Platonism. He is also, inevitably, atraditional kind of folk devil, a dark figure dabbling in ‘unlawful things… morethan heavenly power permits’.111 His occult power becomes a metaphor for theambiguous state of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, in the period.Poised ambivalently between medieval and modern ways of thinking, betweenscientific rationalism and superstitious folk belief, the magician is both humanly

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flawed and exceptionally powerful in his control over the forces of nature – apotential hero or, like Icarus, a figure doomed by his pride to attempt to soar toonear the sun and, overreaching himself, plummet to his destruction. Heembodies ‘the paradox of superhuman power that is humanly limited’.112

He is also, as far as the audience is concerned, a star attraction. And so, whenHieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy bites out his tongue and offers it to theKing; when the brazen head speaks in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; whenAriel makes the banquet disappear in The Tempest; when the tapers lightthemselves onstage in A Game At Chess – all these are examples of more or lesselaborate conjuring tricks to charm an audience. The spectators who come tosee plays such as Doctor Faustus, or The Tempest, or Friar Bacon and FriarBungay are, among other things, coming to see the wonders and illusions ofthe fairground jugglers and practitioners of legerdemain translated into thetheatre. For an essential dimension of the theatrical figure of the magicianin the play is his physical presence, there on the stage, embodied in an actor,before the very eyes of an audience.

This mixture of magic and theatre was a powerful combination. At Exeterin the early seventeenth century (the exact date is not clear) a company oftravelling players were presenting a performance of Christopher Marlowe’sDoctor Faustus. It is a play about dabbling in the dark arts: Faustus, theRenaissance intellectual, having apparently mastered most of the legitimateknowledge of his culture, begins to explore the forbidden knowledge of the occult. The Devil sends his messenger Mephistophilis to offer Faustus a deal:all the worldly power and knowledge he desires in exchange for his soul. Faustusaccepts his offer – and is eventually damned. The play gives actors plenty ofopportunity for performing some light-hearted conjuring tricks and theatricalillusions, but it also has scenes in which Faustus performs rituals to conjure updevils and spirits. A contemporary manuscript source tells of

[c]ertain players at Exeter acting upon the stage the tragical story of DoctorFaustus the conjurer; as a certain number of Devils kept every one his circlethere, and as Faustus was busy in his magical invocations, on a sudden theywere all dashed, every one harkening other in the ear; for they were allpersuaded there was one devil too many amongst them; and so after a littlepause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with thismatter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every manhastened to be first out of doors. The players (as I have heard it) contrary totheir custom, spending the night in reading and in prayer got them out oftown the next morning.113

This anecdote is a particularly resonant one in the history of stage conjuringbecause it raises a particularly disturbing possibility: that in an age of belief


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in – and fear of – ‘real’ magic, the theatrical performance of magic might turnout to be too realistic. In an age in which beliefs in witchcraft and devil worshipwere widespread in all levels of society throughout Europe, women or men whowere accused of practising magic in this sense were in genuine danger ofbeing punished by death. The Exeter performance of Doctor Faustus seemsto indicate a fault line: a point at which – for those involved in it – the fictionalperformance turns, terrifyingly, into reality.

Writers on magic have tended to stress the potential for this sort ofmisunderstanding of early conjuring acts. Thomas Frost, whose Lives of theConjurors is one of the seminal books on the history of conjuring, argued that

[t]he spread of the Reformation in northern and central Europe had no effectin rendering the unhappy wight who was accused of sorcery less liable to beimprisoned and exposed in the pillory, happy if he escaped the stake andfaggot. The statutes of Henry VIII against conjuration, witchcraft, falseprophecies, and demolition of crosses provided the penalty of death for suchoffences… It would have been easy for conjurors to have avoided bringingthemselves under the operation of this law, if the people had been lessignorant, and therefore less accessible to the suggestions of superstition. Butthere were few persons in those days who could see the simplest conjuringtrick performed without a sensation of awe mingling with their wonder, andthere was in every assembly some weak-minded person ready to declare thatsuch things could be done only by the aid of the devil.114

More recently, Milbourne Christopher, in his Illustrated History of Magic, oneof the standard books on the subject, argues that when

higher church authorities launched their long, ruthless campaign againstwitchcraft, devil worship and sorcery, [c]onjurors, who claimed no demonicpowers, suffered along with other innocent victims… After performing inPadua and Mantua, Italy, a man named Reatius was seized and tortured untilhe admitted he produced his deceptions with sleight of hand and the help ofconfederates.115

The issue, once more, is that of the potential slippage between one kind of‘magic’ and another, between what was termed in the previous chapter efficacyand entertainment. We have already suggested that it is not possible to chart asimple linear progression from ‘primitive’ cultures, who believe in magic-as-efficacy, through to ‘sophisticated’ ones (like our own?) who engage with magiconly on the level of entertainment. The entertainment/efficacy braid is adynamic, not a static, feature of performance. In order to examine, then, the waythat that braid looked in a particular culture, let us look in more detail at the

FIRE AND FAGGOT TO BURN THE WITCH

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complex net of meanings and beliefs which traverses the notion of ‘conjuring’in the early modern period: at the professional entertainers, the practitionersof legerdemain; at their relationship to the wider world of popular entertainment;and to the broader understandings of the notions of magic and knowledge(both permitted and forbidden) against which both of these played out theirparts.

Brandon and the pigeonWe should begin with the status of the conjuror (or ‘juggler’, more precisely) inearly modern England. In fact, it is not all that easy to find a starting point.Accounts of early English ‘juggling’ acts are comparatively few and far between:few details have survived. By definition, there is something ephemeral aboutthe very nature of popular culture, especially in the ages before mechanicalreproduction and mass media. The names of leading writers, painters, composersoften echo down through the years: the names of leading acrobats, jugglers andtrapeze artists less frequently. Once magic becomes big business, or at leasta big part of show business in the mid-nineteenth century and begins tomake use of the machinery of advertising and publicity (newspaper reviews,photographs, illustrated posters and engravings), it becomes much easier toidentify and study the careers of individual magicians. Indeed, many of thegreatest magicians of the nineteenth century, performers such as ProfessorAnderson, Maskelyne and Robert-Houdin, were skilled self-publicists as well asskilled conjurors, and their cultural footprints are comparatively easy to spotand to follow. But the further back we look the harder it is to trace individualperformers of stage magic, or to understand what their performances mighthave been like. Municipal records give some facts and figures – where a jugglerperformed, and when, and how much he was paid etc. – but it is hard to buildup a picture of their actual acts.

Nonetheless, some traces exist. The earliest individual British performer forwhom we have a definite record was a man called Brandon, who achieved quitea degree of fame in the reign of Henry VIII. Comparatively little is known abouthis life, although Philip Butterworth has done some splendid work in piecingtogether what there is to be found out about ‘the King’s Juggler’, as Brandonwas known.116 It is not clear quite what the role of King’s Juggler involved,although Brandon seems to have enjoyed a similar status to some of the well-known licensed fools of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, men likeRichard Tarlton or Will Kemp, who maintained careers as freelance performerswhile simultaneously enjoying royal or aristocratic patronage.117 No contemporaryrecords exist which can give us an extended sense of what Brandon’s actualperformances might have been like or what sort of tricks he performed. We do,however, have a few fragmentary references from near-contemporary sources.For example, Reginald Scot, writing a few years after Brandon’s death, gives the


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following vivid account of one of his tricks which seems to have passed intoElizabethan folklore:

What wondering and admiration was there at Brandon the juggler, whopainted on the wall the picture of a dove, and seeing a pigeon sitting on the topof a house, said to the King; Lo now your grace shall see what a juggler cando, if he be his crafts master; and then pricked the picture with a knife so hardand so often, and with so effectua[…] words, as the pigeon fel down from thetop of the house stark dead. I need not write any further circumstance to shewhow the matter was taken, what wondering was thereat, how he was prohibitedto use that feat any further, lest he should imploy it in any other kind ofmurther, as though he, whose picture soever he had pricked, must needs havedied, and so the life of all men in the hands of a juggler: as is now supposedto be in the hands & wils of witches. This story is, untill the day of the writinghereof, in fresh remembrance, and of the most part beleeved as canonicall, asare all the fables of witches: but when you are taught the feat or sleight (thesecrecy and sorcery of the matter being bewraied, and discovered) you willthink it a mockery, and simple illusion. To interpret unto you the revelation ofthis mysterie; so it is, that the poor pigeon was before in the hands of thejuggler, into whom he had thrust a dramme of Nux vomica, or some othersuch poison, which to the nature of the bird was so extream a venome, as afterthe receipt thereof it could not live above the space of half an hour, and beinglet lose after the medicine ministred· she alwaies resorted to the top of thenext house: which she will the rather do, if there be any pigeons already sittingthere, and (as it is already said) after a short space falleth downe, either starkdead, or greatly astonied. But in the mean time the juggler used words of art,partly to protract the time, and partly to gain credit and admiration of thebeholders. If this or the like feat should be done by an old woman, every bodywould cry out for fire and faggot to burn the witch.118

One of the interesting things about Brandon’s trick is how much it looks like apiece of ‘real’ sorcery. Brandon is challenging his royal audience with thepossibility that he has killed a pigeon by remote magic: he stabs the picture of thebird, which is painted on the wall, and as a result (or so it seems) a real pigeon,sitting on a nearby roof falls dead. It is the technique of the witch, of the voodoopriest: violence enacted on the doll affects the person in real life. In fact, Scotexplains, this was simply an example of what he calls ‘private Confederacie’ – bywhich he means secret preparation beforehand: Brandon had actually poisonedthe bird earlier and timed his trick to coincide with the working of the poison. Itis an effective (if rather cruel) illusion by a licensed professional entertainer.

Perhaps, indeed, it was too effective: his audience could not guess the secretand as a result Brandon was prohibited by the King from ever performing it


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again ‘lest he should imploy it in any other kind of murther, as though he,whose picture soever he had pricked, must needs have died, and so the life ofall men in the hands of a juggler’. There seems to be a genuine fear on Henry’spart that such magic might get out of hand. For Brandon the punishmentmight have been a comparatively small price to pay for the way in which thestory would have enhanced his reputation: indeed the additional publicity andthe attribution to him of supernatural powers might well have been very goodfor his career. There is, however, a potential downside, as Scot’s ominous lastwords indicate: ‘If this or the like feat should be done by an old woman, everybody would cry out for fire and faggot to burn the witch.’119

Scot is in no doubt that in his society the relationship between playing atbeing a magician and actually being thought to be a magician is an unstable andpotentially dangerous one. In fact his whole book, the Discovery of Witchcraft,which we look at in more detail presently, is aimed at clarifying the relationshipbetween different kinds of ‘conjuring’.

But how true is it that the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century juggler, livingin a time of witchcraft persecution, was himself in danger of being persecutedas a sorcerer? The history of conjuring certainly abounds with stories thatsuggest that it might be true. What may be less expected is how fragile thisevidence turns out to be. Thomas Frost, for example, tells us that Scot speaksof ‘a juggler [who] was, in the reign of Elizabeth, condemned as a wizard, andwould have been pilloried but for the interposition of the Earl of Leicester’.120

On closer examination, though, this turns out to be ‘T.E., Master of art, andpractiser both of physick, and also in times past, of certaine vaine sciences’: nota street entertainer at all, but a doctor who, Faustus-like, seems to have got holdof the wrong books and to have started claiming occult powers. And while T.E.now admits that ‘among all those famous and noted practisers, that I have beeneconversant withall these xxvi. yeares, I could never see any matter of truth tobe done in those wicked sciences, but onely meere cousenings and illusions’,121

his cozening was that of the practitioner of folk magic rather than that of the entertainer.122

Many of the other stories which appear to show conjurors being taken forwizards turn out to be similarly ambiguous. For example Girolamo Scoto – whoappears in Johnson’s Volpone as ‘Scoto of Mantua’, a mountebank and travellingsnake-oil salesman – was in real life a knight and a diplomat, working at thecourts of, among others, the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. He was also acelebrated amateur ‘juggler’ – specializing, as far as we can tell, in card tricks,and with enough of a reputation that Thomas Nashe, in The UnfortunateTraveller (1594), talks of ‘Scoto, that did the juggling tricks before the Queen’(i.e. Elizabeth I) when he visited England between 1576 and 1583.123 At onepoint, though, Girolamo Scoto’s career runs into the kind of trouble that ReginaldScot might have predicted for the illusionist in an age of witch-hunters: he finds


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himself accused of sorcery proper. His accuser was Anna of Saxony, wife ofCount Palatine John Casimir. She was charged with committing adultery with ayoung knight, Ulrich von Liechtenstein; in her defence she maintained that shehad been bewitched by Scoto, who entered her room by magic carrying a crossbound with wire. Scoto, she claimed, ordered the wire to unravel and wrap itselfround her body, binding her tightly so that she could not resist his amorousadvances. Later he tired of her, she claimed, and fled with her most preciousjewels, leaving her in the power of Ulrich. The juggler is accused of being awizard. Yet, although the story might illustrate a cultural nervousness about thestatus of the ‘juggler’, it has, for Scoto at least, a happy ending: not even themost credulous prosecutor seemed impressed: no charges were brought againstScoto, while Anna and her lover were imprisoned for life.124

Similarly, tales of accusations of sorcery surround the legendary WilliamBanks,125 who together with his bay horse, Morocco, was one of the greatcelebrities of Elizabethan and Jacobean popular culture. As Edwin Dawesobserves, ‘there is scarcely a humorous writer between 1590 and 1620 whodoes not mention them’.126 Among those who do are Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,and Thomas Nashe.127 Morocco performed a variety of tricks which thecredulous might ascribe to magic powers. Samuel Rid, writing in 1612, describestheir performance:

Such a one is at this day in London; his master will say ‘Sirra, here be diversegentlemen, that have lost diverse things, and they hear say that thou canst tellthem tidings of them where they are. If thou canst, prithee show thy cunning andtell them.’ Then hurls he down a handkercher or a glove that he had taken fromthe parties before, and bids him give it the right owner, which the horse presentlydoth. And many other feats this horse doth… which not one among a thousandperceives how they are done, nor how he is brought to learn the same.128

Rid, whose book is about juggling tricks, is perfectly well aware that the trick isdone through subtle signals between master and horse:

As for example, his master will ask him how many people there are in theroom: the horse will paw with his foot so many times as there are people. Andmark the eye of the horse is always on his master, and as his master moves,so goes he or stands still… …And note that that the horse will paw anhundred times together, until he sees his master stir: and note also thatnothing can be done, but his master must first know, and then his masterknowing, the horse is ruled by him by signs.129

But if the rationalist is clear how the trick was done, it seems that there maystill be room for ambiguity. We get a hint of this in a fictional dialogue published


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by ‘John Dando’ and ‘Harry Runt’ – purportedly ostlers at the inn where theywere staying who are recording a ‘conversation’ which they overheard betweenthe horse and his master. Maroccus Extaticus. Or, Bankes’ Bay Horse in aTrance takes the showman and his horse and makes them the mouthpieces fora satirical Discourse set downe in a merry Dialogue, between Bankes and hisbeast: Anatomizing some abuses and bad trickes of this age.130 The dialogueitself, which is a fairly standard Elizabethan satire on the low morals of London,and the goings-on in its inns and brothels, treats the idea of the talking horse asperfectly normal. At one point in the course of their conversation, though, thefictional Banks asks Morocco if the horse bears a grudge against ‘that drabbethat the last daie when shee sawe thee heere doo thy trickes, sayd thou wert adeuill & I a coniurer?’131 The horse’s reply is nonchalant: Morocco does notseem particularly bothered by the prostitute’s outburst. The question remains,though: does this piece of fictional dialogue point towards a real-life problem forthe Elizabethan juggler and his horse?

On the surface, there are elements of the legend which suggest that it mighthave done: contemporary sources tell how Banks and Morocco were accused ofsorcery – and even executed for it – while touring on the continental mainland.Thomas Morton, for example, recounts an anecdote…

…which Banks told me at Frankfurt, from his own experience in Franceamong the Capuchins, by whom he was brought into suspicion of magicbecause of the strange feats which his horse Morocco played.132

The context and the tone of the story, though, both suggest that it should betaken with a degree of scepticism. The tale is one which ends up very much toBanks’s own advantage, as he turns the tables on his accusers. He orders Morocco‘to seek out one in the press of people who had a crucifix on his hat; which done,he bade him kneel down unto it, and not that only but also to rise up again and tokiss it.’ Morocco, that is to say, performs a version of his usual routine and, in theprocess, proves them both innocent of sorcery since ‘the devil had no power tocome near the cross’.133 The story is repeated by Morton (in the context of ananti-Catholic polemic) but it originates with Banks himself. And, like Brandonwith his pigeon, Banks comes out of it with his reputation greatly enhanced. Notonly is he skilful enough to pass for a real sorcerer in the first place, he is thenwitty enough to outsmart the superstitious (Papist) foreigners, to play them attheir own game and prove that he is innocent after all. It all sounds rather morelike an effective piece of PR than evidence of any real accusation of sorcery. It maybe that these early jugglers were – within their own cultural constraints – every bitas adept at publicity as their nineteenth and twentieth successors after all.

The story of Banks, Morocco and the French Capuchins, then, is dubious.The more melodramatic version of the legend – in which the juggler and his


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innocent horse were both burned at the stake as sorcerers – is simply false. Itoriginates, as far as we can tell, in Ben Jonson’s account:

Old Banks the juggler, our Pythagoras,Grave tutor to the learned horse. Both which,Being, beyond sea, burned for one witch…134

in his poem ‘On The Famous Voyage’. But once more, Banks and Morocco areactually characters in a satirical fantasy: ‘On the Famous Voyage’ is a mock-heroic poem depicting a ‘Voyage’ through the ditches, sewers and waterways ofLondon. Banks and Morocco appear (not even as themselves, but in their newre-incarnation, ‘Their spirits transmigrated to a cat’!) only as cartoon charactersin a surreal and nightmarish landscape: it is all a joke, and Banks and Moroccowere both alive and well when the poem was written and published.135

In fact, what is a little surprising about conjuring in the early modern periodis how very few substantiated examples we find of jugglers falling foul of thelaws against witchcraft. Most of those which can be checked out lead to a deadend: law cases collapse, anecdotes turn out to be of dubious provenance, or lessconclusive than they first seemed. Thomas Frost’s assertion that ‘there werefew persons in those days who could see the simplest conjuring trick performedwithout a sensation of awe mingling with their wonder’ may have some truth init, and there may well have been the occasional onlooker who, like the fictionalprostitute in Maroccus Extaticus was ‘ready to declare that such things could bedone only by the aid of the devil’.136 But the significant point is that few of theseaccusations seem to have been taken particularly seriously by the authorities –either in Britain or on the continental mainland. Even Frost admits that ‘fromthe accession of James I., in the first year of whose reign sorcery was made acapital offence none of the professors of the Black Art [i.e. jugglers] seem tohave suffered the penalty’.137

The early modern juggler, then, might not, after all, have operated in thecontinual shadow of the gallows or the stake. This is not to say that those areasof ambiguity, the cultural tensions between magic as entertainment and magicas efficacy, are irrelevant. Many people did believe fervently in witchcraft; andjugglers in fairgrounds, markets, street corners and inn yards did performapparently miraculous illusions. We need, though, to consider further just howthat braid between entertainment and efficacy might have been configured inthis period – and we can see that braid in more detail by looking at some of theways in which ‘juggling’ was written about in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies: in works such as Thomas Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions(1567), Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), Samuel Rid’s Art ofJugling (1612), and the pseudonymous138 Anatomie of Legerdemain by HocusPocus Junior (1634). The contemporary literature of conjuring and legerdemain


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gives us, in many ways, a clearer perspective on juggling in the early modernperiod than do the scant documentary records we have of the professionalentertainers themselves. Moreover, the existence of this emerging literature ofjuggling and legerdemain confirms a sense that there was a general interest inthe topic. It also reminds us that conjuring tricks are not only the preserve ofthe professional conjuror: the middle-class reading public of Elizabethan andJacobean England was able, and eager, to buy books containing instructions asto how to perform illusions for their own entertainment.

Thomas Hill Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (1567)One of the earliest of English books about conjuring is Thomas Hill’s Naturalland Artificiall Conclusions (1567). In fact, this was, according to its author, atranslation of a work ‘Written first by sundry scholars of the University ofPadua’, and intended ‘for the commodity of sundry Artificers, as for the matters ofpleasure, to recreate wits at vacant times.’139 The self-advertisement strikes thatambivalent tone which will become characteristic of magicians’ handbooks in yearsto come, simultaneously claiming the high seriousness of Italian Renaissancescholarship, and addressing itself to the popular market, ‘to recreate wits invacant times’. Like many later magic handbooks, too, it is questionable quite howmany of Hill’s tricks would actually have worked. Nonetheless, Hill promises toteach the diligent reader how, for example, ‘to stick an Iron or Steel Bodkin intothe head of either Cock, Hen or Chicken’, ‘How to make letters appear of thecolour of Gold, Copper, or Silver’, or

To make a blown Bladder to dance and skip from place to place.

To do this, put Quicksilver in a bladder, and lay the bladder in a hot place, andit will after skip from place to place without handling140

Practicality apart, some of Hill’s illusions might seem culturally somewhat riskyin an age which frequently took its religious beliefs with deadly seriousness.Neither Hill’s account of ‘How to turn water into wine, a proper secret’, nor hisinstructions about ‘How to walk on the water, a proper secret’ seem to beparticularly effective tricks. The latter involves tying wooden pattens to the feet,and a sceptical marginal note, written in a seventeenth-century hand in oneextant edition, sneers ‘and if you do not sink, you shall be sure to go upon thewater’.141 Even so, to use two of the key miracles of the New Testament as abasis for conjuring tricks whose purpose is simply ‘to recreate wits in vacanttimes’, is to play with powerful and potentially dangerous imagery.142

Conjuring tricks are not all the book has to offer, however. Readers could alsolearn ‘How to make Hens lay Eggs all the Winter through’ by changing theirfeed; ‘To make birds come to your Culver-house’ by tempting them with honey-soaked grain; and ‘To kindle fire at the Sun’ by reflecting and focusing sunlight


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onto very small kindling, as well as recipes for toothpaste, and remedies forworms and fleas. The conjuring tricks, the folk remedies and the common-sense tips for good husbandry sit side by side in the book, undifferentiated.Hill’s modern editor describes the collection as ‘a ludicrous mixture of old-wives tales, parlour tricks that are sure to fail, and, occasionally, good advice forhousewives or small farmers’143 – but this understates it. Naturall and ArtificiallConclusions also contains instructions as to ‘How to see many and diversestrange sightes in a Urinal’, procedures for testing a young woman’s virginity byburning herbs under her nose (‘and if she be corrupt she shall piss’), dubiousdiagnostic techniques to ‘know if a sick person shall die or not’, and a diviningmethod ‘to find a person drowned, that hath been sought for’. At this point themiscellany moves beyond old wives’ tales and veers close to a rather differentkind of magic: the kind that in some communities could get an old wife hauledbefore a court and accused of witchcraft.

What is significant about Hill’s work is precisely its lack of differentiationbetween one kind of heading and another. The ease with which Hill movesfrom one mode to the next, from health and housekeeping tips, to illusions toamaze your friends, to snippets of folk magic, implies a world-view in whichthe boundaries between one kind of magic and another, between performanceand medicine, between husbandry and divination are extremely permeable:the braid of entertainment and efficacy is particularly tightly woven here. KeithThomas, in his seminal study of Religion and the Decline of Magic, hasdescribed how a residual paganism allowed ‘cunning men’ (and women) andpopular magicians to make a considerable living in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, selling their arts of divination, making love potions and aphrodisiacs,charming and blessing. Some of these folk magicians clearly believed in theirown magical powers. Others were self-confessed impostors.’144 The boundariesmay frequently become blurred between the professional village magic workerand the confidence trickster, or between the confidence trickster and theperforming juggler. The jumble of ideas in Hill’s handbook of magical effectsshows the blurring of these boundaries in action. Entertainment and efficacy,in Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions, look less like a braid and more like aporridge: and to this extent, Hill states a problem which later writers aboutmagic and conjuring will have to solve.

Reginald Scot The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584)We have already come across Scot as the source of the story of Brandon’s pigeon,and his ominous afterword that ‘If this or the like feat should be done by an oldwoman, every body would cry out for fire and faggot to burn the witch’. Thatsentence effectively goes to the heart of his central concerns in the book. Again,The Discovery of Witchcraft is not strictly speaking a book about conjuring inthe modern sense, although like Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions, it


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does contain tips and instructions regarding how to perform juggler’s illusions.But in most other respects Scot’s book is the very opposite of Hill’s. WhereasHill is content to let all kinds of material sit side by side in an undifferentiatedway, Scot is absolutely concerned to draw distinctions between one kind of‘magic’ and another. This indeed, is his whole aim – to show that many of thesupposed feats of witches, wizards and other kinds of black magicians, whichwere fuelling the growing fears of, and reactions against, witches in the period,actually had nothing to do with occult powers. Scot concludes that witch-hunting is itself a kind of bewitchment – and that

[t]he common people have been so assotted and bewitched, with whatsoeverpoets have feigned of witchcraft, whether in earnest, in jest, or in derision;and with whatsoever loud liars and cozeners for their pleasures herein haveinvented, and with whatsoever tales they have heard from old doting women,or from their mothers’ maids, and with whatsoever the grandfool theirghostly father, or any other morrow mass priest had informed them; andfinally with whatsoever they have swallowed up through tract of time, orthrough their own timorous nature or ignorant conceit, concerning thesematters of hags and witches: as they have so settled their opinion and creditthereupon, that they think it heresy to doubt in any part of the matter…145

Here more than anywhere we hear the message that there is danger ofconfusion between the ‘juggler’ and the sorcerer – but we hear it stated in thevoice of someone who does not believe in sorcery. Scot’s book is the primeexample in English of a slowly rising tide of rational scepticism amongsixteenth-century European Protestant writers concerning popular beliefsin the occult. It is in the tradition of those works by European Humanistintellectuals such as Montaigne and Erasmus, and early scientists such as thephysician Johann Weyer, all of whom had all argued against the growing spate ofEuropean witchcraft persecutions.146 Scot’s work, however, is one of the mostsustained attacks on the popular fears, superstitions and prejudices which gaverise in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the persecutions. It was alsosufficiently influential to move James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) torespond with his own Daemonologie,147 a passionate defence of the persecutions.Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft is a lengthy and detailed attempt to show thatmost accusations of witchcraft were based either on spite or (more usually) onignorance, and that the witchcraft itself is usually a case either of trickery, or offolk medicine. In the process he demonstrates to the reader the techniques bywhich many of the tricks are carried out, and the ways in which the lessscrupulous (or perhaps the less cautious) miracle-monger might fool his audience.Thus, the book is full of examples of exposures of supposedly supernaturalpractices which we can recognize as the tricks of the professional juggler.


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Like most of his contemporaries, Scot does not deny the reality of the Devil.What he doubts is that Satan works through the human agency of the poorvictims of the witch trials. Working empirically, he gathers enough examples oftricksters and trickery to feel that he must have convinced any fair-mindedobserver that the witch persecutions were a case of communal hysteria foundedon Catholic prejudice. ‘Who’, he asks,

will maintain, that common witchcrafts are not cozenages, when the greatand famous witchcrafts, which had stolen credit not only from all thecommon people, but from men of great wisdom and authority, are discoveredto be beggarly slights of cozening varlets?148

A recurrent theme of Scot’s book is the gullibility of those who mistake the skillof the performer for the dark powers of the occultist. With example afterexample, using his research, his wit and his rational world-view, Scot debunksthe whole machinery of early modern demonology. His writing is often serious,occasionally playful. At one point he gives the reader a whole chapter in whichhe explains how to conjure devils in a way which accords with popular tradition:

When you will have any spirit, you must know his name and you must also fastand be cleane from all pollution, three or four dayes before; so will the spiritbe the more obedient unto you. To make a circle and call up the spirit withgreat intention, and hold a ring in your hand, rehearse in your ownee name,and your companye (for one must always be with you) this prayer following,and no spirit shall annoy you, and your purpose shall take effect.149

The rest of the chapter is devoted to the prayer and the magic words to beused – with the wry observation that ‘this agreeth with popish charmes andconjurations’150 – in order to summon and control a demon. As readers we areled into the supposition that Scot is, in all seriousness, teaching us, like Faustus,to conjure spirits. But the rug is immediately whisked away from under ourfeet: the next chapter is entitled ‘A confutation of the manifold vanities conteinedin the precedent chapters, specially of commanding of divels’. It starts:

He that can be perswaded that these things are true, or wrought indeedaccording to the assertion of couseners, or according to the supposition ofwitchmongers and papists, may soone be brought to believe that the mooneis made of green cheese.151

We are left feeling foolish for having gone along with the previous chapter atall. It turns out that, like a good conjuror, Scot was misdirecting our attention.The technique allows him to have it both ways. First he offers us the guilty


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thrill of being apparently initiated into the occult practises; then (having luredus into becoming just as gullible as those he elsewhere ridicules) he initiatesus into his own healthy scepticism. Scot’s imagined reader is literate,educated, sophisticated – and a rationalist. He or she is also fascinated by thetechniques of the juggler. In Book XIII, Scot begins to talk ‘Of illusions,confederacies, and legierdemaine, and how they may be well or ill used.’152

This section of Scot’s Discovery is generically related both to the ‘how-to…’manual of conjuring tricks – which he takes great delight in detailing for thereader – and also to Elizabethan cony-catching literature: those books whichopened up to a literate, educated and respectable public the tricks and stratagemsof the Elizabethan underworld.

Many of the routines Scot describes are party tricks, designed to amaze yourfriends, or to win a bet. His list includes tricks with balls, coins, paper andhandkerchiefs – for example:

To make a little ball swell in your hand till it be very great.To consume (or rather to convey) one or many bals into nothing.How to wrap a wag upon the knuckles.To convey money out of one of your hands into the other by legierdemainTo convert or transubstantiate money into counters, or counters into moneyTo put one testor into one hand, and another into the other hand, and with

words to bring them togetherTo put one testor into a strangers hand, and another into your own, and to

convey both into the strangers hand with wordsTo throw a piece of money away, and to find it again where you lostWith words to make a groat or a testor to leap out of a pot, or to run along upon

a tableTo make a groat or a testor to sink through a table, and to vanish out of a

handkercher very strangelyA notable trick to transforme a counter to a groatAn excellent feat, to make a two penie peece lie plaine in the palme of your

hand, and to be passed from thence when you listTo convey a testor out of ones hand that holdeth it fastTo throw a piece of money into a deep pond, and to fetch it again from

whence you listTo convey one shilling being in one hand into another, holding your hands

abroad like a roodTo transforme any one small thing into any other forme by folding of paper.

He gives detailed instructions as to how to perform these tricks. When he comesto card tricks, however, he is more cautious. Tricks with cards are much closerto roguery, as he explains in Chapter XXVII, which is on the subject ‘Of cards,with good cautions how to avoid cozenage therein: speciall rules to convey and


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handle the cards, and the manner and order how to accomplish all difficult andstrange things wrought with cards.’153

And at this point, the book shifts genres. It is no longer merely a how-toguide: it is a manual of urban self-defence, intended to warn the innocentreader against the tricks of a particularly predatory kind of juggler: the cardsharp.

Having now bestowed some waste money among you, I will set you to cards;by which kind of witchcraft a great number of people have juggled awaynot only their money, but also their lands, their health, their time, andtheir honesty. I dare not (as I could) shew the lewd juggling that cheaterspractice, lest it minister some offence to the well disposed, to the simplehurt and losses, and to the wicked occasion of evil doing. But I would wishall gamesters to beware, not only with what cards and dice the play, butespecially with whom and where they exercise gaming. And to let dice passe(as whereby a man may be inevitably cousened) one that is skilful to makeand use Bumcards, may undoe a hundreth wealthy men that are given togaming: but if he have a confederate present, either of the players orstanders by, the mischief cannot be avoided. If you play among strangers,beware of him that seems simple or drunken; for under their habit the mostspeciall couseners are presented, and while you think by their simplicityand imperfections to beguile them (and thereof perchance are perswadedby their confederates, your very friends as you think) you your self will bemost of all overtaken. Beware also of the […]tors by, and lookers on, andnamely of them that bet on your side, for whilest they look on your gamewithout suspition, they discover it by signes to your adversaries, with whomthey bet, and yet are their confederates.154

But despite his disclaimer, Scot does indeed show ‘the lewd juggling thatcheaters practice’, showing the reader how to do several card tricks, all ofwhich could be used in dishonest play as well as in honest delight. How, forexample, ‘to deliver out four aces, and to convert them into four knaves’155 and‘How to tell one what card he seeth in the bottome, when the same cardis shuffled into the stock.’156 What is extraordinary about the book is howthorough it is as a handbook of conjuring – and how modern it seems, notonly in its rational scepticism, but in its technical descriptions. Like mostdescriptions of magic tricks, the moves are a little hard to follow on the page,and the Elizabethan English makes it harder for the contemporary reader. Yetmost of the principles which Scot adumbrates in these chapters are to be foundin modern conjuring manuals. For example, the basic principle of card magicin which Scot instructs his Elizabethan reader, is one that few modernconjurors would dispute:


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But in shewing feats, and juggling with cards the principal point consistethin shuffling them nimbly, and alwaies keeping one certain card either in thebottome, or in some known place of the stock, four or five cards from it.Hereby you shall seem to work wonders; for it will be easie for you to see orspie one card, which though you be perceived to do, it will not be suspected,if you shuffle them well afterwards.157

He details, too, techniques which are still the stock-in-trade of modernconjurors such as the finger break and the in-jog:

And this note I must give you, that in reserving the bottome card, you mustalwaies (whilest you shuffle) keep him a little before or a little behind all thecards lying underneath him, bestowing him (I say) either a little beyond hisfellowes before, right over the forefinger, or else behind the rest, so as thelittle finger of the left hand may meet with it: which is the easier, the readyer,& the better way. In the beginning of your shuffling, shuffle as thick as youcan; and in the end throw upon the stock the neather card (with so many moat the least as you would have preserved for any purpose) a little beforeor behind the rest. Provided alwaies, that your fore finger, if the pack be laidbefore, or the little finger, if the pack lie behinde, creep up to meet with thebottome card, and not lie betwixt the cards: and when you feel it, you maythere hold it, untill you have shuffled over the cards again, still leaving yourkept card below. Being perfect herein, you may do almost what you list withthe cards.158

His techniques involve basic issues such as catching an early glimpse of the targetcard in order to be able to producing it later in the routine: ‘then shuffle the cards,or let any other shuffle them; for you know the card already, and therefore may atany time tell them what card they saw: which neverthelesse would be done withgreat circumstance and shew of difficultie.’159 And as that last phrase shows, Scothad a good sense of the showman’s instinct for making the comparatively simpleappear extremely difficult.

The same is true of the descriptions of other kinds of tricks. Book XIII ofScot’s Discovery is a primer of basic magic techniques. Some, admittedly, seemwilfully obscure, such as his assertion that ‘To make a shoal of goslings, or (asthey say) a gaggle of Geese to seem to draw a timber log, is done by that verymeans that is used, when a cat doth draw a fool through a pond or river: buthandled some what further off from the beholders.’ (Perhaps the cat routine wasfamiliar enough to Elizabethan readers as to need no further explanation?)Others are disappointingly prosaic: ‘To make one dance naked: Make a poor boyconfederate with you, so as after charms, &c. spoken by you, he uncloth himself,and stand naked, seeming (whilest hee undresseth him) to shake, stamp, andcrie, still hastening to be unclothed; till he be stark naked.’160 On the whole


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though, Scot offers a manual of magic tricks, most of which are as relevant todayas they were when they were written. A contemporary conjuror would recognizeboth the techniques and the apparatus which Scot describes; clearly the‘jugglers’ of his day were familiar with the kinds of devices which latergenerations went on to use in different ways. The use of a code between themagician and the assistant in order to give the impression of psychic powers, forexample, was a major feature of Victorian mentalist acts. In the followingdescription we see that Scot pre-empts some of the ‘mind-reading’ techniquesof the Golden Age by four centuries:

Juggling knacks by confederacy, and how to know whether one calls cross orpile [i.e. heads or tails] by the ringing.

Lay a wager with your confederate (who must seem simple, or obstinatelyopposed against you) that standing behind a door, you will (by the sound orringing of the money) tell him whether he cast cross or pile; so as when you aregone, and he hath fillipped the money before the witnesses who are to becozened, he must say; What is it, if it be cross; or What ist, if it be pile: or someother such sign, as you are agreed upon, and so you need not fail to guessrightly. By this means (if you have any invention) you may seem to doe ahundred miracles, and to discover the secrets of a man’s thoughts, or wordsspoken a far off.161

The Elizabethan juggler’s system is a little more rudimentary than the elaboratesystem of verbal codes developed by the nineteenth-century mentalists, but thetechnique is essentially the same. And while Scot describes it in terms of a verybasic trick ‘to know whether one calls cross or pile’ he is alert to the infinitepossibilities inherent in such a code: ‘By this means (if you have any invention)you may seem to do a hundred miracles, and to discover the secrets of a man’sthoughts…’

Scot’s careful analysis of the topic of magic illustrates the ways in which theconcepts of juggling and conjuring are used in the Renaissance – as does his ownuse of the terms. Scot approaches the distinction between efficacious magicand magic as entertainment in a very different way from Thomas Hill; for Scot,there is no such thing as efficacious magic, therefore everything is performance.Throughout the Discovery the words ‘conjuror’, ‘conjuring’, ‘conjuration’ etc. areused – as they would have been used generally in the period – to refer to someonewho claims, tries, or pretends to practise efficacious magic. But of course, in Scot’shands – since he steadfastly refuses to give credence to beliefs in witchcraft – whatthis really means is someone who is tricking his audience.

‘Juggler’ along with its cognates, is a more straightforward word in Scot’svocabulary. It means principally a professional performer, though this too hasovertones of dishonesty. In Scot’s view there is, clearly, no great distance between


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the performer and the cheat. Yet he is broad-minded enough to admit that thereis room for the entertainer, and scrupulous enough to worry away at the variousshades of distinctions between, on the one hand the entertainer and the fraudster,and on the other between the entertainer and the occult practitioner. He goes intodetailed arguments about the similarities and differences between different kindsof ‘conjuring’, practised for different reasons and to different effects, beforeannouncing,

To conclude, it is to be avouched (and there bee proofes manifest enough)that our Jugglers approach much neerer to resemble Pharaohs Magicians,than either witches or conjurors, and make a more lively shew of workingmiracles than any inchantors can doe: for these practise to shew that inaction, which witches doe in words and terms.162

He concludes that there is no harm in the juggler’s art

so long as the power of almighty God is not transposed to the juggler, noroffence ministred by his uncomely speech and behaviour, but the actionperformed in pastime, to the delight of the beholders, so as alwaies thejuggler confesse in the end that these are no supernatural actions, butdevices of men, and nimble conveyances…163

Provided that the entertainer comes clean about his skill, and does not try to pass it off as supernatural, it should be regarded as a legitimateperforming art.

There is one further level to Scot’s argument. In the Discovery the notion ofconjuring is unremittingly linked, not only to the notion of deception but also tothat of Catholicism. As suggested in the previous chapter, this is a commonRenaissance trope, and Scot frequently pretends to confuse the words ‘conjuror’and ‘cozener’164 in order to make his point through humour. More seriously,though, phrases such as ‘papists and conjurors’ or ‘papists conjurors andwitches’ are formulae of which Scot is particularly fond.165 Where one of theseconcepts is to be found, the other is frequently nearby. Thus, for example, Scottalks about superstitions of past ages, superstitions such as that of

a holy garment called a wastecote for necessity was much used of our forefathers,as a holy relique, &c. as given by the Pope, or some such arch-conjuror, whopromised thereby all manner of immunity to the wearer thereof; insomuch ashe could not be hurt with any shot or other violence.166

In true Protestant style the Pope is described as a conjuror – indeed an ‘arch-conjuror’, a false magician who practises superstitious (and ineffective) magic.


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The magic waistcoat’s promises of immunity are – Scot leaves us in no doubtabout this – false. Like the villainous Archimago,167 the wicked wizard in EdmundSpenser’s complex and influential religious and political allegory The FaerieQueene, the Pope becomes an archetype of false belief. The old religion(which was, according to the dominant Protestant ideology of Elizabeth’s day,the false religion) is damned by association with magic. Scot’s underlyingrational Protestant world-view means that the language in which he describesthe magicians of his day is always doing some religious-political work. The word‘conjuror’ yokes together Catholicism and fraudulence.

Samuel Rid The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (1612)Scot, then, over his 400-odd pages, considers the nature of juggling andlegerdemain as part of his larger concern: to discredit, in the name of rationalProtestant scepticism, popular assumptions about witchcraft and natural magic,and to contribute to the doctrinal polemics of post-Reformation England. Thirtyyears later, much of his research turns up under another writer’s name, cheerfullyplagiarized by Samuel Rid in The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (1612), the bookwhich can probably claim to be the first purpose-produced handbook for theamateur conjuror. What is interesting here is not the plagiarism itself (which wasa common enough tactic among early modern writers and among conjurors of allperiods) so much as what gets left out: that is to say, everything except the tricksthemselves. Rid strips away Scot’s more serious theological and humanitarianpurposes and publishes a simple handbook of juggling and legerdemain whichoffers the reader a series of party tricks. The fact that Rid can bracket thisso unproblematically as a form of entertainment reinforces the sense that bythe early years of the seventeenth century a distinct and recognizable performanceart has emerged. ‘Jugling’, as Rid says ‘is now become common’168 – and in theprocess it has generated a market for instruction booklets.

In The Art of Jugling, Rid offers both a definition of the art as a whole andplenty of examples of individual illusions. His definition (freely borrowed fromScot) is that

[t]he true Art therefore of Jugling consisteth of Legerdemain: that is the nimbleconveyance and right dexterity of the hand, the which is performed diverse ways,especially three: the first and principal consisteth in hiding and conveying ofballs; the second in alteration of money; the third in shuffling of cards. And hethat is expert in these may show many feats and much pleasure.169

Rid has defined his readership more precisely than did Thomas Hill. The Artof Jugling or Legerdemaine is aimed squarely at the amateur conjuror who wantsto learn, for example, ‘A very pretty trick to make a groat or a testor to sinkthrough a table, and to vanish out of a handkerchief very strangely’, or how ‘To


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consume (or rather convey) one or many balls into nothing’, ‘To convey moneyout of one hand into the other, by legerdemain’, ‘To throw a piece of money away,and to find it again where you please’. Occasionally Rid slips into an admonitorytone similar to that used in the coney-catching pamphlets of Greene and others,and includes warnings about how to avoid being cheated at dice and cards. Forthe most part, however, this early aficionado of conjuring is sharing with thereader a naive enthusiasm for juggling as performance. Thus, for example:

To cut half your nose in sunder, and to heal it again presently without any salve.

[This is easily done; however being nimbly done it will deceive the sight ofthe beholders.] Take a knife, having a round hollow gap in the middle, and layit upon your nose, and so shall you seem to have cut your nose in sunder:provided always that in all these, you have another like knife without a gap,to be showed upon pulling out of the same, and words of enchantments tospeak. Blood also, to bewray the wound, and nimble conveyance.170

Again, the trick itself is copied almost verbatim from Scot, but Rid’s parenthesisis his own, and in it we can detect an almost childish delight in sleight of hand,and in these jokeshop illusions. The reader, it is implied, will probably want torush off immediately and try out these party pieces.

It is a fair assumption that in this instruction manual Rid is painting a reasonably accurate picture of the kind of routine which a contemporaryprofessional juggler would have performed. As well as being taught individualillusions, the reader is initiated into the basics of conjuring: the importance ofcarrying the trick off with confidence (‘a good face’); of nimbleness of execution(‘for if you be a bungler, you both shame your selfe, and make the Art you goeabout to be perceaued and knowne, and so bring it into discredit’171) and of agood line in patter in order to misdirect the audience’s attention. This last isa standard feature of handbooks of magic tricks from earliest times to thepresent day: the art of the magician does not lie in manual dexterity alone, butin the context in which it is presented. Note, though, what sort of patter Ridrecommends:

You must also have your words of Art, certain strange words, that it may notonly breed the more admiration to the people, but to leads [sic] away the eyefrom espying the manner of your conveyance, while you may induce themind, to conceive, and suppose that you deal with Spirits: and such kindof sentences, and of speeches, are used in divers manners; fitting andcorrespondent to the action and feat that you go about. As ‘Hey Fortuna,furia, nunquam, Credo, passe passe, when come you Sirrah?’ or this way:‘Hey Jack, come aloft for thy master’s advantage, pass and be gone!’ Or


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otherwise, as ‘Ailif, Casil, zaze, Hit, metmeltat, Saturnus, Iupiter, Mars, Sol,Venus, Mercurie, Luna?’ Or thus: ‘Drocti, Micocti, et Senarocti, Velu barocti,Asmarocti, Ronnsee, Faronnsee, hey pass, pass.’ Many such observations tothis art, are necessary, without which all the rest, are little to the purpose.172

The patter, which the early modern juggler is encouraged to adopt, is the ‘wordsof art’ of the practising sorcerer or occultist. Once more we are directed towardsthe ambiguous position of the juggler in relation to ‘real’ magic. Given theseriousness of the penalties for being convicted of practising genuine witchcraftduring this period – and these had increased significantly in the last few yearsunder James I – it might be expected that the professional entertainer wouldsteer clear of anything which might raise that suspicion. On the contrary,however, Rid’s juggler is positively instructed to lead his audience ‘to supposethat you deal with Spirits’, by chanting a quaint mixture of Latin, English and totalgibberish.173 Interestingly, some of the ‘words of art’ that Rid suggests are takenfrom contemporary accounts of real charms and folk magic, spells andincantations which are believed by their users to be genuine and effective: ‘Ailif,Casil, zaze, Hit’, for example, is recorded by Scot as coming from ‘A charmeteaching how to hurt whom you list with images of wax’.174 According to Rid,this patter, some of which is taken from the practices of those claiming realoccult knowledge, is the very essence of the act: ‘Many such observations to thisart, are necessary’ he says, ‘without which all the rest, are little to the purpose.’The patter of the seventeenth-century juggler is designed precisely to dressthe entertainment in the garments of efficacy. Just as Brandon’s reputationmight have been enhanced by the pigeon episode; and just as Banks may wellhave invented (or at the very least, capitalized happily upon) the story of howhe and Morocco were accused of witchcraft on the continent, so here theapprentice amateur conjuror is being encouraged to take risks with hisperformance and to flirt with the notion of the truly subversive.

A description of a juggler’s act from later in the century shows even moreclearly the way in which the seventeenth-century juggler might encourage theillusion that he is performing ‘real’ magic. Thomas Ady’s Candle in the Darkcontains the following description.

A juggler, knowing the common tradition and foolish opinion that a familiarspirit in some shape must be had for the doing of strange things, beyondthe vulgar capacity, he therefore carrieth about him the skin of a mousestopped with feathers, or some like artificial thing, and in the hinder partthereof sticketh a small springing wire of about a foot long, or longer, andwhen he begins to act his part in a fair or a market before vulgar people, hebringeth forth his imp, and maketh it spring from him once or twice uponthe table, and then catcheth it up, saying, Would you be gone? I will make


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you stay and play some tricks for me before you go?… Then begin the sillypeople to wonder, and whisper, then he sheweth many slights of activity asif he did them by the help of his Familiar, which the silliest sort ofbeholders do verily believe.175

The ‘imp’ is manipulated through a combination of ventriloquism (the jugglermakes ‘a squeaking noise with his lips’) and legerdemain. It fools some of thepeople some of the time, yet only ‘the silliest sort of beholders do verily believe’that it is really a familiar spirit. For most, it remains either ambiguous or adramatic fiction. Ady portrays a split audience, in which different spectatorsinterpret what they are seeing in different ways. Some see it as pure entertainment;others see it as trafficking with spirits. It is interesting, however, to see who Adyis referring to when he talks of the ‘silliest sort of beholders’. It sometimeshappens, he explains,

that if here have been any University Scholars at the beholding, or at theacting of these common Tricks, they have gone out and fallen into a disputeupon the matter, some saying, Sensus nunquam fallitur circa propriumobjectum,176 some have said that the Juggler by his Familiar doth thickenthe Air, some again that he hurteth the Eye-sight, and so deceiveth thebeholders; and in all their discourse they shew themselves veryPhilosophical, but very little capacious. And Cooper writing upon thatsubject, hath pretended to shew himself Theological, but betrayeth himselfto be very silly, blind, and ignorant.177

It is not only the poorest section of the crowd, nor those with the least formaleducation, who are prone to mistake sleight of hand for sorcery. The scholars’cleverness, their tendency to over-interpret, renders them every bit as gullibleas the ignorance of the ‘vulgar people’. A timely warning to academics who writeabout magic!

The seventeenth-century juggler was able to ply his trade in the shadowyarea between belief and illusion. In The Art of Juggling, Rid adds a conventionalhealth warning, carefully condemning those who use such tricks for harm. Heis aware that the boundaries between entertainment and efficacy need to behandled with care. Echoing Scot, he warns that ‘…when these experimentsgrow to superstition and impiety, they are either to be forsaken as vain, or deniedas false’. However, he goes on to affirm that

howbeit, if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurtof our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of Gods holy name: thensure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein orhereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural.178


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William Vincent (attrib.) Hocus Pocus,The Anatomy of Legerdemain (1634)Atttitudes towards ‘jugglers’ during this period, then, are complex. It wouldcertainly be a mistake to assume that all performers of theatrical magic wereautomatically in danger of being charged with being in league with the devil.There is nothing simple or uniform about the beliefs which were held aboutmagic and witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and the early modern periods.During this time we see both credulity and scepticism, both belief in thesupernatural and an urge to debunk such belief. Thus on the one hand we canidentify a sceptical strain in English Renaissance thought (represented mostclearly by Scot) which meant that popular entertainers who performed magictricks would not automatically be accused of witchcraft – even when, as Ridrecommends, they went out of their way to appear as if they were reallycommuning with spirits. On the other hand we can distinguish a significantbackground of superstition and occult belief (a background so prevalent thatScot needed to write his book because he was so concerned at the way in which‘The common people have been so assotted and bewitched, with whatsoeverpoets have feigned of witchcraft’179) against which performers such as Banksand Brandon carried out their juggling tricks.

Both the writings and the career of another early modern juggler give us afurther insight about the way in which rationality and superstition intersect inearly modern juggling performances. The phrase ‘Hocus Pocus’ lives on in ourcommon speech long after the showman who performed under that name hasvanished into obscurity. Originally, though, Hocus Pocus was a juggler whoplayed at fairs, markets, country houses, at civic entertainments and on streetcorners during the early seventeenth century. In fact, it is quite probable thatmore than one practitioner operated under that name: for later generations,certainly, ‘Hocus Pocus’ seems to have become a generic name for a certainkind of juggler who, like Santa Claus or Ronald McDonald, was able to be inmany places at once. However, evidence from various civic records (includingcourt records from Leicester in which he is accused of obtaining money bydeception) has led recent scholars to identify the original Hocus Pocus asWilliam Vincent.180 The stage name was kept alive, at least in part because itbecame incorporated into the title of one of the most-frequently reprintedof seventeenth-century books on conjuring: Hocus Pocus, The Anatomy ofLegerdemain.

The Anatomy of Legerdemain, once more, repeats a good deal of materialfrom both Rid and Scot – although in this case the author is more careful to usehis own words when lifting material than was Rid. Many of the tricks, though,are the same; and again, taken together they provide a good overall picture of therepertoire of the early modern juggler. Here, for example, are the instructionsfor ‘An excellent feat to make a two-penny piece lie plain in your hand, and to bepassed from thence when you list’:


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Put a little red wax (but not too thin) upon the nail of your longest finger, andlet a stranger put a two-penny piece into the palm of your hand, and shut yourfist suddenly, and convey the two-penny piece upon the wax, which with useyou may so accomplish as no man shall perceive it. Then say, Ailiff, casil,zaze, hit, mel, and suddenly open your hand, holding the tips of your fingersrather lower then higher than the palm of your hand, and the beholders willwonder where it is become. Then shut your hand suddenly again, and laya wager whether it be there or no; and you may either leave it there, or takeit away with you at your pleasure.181

One thing which has survived from Rid is the patter. The ‘words of art’ are thesame: ‘Ailiff, casil, zaze, hit’ – once more, they are those words from the spell to‘hurt whom you list with images of wax’, but taken completely out of context,and used to disguise a quick and simple coin effect.

Where The Anatomy of Legerdemain shows a great advance on itspredecessors is in its illustrations, which are many and detailed. The book isclearly intended as a serious manual of professional techniques for would-bejugglers. It is a far cry from Scot’s painstaking unmasking of pseudo-witchcraftin the Discovery. This, though, makes the very end of The Anatomy all the moresurprising. The author begins his conclusion conventionally enough, boastingthat if the reader has taken the trouble to understand the book ‘there is not atrick that any juggler in the world can show thee, but thou shalt be able toconceive after what manner it is performed.’ He then adds, however, thesurprise proviso: ‘if he do it by a sleight of hand, and not by an unlawful anddetested means.’ After all the instructions how to perform the tricks, the authorsuddenly opens the door to the occult. He goes on to affirm

[t]hat there are such it is not to be doubted of, that doe work by unlawfulmeans, and have besides their own natural endowments the assistance ofsome familiar, whereby they many times effect such miraculous things as maywell be admired by whomsoever shall either behold or hear tell of them.182

We are suddenly back in the world of Jacobean folk beliefs about witchcraft, aworld in which ‘miraculous things’ are carried out by ‘familiars’ – minordemons at the service of the witch or wizard. The author goes on to assure thereader that

I could give an instance in one whose father while he lived was the greatestjuggler in England, and used the assistance of a familiar; he lived a Tinkerby trade, and used his feats as a trade by the by; he lived, as I was informed,always be-tattered, and died for ought I could hear in the same estate. Icould here, as I have instanced in this man, so give you his name, and where


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he liveth, but because he hath left the bad way, and chose the better, becausehe hath amended his life, and betook himself to an honest calling, I willrather rejoice at his good, then do him any the least disgrace by naming himto be such a one.183

This is a strange bit of teasing: coyly the author refuses to name the anonymous‘father [who] while he lived was the greatest juggler in England, and used theassistance of a familiar’. Yet the implication is that he is speaking of his ownfather – and since the author of this work calls himself ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’,the inference we are asked to draw is that this ‘greatest juggler in England’ whoused the assistance of a familiar and then repented, is actually ‘Hocus Pocus’himself: William Vincent.

Yet even here we cannot rest. It gets even more complicated – since it is morethan likely that William Vincent himself was actually the author of The Anatomyof Legerdemain.184 If this is indeed the case, and father and son are one andthe same, then it seems the writer is accusing himself of having practisedwitchcraft – and then providing himself with an alibi by claiming to be dead!The meaning of that final paragraph shifts once again, becoming self-referential – and by now almost certainly ironic. Once more, the apparent claimof supernatural aid looks more and more tongue-in-cheek.

Several years after Vincent’s death, Hocus Pocus is still remembered as anarchetype of the street conjuror: in 1655 Thomas Ady defines the craft ofjuggling as consisting

first, in sleight of hand, or cleanly conveyance… [which] is profitably seenin our common Jugglers, that go up and down to play their Tricks in Fairsand Markets. I will speak of one man more excelling in that craft thanothers, that went about in King James’s time, and long since, who calledhimself, The King’s Majesty’s most excellent Hocus Pocus, and so was hecalled, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used to say, Hocuspocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, toblind the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currentlywithout discovery, because when the eye and the ear of the beholder areboth earnestly busied, the Trick is not so easily discovered, nor theImposture discerned.185

Like Rid, Ady accurately describes the function of the magician’s patter as beingto ‘busy’ the ear of the beholder and prevent the discovery of the trick. He doesnot suggest that Vincent followed Rid’s advice in adopting a pseudo-occultpersona (although the Latinate phrases are clearly intended to sound vaguelymystical). What Ady does tell us, though, is that, like Brandon, Vincent claimedroyal patronage. Calling himself ‘The King’s Majesty’s most excellent Hocus


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Pocus’, he seems to have been licensed, not merely by a local magistrate, noreven by the Master of the Revels, but by the King himself. Such a prestigiouspatron was the privilege of very few entertainers: among this elite wasShakespeare’s company, the King’s Men.

The records bear out Vincent’s claim. N. W. Bawcutt, in his authoritative studyof Vincent, cites a royal warrant, issued in July 1619 on behalf of King James:

A Licence to William Vincent under the Signet, to exercise the Art ofLegerdemaine in any Townes within the Relme of England and Irelandduring his Mats pleasure.186

The fact that the license apparently had to be renewed in 1627, afterJames’s death, strengthens the case for seeing this as a personal warrant. Andthis is interesting because the notion of ‘license’ has a specific significance inthis period. To be licensed is to be given permission to say and do things thatare otherwise unlawful, like the licensed fools in Shakespeare’s plays, whosesatires and jibes against their employers are met with laughter rather than withpunishment. By licensing the performer, the authorities – in this case theauthority of the King himself – sanction subversion. And in this case (and thisis what makes it more significant in the case of Vincent than it was in the caseof Brandon) the juggler is being licensed directly by James – the ‘RoyalScotchman’ whose passionate belief in the reality, and the danger, of witchcraftled him to participate directly in witch trials, to publish his Daemonologie as adirect refutation of Reginald Scot’s sceptical Discovery, and to strengthenexisting witchcraft legislation with a statute of 1604. Against all the backgroundof debates about the occult, against the proliferation of folk magic and paganbelief in rural areas, at a time when witchcraft was still punishable by death,187

a famously superstitious king is happy to license Hocus Pocus.

‘Betwixt jest and earnest’

The bent little fortune-tellers terrorizing their clients with crystal balls are toymodels of the great ones who hold the fate of mankind in their hands.

Theodor Adorno188

In the science of optics there is a useful technical term, ‘paraxis’. A paraxialregion is ‘an area in which light rays seem to unite at a point after refraction.In this area, object and image seem to collide, but in fact neither object norreconstituted image genuinely reside there: nothing does’.189 The paraxialregion is a useful metaphor for the imaginative space in which the juggler’sperformance of magic takes place: an imaginative space which ‘is neither


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entirely “real” (object) nor entirely “unreal” (image), but is located somewhereindeterminately between the two.’190

Certainly, when it comes to questions of magic, conjuring and juggling, thevision of the early modern period is multifocal, able to contain paradoxes andcontradictions. I have argued against the notion that the juggler in this periodwas in continual danger of being arrested for a witch or conjuror, yet theambiguous space between efficacy and entertainment was real. The point is,though, that for the most part this ambiguous space existed in the mind of theaudience rather than in the attitudes of the authorities or the laws of the land.191

Moreover, it is a space which seems, on the whole, to have been regarded as acreative and playful one, rather than as a dangerous one, by the juggler and hisaudience.

Such indeterminate spaces are not met with approval by all. Sir ThomasBrowne despaired of the common people’s willingness to be exploited by thiskind of ambiguity. His Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Enquiries into Vulgar andCommon Errors (1646) is one of the earliest theoretical studies of Englishpopular culture. Unsurprisingly, since he was writing during the period of theEnglish Civil War, Browne sees himself as playing for high stakes. Like manyother scientific rationalists of this pre-Enlightenment period, he sees theperpetuation of rational Christianity, grounded in logic, rhetoric and syllogisticreasoning as well as in faith, as the keystone of civilization. The ‘Popular Errors’,of which his book is an anatomy and a refutation, threaten the basis ofcivilization itself, and his book is a passionate attempt to defend rational belief,lest the world plunge back into another Dark Ages. Thus in Book I of the work,Browne anatomizes the various ways in which erroneous, superstitious or justplain wrong-headed thinking and beliefs arise in his society. By ‘errors’, of course,Browne means everything apart from his own moderate rational ProtestantChristianity. For Browne, there is no conflict between reason and faith – indeed,he sees ‘true’ Christianity as supremely rational, based on the rationality ofChrist himself:

But the wisdom of our Saviour, and the simplicity of his truth proceeded…[by] placing his felicitie in things removed from sense, and the intellectualenjoyment of God… [T]here is surely no reasonable Pagan, that will notadmire the rationall and well grounded precepts of Christ, whose life as it wasconformable to his doctrine, so was that unto the highest rules of reason; andmust therefore flourish in the advancement of learning, and the perfection ofparts best able to comprehend it.192

Browne has confidence in the absolute rightness of his Anglican world-view.As a result, when he looks at contemporary culture he is appalled by the extentto which the ‘epidemic’ of popular errors has spread. One of the main sources


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of these popular errors is the gullibility (or ‘erroneous disposition’) of thepeople, and in Chapter III Browne spends some time analysing this gullibility.In Browne’s view, illiteracy, weak understanding and herd thinking lie at the rootof the problem, but these are made worse by the ease with which folk are ledastray by charlatans of one form or another. Browne is convinced that there is acontinuum between, on the one hand, contemporary Christian heresies and thespectre of competing world religions such as Islam, and, on the other hand, theforms of popular error and manipulation of the masses which take place on alower level. If the fraudulent ‘Priests of Elder time’, prophets such as Mohammed,and other brands of Christianity pose a kind of threat to Browne’s ordered,rational view of Christian civilization, so a similar kind of threat is posed bymountebanks and travelling performers:

Saltimbancoes, Quacksalvers and Charlatans, deceive them in lower degrees…Astrologers, which pretend to be of Cabala with the starres, such I mean asabuse that worthy enquirie, have not been wanting in their deceptions…Fortune tellers, Juglers, Geomancers, and the like incantatory impostors,though commonly men of inferior ranke, and from whom withoutillumination they can expect no more then from themselves, doe daily andprofessedly delude them: unto whom (what is deplorable in men andChristians) too many applying themselves betwixt jest and earnest, betray thecause of truth, and insensibly make up, the legionarie body of errour.193

Browne lumps together the street entertainers and the confidence tricksters: inhis mind, the dividing lines between the performer and the criminal are blurred,to say the least. There is a subtlety in Browne’s analysis of the spirit in which‘men and Christians’ – who, he implies firmly, should know better – engage withsome of these charlatans. They do so, he says ‘betwixt jest and earnest’. It is animportant insight into a kind of liminality, a state betwixt and between in whichneither belief nor scepticism predominates. Browne has no truck with this stateof mind, of course: for him it ‘betrays the cause of truth’ and simply, ifunconsciously, contributes to the growing and ‘legionarie’ body of error. It is,however, central to our theme. Just as Browne lumps together entertainers andcriminal tricksters, so here is the other side of the coin: people who consultfortune tellers or geomancers are positioned both as audience and victim –‘betwixt jest and earnest’. Browne, in his politico-theological analysis of hisculture, saw the juggler as representing the thin end of the wedge of barbarism.

And it is here, in the interstices between jest and earnest, that the Exeteranecdote, of the performance of Doctor Faustus at which actors and audiencealike ‘were all persuaded there was one devil too many amongst them’, appears.It is, in some ways akin to the stories of Banks and Brandon and Hocus Pocus.Like those, it is yet another story of a magical performance which operates on


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the threshold between make-believe and reality. And in this case the possibilitythat truly occult powers might be involved is one which infects not only theaudience but the performers as well.

But it is significant that this, one of the most vivid anecdotes about aconjuring performance which seemed to cross over the threshold into therealms of the supernatural, does not come from accounts of jugglers at all, butfrom a description of a performance by a company of professional actors.Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre-makers were vividly aware of the fact that, inthe theatre, illusion depends upon an unstable double vision. The fictionalworld of the dramatic narrative is a product of the conjunction, and theinterpenetration, of the ideal and the material: the ‘ideal’ fiction of the narrative‘materializes’ in the bodies of real, present human beings, carrying physicalstage props and wearing physical costumes. Theatrical spectatorship thereforeinvolves a negotiation between two realities, and Elizabethan playwrights andacting companies were experts at manipulating these realities. At Exeter,however, things seem to have got out of control. Actors and audience, theirimaginations working together, are suddenly faced with the possibility that theirtheatrical magic might be more than just metaphor. The unnerving sense ofthat extra devil on the stage suggests that by playing out the story of Faustus’ssatanic pact they might themselves have unwittingly entered into a similarcontract.

The majority of educated Elizabethans, including many of the lawmakers, seemat heart to have agreed with Scot that, on the whole, the entertainer, the juggler,the practitioner of legerdemain, poses little threat to the commonwealth:

Howbeit, if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurtof our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of God’s holy name, thensure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or herebya natural thing be made to seem supernatural. Such are the miracles wroughtby jugglers, caused by fine and nimble conveyance, called legerdemain…194

And, indeed, for most Elizabethan cultural polemicists195 the emergingprofessional theatre was actually a cause of far more serious anxiety than theroutines of the fairground juggler. The position of the Elizabethan professionalactor was not very different in legal terms from that of the juggler: the 1572 Actfor the Punishment of Vagabonds linked actors and jugglers together quitespecifically, stipulating that unless they were licensed to perform by anaristocratic patron or a magistrate, all ‘common players in interludes,minstrels, jugglers, peddlers, tinkers and petty chapmen… shall be taken,adjudged and deemed rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars.’196 But althoughthey were linked on this level, there were also differences. Jugglers were oftenconsidered to exist on the margins of criminality, allied with cheats, frauds and


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‘coney-catchers’; but despite that – or possibly because of that – the threatwhich the juggler posed to the social and imaginative order was limited. Theprofessional theatre, on the other hand, posed a different kind of threat. It wasmore of an unknown quantity: highly popular, undergoing a phase of rapidgrowth and development – and capable of transporting audiences into unfamiliarrealms of the imagination. The antitheatrical prejudice of certain social groupsled to a massive and occasionally hysterical cultural campaign to limit, censor andclose down the public theatres of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Andamongst those polemicists for whom the new Elizabethan commercial theatrerepresented the worst form of depravity, the argument that the illusions of thestage were indeed demonically inspired was more than merely metaphorical.William Rankins, writing in A Mirror of Monsters, says of the players of thesetheatres that

they are sent from their great captain Satan (under whose banner they beararms) to deceive the world, to lead the people with enticing shows to thedevil, to seduce them to sin, and well-tuned strings to sound pleasing melodywhen people in heaps dance to the Devil.197

Rankins’ assertion that the actor is an agent of Satan articulates an extremeview, it is true, but his outburst bears witness to the level of concern which thisburgeoning art form evoked amongst some of those who saw it as their duty topolice the imaginations of their fellow citizens.

This may be because basic relationship which the Elizabethan and Jacobeantheatre establishes with its audience is qualitatively different from that betweenthe juggler and his audience. The juggler’s relationship with his audience isessentially a combative one: he performs impossibilities and challenges hisaudience to see how the trick is done (making quite sure they are unable to doso). The success of his act depends on the position of superiority which heestablishes. But the magic of the developing Elizabethan popular theatre was ofa different order. It involved a different kind of relationship, a different kind ofcontract, between the performer and the audience, one based on imaginativecollaboration. Shakespeare’s famous Prologue to Henry V articulates brilliantlythe way in which the bare Elizabethan stage invited the audience to join in theact of creation.

Piece out our imperfection with your thoughts;Into a thousand parts divide one manAnd make imaginary puissance.Think, when we talk of horses, that you see themPrinting their proud hoofs i’th’receiving earth;For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings…198


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This is an essentially different contract from the one which exists between theconjuror and his audience. The theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporariesoffers a collaborative relationship rather than a competitive one: the audience isimplicated in the act of creation, seduced into sharing the work with theperformers. And this may be, in the end, why it was fitting that it was the actor,rather than the juggler, whose mode of entertainment seemed the moregenuinely threatening to public order.


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Chapter Four

On the margins: criminals andfraudsters

The Beggar’s BushIn early modern England, then, the professional juggler was quite likely to be seen asa confederate of the criminal underworld (‘practising’, as Rid says ‘their cozeningart of fast and loose’199) rather than as a confederate of the devil. When Scot’sdetailed exposé of the tricks of ‘cozening varlets’ in his Discovery of Witchcraftmakes a case for a rational and sceptical understanding of their trickery, it alsodemonstrates how good some of their ‘beggarly slights’ are. And while those whofalsely claim to practise a real form of magic are acquitted of witchcraft, they arenonetheless, in Scot’s eyes, criminally culpable and to be punished by the law.

Howbeit I confess, that the fear, conceit and doubt of such mischievouspretences may breed inconvenience to them that stand in awe of the same.And I wish, that even for such practices, though they never can or do take effect,the practisers be punished with all extremity; because therein is manifesteda traitorous heart to the Queen, and a presumption against God.200

The economy of Elizabethan ideology and power typically reinscribes the pettiestinterpersonal misdemeanour as an offence against the State, against the Queenand against the Divine purpose. Accordingly, Scot’s scepticism acquits thefake magician of occultism, only to condemn him or her anew for manifesting‘a traitorous heart to the Queen, and a presumption against God’.

Thus, while famous jugglers such as Brandon, Banks and Hocus Pocus mayhave achieved a kind of cultural respectability, many of their colleagues wereseen in a very different light. In Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Antipholus ofEphesus describes how he was set upon by a gang including one Pinch –

…a hungry, lean-fac’d villainA mere anatomy, a mountebank,A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller, A needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch, A living dead man. This pernicious slave,Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer…201

In fact, Antipholus has got it wrong: Pinch is actually a schoolmaster. But thedescription serves to identify a social stereotype of a more criminal type of juggler.


It is a stereotype which we can see in action in another play from the period.In Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Beggars Bush,202 there is a vividlydepicted scene between three ‘Beggars’, Higgen, Ferret and Prig, and threedrunken ‘Boors’.203 The beggars – and Prig in particular – are also cheats,looking to prey on the gullible, and it is worth looking at the scene in somedetail, since we can see in it a vivid early representation of the conjuror astrickster.

Prig first approaches the victims, asking, ‘Will ye see any feats of activity,Some sleight of hand, leigerdemain? hey pass, Presto, be gone there?’ The Boorswelcome him, and his first ‘trick’ is a simple joke: ‘Look you my honest friends,you see my hand; Plain dealing is no Divell: lend me some money; Twelve-pencea piece will serve.’ He appears to be offering to do a trick with it, but whenthe victims hand it over, he simply pockets it, saying, ‘I thank you, Thank yeheartily: when shall I pay ye?’ This is taken in good part as a piece of harmlessfun (‘Ha, ha, ha, by th’ masse this was a fine trick’, chortle the Boors), andPrig goes on to promise that ‘now I’le shew your worships A trick indeed’.Accompanied by appropriately nonsensical incantations (‘Ascentibus,malentibus, Presto’), he makes three balls disappear, and then plucks them‘like three bullets from your three noses… Titere, tu patule… Recubans subfermine fagi… Silvestram trim tram’.204

The trick is a classic piece of street conjuring. However, it is also a cover fora robbery. As Prig pulls the bullets from the Boors’ noses, Higgen is busypicking their purses. The Boors, blissfully unaware of Higgen’s legerdemain,are impressed by Prig’s. He then promises them:

Prig. One trick more yet; Hey, come aloft: sa, sa, flim, flum, taradumbis?East, west, north, south, now flye like Iack with a oumbis. Now all your money�s gone: pray search your pockets. 1st Boor. Humb. 2nd Boor. He, 3rd Boor. The Devill a penny’s here, Prig. This was a rare trick.1st Boor. But �twould be a farre rarer to restore it.Prig. I�le do ye that too: look upon me earnestly, And move not any wayes your eyes from this place, This button here: pow, whir, whiss, shake your pockets. 1st Boor. By the masse �tis here again boye.205

Prig apparently returns their vanished coins, and then magnanimously refusesany further payment for the entertainment, protesting that ‘My first trick[i.e. the money he “borrowed” from them at the start of the routine] has

ON THE MARGINS: CRIMINALS AND FRAUDSTERS

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paid me.’ He and his companions scurry away from their befuddled butdelighted audience before the boors discover – as they do a few lines later,when they try to pay their drinks bill – that he has switched their real moneyfor fake:

Boy. This is a counter Sir.1st Boor. A counter? stay ye, what are these then? O execrable Jugler! O damn�d Jugler! Look in your hose, hoa: this comes of looking forward. 3rd Boor. Divell a Dunkirk! what a rogue�s this Jugler, This hey pass, repass, h�as repast us sweetly.206

Prig and his companions are closely related to other entertaining low-lifecharacters from Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and theatres; to the‘coneycatchers’ whose criminal activities are exposed by Elizabethan writers suchas Awdeley, Harman and Greene;207 to the rogue Autolycus in Shakespeare’sWinter’s Tale who mixes some thievery with his ballads and trinkets; to thecutpurses at Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair who ply their trade while balladsingers and puppet shows distract their victims. Prig’s thefts, however, areskilfully woven into the very fabric of his juggling act: his legerdemain and his‘words of art’ are all part and parcel of his roguery.

Beggar’s Bush illustrates some of the issues which Scot deals with in hisDiscovery of Witchcraft, and throughout the period there are certainly enoughreal-life examples of street conjurors accused of ‘cozening’ their clients. James’sroyal juggler William Vincent, ‘Hocus Pocus’, appears in the magistrates’ recordsof Leicester in 1625, accused of cheating a man at cards.208 The juggler as a kindof confidence trickster is a particularly significant figure in the period fromwhich Beggar’s Bush comes. Beaumont and Fletcher are articulating in this playa common social attitude towards the juggler, portraying him as a certain type ofnimble-witted predator. Thus, in Beggar’s Bush, the juggler gets pressed intoservice in the broader Elizabethan and Jacobean project of social satires aboutthe gullibility of the common people. This was a central theme in the satireof the period for a number of interrelated reasons. In social and economic terms,the growth of agrarian and mercantile capitalism, which meant that land wasincreasingly seen in terms of monetary value, encouraged both financialspeculation among the landed classes, and a drift to the city among the labouringclasses – both of which created ideal conditions for the clever (and usuallyurban) fraudster to prey on his gullible country cousin. In intellectual terms, thevery nature of the world itself appeared to be changing. The discoveries of earlymodern science, from the circulation of the blood, to the recognition that theearth circles the sun, to – eventually – Newton’s principles of Optics andMechanics, were all re-defining the nature of humanity and its place in what


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seemed to be an increasingly expanding and mechanical universe. And in termsof religious belief, the doctrinal and organizational upheavals of the periodbetween the Reformation and the Civil War meant that the apparent certaintiesof a stable world-view had been replaced by a culture of controversy: the truthsof everyday life were the subject of debate and argument, and people died andkilled in defence of matter of doctrinal detail.209

In their various ways, all of these placed a new emphasis on the importance ofthe intellect as a survival mechanism in this confusing and rapidly changingworld. There was a sense that while, as Donne put it, the ‘new philosophy callsall in doubt’,210 it was important to wrestle with the new complexities of thisworld, both on an individual level and on a broader social level. The individualsquire cheated out of his inheritance might be a laughing matter and thesubject for a comedy – but that pattern frequently repeated could potentiallycause an economic collapse on a national scale. A new scientific discovery suchas the telescope gave rise to exciting possibilities – but when you looked throughthat telescope and saw no sign of God or his heavens up there, what did that doto man’s sense of his place in the universe? The doctrinal arguments of thepreacher in the pulpit could become the rallying cry for a popular revolution orthe ideological basis for political and religious tyranny. It was important to keepyour wits about you. Whatever form it took – whether that of the countrymancome to town in search of labour, the younger son of a landowner looking to makea quick fortune, the ordinary man trying to come to terms with the implicationsof the new science, or the Christian assailed by a variety of different accounts asto how and why his soul might be damned or saved – gullibility was potentiallysocially dangerous.

Little wonder, then, that in certain periods the juggler – the entertainingprofessional trickster who makes a living by challenging the interpretativefaculties of his audience and deceiving them – takes on a symbolic meaning,representing a whole class of rogues who live on the naïveté of their victims.In periods when a culture is particularly concerned with the importance ofinterpretation, or when it has a particularly strong sense of its own vulnerability,the juggler represents a threat to its ability to maintain its own boundaries. Ineconomic terms the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were timesof great structural change as feudal structures gave way to those based on capital.Change was the lifeblood of the Elizabethan and Jacobean economy – andconsequently it was also a source of intense anxiety. It underlies the philosophicalobsession with the themes of metamorphosis, mutability, decay, mortality,instability, time and progress which can be observed nearly everywhere in theculture’s literature: in its sermons, social treatises, scientific tracts, love poems,plays, romances, and theological discourses. In his so-called ‘Mutabilitie’ Cantosat the end of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser attempted to reconcile theparadoxes of a world in apparent flux, articulating a vision of Nature in which the


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incessant changeability of earthly forms is itself an expression of a deepercosmic pattern:

I well consider all that ye have saidAnd find that all things steadfastness do hateAnd changed be: yet being rightly weighedThey are not changed from their first estate;But by their change their being do dilate:And, turning to themselves at length again,Do work out their own perfection so by fate.211

Under such circumstances, a juggler who makes solid objects change place,appear, disappear and transform is performing the economic and philosophicalobsessions of a whole culture. Such a performance may be greeted with delight ormistrust – or, as is often the case, with a mixture of both.

Augustan jugglers and Augustan satirists Later cultural moments experienced their own versions of such economicanxieties. By the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, the residualelements of feudalism had all but vanished in Britain. The institutions ofmercantile capitalism were no longer emergent structures, but the dominantform of economic, social and cultural life. They had achieved a level of stabilitywhich would last until they were challenged by the emergence of industrialcapitalism towards the end of the century. The Augustan period’s obsession withfraud and criminality was not rooted in an overwhelming sense of cosmic change,but in questions about the nature of its apparently solid and respectable socialstructures. One repeated topos among the social satirists of this period was thesimilarity between the petty and open vices of the criminal underworld andthe larger, hidden vices of the apparently respectable world – a world in whichvice and exploitation seemed increasingly prevalent and increasingly profitable.John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, one of the great box office phenomena of theeighteenth-century theatre, made much of the parallels between the theftsperpetrated by London’s underclass and those perpetrated by its politicians,authorities and rulers. Alexander Pope’s Dunciad imagines a nightmare Londonin which civilized values disintegrate; William Hogarth’s etchings andcaricatures vividly depict the chaotic underbelly of London life; Jonathan Swift,in Gulliver’s Travels, charts a rational man’s descent into madness when facedwith the contradictions of his society. On one level, the self-image of Augustanculture seems confident and self-assured; on another, however, it is haunted bythe anxiety that its whole economic and social structures are driven by ‘Vice’, andthat this may lead to a cultural collapse.

The nightmare of cultural meltdown which so obsessed the Augustan satiristsbecame a genuine economic possibility in 1720 with the collapse of the South


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Sea Company, which had been founded in 1711 in order to trade, mainly in slaves,with Spanish interests in South America. The company’s collapse precipitated afinancial and economic crisis on a scale comparable to that of the Wall Street crashin the 1920s, ruining many private investors, bringing down government stock,and exposing the potential fragility of the financial institutions and economicstructures which had seemed so secure.

The memory of the South Sea Bubble haunted early eighteenth-centurysociety. Edwin Dawes cites one particularly effective satirical engraving, ArlequynActionist (Harlequin the Stockholder, 1720), which shows a conjuror and hisapparatus in the foreground, while in the background distraught and ruinedshareholders riot.212 Dawes adds:

The mania that the South Sea Bubble generated is an illuminating exampleof public hysteria. It highlights one of the traits that both conjurer andconfidence-trickster trade upon – the gullibility of the masses and an almostpathological compulsion to be deluded.213

This is true – but it is also true that the South Sea Bubble was not, strictlyspeaking, a confidence trick: it was the inevitable economic result of a wildoutburst of speculation in a government-sponsored investment scheme whosepurpose was to raise capital in order to liquidate the national debt.214 There wascertainly corruption within both the South Sea Company and the government, butthe collapse of the market and of the scheme was due also to the comparativeinexperience of government, speculators and directors alike in handling financialinvestment on such a scale. The South Sea Bubble was the result of over-optimistic speculation, coupled with ruthless profiteering: it was what happenswhen a capitalist economy overheats and then loses confidence. Even so, Dawes isright to draw attention to the ways in which in this period the conjuror became anicon in the popular media, representing the dangers inherent in the generalpublic’s willingness to believe in all sorts of unlikely schemes. The conjuror, theconfidence trickster and the capitalist all depend on the willingness of their publicto believe in their promises, and the faith required of the speculator by thecapitalist is the obverse of the gullibility which the confidence trickster requires ofhis victim, or the conjuror of his audience.

When John Gay wrote his short poem ‘The Jugglers’, which was publishedas one of his collection of Fables in 1727, it is not unlikely that the South SeaBubble experience was in the back of his mind: Gay, after all, was one ofthe stockholders who had been left near-destitute by the company’s failure.‘The Jugglers’ gives us some insight into the actual performances of an earlyeighteenth-century conjuror, but it also elaborates on a developing nexus ofideas about conjuring and society. As in The Beggar’s Opera, Gay uses the arenaof London low life to present a moral allegory. In this case the allegoricalframework is couched in terms of the traditional motif of the challenge between



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the mortal and the god – the kind of challenge of which there are plenty ofexamples in the Greek myths, such as Arachne’s spinning competition withAthena, and Marsyas’ musical competition with Apollo. In Gay’s poem, the‘goddess’ Vice hears of the juggler’s fame and challenges him to a conjuringcompetition. Vice is a mock-heroic allegorical figure of the kind much favouredby Augustan poets.215 She does not represent any particular form of viciousbehaviour; rather, she personifies the vice that underlies the society’s whole wayof being.

Convinc�d of his inferior skill, She sought his booth, and from the croud Defy�d the man of art aloud. Is this then he so famed for slight, Can this slow bungler cheat your sight, Dares he with me dispute the prize?216

We should note that this conjuror is not himself a criminal. He is simply aproficient professional entertainer, whose arts attract the attention of the goddess.Since this is a famous and successful conjuror he is not working the street cornersbut seems to have a semi-permanent booth – probably, though it is not madeexplicit, at one of the great London fairs such as Bartholomew Fair. The poemgoes on to catalogue his act:

The cups and balls he play�d; By turns, this here, that there, convey’d: The cards, obedient to his words, Are by a fillip turn�d to birds; His little boxes change the grain, Trick after trick deludes the train. He shakes his bag, he shows all fair, His fingers spread, and nothing there, Then bids it rain with showers of gold, And now his iv�ry eggs are told, But when from thence the hen he draws, Amaz�d spectators humm applause.217

The list is predictable enough: the cup and balls, card tricks, transpositions andtransformations. These are the kinds of tricks which we might expect and towhich other sources refer. The repertoire of the street conjuror apparentlychanged little in hundreds of years – although the production of the live henfrom the ivory egg sounds as if it might have been an innovation worth seeing!More interesting, though, is the way in which Gay uses the conjuror’s act as a



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symbol for the dishonesty of the city. When Vice takes the stage, her conjuringact is far more spectacular: she shows the crowd a distorting mirror whichmakes each spectator admire the handsomeness of his own image; she produces‘magic’ banknotes which make politicians speak or stay silent; a thief takes holdof a purse – and then watches it turn into a hangman’s noose in his hand; a rakelays hold of a beautiful woman only to find that he is holding a box of pills, curesfor the pox. Time after time Vice offers lures which turn into curses:

Twelve bottles rang’d upon the board, All full, with heady liquor stor�d, By clean conveyance disappear, And now two bloody swords are there.218

This emblematic narrative, in which drink leads to quarrelling and death, is typicalof Vice’s tricks; they are all small morality plays, in which her power to seduceand then destroy men is displayed. The attitude towards the art of ‘juggling’ whichGay displays is ambiguous, however. On the one hand, conjuring clearly becomesa metaphor for the workings of Vice; she is, indeed, the supreme conjuror. Onthe other hand, though, when the actual street entertainer acknowledges hersupremacy, the tone is not entirely clear.

The Juggler now, in grief of heart,With this submission own�d her art.Can I such matchless slight withstand? How practice hath improv�d your hand! But now and then I cheat the throng: You ev�ry day, and all day long.219

The comparison between the two suggests both the similarity and the difference.The professional entertainer is a novice compared to the goddess Vice; his tricksand illusions are comparatively harmless.

Gay’s friend and fellow satirist Jonathan Swift also used the image of theconjuror in the third volume of his Miscellanies (1736). This included a pasticheadvertisement for ‘The Wonder of all the Wonders that ever the World Wonderedat’, to be performed ‘for all persons of quality and others’, by a fictional conjurornamed John Emanuel Schoitz, ‘newly arrived in this city’.220 The city in questionis Dublin, and the wonders promised by the fictitious Schoitz start with thepromise to ‘heat a bar of iron red hot and thrust it into a barrel of gun powderbefore the company, and yet it shall not take fire’. The imagined tricks becomeincreasingly unlikely and increasingly gruesome: in an early version of the ‘guntrick’, Schoitz offers to discharge a loaded blunderbuss into the face of one ofthe spectators ‘without the least hurt’; to ‘take a pot of scalding oil and throw it



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by great ladlefuls directly at the ladies without spoiling their clothes or burningtheir skins’ and to make the Gentlemen ‘drink a Quart of hot melted lead’ withoutharm. He promises to drive spikes, pikes, nails and swords through the bodies ofthe Ladies and Gentlemen present (and their children); to hang their servantsfrom the roof; to rip out their eyes and teeth, jumble them up and then give themback to them and ‘Many other performances of art, too tedious here to mention’.

Swift’s advertisement is, of course, a parody of contemporary conjuror’sadvertisements – but it is also more than that. This conjuror’s imaginary act hasa political dimension too: it frames a fantasy of vengeance perpetrated againstthe Persons of Quality who are invited to attend. ‘John Emanuel Schoitz’ soundsvery much like a projection of Jonathan Swift himself – one of his many fictionalpersonae – and his imaginary acts of violence are all directed at the rich andtheir dependants. Beneath the fun that is being poked at the claims of conjurorslies a typically savage Swiftian attack on the Anglo-Irish ruling classes, thelandlords who, in another context, he described as cannibalistic monsters who,‘as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best titleto the children’.221

Dudley Bradstreet and the Bottle-ConjurorIn Gay and Swift, then, the figure of the conjuror-as-trickster takes on additionaldimensions: as foil for the greater vices of London and as the hero-villain of abloodthirsty revenge fantasy. Stylistically accurate though it was, Swift’s parodyadvertisement for the ‘Wonder of all the Wonders’ appeared only in book form, inhis Miscellanies: consequently, even if the underlying political polemic weremissed, the context meant that there was little chance of a reader mistaking it fora genuine advertisement. It was perhaps a little harder for audiences to spot anyfalse notes in the conjuror’s publicity material that appeared during the run ofSamuel Foote’s satirical revue An Auction of Pictures at the Little Theatre (alsoknown as the New Theatre) in the Haymarket. Certainly, the coming attractionon 16 January 1749 promised to be something very special. The conjuror whowas booked to perform there would, the public were assured, perform a routinein which

[h]e presents you with a Common Wine Bottle, which any of the Spectatorsmay first examine; this bottle is placed on a Table in the middle of the Stage,and he (without any equivocation) goes into it, in the Sight of all theSpectators, and sings in it; during his stay in the Bottle, any person mayhandle it, and see plainly that it does not exceed a common Tavern Bottle.222

The promised trick – never before seen – attracted the expected attention.There was a large (though not a capacity) crowd, who had paid the sort of seatprices associated with a new attraction: ‘stage, 7s6d, boxes 5s., pit 3s., gallery,



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2s.’223 When the show failed to start at the advertised time, the crowd’simpatience was at first good-natured, then became more and more bad-tempered.The report in the General Advertiser for the following day recorded that

the only [miracle] he perform’d was that, he render’d himself invisible(without any Equivocation) to the no small disappointment of the gapingMultitude; who being told from behind the Curtain that the Performer hadnot yet appear’d, but that if they would stay until the next Night, instead of aQuart Bottle he should creep into a Pint, immediately grew outrageous, andin a Quarter of an Hour’s Time broke to Pieces all the Boxes, Benches,Scenes and everything that was in their power to destroy, leaving only theShell of the House remaining.224

The crowd also stormed the box office and took back the entrance money. Theriot caused damages to the tune of £4,000, as estimated by the theatre owner,John Potter. According to Potter, the theatre had been rented for the night of thehoax by one William Nicholls – who then disappeared without trace.

The ‘Bottle-Conjuror’ became a cause célèbre in London. In the popularpress, in broadsides, satirical pamphlets and cartoons,225 he was morefrequently admired for the impudence of his deception than he was vilified forhis dishonesty. One contemporary source records that ‘Most of the Witsemployed their Pens for a Month after upon this Subject, and all in Defence ofthe Bottle-Conjurer’.226 The subject also, as Milbourne Christopher records,‘provided hilarious scenes for contemporary theatrical productions.’227 Forexample, The Bottle Conjurer Outdone or The Power of Magic and the Escape ofHarlequin into a Quart Bottle played at the Great Tiled Booth, Bowling Green,Southwark on 20 February 1749 as a Benefit for Mr Morgan (who playedHarlequin), and was repeated at Bartholomew Fair at Yates’s Great TheatricalBooth on 23rd August.228 Advertisements for further ridiculous feats appearedin response to the debacle: one in the General Advertiser for 27 January 1749announced that

Don John de Nasquitine, sworn brother and champion to the man that wasto have jumped into the bottle… hereby invites all such as were thendisappointed to repair to the theatre on Monday the 30th, and that shallbe exhibited to them which never was before, nor ever will be hereafter seen.All such as shall swear upon the Book of Wisdom that they paid for seeingthe Bottle man, will be admitted gratis; the rest at Gotham prices.229

The last sentence (with its reference to the ‘Book of Wisdom’ and ‘Gothamprices’230 – as well as its promise of free admission) gives the game away: this isa satirical joke, not another moneymaking confidence trick.



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It was the sheer scale and simplicity of the fraud that seems to have caughtthe public imagination; and if the Bottle-Conjuror became a kind of criminalfolk hero, the audience were despised as typical of the gullible masses who wereso easily defrauded. This, perhaps, is somewhat unfair, since it is the very natureof any conjuror’s pre-publicity that it promises an audience the seeminglyimpossible and invites them to attend in order to see how the conjuror fulfilsthat promise, how he reconciles the apparent contradictions of his claim. Theaudience who were attracted by the Bottle-Conjuror’s publicity were no morenaïve than any other audience queuing for a ‘magic’ show. They were, however,both fooled and robbed.

The Bottle-Conjuror was never unmasked. Among those rumoured to haveperpetrated the scam were Samuel Foote himself, John Potter the proprietor ofthe theatre, the Duke of Cumberland and two different aristocrats both calledJohn Montagu – one of whom was the 2nd Duke of Montagu, the other the 4thEarl of Sandwich.231 None of these, however, actually claimed responsibility, andPotter and Foote vociferously denied it. One man who did claim responsibilityfor the Bottle-Conjuror hoax was the Irish gentleman-adventurer DudleyBradstreet, who, six years later, published a detailed account of it in hisautobiography, The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Capt. Dudley Bradstreet.Bradstreet was a colourful character. The early part of his narrative describeshis military career in which he was ‘employ’d in Secret Services by the M-----stryof G---t B----n, in the Late Rebellion’. He talks of ‘His M----sty’s present tohim… [and] His letters to his M-----sty, and the answers he received from theK---g, [and] The reward he got for his Services, occasioning his Scheme of theBottle-Conjurer.’ He goes on to tell how he

[p]ass[ed] as a magician in Covent-Garden, where many of high Birth andFortune of both Sexes, and even famed for Wisdom, resorted to him, upon hispromising to renew their Age, making them thirty or forty Years younger thanthey were, informing others when their Husbands or Wives should die [andof] His being made Governor and Judge of the finest Seraglio in England,and his promised Feast to the city of London; Facts well known to all theCourts of Europe.232

Bradstreet also wrote a play about the Bottle-Conjuror, one of the ‘contemporarytheatrical productions’ mentioned by Christopher. His Life includes the fulltext of The Magician, or The Bottle-Conjurer,233 of which he claims ‘every partof it is true, except the confining of the Business of ten days to twenty-fourHours, which the Rules of the Stage require’.234 Bradstreet himself features as‘Captain Spy, A Schemer’, and the play portrays not only the Bottle-Conjurorhoax, but also Bradstreet’s time as a Covent Garden conjuror. In the earlyscenes a Procuress brings victims to the ‘magician’, who fleeces them of their



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money by pretending to tell their fortunes. A typical scene is one in which LadyJudgeill comes to see the conjuror wanting to be reassured that she will soon berid of her ageing husband and find happiness with young Lord Variety. Theconjuror of course obliges – though with a twist:

Lady Judgeill. When will my Lord die?Conjuror. He approaches Death nearer and nearer every day; the better youbehave and the more you both caress, the faster it will hurry him to his Grave.Lady Judgeill. Dear Sir, I’ll kiss and embrace him, for the future, everyNight while he lives, and Day if he pleases…235

This sequence bears a strong resemblance to Ben Jonson’s plays aboutconfidence tricksters, Volpone and The Alchemist. Indeed, the comparison withthe latter is knowingly and overtly made within the play itself: the Bradstreetcharacter, ‘Spy’, is advised by his confederate Liewell that ‘you should have agood many large old Books and a Globe laid before you; it is so in the Play calledthe Alchymist’. 236 Spy disagrees, arguing disingenuously that

[a]s we are Originals there ought to be no Imitation; and as you are to permitnobody near me, but those whose lives and Adventures are all known to us, Ithink I may safely go on without the Tools used by the Conjurers of old.237

The irony is that there is nothing very original at all about Spy’s stratagems. Histechniques are precisely those described by Jonson nearly a hundred and fiftyyears earlier.

Thus, according to Bradstreet’s dramatized account, the Bottle-Conjuror isnot simply a one-off prank; it is a calculated act of vengeance by a servant ofthe crown who felt himself unfairly treated. It is also, however, a logical extensionof the Covent-Garden adventures. The scam at the Haymarket Theatre is simplya more public, audacious and profitable version of the phoney fortune-tellingroutine which he had been previously running. But in the play this routine itselfis derived from Jonson – as Bradstreet’s real-life Covent Garden scams may wellhave been. The Bottle-Conjuror, seen through Bradstreet’s narrative, becomessomething more than a rather crude hoax. It becomes part of a circulation ofmeanings between the theatre and everyday life, in which Jonsonian comedybecomes imitated for real-life profit, developed into a larger-scale hoax which preyson an appetite for theatrical entertainment itself – the result of which destroys atheatre! This later gives rise to a play which frames the real-life events in terms ofJonsonian comedy (to which it overtly refers) in order to present in theatrical termsa theatrical event which never took place! In this complex interaction between thestage and reality, the Bottle-Conjuror hoax is effectively produced by Jonsoniancomedy – a comedy which itself satirizes the greed and gullibility of Londoners.



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The proliferation of smoke and mirrors does not stop there. Was Bradstreetreally the Bottle-Conjuror? Quite possibly: while others have been credited withthe hoax, no alternative culprit has been identified with any certainty – andBradstreet has a clear advantage over other candidates in that he has actuallyclaimed responsibility. Even so, it is difficult to be sure that Bradstreet’s accountis not fictional; that he is not simply cashing in, from the comparative safety ofDublin, on the notoriety of the hoax. As I have already suggested, magicians(even the most respectable of them) are notoriously unreliable in their memoirsand frequently prone to claiming more credit than is due them. In Bradstreet’scase, there are certainly some aspects of his account which seem questionable.For example, although he claims to have had expert advice in the production ofthe play from the famous actress Peg Woffington and describes the productionitself, there is no clear independent evidence that the play was ever actuallyperformed on the London stage. It may be that Bradstreet’s Bottle-Conjuror isevery bit as insubstantial as the one that the audience waited impatiently to seeat the New Theatre that night in January 1749.

What is certain is that Bradstreet gives us a detailed and sustainedcontemporary insight into this notorious hoax. He also agrees with all the othercommentators that the Bottle-Conjuror incident should be seen as a morallesson. It shows, he says that ‘the Wise may be imposed upon, and that a needySchemer may occasion such convulsions as might involve thousands in theDanger, and proves, a Farthing Candle, properly applied, sufficient to fire theWorld.’238 He goes on to lament that

[i]t might well be expected that this Affair would reform the Town, but alas!immediately after, a Man who kept an Ale-house at the Raven in Golden-laneadvertised that Don Quevedo de Jumpedo was just arrived in Italy, and wouldin five Nights jump down his own throat at his House. An incredible numberwent to see this Performer and were all disappointed, except the Man whopromised it.239

The Bottle-Conjuror incident, then, derives its meaning from eighteenth-century obsessions with economic fraud; it becomes a moral parable, or a kindof satiric social drama in a Jonsonian vein, in which the Conjuror’s dupedaudience become symbolic of the gullibility of those who would be taken in byall sorts of unlikely schemes, and the absent Conjuror himself becomes anadmirable rogue, who, in profiting from the greed and gullibility of his victims,simultaneously has a lesson to teach them.

There may be another level, too, on which the incident reverberated withsomething important in the Zeitgeist. George Winchester Stone has pointed outthe link made by some contemporaries between the Bottle-Conjuror hoax andthe appearance of an important philosophical essay by the Scottish empiricist



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David Hume: ‘Hume’s “Essay on Miracles” was published in April 1748; andthere are several allusions to it in the newspaper account and letters.’240 The‘Essay on Miracles’ was a rational and empiricist critique of that tradition – stilla very important one within the Christian Church – which regarded Biblicalmiracles as a manifestation, or even a ‘proof ’ of the truth of Christianity.241

Hume’s great predecessor, the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke haddefended the traditional view that miracles played an essential role in demon-strating the divine truth of Christian revelation. Hume rejects this, arguing thatsince ‘no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability,much less to a proof ’,242 and that since the occurrence of a miracle is bydefinition against natural law, then reports of miracles are more likely to be falsethan they are to be accurate. Reports of miracles should therefore be rejected –and, indeed, if it seems we have directly witnessed a miracle ourselves, then weshould be prepared to doubt the testimony of our own senses. Hume’s argumentarticulated an increasingly widely held Enlightenment position against anyform of religious superstition – a position which culminated in Voltaire’sPhilosophical Dictionary (1764) where he argues that biblical accounts of themiracles of Jesus should be understood allegorically. While many churchmenand theologians at the time condemned Hume as a dangerous atheist, in facthis challenge to the miraculous tradition within religious belief was actuallybeneficial to the established Church in the long run. The arguments which heand fellow empiricists were making forced theologians to respond with a robustreconsideration of doctrine. The Church’s gradual shift towards a theology thatdepended less on the ‘evidence’ of the miraculous for its justification, and moreon a combination of faith and reason, actually owed a great deal to Hume’s attack.

So when, the day after the hoax, an anonymous writer in the Daily Advertisercommented that ‘Those opposed to a recent late book would have been gratifiedhad the Conjurer jumped into the bottle and proved “that miracles had not yetceased”’,243 he is making a jocular connection with a serious cultural issue. Ofcourse, the publication of Hume’s essay in itself had no causal relationship eitherwith the Bottle-Conjuror riot or with the tide of public opinion which followedit. The incident at the Haymarket Theatre, however, tapped into the samekind of debates which were raised by Hume’s critique. The scorn poured onthe ‘gaping Multitude’ who had been duped by the Bottle-Conjuror, was amanifestation, on a popular level, of the same kind of rational scepticism whichfuelled Hume’s critique of the appeal to miracles as a foundation stone of belief.The Bottle-Conjuror fiasco may have touched more than one nerve in thecollective psyche of mid-eighteenth-century London.


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Chapter Five

On the boundaries of the human

Besides, animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason andhumanism progressed. A logic parallel to that of racism… The convergence ofprocesses of civilization is astounding. Animals, like the dead, and so manyothers, have followed this uninterrupted process of annexation throughextermination, which consists of liquidation, then of making the extinct speciesspeak, of making them present the confession of their disappearance. Makinganimals speak, as one has made the insane, children, sex (Foucault) speak. Thisis even deluded in regard to animals, whose principle of uncertainty, which theyhave caused to weigh on men since the rupture in their alliance with men, residesin the fact that they do not speak.

Jean Baudrillard244

A theme of this book is the way in which magic inhabits the epistemologicalboundaries of the age in which it finds itself. The conjuror is constantly engagedin boundary work: in the name of entertainment (or wonder), he brings us upagainst the limits of a culture’s beliefs and knowledge and of its habitual ways ofunderstanding the world. Thus, in an age of superstition and supernatural belief,the conjuror trades on the supernatural in order to suggest explanations for hisperformances. As we have seen, Samuel Rid, writing in the Jacobean period,encourages his jugglers to capitalize on the imagery of the ‘real’ wizard and to playup against the edge of his culture’s belief about the power of man to harnessoccult powers. In ages less likely to take for granted the reality of the supernatural,conjurors find other boundaries against which to work. Implicitly or explicitly,they challenge the laws of nature: by passing one solid object through another, byperforming levitations, by ‘changing’ one thing into another, by killing ordismembering and then reviving or making whole. The themes of the conjuror’snarrative play, time after time, with the possibility (or the fantasy) that apparentnatural laws may not, after all be absolute. And in an age of materialism andrationality, this in itself becomes one of the attractions of his performance: that ina world which the scientist purports to explain with increasing thoroughness, hereminds the audience that there is after all the possibility of wonder.

The conjuror then is generally operating on or near the boundaries of aculture’s knowledge. In this chapter, however, I shall be talking about boundarywork in a more precise and particular sense – the way in which the performancesof conjurors and their colleagues have variously subverted and/or reinforced theboundaries of what it means to be human.


In our construction of ‘the human’, one of the ways in which we havetraditionally proceeded is by drawing boundaries in order to delineate what thehuman is not. The historian Keith Thomas traces this back to Descartes, whostressed the lordship of humanity over a natural world which is characterized asinert and lacking in any spiritual dimension. According to Thomas, ‘Man stoodto animal as did heaven to earth, soul to body, culture to nature.’245 In fact thisabsolute distinction between man and nature pre-dates Descartes by millennia.It is articulated in the Book of Genesis, the founding myth of western culture.But it is true that Cartesian philosophy, and the greater Enlightenment projectin which it played such an important role, made that distinction culturally moreurgent. And if the distinction between man and animal is so important, the keyquestions of what it is that distinguishes us from animals become important too.Again the common-sense response is an important one: man is a rational animaland a language animal. These are the key borderlines – and therefore the site ofboth scientific experiment and imaginative exploration. Hence the prevalence oftalking animals in folk tales and mythology; hence the prevalence of mythsrelating to deities or sorcerers who, like Circe, turn men and women intoanimals – teasing us with the horrifying possibility that the boundary may bebroken down. Hence, too, the widespread fascination with twentieth-centuryscientific explorations into the language of animals, and, with those attempts, toteach chimpanzees and dolphins a human language which have met with suchlimited success.

Another important distinction is that between the animate and theinanimate, or to put it another way, between mechanical and inanimate and theorganic. Again, this is not always as simple, nor as innocent, as it seems – asthe Elizabethan scholar John Dee discovered at an early age, when the mechanicalflying scarab which he designed for a Cambridge college production ofAristophanes’ Peace was taken for a living monster, leading to the first of themany accusations of sorcery which pursued him for the rest of his life.246 Inlater years the pervasive imagery of both the universe and the human bodyas some kind of machine (with or without a ghost in it) attests a growinguncertainty about the simple distinction between the human and the inanimate:when Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein uses electricity to animate theapparently lifeless assemblage of parts on his laboratory table, he articulates thisuncertainty about how absolute this separation actually is. So, too, in a differentmode, does James Whale’s 1931 film version of Frankenstein, where the boltthrough Boris Karloff ’s neck wittily sums up this complex of ideas in a singlevisual image. Science fiction films and novels have relentlessly explored theambiguities of this theme through numerous robots and androids – mostsuccessfully, perhaps, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). On another level,the image of the human mind as a kind of computer has become common inrecent years. This, though, is hardly comforting, since the computer on our

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desk can perform most reason-based tasks more efficiently than the one which(we are told) we carry around in our heads. Perhaps man is not, after all, such arational animal: certainly, since the advent of the computer, popular culture hastended to take its cue from Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, seeking definitions of thehuman which do not depend on rationality.

If the construction of the human involves definitions such as ‘not animal’,‘not inorganic’ another involves the category ‘not disembodied spirit’. Biblicaltraditions which distinguish us from beings of pure spirit: in the traditionalhierarchy of creation humanity is ‘lower than the angels’, and the spheres whichrelate to these different orders of creation remain separate: they are the realmsof heaven (or hell) and earth. Here, too, boundaries seem less than absolute: infolk traditions across the world there are endless tales of ghosts returning, ofwitches and sorcerers who, like the Witch of Endor, were able to conjure themup, or of oracles who maintained a privileged communication with the spiritworld. The shamanic tradition which is referred to in Chapter One is dependenton the concept of being able to negotiate between one world and the other. LaterEuropean philosophical developments led thinkers to approach this boundary ina slightly different way. Cartesian dualism sees reality as a dichotomy of matter(extended or spatial substance) and spirit (thinking substance, including God).Descartes argued for the independent existence of a non-corporeal realm and aphysical realm and saw the mind as separate from body, the two representingseparate and distinct principles of being or classes of substance in the universe.And while an increasing secularization of western thought during the nineteenthand twentieth centuries has called into question the nature of the ‘spirit’ side ofDescartes’ dichotomy, there are still millions of people for whom its existence isnot in question, and for whom scientific advances tend to confirm rather thanrefute their beliefs.

The performance of magic touches on this question in a variety of ways. Inthis chapter, I shall be looking at two areas of magic in particular – both of themin some ways peripheral to the mainstream of conjuring as we now conceive it,but nonetheless an essential part of the history of magic: talking animals andautomata.

‘Appearances of Reason in the Brute’: human/animalWilliam Banks and his horse, Morocco, whom we encountered in an earlierchapter, are good examples of the kind of subliminal trickery which may beemployed in order to make an animal seem to have human intelligence. We sawthat part of the mythology of this famous double act involved hints andsuggestions of sorcery – suggestions which Banks himself may well haveencouraged as a publicity strategy. But in some ways Banks and Morocco werebefore their time; the great age of the ‘intelligent animal act’ was the longeighteenth century – that period between the Restoration and the Regency which


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broadly coincides with the philosophical period we call the Enlightenment.And to this later age, this kind of entertainment presented a different kindof philosophical question. The great intellectual project of the EuropeanEnlightenment movement was to synthesize ideas of God, man and nature into acoherent world vision in which human reason, through which man understandsthe universe and his place in it, becomes the prime mover. John Collier summedup what had become the common view when, at the end of the eighteenth century,he concluded in his inquiry into the ‘Vital Principle and the Soul of Man’ that thesuperiority of Reason is what marks man off from the rest of Creation, the factthat God has endowed him with

Faculties, distinct perceptions, and in vast abundance; genius, reflection,reason, and foresight, together with a knowledge of his God, and the meansof tracing him out, whereby his elevated thoughts improve these hisadmirable talents, and turn them to excellent advantage.

No one animal in the creation partakes with Man in this sublime exercise ofhis faculties, and in the consolations which accompany it. It is the particularexcellency of his reasonable creatures only…

Reason (for instance) avails itself of the sacred treasury of the past, comparesit with the present and judges its influence on the future. Reason surveys andconnexts the scattered variety of intellectual knowledge diversified amongthe Brute creation, as it were into one whole, the animating soul presidingover all, concentring in itself ‘the sum of all their powers’.

Reason in Man is active and fruitful, unrestrained by place or time, capableof varying and enlarging its attainments… Compare this now with the actionsand appearances of reason in the Brute.247

Enlightenment rationalism went hand in hand with advances in scientificthought, and scientists took an almost missionary zeal, throughout the eighteenthcentury, in spreading the word amongst the public. Demonstrations andexplanations of scientific principles and inventions spread from London’s coffeehouses, to salons, theatres, halls, mechanics’ institutes and scientific and literarysocieties both in the capital and in the provinces. By the end of the eighteenthcentury nearly every English town of any significance was part of a regular circuitof lectures and exhibitions: science was offered to the public in the form ofperformance, and successful careers might be made out of it since ‘“knowledge”,as Benjamin Martin reflected, “is now become a fashionable thing.”’248

It is important not to oversimplify. For every action, as one of theEnlightenment’s greatest thinkers explained, there is an equal and oppositereaction,249 and the Age of Reason also showed intense interest in the irrationaland the supernatural. As recent scholars have argued, ‘the eighteenth century


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was too deeply involved with the occult to have us associate it exclusively withrationalism, humanism, scientific determinism and classicism’.250 Nonetheless,there was a dominant strain within Enlightenment thought which celebratedthe rationality of man. To the exhibitors of the intelligent animals, this musthave been a godsend, offering them the chance to subvert just that boundarybetween man and the animal world which scientific and theological thoughtlooked to emphasize. Thus the Age of Reason was also the heyday of phenomenasuch as William Pinchbeck’s ‘Pig of Knowledge’, James Hazard’s ‘LearnedPig’, Sieur Rea’s ‘Little Scientific Pony’, Signor Castelli’s Dog ‘Munito’, the‘Wonderful Intelligent Goose’ and many other Learned, Sapient, Scientific, andPhilosophical farmyard and domestic animals. Frequently publicized in termswhich imitated, quoted and parodied the more ‘respectable’ scientific lecturesand demonstrations with which they competed for customers, these intelligentanimals were exhibited not only in fairs but also in lecture rooms, arcades,halls and institutes throughout Europe and America. Some, like Munito thedog, could also be consulted…

AT HOME

At No. 1, Leicester Square,

Where he exhibits, Daily, every Hour from TWELVE till FIVE,

His wonderful and surprising Knowledge, which last Year so greatlyentertained all those who honoured his Performance with their presence.

MUNITO, besides his former accomplishments, will astonish the Publicwith his vast Knowledge in the Sciences of

GEOGRAPHY, BOTANY, and NATURAL HISTORY251

Intelligent animals appeared, too, in another form in one of the greatest of thesatires against the rationalist assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy. Inthe fourth and last book of Jonathan Swift’s surreal and misanthropic fantasyGulliver’s Travels, the eponymous narrator collapses into an existential despairat the irrationality and the inhumanity of his fellow men, comparing themunfavourably to the wise and benevolent race of the Houyhnhnms, the talkinghorses he had encountered on his final voyage.

Swift’s talking animals are far removed from those on display in eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century London and Boston, but they share an ideologicalfunction: to problematize the assumptions about the primacy of man’s role as‘rational animal’. For some Enlightenment spectators this raised some seriousquestions. A contemporary publication, Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous histories,designed for the instruction of children, respecting their treatment of animalsarticulates some of these issues. It is written in the form of a series of conversationsbetween a mother (‘Mrs. Benson’) and her daughter, and some friends. In one


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of these conversations, they discuss the recent phenomenon of the Learned Pig,which Mrs. Benson had seen on a visit to London. This Pig was able to ‘spell’words by pointing at, or picking up, cards arranged on the floor – leading theconversation towards the question of whether the Pig can really have human-likeintelligence. At first Mrs. Benson brushes the question away:

For my part, replied Mrs. Benson, I find the subject so much above mycomprehension, that whenever my mind is disposed to expatiate on it, I checkthe inclination, from an opinion that it is of no consequence to me, whetheranimals have intellects or not, and that it is amongst those things which theAlmighty has intentionally concealed from our penetration. That they are inthe power of man, and subservient to his use and pleasure, gives them asufficient claim to our compassion and kindness…252

Later, however, when her daughter presses her more insistently on the question,she replies firmly in the negative.

Nor are animals capable of attaining human sciences because, for these,human faculties are requisite; and no art of man can change the nature ofany thing, though he may be able to improve that nature to a certain degree;…And I would advise you, Harriet, never to give countenance to those peoplewho shew what they call learned animals; as you may assure yourself theyexercise great barbarities upon them…253

If the impulse of Enlightenment rationalism is to insist on the clear andunalterable distinction between man and the animal world, then the showman’sresponse is to subvert that distinction. Trimmer’s Mrs. Benson sees a danger inthe Learned Pig, in that it threatens to blur an important boundary.

The showman could respond, however, that such exhibitions were actually inthe spirit of the Enlightenment itself. This, certainly, is the line taken by WilliamPinchbeck, the owner and exhibitor of the ‘Pig of Knowledge’ which caused agreat stir in late nineteenth-century America, when he eventually wrote anexplanation of how the act was done in The Expositor, the first conjuring bookpublished in America. He explains the way in which a pig can gradually bebrought to respond to subtle cues and trained to pick up cards by rewarding itwith food. The Expositor takes the form of a rather witty series of fictional lettersbetween Pinchbeck and a correspondent who is eager to learn Pinchbeck’ssecrets, starting with the training method for the Pig. Pinchbeck was writing inpart, it seems, in order to defend himself against the accusation that training thepig involved, as Sarah Trimmer put it, ‘great barbarities’. However he was alsowriting as a true man of the Enlightenment:

THE intention of this work was not only to amuse and instruct, but also


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to convince superstition of her many ridiculous errors, – to shew thedisadvantages arising to society from a vague as well as irrational belief ofman�s intimacy with familiar spirits, – to oppose the idea of supernaturalagency in any production of man, – and lastly, how dangerous such a belief isto society, how destructive to the improvement of the human capacity, andhow totally ruinous to the common interests of mankind.254

The correspondent, too, writes in a spirit of enlightened rational curiosity. Hewishes to understand how the routine works in order to refute the more mysticalaccounts of it which he has heard.

Wherever I stop on my tour I am sure to hear of the fame of your celebratedPig, and the many different opinions prevailing relative to the mode of histuition, makes him a subject of general speculation. Some contend it iswitchcraft; and others, like the ancient Pythagoreans, believing in thetransmigration of souls, conclude that the spirit of the grunting philosophermight once have animated a man.

An evening or two since, stopping at an inn, your Pig being the topic ofconversation, I could not but listen to a grave old gentleman, who, putting ona very affected, sage like look, declared his performances were the effectsof the Black Art; that the Pig ought to be burnt, and the Man banished, as hehad no doubt but you familiarly corresponded with the devil. O monstrous!will time and experience never remove such credulity from the earth?Must ingenuity, the parent of manufactories, the progressive pillar to wisdomand the arts, whose summit supports a mirror where superstition may see herown gorgon image, be thus broken and overturned by the rude hands ofignorance and pride? We rejoice that we live in an enlightened part of theworld, where liberty extend her choicest blessings, and where the PresidingMagistrate is a philosopher, and under his patronage men of talents dare to besuch; and these absurd opinions are but the dogmas of devotees and folly.255

Pinchbeck’s Pig of Knowledge both subverts and polices Enlightenmentassumptions about the boundary between the human and the animal. Inperformance, it seems to have encouraged in the spectator a ‘willing suspension ofdisbelief’256 – a temporary acceptance of imaginative possibility. It may have teasedhis audience into all sorts of musings about sorcery, the transmigration of soulsand the human spirit inhabiting a pig’s body. But in his published explanation,Pinchbeck reverts to the party line of the Age of Reason: he not only explains howthe trick is done, but as he does so he simultaneously praises all that is‘progressive’, ‘enlightened’ and libertarian about his society. In doing so Pinchbecktakes on the role of the showman-as-satirist: displaying the distortions only inorder to emphasize the norms of Nature against which they appear to transgress.


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Subverting the distinction between man and the animal world took avariety of forms, of which intelligent animals, like Morocco, Munito and thePig of Knowledge were only one. More extreme were the later freak showsand dime museums of nineteenth- century entrepreneurs such as P. T.Barnum. As Jane Goodall has shown, the relationship between the scientificand performative traditions of display was a complex one, involving variousforms of co-dependency:

At this time there was a… prospect that scientific modernisers might losetheir battle against the superstitious ideas that had such a strong hold on thepopular imagination. But these agonistic tensions did not settle into a set ofsimple dichotomies: modernity versus tradition, rationality versussuperstition, natural order versus an outlandish theatre of wonders. Whatmakes the history interesting is the breakdown of these dichotomies…257

Thus, one of the forefathers of P. T. Barnum’s ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ wasalso one of the great Enlightenment projects: Leibnitz’s proposal for ‘A NewSort of Exhibition’, a museum of everything which would containperformances by both humans and animals, together with exhibitions of newscientific technology. Leibnitz’s aim was to attract the general public and toteach them about new advances in science through the medium of popularculture: conjurors, clowns, fire-eaters, shadow plays, acrobats and comedies,as well as scientific exhibitions and displays. In Barnum’s hands this becamean exhibition which juxtaposed the contents of the American Museum (whichhe acquired in 1841) with ‘every known category of popular entertainment’,exhibiting not only learned animals and talking birds but all kinds ofmonsters, real and faked, such as the famous ‘Fejee Mermaid: the moststupendous curiosity ever submitted to the public for inspection’.258 Andwhile mermaids and intelligent pigs remain in the realms of fantasy,259

evolutionary theory – versions of which were already current in Frenchscientific circles in the early nineteenth century, fifty years before Darwin’spublication of The Origin of Species in 1859 – eventually meant that the natureof the boundaries between man and the animal world would be up forreconsideration in very different terms.

‘The whole thing is an allegory, a continuous metaphor’:human/mechanical

The Professor of Poetry and Eloquence took a pinch of snuff, and, slapping thelid to and clearing his throat, said solemnly, ‘My most honourable ladies andgentlemen, don�t you see then where the rub is? The whole thing is an allegory,a continuous metaphor. You understand me? Sapienti sat.’ But several mosthonourable gentlemen did not rest satisfied with this explanation; the history


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of this automaton had sunk deeply into their souls, and an absurd mistrust ofhuman figures began to prevail. Several lovers, in order to be fully convincedthat they were not paying court to a wooden puppet, required that theirmistress should sing and dance a little out of time, should embroider or knit orplay with her little pug, &c., when being read to, but above all things else thatshe should do something more than merely listen – that she should frequentlyspeak in such a way as to really show that her words presupposed as a conditionsome thinking and feeling.

Ernst T. A. Hoffmann260

The intelligent animal act was popular in the late eighteenth century, but it hada fierce competitor. No sooner has Pinchbeck’s correspondent in The Expositormastered the knack of using food to train the Pig to respond to his cues, than hewrites to report sadly that

the Pig no longer excites admiration. There is a certain PhilosophicalMachine lately arrived from France, which engrosses universal attention. Theadmittance to visit this curiosity is fifty cents; and people throng in crowds toview it. The Proprietors name it The Invisible Lady and Acoustic Temple;261

He goes on to describe the Philosophical Machine, which, like the pig, claims thesupposedly human quality of rational discourse:

In the middle of a room is seen a railing in the form of an octagon, paintedred: In the centre of this is suspended a square chest, whose circumferencecontains about twenty-four inches: Apparently isolated on this, is a domesupported by four small columns: A small glass globe, silvered, ornamentsand caps the extreme convexity of this dome. From each corner of this chestproceeds a trumpet: To the concavity of either of these you may put aquestion, and a rational answer, in an effeminate tone of voice, will beimmediately returned.262

It is also good enough to fool a professional:

Astonished, I placed my ear to the floor, to the walls, and even clambered tothe ceiling to discover the agent to whom I attributed the answers: I listened,but distinguished no sound.263

More important than the intelligent animal act to the mainstream of stage magichas been the automaton – a machine which in one way or another imitatesnature. Many of the great magicians such as Robert-Houdin and John Nevil


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Maskelyne were (or at least claimed to be) trained in the mechanics of clock-making and watchmaking. Some of those who weren’t relied on partners whowere so trained: Isaac Fawkes, the great eighteenth-century showman whoexhibited at Southwark Fair and Bartholemew Fair, worked in partnership witha Fleet Street clockmaker,264 who created illusions in which art imitated life.

Automata in the broadest sense of the word (meaning mechanical deviceswhich simulate human or natural functions either on a mimetic or a pragmaticlevel) have a long history, and have played an important part in the developmentof western technology. With the rediscovery of Greek culture during theRenaissance, the newly translated writings of scientists and engineers of theancient world such as Heron of Alexandria provoked widespread interest.Heron’s Pneumatics, in particular, was taken up by practically minded thinkerssuch as Agostino Ramelli, whose Diverse e Artificiose Macchine

…borrowed heavily from the Alexandrine writings. He described andillustrated for the first time the rotary pump, mechanical details of windmills,and a coffer-dam of interlocking piles, as well as other technologicaldevelopments. Consistent with other writings of the period, Ramelli did notneglect to include several examples of biological automata in the form ofhydraulically operated singing birds.265

Although there is no strict dividing line between the categories, I am moreconcerned in this chapter with these ‘biological’ automata than with the proto-industrial applications. In particular, animated human figures seem to have madetheir first appearance in the sixteenth century, in the work of Hans Bullmann ofNuremberg (c 1525) and Gianello Torriano of Cremona. Automata have been afeature of the leisure industry since their invention, and from the sixteenthcentury onwards, the pleasure gardens of the very rich have been adorned withhydraulic and pneumatic entertainments in form of fountains and grottoes,artificial birdsong, animated animals and human figures of ever-increasingelaborateness. For example, in Archbishop Marcus Sitticus’s chateau atHeilbronn, the famous seventeenth-century water gardens were augmented in1725 by the designs of a Nuremberg craftsman called Lorenz Rosenegge; hismechanical theatre contained no less than two hundred and fifty-six figures,powered by water-turbine and a complex system of gearing.

The life of an entire village takes place on a stage that measures about sixyards in width. As sentinels move about to announce the time, noblemen bowto ladies who flutter their fans, while guards on sentry duty show their arms,jugglers in Hungarian costumes watch a ballerina dance with a tame bear,and merchants sell their wares. Of particular interest is the left wing of thetheatre, which is shown in the process of construction, with the workmenplying their respective trades.266


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No conjuror could approach such magnificence: still, it has traditionally beenone of the functions of popular culture to appropriate the pleasures of the veryrich and re-present them, in modified form, for the enjoyment of poorer folk.What Rosenegge provided for the Archbishop’s private delight, showmen suchas Isaac Fawkes and his successors offered to the customers at BartholomewFair.

In the past decade or so Performance Studies has taken a particular interestin ‘technological’ theatre. Traditionally, the role of technology has generallybeen seen to be a framing one: defining the spaces and effects within aperformance, and enriching and focusing the audience’s experience throughlight and sound. More recently, performance theorists – drawing onBaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, on Donna Haraway’s concept of thecyborg, and on N. Katherine Hayles’ arguments about ‘the posthuman’ – havebegun to explore the relationship between the human performer and themechanical, digital or virtual performer.267 In one sense, of course, this is avery ancient form of performance: the integration of the human body with amechanical simulacrum is at the root of all puppetry. But the technology ofperformance has expanded to include video imagery, computer-generatedimages and environments, web-based technology, prosthetic technologiesdrawn from medical science, and ‘robots’. Whether such technology is seen asan extension of the body or as an alternative to the body, the interaction betweenthe human and the non-human, between the live and the mediated, has becomea central theme of Performance Studies. Conjurors’ automata play a key role inthe history of this.

They were at the height of their popularity during the ‘long eighteenthcentury’ – a period in which technology had developed sufficiently to allowfor the creation of figures which seemed sufficiently lifelike, while the massproduction of the Industrial Revolution was not sufficiently advanced to maketechnological marvels a commonplace. During the earlier part of this period,automata were largely limited to machines which looked like natural objects.Hence the age’s fascination with all kinds of mechanical marvels such as pipe-smoking skeletons, mechanical ducks and peacocks, mechanical artists andinstrumentalists such as the flute player and the Writing and Drawing Master.Jessica Riskin has characterized the differences between seventeenth-centuryand eighteenth-century automata by showing how in earlier designs

the mechanism is all subterranean and the imitative figures all on top. But,even in cases where the mechanism was contained within the figures, itplayed no part in the imitation, which was purely external. An artificial swan,presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1733 by a mechanician namedMaillard, contained its mechanism inside itself. The swan paddled throughthe water on a paddle wheel while a set of gears swept its head slowly from


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side to side. It was intended to represent the behavior of a natural swan, butby no means to reproduce its physiology.

By the late eighteenth century, automata were imitative internally as well asexternally, in process and substance as well as in appearance.268

And if the talking animals and learned pigs were rarely taken seriously by the scientific establishment of the Enlightenment, the automaton was seenas raising genuine questions about the nature of human and artificial‘intelligence’. Jacques Vaucanson, for example, invented a set of automatawhich included a pipe-and-tabor player, a flute player, and a duck which‘stretches out its neck to take corn out of your hands; it swallows it, digests it,and discharges it digested by the usual passage… The Food is digested, as inreal Animals, by Dissolution, not by Trituration, as some natural philosopherswill have it.’269 Vaucanson displayed these figures commercially in Paris in1738, but this popular display was secondary to his main purpose, which was tobe seen as a serious philosophical investigator into human nature. In this hewas successful: Voltaire championed him as ‘Prometheus’ rival’, and in 1757 hebeat Dennis Diderot (the very personification of the Enlightenmentintellectual) to an appointment as ‘Associated Mechanician’ to the ParisAcademy of Sciences.270 According to one recent scholar of Vaucanson’sautomata, their success

lay in their author’s transformation of an ancient art. Automata, ‘self-moving machines,’ had existed from antiquity, but as amusements andfeats of technological virtuosity. Vaucanson’s automata were philosophicalexperiments, attempts to discern which aspects of living creatures could bereproduced in machinery, and to what degree, and what such reproductionsmight reveal about their natural subjects. Of course, his automata were alsocommercial ventures intended to entertain and demonstrate mechanicalingenuity. But their value as amusements lay principally in their dramatizationof a philosophical problem that preoccupied audiences of workers,philosophers, and kings: the problem of whether human and animal functionswere essentially mechanical.271

It seems a large leap from the philosophes of the Paris Academy to the showmanof London’s fairground booths and parlours, but in fact the distance is not as greatas it might first appear. While Isaac Fawkes and his colleagues had none ofVaucanson’s intellectual ambitions, the effect which their automata had upontheir public was much the same. And, indeed, Vaucanson himself soon becameone of Fawkes’s successors; by 1742 his mechanical figures were showing ‘atthe Long Room at the Opera House at the Haymarket, at 1, 2, 5 and 7 in the afternoon’.272


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And for all his philosophical pretensions, Vaucanson was not above a littledeception: his Defecating Duck was actually a fraud. Far from imitating thedigestive functions of a live bird, close observation discovered (although not untilseveral years later) that the grain was entirely separate from the excrement – whichwas loaded into the tail end before each performance! Frederic Nicolai publishedthe first exposé of the Duck in 1783,273 but it may come as no surprise to discoverthe great Robert-Houdin claiming to have made the same discovery himself quiteindependently, while repairing the Duck’s mechanism in 1845. ‘To my greatsurprise’, he says, ‘I found that the illustrious master had not disdained to haverecourse to a trick which a conjurer would have been proud of. The digestion, sopompously announced in the memoir, was only a mystification – a real canard, infact. Decidedly, Vaucanson was not only my master in mechanism, but I must bowbefore his genius for juggling.’274 Opinion is divided as to how seriously to takeRobert-Houdin’s claim – or as to whether the parts he was cleaning even camefrom Vaucanson’s Duck.275

For the conjuror, a particular attraction was the more ambitious kind ofautomaton (real or fraudulent) which could interact with spectators – machinessuch as the Sagacious Swan who read spectators’ thoughts and guessed the valueof cards they had chosen; or the Talking Head, which (like that of the medievalFriar Bacon) would make predictions, were particularly popular. More impressivethan any of these, though, was the eighteenth century’s most famous automaton:Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player, also known as the MechanicalTurk, which was exhibited in the courts and salons of polite upper-class societyin eighteenth-century Europe. Its first public appearance was in 1770, before anaudience which included the Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa.276 VonKempelen was an aristocrat, courtier and counsellor – a wealthy civil servant, infact, and an accomplished linguist who also had an interest in and knowledge ofphysics, mechanics and hydraulics. His initial interest in mechanical marvelswas that of the amateur scientist and philosophe. His attempt to design amachine which could talk was another experiment which tested one of the keyattributes of human nature, spoken language, and he regarded it as an altogethermore serious undertaking than his Chess Player. Indeed, von Kempelen wassurprised and not a little embarrassed by the success of the chess-playingautomaton, and the consequent fame which it brought him. A few years after itsdébut he dismantled it – only to be ordered to rebuild it by Emperor Joseph II in1781, in order to impress the visiting Grand Duke Paul of Russia. When JosephII subsequently granted him two years’ leave from his court duties in Vienna inorder to take the Mechanical Turk on a European tour, von Kempelen (who mayhave been in some financial difficulties at the time) acquiesced – but notaltogether enthusiastically.

In Paris the Turk publicly played and beat a number of highly ranked chessplayers, including Benjamin Franklin. The most interesting of these games,


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however, is one which the Turk actually lost – against the man generallyrecognized to be the best chess player in Europe. According to Philidor’s sonAndré, in a story first published in the French chess magazine Le Palamède in1847, von Kempelen approached Philidor on the eve of their contest, asking himeffectively to throw the match.

Philidor was not a vain man and apparently agreed to allow the machine tobeat him if it played well enough for such a victory to be plausible. But, hesaid, if it did not prove to be a strong player, he would have no qualms aboutdefeating it.

Evidently the Turk was nowhere near being a strong enough player for a victoryover Philidor to have been convincing, for Philidor easily won the game. But helater confessed that no game against a human opponent had fatigued him tothe same extent. Philidor apparently believed that the Turk was genuine, andfound the idea of a chess-playing machine rather terrifying.277

It is not the attempt to fix the match which is so intriguing about this anecdote.It is Philidor’s reported response to the game: the fact that he believed in thegenuineness of the Turk and was so disturbed by prospect of a chess-playingautomaton. Philidor found the automaton disturbing precisely because it took onhuman opponents at an exercise of rationality – and won – beating the rationalanimal at the very thing which made him most human.

It may be, too, that at some level Philidor recognized that his match against theautomaton had something iconic about it. What he certainly could not haverecognized was that this challenge anticipated, in an inverted way, the test whichthe twentieth-century logician, mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turingdesigned in order to determine the boundaries of machine intelligence – andwhich is now recognized as one of the foundation stones of modern computerscience: ‘Simply put, the computer passes the test and is deemed an intelligent“thinking machine” if a human conversing with it via typewritten messages cannottell whether it is another human or a machine’.278 Contemporary language-basedcomputer programmes, operating under Turing test conditions, can pass for‘human’ approximately fifteen per cent of the time. A famous programme namedELIZA279 – after Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle – more or less successfully emulated thelinguistic gambits of the psychotherapist, giving rise to a spate of Computer-AidedSelf-Help programmes which are now in use in reputable clinics: the Royal Collegeof Psychiatrists has concluded that ‘computer-aided self-help cuts therapist timewith each patient significantly, without impairing improvement, for patients withanxiety and depression.’280

Philidor, a respected and successful composer and musician and a prodigiousintellectual as well as the most brilliant chess player of his generation, was in abetter position than most to carry out such a test. Von Kempelen’s ‘computer’ lost


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the game of chess, but it passed the more important test. Unlike the machine inthe Turing test, however, its task was to convince its opponent, not that it washuman, but that it was a genuine ‘intelligent, thinking machine’.

If the match between Philidor and von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turkanticipates the Turing test in this respect, there is another way in which itanticipates a more recent milestone in the history of thinking machines. Half acentury after Turing’s original formulation of his test, Gary Kasparov, the worldchess champion, was narrowly outplayed by the IBM computer Deep Blue ina six-match tournament which once more prompted a re-think of what wemean by the whole concept of Artificial Intelligence – and indeed, of humanintelligence. ‘When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997, most ArtificialIntelligence researchers and commentators decided that chess playing did notrequire intelligence after all and declared a new standard, the ability to play“Go”’.281

Automata such as the Mechanical Turk challenged the audience’s own senseof ‘liveness’ 282 – its understanding of the boundaries not only between the humanand the non-human but between the organic and the inorganic. They generatedin audiences a double-sided response which involved both the will to believethat something truly unnatural was taking place, and also the urge to explain itrationally. As Pinchbeck’s Expositor correspondent exclaims,

Is it possible that the most ingenious of mankind could contrive a machinecapable of giving rational answers? No, I am convinced to the contrary:Neither has the proprietor any connexion with a familiar spirit. But on whatprinciple these opaques are enabled to discourse, is the mystery I wish you tounriddle.283

The actual explanation was both ingenious and mundane. Most conjurors’interactive automata – and the Mechanical Turk was no exception – were operatedby a combination of the cogs and wheels of the traditional watchmakers craft, andby mechanisms relying on hydraulics and air pressure, often controlled by ahidden operator. In the case of the Turk, an ingeniously designed cabinet with asliding seat and various folding partitions created the false impression that nohuman being could fit inside the mechanism; meanwhile, a set of magnetsattached to the underside of the chessmen relayed information to the operatorabout an opponent’s moves. The names and identities of von Kempelen’soperators are not known. In later years, however, when the automaton passed intothe hands of Johann Maelzel, he is known to have hired expert chess players suchas Johann Allgaier, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis and Peter Williams asoperators.284

These mechanical inventions, the automata, are particularly significant interms of the boundary work that they do, not only because they seem to challenge


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something very essential about the construction of humanity, but also because theytap into a powerful and ambivalent Enlightenment image: that of the Universeas a kind of divinely inspired machine. Newtonian physics became westernphilosophy’s dominant explanation of how the universe works, and during theeighteenth century it became increasingly common to think of the universe itselfas being essentially mechanical. A famous argument for the existence of God putforward by William Paley (the ‘high priest’ of the theological utilitarians)285 in 1802sums up the way in which rational theology had developed since the early yearsof the Enlightenment.286 Deeply embedded in Paley’s thought, as it was deeplyembedded in the thought of many thinkers of the time, is a conviction that theuniverse is basically mechanistic. In Natural Theology, an influential and popularwork which went through twelve editions in its first seven years, he imagines a manfinding a watch and wondering how it came to be there, what its origins were.

This mechanism being observed (it requires indeed an examination of theinstrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceiveand understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood),the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker:that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, anartificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actuallyto answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.287

This becomes Paley’s dominant metaphor: he describes the universe as a watch,and God, in a resonant image, as the great watchmaker,288 He articulates anincreasingly common view of the universe as a great and complex machine,operating according to those laws of mechanics which Newton had formulated,just over a century earlier, and whose discovery had not only made possible thebirth of the machine age in the eighteenth century, but in doing so had changedthe culture’s construction of Nature, and of man’s relationship with it. ThusPaley can write ‘That an animal is a machine, is a proposition neither correctlytrue nor wholly false’.289

This is why, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the question of theboundary between man and machine became so very important: because of thesuspicion that the difference between the living organism and the mechanicaldevice may not, after all, be so great. If the universe is essentially a greatmachine, it becomes, literally, vital to establish what, if anything, makes us morethan machines. Is it the soul (the ‘ghost in the machine’?) Or is it – as Paleysuggests here – the mystery that lies beyond the machine

The difference between an animal and an automatic statue, consists inthis, – that, in the animal, we trace the mechanism to a certain point, andthen we are stopped; either the mechanism becoming too subtile for our


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discernment, or something else beside the known laws of mechanism takingplace; whereas, in the automaton, for the comparatively few motions of whichit is capable, we trace the mechanism throughout. But, up to the limit, thereasoning is as clear and certain in the one case, as in the other.290

Paley’s argument was, in his own terms, an optimistic one: the GreatWatchmaker that he envisaged was a beneficent being. For some of the Romanticgeneration, however, the image took on a rather bleaker aspect. Newton’suniverse could seem an impoverished and desolate place, as William Blake makesclear when he talks despairingly of the ‘Newtonian Voids between the substanceof creation’291 and prays ‘May God us keep/From single vision and Newton’ssleep.’292 Paley’s image of the watch lying abandoned on the heath was at best anambivalent one. If the watchmaker had made it and wound it up, had he alsowalked away from it? A large part of the Romantic poets’ project lay in aninsistence (in which it sometimes sounds as if they are trying to convincethemselves) that the universe was not after all merely a machine, but wasvitalized with ‘something far more deeply interfused… a motion and a spirit,that… rolls through all things’.293

Automata, then, operate at this interface between the mechanistic andanimistic. By replicating organic life in terms of machinery, automata likeVaucanson’s Duck and von Kempelen’s Turk articulate an age’s ambivalenceabout mechanistic explanations of the universe. The two contradictory claims –‘that life is essentially mechanistic and that the essence of animal life isirreducible to mechanism’294 are not reconciled in the figure of the automaton.Rather they confront each other in all their contradictoriness. Von Kempelen’sMechanical Turk challenges the spectator to explain its feats, and in doingso the spectator is forced to construct explanations which either leave hercommon-sense world-view intact (there is a human intelligence at work here),or else subvert its boundaries (a machine may have ‘intelligence’). And, just asthe exhibitors whose learned animals posed a challenge to common-senseEnlightenment distinctions between the human and the animal were touchingon important scientific themes, so the automata raised questions about humanand artificial intelligence which would be more fully explored by the scientificinventions of a later generation. Paradoxically, the ‘wondrous’ explanation ofthe Mechanical Turk leads to a world-view which is more modern than itsalternatives.

The UncannyThe story of the automaton does not end with the end of the Age ofEnlightenment. While the insights of later computerized generations were notavailable to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, nonetheless theboundary between the human and the artificial continued to obsess


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philosophers; and the showman’s automaton continued to be a popular additionto conjuring shows. In the 1870s, when magic had moved into the large theatresand music halls and was playing to the newly leisured working classes and middleclasses of nineteenth-century London, J. N. Maskelyne re-packaged themechanical figure for this new theatrical environment. His ‘Psycho’ – essentiallya card-playing automaton, but an intricately designed and extremely effectiveone – was one of the most famous of these theatrical effects. And whilefigures like Psycho continued to amuse the audiences at the Egyptian Hall,their wider metaphorical significance continued to attract the attention ofphilosophers.

If William Paley’s Natural Theology sits at the turn of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, Sigmund Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis dominatethe turn of the nineteenth and twentieth. In his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (DasUnheimliche), Freud looked at the significance of the boundary between thehuman and the mechanical. It is because of Freud’s essay that this word,‘uncanny’, has become so current in certain areas of cultural and performancestudies. It is a useful one in thinking about conjuring and its significance, but itsfull meaning cannot be understood without looking at the ambiguity inherent inthe German word which Freud used: Freud, like many psychoanalytic critics afterhim, was particularly fond of the richness of meaning offered by puns andwordplay. Das Heimliche – the non-negated version of the word – contains adouble meaning. It refers on the one hand to that which is familiar (‘homely’)and comfortable. Its opposite, therefore, das Unheimliche, carries a feeling ofestrangement, of no longer being ‘at home’ in the world. However, a secondmeaning of das Heimliche means that which is hidden or concealed. In this senseof the word das Unheimliche is that which is revealed. Das Unheimliche exposesthat which is usually kept out of sight. Thus ‘the uncanny combines these twosemantic levels. It uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbingtransformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar’.295

Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ was an extended piece of literary criticism ofE. T. A. Hoffman’s short story ‘The Sand-man’, in which a young man, unable todistinguish between the animate and the inanimate, falls in love with Olympia, alifelike automaton. It was also a response to an earlier philosophical work on thesame theme. In ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906), Ernst Jentsch haddefined ‘the uncanny’ in terms of a person’s feelings of uncertainty – inparticular an uncertainty about whether something was animate or inanimate.Freud comments:

Jentsch has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts whether an apparentlyanimate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might notbe in fact animate’; and he refers in this connection to the impression madeby waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To these he


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adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of insanity,because these excite in the spectator the impression of automatic,mechanical processes at work behind the ‘ordinary appearance of mentalactivity’. Without entirely accepting this author�s view, we will take it as astarting point for our own investigation.

The sensation of ‘the uncanny’, then, may be produced by the suspicion thata human being may be nothing more than an elaborate mechanism. This is, aswe have seen, the very position in which Paley’s Natural Theology places the human subject, and a subsequent ambivalence about the mechanisticinterpretation of the universe is deeply woven into post-Enlightenmentthinking.

As Freud’s final sentence suggests, he was to take Jentsch’s insight and giveit a characteristic twist. Jentsch had argued that while people vary greatly in theirsusceptibility to the feeling of the uncanny, it is particularly strong in those whoare comparatively uneducated (by whom he meant primitive peoples, children,women, and the lower classes) or of a nervous disposition, epileptics and theinsane. Freud, however, considered the uncanny from the standpoint ofpsychoanalytic theory, in which the frightening element is something which hasbeen repressed and which then later recurs. Freud’s account of the Uncannyturns it into a phenomenon of normal, rather than abnormal, psychology: it is afeeling which arises when some idea or emotion from early childhood, somethingwhich has been buried or hidden from itself by our conscious mind, is triggeredby an experience in the present, comes to light and reasserts itself. By definition,the sensation of the Uncanny is something which only an enlightened adult canexperience:

Freud explained that since children do not strictly distinguish between theanimate and the inanimate, they are inclined to think their dolls or stuffedanimals are alive. As adults, then, the sight of a life-like automaton or automatichuman behavior reactivates the infantile belief that we thought we hadsurmounted.296

And this, perhaps, is not a bad model for thinking about the pleasures ofmagic in performance as a whole. While it appeals to children, magic is also agrown-up form of entertainment for the same reason that the sensation of ‘theUncanny’ is grown-up. It triggers a relationship between the ‘adult’, rationalmind and the beliefs that we thought we had surmounted.

I have suggested that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century automata performboundary work which both marks and problematizes the distinction between thehuman and the non-human. Hoffman’s story, and Freud’s reading of it, is aboutwhat happens when those boundaries break down. The feeling of ‘The Uncanny’


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is one prompted by the return of the repressed – and not surprisingly, in Freud’sinterpretation ‘the repressed’ turns out to be feelings of childhood sexuality.Both at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieththe conjurors’ automata – figures like Psycho – continued to be touchstones fora philosophical puzzle which lay at the heart of a culture’s anxiety about what itwas to be human.

New media and the dissolution of bordersBy way of conclusion of this chapter, I want to turn to a very modern version ofthe automaton. In recent years, the world of magic has had to come to termswith new media: the Internet and digital technology have presented newchallenges and new opportunities. As ever, conjurors have looked for ways ofturning the latest scientific developments into material for their acts – as can beseen, for example, in the Internet magic tricks available at sites such ashttp://www.geocities.com/Baja/4954/, http://www.caveofmagic.com/ and http://www.internetmagictricks.com/. These, though, are comparatively simpleadaptations of old routines. Some of the wider implications which digitaltechnology will have for the contemporary conjuror are raised in a provocativearticle by Christophe Lombardi entitled ‘The Cyborg Magician’. Lombardidescribes the research of Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at ReadingUniversity, whose work with microelectronic implants itself goes some waytowards dissolving the boundaries between human and computer. Warwick’simplants have enabled him to create a direct link between a computer and hisown nervous system, and Lombardi attempts to assess the implications that thisnew technology will have for conjurors – including the possibility of micro-electronically assisted telepathy. He adds that

Of course, when such technology will be readily available to everyone (at leastanyone who can afford it; another ethical question…), it will be impossible todeceive audiences with it. But remember Robert Houdin and ‘The Light andHeavy Chest’: there will be a few years when such technology will not be knownto everyone, but when it will be accessible to a few people who are prepared topay to get it and who will then be able to use it to accomplish impossible feats,not with a gimmick, not with clever misdirection, but with an implant!

Among those few, the magicians who will choose to use this technology willhave as much impact as Robert Houdin in Algeria in 1856! They will havebecome the first ever cyborg magicians!297

In fact, this kind of ‘magic’ is already being performed, although in a culturalcontext which Lombardi may not have envisaged. Postmodernism dissolves theboundaries between high art and popular art, so perhaps it is not surprising to find


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that the first ‘cyborg magician’ is actually an avant-garde performance artist,Stelarc, whose work ‘explores and extends the concept of the body and itsrelationship with technology through human/machine interfaces’.298 As well asworking with implants and prosthetic body parts, Stelarc has developed an exhibitentitled Prosthetic Head (2002) – which is actually a digital version of the oldTalking Head routine so popular with Victorian conjurors.299 The nineteenth-century illusion was produced using a three-legged table and a live assistantwhose body was hidden by cunningly positioned mirrors. The postmodern versionis a three-dimensional digitally animated caricature of Stelarc himself, whichappears on a screen and answers questions that audience members ask it in realtime by means of a computer keyboard. Way beyond the capabilities ofprogrammes such as ELIZA, Stelarc’s head performs so well that, although

intellectually, (audience members) know they are just pushing buttons toactivate software, yet they find themselves feeling their way through theconversation, hoping the head will maintain the logical flow, or perhapsperversely, willing him to get it wrong, and fail the ‘like a human’ test.300

Prosthetic Head poses a question which is not, on the surface, that differentfrom the one posed by von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk. But at the level of detailthings are very different indeed. The Enlightenment chess-playing machine wasactually a trick. It did not do what it claimed to do: it was actually worked by ahuman operator hidden inside the mechanism. Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head is alsooperated by a human, but Stelarc makes no secret of the fact – and that humanagency only reaches as far as the design and programming of the software whichgenerates the head and its answers. The ‘magic’ lies in the fact that in thisinstance what you see is what you get: a piece of computer software, the skill andcomplexity of whose design enables it to emulate human responses in ways thatevoke wonder.


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Chapter Six

Acting and not-acting: Robert-Houdin

He (the magician) creates so convincing an illusion of actuality that our eyesaccept what our minds hold in abeyance. It is this conflict between eyes andminds that produces the sense of wonder in us.301

Bernard Beckermann

A conjuror… is an actor playing the part of a magician.302

Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin

Conjurors, actors and jugglers‘A conjuror… is an actor playing the part of a magician.’ Robert-Houdin’sdefinition of the conjuror has become a piece of folklore, which professionalconjurors delight in repeating to each other in order to remind themselves of theelement of showmanship that the good conjuring act demands. The phrase is sowell known, and so frequently quoted among conjurors, in fact, that it is worthteasing its meaning out a little.

First of all, the notion of acting is a more complex one than may seem to bethe case at first. Some sense of this complexity is given if we consider thecontention of performance theorist Marvin Carlson that, within the context of aplay frame, a performer ‘is not herself (because of the operations of illusion), butshe is also not not herself (because of the operations of reality). Performer andaudience alike operate in a world of double consciousness’.303 In order to try tomake sense of some of the questions about what acting is, and how it relates toother kinds of performance, Michael Kirby broke down the apparently simpleconcept into five distinct modes:304 at one end of the spectrum he placed ‘non-matrixed performing’, by which is meant ‘doing something onstage other thanplaying a character’.305 The examples he gives are of the kurombo and koken ofkabuki performances – the stagehands who move props and help actors to changecostumes in full view of the audience. In fact, similar kinds of stagehands may beused in a magic performance: the kinds of semi-visible assistants, for example,who help to cover up, or carry on and off stage, a large prop or piece ofequipment. Next comes ‘symbolized matrix performing’ where the performer’spresence (or costume, or function) presents him or herself in a special way,drawing attention to themselves as skilful and/or entertaining in their own right,but still there largely to support the central character. In the context of atraditional magic show, this typically is the modality of the glamorous femaleassistant, whose function is dependent on the presence of the lead performer.

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‘Received acting’ (the third point in the continuum) ‘is what “extras” do – theyare in costume, they may speak fragments of lines, and the audience reads themas part of the situation of a scene. But extras do very little “character acting”’.306

Kirby’s final two points on the spectrum, ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ acting, aredistinguished from each other largely by the different levels of physical, mentaland emotional commitment which they involve. When Robert-Houdin talked ofthe conjuror as an actor playing the part of a magician, he was probably talkingabout what Kirby calls ‘simple acting’, which involves simulation andimpersonation, rather than the investment of the whole being of the performer inthe created reality of a character. Complex ‘realistic’ acting of this kind, in thesense that we understand it, was not something of which Robert-Houdin wouldhave had any experience: it was largely an invention of the modernist, naturalistand post-naturalist theatre of the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Acting, as a sub-category of performing, then, contains a variety of possiblemodes; the magic show can employ more than one at a time, and may well shiftbetween them during the performance. Robert-Houdin, however, meantsomething quite specific when he talked about the conjuror being an actorplaying the part of a magician, and the original force of his assertion is notalways understood by those who now quote it so freely. It must be admitted thattranslations from the original French do not help; it is often also rendered,rather more obscurely: ‘The magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’!The full quotation, in context, sheds some light on Robert-Houdin’s meaning.He is writing towards the end of his career, in a volume entitled Les Secrets dela Prestidigitation et de la Magie: Comment on devient sorcier (1868). The tone,incidentally, is important: Robert-Houdin deliberately and ironically uses theoccult term ‘sorcier’, as if he is promising to initiate his reader into the secretsof the dark arts. When Angelo John Lewis, the British writer on magic,translated that volume into English under the nom-de-plume by which he wouldbecome famous,‘Professor’ Hoffman, he kept the sly tone by rendering thesubtitle How to Become a Wizard.307 In fact the book has nothing to do withwizardry, of course, and everything to do with the skills of the stage illusionist.Yet that light-hearted gesture towards the occult is important to what Robert-Houdin is saying, for he is redefining the job of the professional illusionist.

The comment about the conjuror and the juggler/magician comes in thecontext of an attempt to untangle the various terms for the profession:prestidigitator, escamoteur,308 juggler, conjuror, magician… All this takes placein French, of course, and the debate is about the nuances of French wordsand French professional terminology. As a result, ‘Professor Hoffman’, in one ofhis footnotes, dismisses it as of little relevance to his English readership. Heapologizes for the fact that ‘The present chapter being a disquisition on theprecise signification of a couple of French terms, will have but little interest forthe ordinary English reader’ (Note 34), and explains that he only included it in


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order to avoid mutilating Robert-Houdin’s original text. In fact, he could nothave been more wrong: not only does the chapter include the most famous of alldefinitions of the conjuror, but its discussion about words, their definitions andtheir connotations, illuminates a series of much larger issues about the conceptof magic as a performance art in the nineteenth century.

Part of the credit for this must belong to Hoffman himself: it is in the Englishtranslation that Robert-Houdin’s dictum is best known, and the truth is thatHoffman – who was no professional showman, but an Oxford-trained barrister,fiction writer and journalist as well as an amateur conjuror – has provided atranslation of Robert-Houdin’s original which is both clear and lucid, and whichdoes justice to the complexity of what Robert-Houdin is trying to achieve.309 Hereis Robert-Houdin’s definition in its context – part of a measured consideration ofvarious terms for what he calls ‘fictitious magic’, in which he is in the process ofrejecting both ‘prestidigitation’310 and ‘escamotage’ as too limiting in theirconnotations:

Neither one of these denominations, however, authorised though they are bylong use, is in my opinion fully adequate to describe the art of fictitious magic.

Escamotage will always recall to the mind the ‘cup-and-ball’ tricks, whence itderives its origin, and referring specially, as it does, to one particular feat ofdexterity, suggests but an imperfect idea of the wide range of the wonder-exciting performances of a magician.

Prestidigitation seems to imply, from its etymology, that it is necessary to havenimble fingers in order to produce the illusions of magic, which is by nomeans strictly true.

A conjuror is not a juggler; he is an actor playing the part of a magician; anartist whose fingers have more need to move with deftness than speed. I mayeven add that where sleight-of-hand is involved, the quieter the movement ofthe performer, the more readily will the spectators be deceived.

The conjuror claims to possess supernatural powers; he holds in his hand awand the might of which nothing can resist. Why then should he need, in orderto work his wonders, to exaggerate the quickness of his movements? Such amode of proceeding is illogical and inconsistent… The word prestidigitation,therefore, only imperfectly describes the art which it denotes.311

Between them, Hoffman and Robert-Houdin provide a cool and rational accountof a new kind of conjuror – one who is not simply a prestidigitator or an escamoteurbut whose ‘art of fictitious magic’312 encompasses ‘a wide range of wonder-excitingperformances’. At the centre of this is the notion that ‘the conjuror claims topossess supernatural powers’. It is a claim which both conjuror and audience may

ACTING AND NOT-ACTING: ROBERT-HOUDIN

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know to be quite spurious, but in the best traditions of Romantic theatre’sdependence on the audience’s suspension of disbelief, both parties agree tosuppose that, for the duration of the performance at least, it may be true. ForRobert-Houdin, this playful claim to supernatural powers is what validates theperformance: the conjuror ‘holds in his hand a wand the might of which nothingcan resist’. Nowadays the magician’s wand is an outdated cliché; Robert-Houdin,however, sees it as the conjuror’s icon par excellence: ‘This elegant little staff,’ hesays with no pre-Freudian irony whatsoever, ‘is the emblem of his magic power.A touch of the wand on any object, or even a wave in that direction, forms theostensible scause of its transformation or disappearance’. (More pragmatically, hethen adds that the wand is a useful device for disguising the palming of objects,and gives the conjuror something to do with his hands, thereby saving him from‘the well-known stage bugbear, the consciousness of possessing arms, and notknowing what to do with them’!)313

The juggler/actor dichotomy is illuminating on several levels, and becauseRobert-Houdin emphasizes what the conjuror is not, as well as what he is, it iseasier to see the way in which his dichotomy is weighted. On the one hand, he ismaking a social point. ‘Juggler’, of course, was a previous term for an illusionistor conjuror, but to Hoffman and Robert-Houdin the word carries the wrongconnotations: it suggests not only a particular kind of performance skill, but alsoa particular kind of social milieu. Thomas Frost, writing at about the same timeas Robert-Houdin, had this to say of the social status of conjurors in Britain atthe end of the eighteenth century:

The social position of the professional conjuror was at this period even moredubious than that of the actor. The prejudice against his art and its professorswhich had been born of ignorance and superstition was dying out with theprocess of mental enlightenment; but he was ranked, in common with thejuggler, the posturer, and the tumbler, as a vagrant, and in his provincialramblings was sometimes in danger of being treated in that character with thestocks. He might be patronised by the upper classes, and even by the royalfamily; but he was not admitted into good society, or even regarded as arespectable character.314

It is, in part, an insistence on his own claim to respectability that motivatesRobert-Houdin’s definition. We can see this more clearly if we compare hisassertion with another contemporary account of the relationship between theconjuror and the juggler – one which comes, appropriately, from a jugglerhimself. Thomas Mayhew, in his invaluable survey of London Labour and theLondon Poor (1849–62) includes an interview with a man who is described as a‘street-juggler’. This man, too, wishes to make a clear distinction betweenconjuring and juggling, although in his own day-to-day business of making a


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living he does not always find it easy to do so. Even so, we can see that the latterterm has undergone some change of meaning and is beginning to refer primarilyto tricks of manual dexterity as opposed to tricks of deception.

According to Mayhew, the man had the reputation of being ‘one of thecleverest that ever came out’.315 He is both a street entertainer and a theatricalperformer, playing the music halls and concert halls of London as well as itsstreet corners and public parks. He admits, however, that ‘I’m too old now to goout regularly in the streets. It tires me too much, if I have to appear at a pennytheatre in the evening.’316 He had started out performing as a tumbler while stilla boy, but then ‘One night I went to the theatre and there I see Ramo Sameedoing his juggling, and in a minute I forgot all about the tumbling, and onlywanted to do as he did.’317 Now, forty years later, Mayhew’s London juggler (bornand raised, as he tells Mayhew, on the Waterloo Road) continues to perform inthe oriental persona which he adopted in emulation of his childhood hero:

I used to have a bag and bit of carpet, and perform in streets. I had Indian�sdress made, with a long horse-hair tail down my back, and white bag-trousers, trimmed with red, like a Turk�s, tied right round at the ankles, anda flesh-coloured skull-cap. My coat was what is called a Turkish fly in redvelvet, cut off like a waist-coat, with a peak before and behind. I was a regularswell, and called myself the Indian Juggler.318

It is a point of great pride with this juggler that ‘he not only learned how to do all[Ramo Samee’s] tricks, but also did them so dexterously, that when travelling“Samee has often paid him ten shillings not to perform in the same town withhim”’.319 He claims that his own earnings, at the height of his powers, amountedto £3 per day or more, but at the time Mayhew meets him, the juggler and hiswife – a strong-woman who, he claims, can lift 700 lbs by the hair of her head –are making rather less than this: approximately five shillings and sixpence a daybetween them (plus the results of a collection) in their engagement at theTemple of Mystery in Old Street Road, where the playbill advertises him as ‘TheRenowned Indian Juggler, performing his extraordinary Feats with Cups, Balls,Daggers, Plates, Knives, Rings, Balancing, etc. etc.’320 The act includes bothconjuring and juggling in the modern senses of the word.

After the juggling I generally has to do conjuring. I does what they call ‘thepile of mags’, that is, putting four halfpence on a boy’s cap, and making themdisappear when I say ‘Presto, fly!’ Then there’s the empty cups, and making�taters come under �em, or there�s bringing a cabbage into a empty hat.There’s also making a shilling pass from a gentleman’s hand into a nest ofboxes, and such-like tricks: but it ain�t half so hard as juggling, nor anythinglike the work.321


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Mayhew’s interview was published in 1861, at a time when the move into themusic halls, ‘penny theatres’ and halls of mystery such as London’s famousEgyptian Hall,322 was changing the nature of magic, establishing it more firmly asan art of the theatre rather than of the street. Mayhew’s interviewee – althoughdescribed by Mayhew as a street juggler – is clearly more at home in the theatre.Certainly, as far as this performer is concerned, there is no straightforwarddivision which locates the magician in the theatre and the juggler in the street.323

Moreover, his pride in his skill as a juggler, and his corresponding disdain for theconjuring aspect of his routine (‘and such-like tricks’) is clear from his tone, andhe is eager to distinguish between the two forms of entertainment, one skilful anddextrous, the other deceptive and simplistic.

I’m a juggler, (he tells Mayhew) but I don’t know if that’s the right term, forsome people call conjurers jugglers; but it’s wrong. When I was in Irelandthey called me a ‘manulist’, and it was a gentleman wrote the bill out for me.The difference I makes between conjuring and juggling is, one�s deceiving tothe eye and the other’s pleasing to the eye - yes, that’s it – it’s dexterity.324

The opposition between what pleases and audience and what deceives an audienceis telling. Clearly, there is an ethical dimension to the juggler’s distinction betweenthe two kinds of performance. (This is borne out by his insistence that the policeknow him and rarely prevent or interrupt his street performances). We get a clearersense of how he sees the relationship between proper juggling and what hescathingly calls ‘the wizard’s business’ when he talks about how real jugglers willoften have to turn their hand to the latter in order to eke out their meagre income.But the ‘pure’ juggler’s art appears to be on the decline in the middle years of thenineteenth century: as Mayhew’s informant explains,

there ain’t above twenty jugglers in all England… such as goes about pitchingin the streets and towns. I know there’s only four others besides myself inLondon, unless some new one has sprung up very lately. You may safelyreckon their earnings for the year round at a pound a week, that is, if theystick to juggling; but most of us joins some other calling along with juggling,such as the wizard’s business, and that helps out the gains.325

Playing the part of a gentlemanIt is from this kind of figure that Robert-Houdin wishes the new kind ofconjuror to distance himself. His strategy is to downplay ‘mere’ physical skill andto stress the imaginative aspect of the conjuror’s art. He is aligning the conjurorwith the theatre rather than with the fairground, the circus or the street; with the‘art’ of the drama rather than the mere ‘entertainment’ of the street performer;


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with high culture rather than with popular culture. Live entertainment innineteenth-century Europe was highly stratified, and licensing laws in mostcountries distinguished between music halls, variety halls and places of popularentertainment on the one hand and ‘legitimate’ theatres on the other. It shouldbe borne in mind, too, that the theatres of mid-nineteenth-century Europeancapital cities such as London and Paris, in these years pre-dating the rise ofnaturalist drama, revelled in large-scale illusion, not only in their crowd-pleasers and melodramas but also in their more serious dramatic productions.Thus, while the conjuror’s most usual venue was actually likely to be the varietyhall rather than the theatre, Robert-Houdin is making the point that hisspiritual home is in the heart of the mainstream theatrical culture. It is, on onelevel, part of his larger project, to establish the conjuror as a ‘respectable’ kindof entertainer; and if he was not the only nineteenth-century conjuror to makethis case, nor even the first, he was certainly one of the most influential. And ifthe profession of actor was not entirely respectable in nineteenth-centuryEurope, the world of the professional actor was certainly a step up from that ofstreet entertainers such as feature in London Labour and the London Poor.

Elsewhere in his Secrets we can see the further evidence of the way in whichRobert-Houdin is concerned with establishing the social status of the conjuror.In an earlier chapter he lays down a set of General Principles for the would-be conjuror. Many of these Principles are good, sound, technical advice. Forexample, he counsels the conjuror not to exceed the attention span of theaudience (which for conjuring acts he puts at a maximum of two hours), and tostructure his performance as a crescendo with each trick being more impressivethen the one before. He warns the novice not to announce a trick’s intendedeffect in advance – so that if things go wrong, the conjuror has left himself anescape route by being able to resolve the trick in a different way. At times, though,Robert-Houdin’s general principles read more like a guide to etiquette. In someinstances this is a specifically professional etiquette appropriate to the conjuror:he states, for example, with high-minded disdain, that he ‘cannot suppose thatany conjuror would for one moment dream of employing confederates among theaudience. This sort of joint hoax has now gone quite out of fashion. A trickperformed on this principle is out of the pale of conjuring altogether’.326 But heis not only setting down the boundaries of acceptability and fashion in terms ofthe conjuror’s techniques: he is also pronouncing on the more general etiquetteof good society and its values. Thus he admonishes the would-be conjuror to‘speak with perfect grammatical correctness’, and to ‘avoid coarse chaff ’; heurges him to adopt a ‘hearty, genial manner, taking care, however, to keep rigidlywithin the bounds of propriety and good taste’.327 And he admonishes him (in atone of horror!) to avoid garish costumes, wizards robes and the like: ‘Let usleave tinsel and high-crowned hats to mountebanks’ he says scornfully – addingthat ‘[t]he most probable result of assuming the conventional garb of a wizard


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will be to make the wearer an object of derision’.328 The conjuror may indeed bean actor playing the part of a magician – but he is certainly not playing the partof a pantomime magician! Instead, Robert-Houdin assures the apprenticeconjuror that ‘the ordinary dress of a gentleman is the only costume appropriateto a high-class conjuror’.329 The phrases are telling: ‘gentleman… high-class’:one of Robert-Houdin’s underlying general principles seems to be that theconjuror is to be reinvented, not as a mountebank or a juggler, but as a perfectlysocialized nineteenth-century gentleman. There is a paradox here, however,since one of the prime virtues of the Victorian gentleman is integrity or honesty.The conjuror, therefore, since he trades in deceptions, has to work doubly hardto establish his claim to any such title.

The part of a high-class gentleman is actually just another role, another formof disguise, another piece of misdirection: the costume, manners and poise of thesuave and socialized gentleman conceal a wonder-worker, the performer whosegreatest skill lies in his ability to evoke wonder, to produce ‘wonder-excitingperformances’.330 For social cachet is not the only thing that Robert-Houdin isconcerned with. At the same time he is making a contribution to a rather localprofessional quarrel. When he coined the phrase in the middle of the nineteenthcentury, two different kinds of magic act were competing for box officesupremacy: on the one hand were the champions of ‘pure’ sleight of hand; on theother were those for whom complex mechanical apparatus lay at the heart of theiracts. Robert-Houdin himself had spent his early years training and working as awatchmaker, and the skills he learned there stood him in good stead as aprofessional illusionist. While he was adept in most areas of magic, his fame as anillusionist was based to a not inconsiderable extent on his ‘mechanical wonders’.His ‘Soirées fantastiques’ at the Palais-Royal in Paris and St. James’ Theatre inLondon included mechanical effects such as his ‘Pâtissier du Palais-Royal’, aminiature figure in a doll’s house patisserie, who produced sweetmeats to orderfor the audience331 and his Marvellous Orange Tree which blossomed, bore fruitand had butterflies flying round it. Many of Robert-Houdin’s contemporariesregarded mechanical figures such as this as being in the tradition of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century automata: complex machines such as were displayed inFawkes’ and Pinchbeck’s booth at Bartholomew Fair way back in the 1720s. Assuch they may have seemed rather old-fashioned to those of his competitors whowere now looking to eliminate such mechanical devices from their act, and toemphasize instead the manipulative skills of the prestidigitator. Thus, Robert-Houdin’s apothegm is at least in part a dig at those of his colleagues who pridedthemselves on their physical skills. By labelling them mere ‘jugglers’ he issimultaneously defending his own status as a provider of wonders – including themechanical wonders for which he was so well known. His formulation also makesan important claim for the conjuror as someone who offers the audience aglimpse of something beyond the mundane. The journey which the conjuror


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offers may not be the spirit-journey of the wizard or shaman; but it is theimaginative journey on which the professional actor takes the audience.

Despite his professed scepticism about ‘mere’ prestidigitation, Robert-Houdin is equally scornful of those practitioners who rely entirely on self-workingapparatus to achieve their effects:

It is easy enough no doubt, to play the conjuror without possessing eitherdexterity or mental ability. It is only necessary to lay in a stock of apparatus ofthat kind which of itself works the trick. This is what may be called the ‘falsebottom’ school of conjuring. Cleverness at this sort of work is of the sameorder as that of the musician who produces a tune by turning the handle of abarrel-organ. Such performers will never merit the title of skilled artists, andcan never hope to obtain any real success.332

It is not entirely surprising to find that Robert-Houdin’s directions to conjurorscontain both paradoxes and self-contradictions. For example, at one point hevirtually contradicts his dismissal of prestidigitation when he declaresrhetorically ‘To succeed as a conjuror, three things are essential – first, dexterity;second, dexterity; and third dexterity’. He then goes on, however, to say that

[t]he art of conjuring bases its deceptions upon manual dexterity, mentalsubtleties, and the surprising results which are produced by the sciences.The physical sciences generally, chemistry, mathematics, and particularlymechanics, electricity and magnetism, supply potent weapons for the use ofthe magician.

In order to be a first-class conjuror it is necessary, if not to have studied allthese sciences thoroughly, at least to have acquired a general knowledge ofthem, and to be able to apply some few of their principles as the occasion mayarise. The most indispensable requirement, however, for the successfulpractice of the magic art is great neatness of manipulation combined withspecial mental acuteness.333

Thus while the conjuror is no mere prestidigitator but an actor playing the partof a magician, in order to play this part well that actor needs dexterity (anddexterity and dexterity!), mental acuteness and a knowledge of the physicalsciences. But the point is that for Robert-Houdin these are simply thenecessary physical and mental skills which enable the act to take place at all:dexterity is not an end in itself, but is a means to an end – and that end is toproduce ‘wonder-exciting performances’. His own description of the ‘MarvellousOrange Tree’ routine gives a clear impression of the kinds of effects thatRobert-Houdin was seeking in his repertoire:


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I borrowed a lady’s handkerchief. I rolled it into a ball and placed it beside anegg, a lemon, and an orange, upon the table. I then placed these four articlesone into another, and when at last the orange alone remained, I used the fruitin question in the manufacture of a magical solution. The process was asfollows; – I pressed the orange between my hands, making it smaller andsmaller, showing it every now and then in its various shapes, and finallyreducing it to a powder, which I passed into a phial in which there was somespirit of wine. My assistant then brought me an orange tree, bare of flowersor fruit. I poured into a cup a little of the solution I had just prepared, and setfire to it. I placed it near the tree, and no sooner had the vapour reached thefoliage, than it was seen suddenly covered with flowers. At a wave of my wandthe flowers were transformed into fruit, which I distributed to the spectators.

A single orange still remained on the tree. I ordered it to fall apart in fourportions, and within it appeared the handkerchief I had borrowed. A coupleof butterflies with moving wings took it each by a corner, and, flying upwardswith it, spread it open in the air.334

It is a complex and somewhat surreal routine, and one which blends variouskinds of conjuring skills. The automaton is there in the form of the tree andthe butterflies, but it is not in itself the object of wonder. This is the middleof the nineteenth century, the heart of the machine age – and, so, paradoxicallythe mechanical tree itself is no longer enough to impress the conjuror’saudience. So Robert-Houdin weaves around the machine a narrative of naturaland unnatural transformations, of disappearance and restoration, of magicalpotions, of winter and spring – a narrative whose execution depends upondexterity and sleight of hand as much as on mechanical devices, but whichis made possible by those devices. We do not have access, in this account, tothe ‘boniment’ – the patter which Robert-Houdin wove around these variousappearances and disappearances, and on which he himself placed so muchemphasis in his advice to conjurors: the patter is ‘the story told by the performer,the discourse, the speech… in fact the mise en scène with which we dress up aconjuring trick in order to give it an appearance of reality’.335 Even without thismise-en-scène, however, we can see that Robert-Houdin’s Marvellous OrangeTree is an expert amalgam of the mechanical and the organic, in which the oneis played off against the other in a way which is perfectly calculated to appeal tothe broad spectrum of nineteenth-century urban audiences.

One of the great skills that Robert-Houdin had as a performer was his abilityto fuse the old and the new. The Marvellous Orange Tree updates thosemechanical marvels of the kind that Isaac Fawkes had exhibited at BartholemewFair in the late 1600s. In other parts of his act, as we have seen, Robert-Houdinwas particularly fond of exploiting ‘the surprising results which are produced


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by… the physical sciences generally, chemistry, mathematics, and particularlymechanics, electricity and magnetism’.336 Nor was he above using pseudo-science to achieve his effects. We have already considered the way in which earlymodern magic performances related to – and could also be distanced from –notions of ‘efficacious magic’ in the form of contemporary witchcraft beliefs.But other kinds of belief are equally important. Very frequently the conjurorflirts with the ‘magic’ of science – and especially the magic of ‘bad science’ orpseudo-science – which is why, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, somany magicians called themselves ‘Professor’ in their stage names, conferringupon themselves a quasi-scientific authority which that title bestowed.

In the middle years of the nineteenth century, for example, Robert-Houdinperformed a levitation act, using his son as the subject, which he called the‘Suspension Étheréenne’. Playbills proclaimed that this Ethereal Suspensionwould demonstrate ‘Suspended Equilibrium by Atmospheric Air, through theAction of Concentrated Ether’, and the accompanying engraving shows Robert-Houdin’s son horizontal in mid-air, apparently asleep, with his head resting onhis elbow, which rests on a staff which is balanced on a stool which is placed ontrestle of which one end has been removed.337 It is an impressive genericlevitation routine, carried out by means of hidden supports. But Robert-Houdininvests his routine with a particular meaning for his audience and presents it asa miracle of modern medicine:

Surgery had supplied me with the first idea of it. It will be remembered that in1847 the insensibility produced by inhaling ether began to be applied in surgicaloperations; all the world talked about the marvellous effect of this anaesthetic,and its extraordinary results. In the eyes of many people it seemed much akin tomagic. Seeing that the surgeons invaded my domain, I asked myself if this didnot allow me to make reprisals. I did so by inventing my ethereal suspension,which, I believe, was far more surprising than any result obtained by my surgicalbrethren. The subject I intended to operate on was my younger son, and I couldnot have selected one better suited for the experiment. He was a stout lad ofabout six years of age, and his plump and rosy face was a picture of health. Inspite of his youth, he displayed the greatest intelligence in learning his part, andplayed it with such perfection, that the most incredulous were duped. This trickwas very much applauded, and I am bound to say that my arrangements wereexcellently made… Still, it sometimes happened that sensitive persons,regarding the etherization too seriously, protested in their hearts against theapplause, and wrote me letters in which they severely upbraided the unnaturalfather who sacrificed the health of his poor child to the pleasures of the public.Some went so far as to threaten me with the terrors of the law if I did not giveup my inhuman performance. The anonymous writers of such accusations didnot suspect the pleasure they caused me. After amusing the family circle, I kept


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the letters preciously as proofs of the illusion I had produced.338

One reason why all magic tutors insist that a conjuror’s patter is as important ashis ‘nimbleness of conveyance’ is that the patter directs the audience towards thething that they are supposed to be seeing. It provides the cognitive frame withwhich the magician wants to tease (or to completely deceive) the audience. Itworks best when the frame refers to something which is on the edge of theaudience’s understanding: to frame an illusion in terms of principles that are toowell known gives the audience nothing at which to wonder; to frame it in termsof something completely outlandish removes an audience’s will to complicity.But to frame a routine in terms of something which just might be true, or interms of scientific principles of which they have heard but which they do not fullyunderstand, is to play upon an ambiguity which for some audience members willbe understood as part of the entertainment, but which for others will seriouslycomplicate their picture of reality – as the outraged letters from audiencemembers illustrate.

Robert-Houdin’s misdirection may have been doubly effective in thisinstance, since there is a second meaning of the word ‘ether’ which may alsohave contributed to the way in which the trick was understood by its audienceto be a ‘scientific’ demonstration. In this second sense of the word, ‘ether’ (or‘aether’) was believed by nineteenth-century physicists to be one of thefundamental substances of the universe. With the acceptance in the earlynineteenth century of the wave theory of light, and the concomitant theories ofelectromagnetic radiation, it had been felt necessary to postulate a medium –ether – through which these waves could travel. This hypothetical and elusivesubstance was believed to permeate all space, but to offer no resistance tomotion. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 (which laid essentialgroundwork for Einstein’s theories of relativity) predicted that the velocity ofthe Earth through the ether could be measured with reference to the variationof the speed of light; when the speed of light was observed to be constant, thevery existence of ether was brought into question, and by the early twentiethcentury it had been abandoned as an unnecessary hypothesis. But in the 1850sether was a matter of scientific orthodoxy – albeit one which was very poorlyunderstood. Robert-Houdin’s claim in his playbill that he will produce hislevitation effect ‘by Atmospheric Air, through the Action of Concentrated Ether’would activate this meaning of the word. It is hard to decide whether Robert-Houdin intended this double meaning, although I suspect he did. The effect, interms of offering the audience a framework for interpreting what they areseeing, is doubly ‘scientific’ – and doubly confusing.

On the whole, however, Robert-Houdin seems to expect a sophisticatedresponse from his audience; he expects them to take the fiction of the ‘etherealsuspension’ for what it is. His mild surprise, and the amusement which he


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shares with his family, at the scientific narrative being taken too seriouslydemonstrate this.339

‘Enacting the part of a French Marabout’Earlier in the book, in a chapter entitled ‘Conjuring and its Professors’, Robert-Houdin had given his own account of the early history of magic, beginning, likeRid, with the Egyptians, and naming in particular Jannes and Jambres, themagicians at Pharaoh’s court and their magical combat with Moses and Aaron.Robert-Houdin, however, locates the roots of fictitious magic (or ‘white magic’ ashe also, rather confusingly, calls it) among a wider range of early and Easterncivilizations, citing as well as the Egyptians, the Chaldees, the Ethiopians and thePersians. Like the true practical nineteenth-century man that he is, Robert-Houdin elevates the wonders of modern science over the fabled deeds of theseearly conjurors, inviting his readers to imagine the astonishment that these‘wonder-workers’ would have felt if faced with a lecture by the most ordinary ofmodern scientists: ‘We cannot doubt that, in their eyes, our professor would pass,then and there, from the rank of magician to that of demigod, or even higher still’.Robert-Houdin is clearly unconvinced by any antiquarian tendency to validate thepresent with reference to the past, or to glorify the feats of the modern conjurorby glamourizing his relationship with his magical forebears, and he concludes,rather elegantly, that ‘if antiquity was, as is sometimes asserted, the cradle ofmagic, it is because the art of magic was then in its infancy’.

It is this rational and sceptical aspect of Robert-Houdin’s character, togetherwith his insistence on personifying the civilized virtues of the good nineteenth-century middle-class gentlemen, which come together in one of the mostfamous anecdotes told about him: that of his magical competition with theMarabouts. In 1856 he was called out of retirement by Colonel de Neveu, headof the political office at Algiers, who persuaded him to perform before someof the principal chieftains of the Arab tribes in Algeria. It was a request with aclear political dimension.

The discourse of magic – in the efficacious sense of the word – has long beenimportant in a colonial context. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuryanthropological theory tended to arise from – and thus confirm and support – theagenda of European and American colonialism and imperialism. The firstquestion facing the colonial administrator was the extent to which local magicalpractices represented a serious threat to the colonialists’ ability to control anddominate non-European populations. The second question was, if they were athreat, how they should be managed. There was a broad consensus that

…magic is one of the most pressing problems confronting colonialgovernments. While white magic can have beneficial effects in spurringharmonious and beneficial social interaction, black magic is thoroughly


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detrimental… [Nonetheless] efforts by colonial government to eradicate magicmight be misplaced, since in many native societies magic serves useful socialfunctions… [and] before measures against sorcerers and witch doctors can beeffective, a colonized population must be educated away from their beliefs insorcery.340

In fact, there were specific aspects about the situation in French colonialNorth Africa in the 1850s which meant that the question of ‘magic’ was aparticularly loaded one. French military rule had only very recently beenestablished over what was an existing sophisticated Islamic culture, and relationsbetween the colonizers and the colonized were violent, aggressive, and markedby mutual incomprehension. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that colonization hadmade the Muslim society more barbaric than it had been before the Frencharrived. Within this uneasy situation, Islam had become a central element inAlgerian nationalist struggles against French colonial rule, and the Marabouts –a distinct brotherhood of mystical and military leaders who drew both on folktraditions and Sufi teachings – played a key role in this resistance. To the colonialadministrators, however, the Marabouts must have seemed very much likethe witch doctors and sorcerers of the ‘primitive’ animist tribal cultures ofCentral Africa, since they were believed by the local peoples to possess specialsupernatural powers. The colonial authorities rightly perceived them as a threatand attempted to restrict their influence wherever possible. It was in pursuit ofthis political goal that Robert-Houdin was invited to Algiers, at a time (one ofmany) when there was a strong possibility of further tribal insurrection. Hetreated the responsibility as an honour:

I must say that I was much influenced in my determination by the knowledgethat my mission to Algeria had a quasi-political character. I, a simpleconjurer, was proud of being able to render my country a service.

It is known that the majority of revolts which have to be suppressed inAlgeria are excited by intriguers, who say they are inspired by the Prophet,and are regarded by the Arabs as envoys of God on earth to deliver themfrom the oppression of the Roumi (Christians). These false prophets andholy Marabouts, who are no more sorcerers than I am, and indeed even lessso, still contrive to influence the fanaticism of their co-religionists by tricksas primitive as are the spectators before whom they are performed.

The government was, therefore, anxious to destroy their pernicious influence,and reckoned on me to do so. They hoped, with reason, by the aid of myexperiments, to prove to the Arabs that the tricks of their Marabouts were merechild�s play, and owing to their simplicity could not be done by an envoy fromHeaven, which also led us very naturally to show them that we are theirsuperiors in everything, and, as for sorcerers, there are none like the French.341


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In his Memoirs, Robert-Houdin tells how he successfully challenged theMarabouts to a public magic competition. In front of an audience of civilauthorities and tribal delegates including ‘caïds, agas, bash-agas, and… somesixty Arab chiefs, clothed in their red mantles (the symbol of their submissionto France)’,342 he stepped forward with a grave sense of his national and politicalresponsibility:

I was here not merely to amuse a curious and kind public; I must produce astartling effect upon coarse minds and prejudices, for I was enacting the partof a French Marabout. Compared with the simple tricks of their pretendedsorcerers, my experiments must appear perfect miracles to the Arabs… Itwas not enough to amuse my spectators; I must also, in order to fulfil theobject of my mission, startle and even terrify them by the display of asupernatural power.343

He succeeded, of course. His performance included many variations on standardtheatrical routines: he produced not only flowers but also (appropriatelyenough!) cannonballs from a hat; a suitably non-alcoholic version of ‘TheInexhaustible Bottle’ delivered apparently endless supplies of both sweetmeatsand coffee from a punchbowl; five-franc pieces appeared in locked boxessuspended above the audience. But it was the three tricks at the climax to theshow which were to seal his reputation as a sorcerer. Antagonistic volunteerswere invited up onto the stage. The first – a ‘herculean Arab’344 – was invited topick up a solidly built but small box, but was humiliated by being unable to doso. (The box was held down by an electro-magnetic charge – which was laterused to give the volunteer a shock which further humiliated him.) This wasdisturbing enough and elicited whispers of ‘Shaitan!’ from his audience. Thesecond trick was one especially requested by Colonel de Neveu, in order torespond to a particular claim of the Marabouts:

One of the means employed by the Marabouts to gain influence in the eyesof the Arabs is by causing a belief in their invulnerability. One of them, forinstance, ordered a gun to be loaded and fired at him from a short distance,but in vain did the flint produce a shower of sparks; the Maraboutpronounced some cabalistic words, and the gun did not explode. The mysterywas simple enough; the gun did not go off because the Marabout had skilfullystopped up the vent. Colonel de Neveu explained to me the importance ofdiscrediting such a miracle by opposing to it a sleight-of-hand trick farsuperior to it, and I had the very article.345

In response Robert-Houdin performed a version of the well-known gun trick.In this, a gun was fired directly at his heart (by a particularly aggressive-sounding


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volunteer who repeatedly told Robert-Houdin that he wanted to kill him), but thebullet ended up embedded in an apple. For his third trick, Robert-Houdin madea volunteer, a young man of about twenty years of age, completely disappear –causing a riot in which ‘the Arabs… impelled by an irresistible feeling of terror…rose in all parts of the house, and yielded to the influence of a general panic.’346

The whole incident has strange echoes of Moses and Aaron demonstratingthe power of the one true God in the court of Pharaoh: here, though, Robert-Houdin demonstrates the power of civilized western showmanship in ‘theAlgiers theatre… a very neat house, in the style of the Variétés at Paris, anddecorated with considerable taste.’347 One of the noticeable things about thewhole incident is the ambiguity about what Robert-Houdin is actually trying toachieve. On one level his brief is to suggest that ‘white man’s magic’ is morepowerful than that of the local wonder-workers, and that he himself is a powerfulsorcerer, one who is able to perform ‘perfect miracles’ and to ‘startle and eventerrify them by the display of a supernatural power.’ But on another level, his taskis more ambitious than that. After the performance, he tells us,

the interpreters and all those who had dealings with the Arabs receivedorders to make them understand that my pretended miracles were only theresult of skill, inspired and guided by an art called prestidigitation, in no wayconnected with sorcery.

The Arabs doubtlessly yielded to these arguments, for henceforth I was onthe most friendly terms with them.348

The deeper purpose of Robert-Houdin’s performance, then, is to effect amajor ideological shift by advancing the claims of western material rationalismover those of the folk rituals of the Marabouts – and, by association, over theclaims of Islam itself. Its function is to construct a clear opposition betweenrationalism and ‘superstition’ and convince the Arabs that the rationalism issuperior. The magician is engaged in that most essential of colonial enterprises:that of establishing the validity of the colonialists’ world-view over that of thesubject people.

‘My public shall be the reader, and my stage a book’:playing the part of a historianThe story of the contest with the Marabouts, as Robert-Houdin tells it, has allthe satisfying structure of myth: an archetypal conflict between civilization andmagical belief. The event certainly took place: whether it took place in quite theway the protagonist tells it is less certain.

History, however, is typically written by the victors, and if what Robert-Houdinproduces is a story of his own heroism in an ideological struggle, we are notsurprised. Perhaps, indeed, it is on a mythic level that the story is most valuable;


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certainly the Memoirs of Robert-Houdin are notoriously unreliable – as well asbeing one of the keystone texts of modern magic, a book which would have beenread by every magician of the succeeding generations, the ‘most influential bookin the world of magic’.349 In the Memoirs, Robert-Houdin chronicles his career,and in particular his relationship with his mentor, an older magician calledTorrini. The young Robert-Houdin first encounters Torrini when the older mansaves his life. Robert-Houdin, travelling through France, has eaten a dish of stewwhich poisons him. On the road, he falls into a fainting fit, and when he recovershe finds himself in a carriage belonging to Torrini, who explains:

My name is Torrini, and I am a conjurer by profession. You are in my house –that is, in the carriage I usually employ as my domicile. You will be surprised,I dare say, to learn that the bedroom you now occupy can be lengthened into atheatre, and in that room behind the red curtains is the stage on which myapparatus is arranged… I found you lying insensible, with your face to theground. Fortunately for you, I was then taking my morning walk by the horses’side, and this circumstance saved you being run over. By Antonio’s help Icarried you to my bed, and my knowledge of medicine restored you to life.350

The story is a dramatic enough one as it stands, but it becomes even more so.Robert-Houdin is grateful but bemused at the extent to which this stranger hasbefriended him and seems to have his interests at heart. Torrini goes on toexplain why ‘…a man belonging to a class not generally erring on the side ofsensibility, should have evinced such compassion for your sufferings’.351 It isproduced, he tells the young man,

…‘by the sweet illusion of paternal love… I had a son, a beloved son; he was myhope, my life, my happiness; but a dread fatality robbed me of him: he died,and, terrible to say, he was assassinated, and his murderer stands before you!…Yes, yes, his murderer!’ Torrini went on, his voice growing gradually firmer:‘and yet the law could not punish me; it left me life. In vain I accused myselfbefore my judges; they treated me as a maniac, and my crime was regarded asaccidental homicide. But what do I care, after all, for their judgment? Whetherthrough carelessness, or imprudence as they say, my poor Giovanni is not theless lost to me, and I shall reproach myself with his death my life long… WhatI have said will suffice to explain the natural cause of my sympathy towards you.When I first saw you, I was struck by the likeness you bore in age and height tomy unhappy boy. I even fancied I could trace a certain resemblance in your face,and, yielding to this illusion, I decided on keeping you near me, and nursingyou as if you were my own child. You can now form an idea of the agony Iendured during the week when I was compelled to despair of your restorationto life. But Providence, taking pity on us both, has saved you. You are now quite


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convalescent, and in a few days, I trust, will be perfectly recovered. Such, myboy, is the secret of the affection I displayed towards you.’352

We learn a little more about the attractive, mysterious and romantic Torrinias the narrative progresses. Robert-Houdin explains that Torrini’s real nameis deGrisy, and that the ‘murder’ of his son was actually an on-stage accidentduring a conjuring trick in which the son was assisting. The guilt of this tragicmishap haunts Torrini, but he finds some redemption in this second ‘son’,Robert-Houdin. Torrini goes on to become his mentor, and a second father tohim, and it is from Torrini that Robert-Houdin learns the true art of the conjuror.

If the story of their meeting and subsequent relationship, and the way in which it is narrated, smacks somewhat of the more melodramatic kind of nineteenth-century novel, there is little wonder. Torrini did not exist: hewas a composite figure ‘constructed from bits of other performers’ lives’.353

The Memoirs, presented as documentary truth by Robert-Houdin and histranslators, and accepted as such by generations of readers including CharlesDickens and Harry Houdini,354 are actually based on a fiction. When ThomasFrost wrote one of the first and most comprehensive histories of conjuring, hisLives of the Conjurors, he included Robert-Houdin’s stories of de Grisy/Torrinias literal fact, thus embedding Robert-Houdin’s fiction even more firmly in thefolklore of the subject.

In the introduction to this book, I suggested that many conjurors’ writings ontheir own art should be seen as a form of essentially ‘performative’: as emulatingand extending the stage act; as consisting of a sequence of gestures designedto misdirect the reader’s attention, to say one thing while doing another; andas repeatedly performing that quintessential conjuror’s routine of appearingto explain the trick while actually doing no such thing. The notion of the book-as-performance is actually one which Robert-Houdin himself disarminglysuggests. In his ‘Overture’ to his memoirs he explains how now, in retirement,he continually experiences a frisson of pleasure as eight o’clock strikes, sincethis is the time his performances would begin. ‘Then, with my eye eagerly fixedon the hole in the curtain, I surveyed with intense pleasure the crowd thatflocked in to see me. Then, as now, my heart beat, for I was proud and happy ofsuch success’.355 He begins to imagine a different kind of performance:

These emotions and souvenirs are not at all painful to me: on the contrary, Isummon them up with pleasure. At times I even mentally transport myself tomy stage, in order to prolong them. There, as before, I ring the bell, thecurtain rises, I see my audience again, and, under the charm of this sweetillusion, I delight in telling them the most interesting episodes of myprofessional life. I tell them how a man learns his real vocation, how thestruggle with difficulties of every nature begins, how, in fact----


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But why should I not convert this fiction into a reality? Could I not, eachevening when the clock strikes eight, continue my performances underanother form? My public shall be the reader, and my stage a book.356

We started this chapter with a consideration of different modalities of acting.Robert-Houdin himself displays different modalities of acting too. What part isthe magician playing? The stage conjuror in the guise of a respectable gentleman?The French marabout who subverts his own supernatural claims? Theauthoritative historian of magic – whose story is actually fabricated… ForRobert-Houdin, it seems, all the world was a stage, and in his lifetime he playedmany parts. He also stated quite openly and disingenuously what many conjurorswriting about magic try to conceal: that the conjuror does not stop performingwhen he picks up the pen.


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Chapter Seven

Before your very eyes: life, death and liveness

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element:its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where ithappens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the historyto which it was subject throughout the time of its existence… The presence ofthe original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

Walter Benjamin357

No illusion is good in a Film, as we simply resort to camera trix, and the deedis did.

Harry Houdini

Death and the MaidenA late nineteenth-century theatre: Onstage, a lady sits in a chair. A conjurorsteps forward and with a flourish, covers her with a cloth. A pause, a gesture –the cloth is removed, the lady has vanished. The conjuror picks up the chairwith one hand, to show how empty it is. He replaces it. Then, another gestureand – out of nowhere – the chair is occupied, not by the lady but by a skeleton!A grim image of human mortality, and a reference to the iconic motif of Deathand the Maiden. This has been a theme of the memento mori trope from theartists of the Middle Ages to Schubert; in 1894 Edward Munch had produced amodernist version on the same theme. But the conjuror’s art is not only aboutdeath but also about resurrection. The magician proudly displays his skeletonlong enough for us to see that it is real, then covers it once more with the cloth.Once more he whips it away and – surprise! – the lady is sitting where she hadformerly been. She stands, they bow and leave the stage.

This scene does not take place on a stage, but on the screen. I have justdescribed Georges Méliès film – Escamotage d’une Dame chez Robert-Houdin/The Vanishing Lady at the Robert-Houdin Théâtre (1896). The film’s locationforms a significant link between magic in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. It was, as the title suggests, filmed in the Théâtre Robert-Houdin,the famous Parisian two-hundred-seat theatre which had once been the home ofthe ‘father of modern magic’ and which Méliès – magician and film pioneer –now owned and ran. In 1888, Méliès had sold his share of his father’s footwearmanufacturing business, and with the proceeds had bought the exhibition


rights for the theatre from Robert-Houdin’s daughter-in-law for 40,000 francs.He had it refurbished and re-opened it as Paris’s answer to Maskelyne andCooke’s Egyptian Hall in London. The young Georges had been fascinated bymagic since the age of ten, when, according to legend, he had been taken to seeRobert-Houdin himself, not long before that great man’s death. As a young manhe had trained as an amateur conjuror, taking lessons from Emile Voisin whoowned a magician�s shop in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple and performing mainlyfor family and friends; when his father sent him to London, ostensibly to trainfor the world of business, he had been a frequent customer at the Egyptian Hall.At the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, he was manager and producer as well asperformer – though, it seems, not a terribly good one. Under his managementthe theatre ran at a financial loss for several years, specializing in ratherderivative programmes, featuring large-scale and rather expensive illusions.Méliès did, however, have an intuitive grasp of the importance of narrativewithin magic performances, and developed his own trademark forms of magicsketches and magic scenes, involving several magicians on stage at once. It wasthis interest in narrative which later enabled him to effect a fusion betweennineteenth-century conjuring traditions and the new medium of film.

Méliès’ Escamotage was based on the illusion which had been made famousin both at the Théâtre Robert Houdin and at the Egyptian Hall by the Frenchconjuror Bualtier de Kolta. In this short film, however, it was Méliès himselfwho played the part of a conjuror, while the maiden in the chair was Jehanned’Alcy, Méliès regular collaborator (and lover – later to become his wife) whohad figured in many of the illusions in the stage shows at the Robert-Houdin.The illusion was created by the simple means of filming one action (d’Alcy’sfirst appearance in the chair), stopping the camera, changing the scene (firstremoving d’Alcy from the chair, then replacing her with a skeleton, thenreturning her to the chair) and then rolling the camera again.358 When playedback, the illusion was that the lady had disappeared, turned into a skeleton, andthen been brought back to life.

In the annals of film history, Escamotage is generally regarded asrevolutionary because it is the first recorded use of stop-action (also known as‘stop-motion’) editing. In it Méliès first begins to explore a use of cinema whichbreaks free of the mode of realism, the record of those everyday scenes ofmiddle-class life, which was dominant in the early years of the moving pictures.His subsequent experiments with the relationship between magic and cinemaare of immense importance to the history of both these art forms.

An age of mechanical – or of digital – reproduction poses particular problemsfor the art of the conjuror, which appears to be one whose particular attractionlies in its liveness. Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s insistence, quoted above, that the‘presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity’ takeson a particularly resonant meaning when applied to conjuring, whose very

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essence lies in challenging concepts of authenticity. The physical presence ofthe performer ‘in time and space, [his] unique existence at the place where [he]happens to be’ would seem to be an essential part of the pleasure of theconjuror’s act. Certainly, the effect of the visual and electronic media on theconjuror’s art has been profound, and at times it has threatened to engulf it, toeclipse it, or to render it irrelevant. In the early years of the twentieth century,as the cinema replaced the showman as the main purveyor of wonders (andthe mainstream theatre, in response, clung ever more firmly to the tenets ofpsychological naturalism) it soon became clear that the Golden Age of Magicwas over. This chapter will examine the conjuring act as a point at whichliveness and mediatized performance intersect. This includes the part played byMagic Lantern and light shows in the magicians’ acts of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, as well as the paradoxical contributions which the livemagic shows of the late nineteenth century made to the early development ofmotion pictures. In the course of this I shall be considering not only some of thetheoretical issues relating to ‘live’ performance, but also ‘liveness’ in anothersense of that word.

The questions which were first articulated by Benjamin, about the status,function and value of the work of art in an age of mechanical representation havea particular intensity in the area of performance. The arrival of the electronicmedia in the first quarter of the twentieth century and its ensuing dominance inthe form of film, TV, radio, video and audio recordings and digital media haveraised essential questions about the place of live performance: firstly, whether liveperformance will be able to continue to compete with the media in the cultural oreconomic marketplace; secondly, whether there is any good reason why it should.

Philip Auslander has argued that

at the level of cultural economy theatre (and live performance generally) and themass media are rivals, not partners. Neither are they equal rivals: it is absolutelyclear that our current cultural formation is saturated with, and dominated by,mass media representations in general and television in particular.359

It is an argument which throws into question some age-old assumptions aboutthe primacy of liveness in performance – and inevitably, theorists have come upwith various answers to the question. The value of live performance, it may beargued, lies precisely in its difference from mediatized events. The presence ofthe performer, the energy that exists between the performer and the audience,creates a special kind of community among the participants. Its veryephemerality, the fact that it exists only ‘in the moment’, sets it apart from themass media. At its most extreme – as articulated, for example, by Peggy Phelanin Unmarked: The Politics of Performance – this defence goes on to argue thatlive performance


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…becomes itself through disappearance… Without a copy, live performanceplunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present – and disappears intomemory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious, where it eludesregulation and control… Performance honors the idea that a limited numberof people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of valuewhich leaves no visible trace afterward.360

Auslander makes a characteristically uncompromising response towards sucharguments for the primacy of live performance. He rejects Phelan’s assertion,that live performance (by ‘disappearing’ and subsequently persisting only in thespectator’s memory) ‘eludes regulation and control’, that by implication itsomehow lies outside the ideological reach of contemporary market capitalism,and the forces which govern that economy. He also has little time for what hesees as

traditional unreflective assumptions that fail to get much further in theirattempts to explicate the value of ‘liveness’ than invoking clichés andmystifications like ‘the magic of live theatre’, the ‘energy’ that supposedly existsbetween performers and spectators in a live event, and the ‘community’ that liveperformance is often said to create among performers and spectators.361

Auslander’s point is that while live performance and the mass media are rivals inthe cultural and economic marketplace, contemporary live performance bothseeks to replicate television, video and film and also incorporates mediatechnology to such an extent that the live event itself becomes a product of mediatechnologies. He cites a range of examples, from the low-level mediatization ofelectric amplification through to the lip-synched miming of the pop singer in the‘live’ performance, the use of giant television screens in a variety of live eventsfrom sports fixtures to rock concerts to performance art, or video screens withintheatrical performances, in order to argue that it is no longer realistic to seeliveness and mediatized performance as ontological opposites.

Live conjuring is, of course, alive and well and living in children’s parties, incorporate hospitality events, and in designated street theatre venues in touristareas such as London’s Covent Garden or Sidney Harbour. Some might arguethat it exists here in its purest form. Yet, in conjuring – as in acting or pop music –the mass media is a dominant and determining factor: those present-dayconjurors whose names are well known are those who have come to terms invarious ways with the dominance of recorded/broadcast media. Asked to name aconjuror, UK audiences over the past thirty or so years might have come up withnames such as Tommy Cooper, Paul Daniels and Derren Brown. US audiencesmight name David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, David Blaine. All of these havemade their career on television.


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Auslander’s argument (somewhat simplified in this summary) providesus with a way of approaching the initial confrontation and the subsequentnegotiations between live conjuring and mediatized performance. A rough graphof this might show a U-shaped curve in which nineteenth-century conjurors’initial excitement at the possibilities of moving picture technology is first replacedby disappointment and anxiety, and later by a willingness to exploit the newtechnology on its own terms. The early realization (most succinctly articulated byHarry Houdini in the epigraph to this chapter) that there might be somethingself-cancelling about the use of ‘camera trix’ in the magician’s art was followed bythe even more devastating comprehension of the extent to which the recorded andbroadcast media would come to dominate the world of entertainment. A laterchapter will look more closely at the ways in which twentieth-century conjurorsresponded to this challenge. The present chapter is concerned with the initialconfrontation between the magician and the film-maker. The contribution whichnineteenth-century conjuring made to the rise of the early film is now acommonplace of film history; however, it is one which is worth revisiting inthe light of Georges Méliès’ Escamotage and its powerful invocation of Death andthe Maiden.

Moving images and the conquest of death: the Magic Lantern

The history of optical illusion… travels a course from religious belief in magicto the start of mass media entertainment, and at every step of the way thepotential for tricking the eye and inventing new diversions (from pop-up booksto the movies) marches in time to the progressive understanding of vision, itsfunction, and above all its propensities. As one conjuror writes, ‘to deceive, youmust know what your audience is thinking.’

Marina Warner362

Méliès was present when the movies were born – which, according to traditionalfilm history, was at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café at 4, Boulevard desCapucines in Paris on 28th December 1895, when the Lumière brothers firstshowed their Cinematographe pictures to a paying audience. Although otherinventors such as Thomas Edison, Max Skladanowsky and William Paul wereworking along similar lines, textbooks of film history usually credit this show atthe Salon Indien as ‘the first public showing of motion pictures projected on ascreen’.363 It took place before a small audience of thirty-three people, who hadpaid a franc each. A review in La Poste for 30th December enthused that

…photography no longer records stillness. It perpetuates the image ofmovement. The beauty of the invention resides in the novelty and ingenuity


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of the apparatus. When these gadgets are in the hands of the public, whenanyone can photograph the ones who are dear to them, not just in theirmotionless form, but with movement, action, familiar gestures and the wordsout of their mouths, then death will no longer be absolute, final.364

This is a truly extraordinary review. The anonymous critic expounds anapocalyptic vision in which the moving image is something which will mean that‘death will no longer be absolute, final’. A death and resurrection show indeed.Just as the developing technologies of mass communication had begun to offerhope that there might be ways of contacting those who have passed over tothe other side,365 so the reviewer of the world’s first film-show sees in theCinematographe, not the future of mass entertainment, but a way in which thedead will become present to us. If we are unable to speak to them, then they willat least be able to speak to us.

Popular entertainment, of course, has long been fascinated with thisparticular boundary. Ghosts, vampires, and the various kinds of undead are aperennial theme of popular culture, and one which magicians have not beenslow in exploiting. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mainmedium for this kind of spooky magic was the Magic Lantern orPhantasmagoria, which tapped into Gothic fantasies of phantoms and spirits.The Magic Lantern has a history which goes back well beyond the Jesuit priestAthanasius Kircher or his contemporary Christiaan Huygens, both of whomhave been credited with its invention in the mid-seventeenth century.366 Itsprehistory includes Aristotle’s writings, in which the principles on which theMagic Lantern is founded are first elaborated; experiments in light and shadowby medieval philosopher-scientists such as Friar Roger Bacon (b. 1214) whichenabled the development of magic shadow entertainment devices; andinventions such as Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘bulls-eye’ lens, which was a primitivebut effective light condenser. Nonetheless, if Kircher did not invent the MagicLantern,367 he was still an important popularizer of it in the later editions of hisArs Magnae Lucis et Umbrae.368 The shows with which Kircher is said to haveentertained his friends are particularly resonant. They contained ‘images ofdevils with pitchforks, Mister Death brandishing his scythe, a soul burning inpurgatory, and other supernatural scenes, as if the new technology inevitablyinvolved phantasms and spectres’; optical illusions, even those created in thespirit of scientific experiment, have a tendency to ‘disrupt the boundariesbetween reality and fantasy.’369

Early versions of the Magic Lantern were powered by oil or candle – weaklight sources which were barely enough to provide more than the most blurredimages. Even so the principles of the Magic Lantern were soon embeddedin popular culture. By the end of the seventeenth century there was a new kindof entertainer – the wandering lantern player, the ‘galante-show’ entertainer


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whose painted slides would be shown in inns or fairs. The narratives of theseshows varied widely: frequently they had a supernatural or magical theme: talesof elves, demons, goblins and ghosts. The street magician had found a new wayof producing uncanny wonders in the name of entertainment.

Magic Lantern shows cover a broad spectrum. Small models were sold aschildren’s toys. Some of the itinerant ‘galante-show’ lanternists usedcomparatively primitive machines, perhaps accompanied by narrative or musicof the lanternist’s own making. But the travelling lantern show could also bequite sophisticated, bringing together a range of mechanical and optical effectsand providing a great opportunity for the lanternist’s own creativity. Forexample, the German lanternist Max Skladanowsky (1863–1939)370 was the sonof a glazier and minor industrialist. Trained as a photographer, he alsoundertook apprenticeships in glass painting and optics with the Hagedorncompany, who manufactured both Magic Lanterns and theatrical lightingapparatus. The skills which he and his father had between them were combinedin a Magic Lantern show with which they both (along with Max’s brother Emil)toured Germany, Central Europe and Scandinavia between 1879 and 1892, andone of whose main features was a sophisticated dissolve between one slide andanother. As well as the Magic Lantern, the family presented a complex versionof the automaton – a mechanical theatre. In 1892 Max and his brother hadinvented and constructed a chronophotographic camera. Using this andunperforated roll film controlled by a worm-gear motion, he shot a short (forty-eight frame) motion film of his brother Eric. By 1895 Max had developed andpatented the ‘Bioskop’ – a mechanism for projecting the resulting image to anaudience of the kind that one might get in a theatre. The Bioskop usedprinciples derived from the double-lens ‘dissolves’ used in his Magic Lanternshow. And since a public performance of their ‘Bioskop’ pictures actually pre-dated the Lumière brothers’ show at the Salon Indien by over a month, theSkladanowsky brothers technically have a better claim than their Frenchcounterparts to having been the first in Europe to project film to a payingaudience. In the end, though, the Bioskop’s reliance on Magic Lanterntechniques was as much of a handicap as it was a success. The double-lens,alternate frame technology of the Skladanowskys’ projection technique wasclumsy and technologically something of a dead end.

At the luxury end of the Magic Lantern scale were the elaboratelymounted shows of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, using sophisticatedmulti-lensed apparatus, which were mounted in America by Joseph BoggsBeale, and in London between 1838 and 1876 at the Royal PolytechnicInstitute in Regent Street. The Institute had a large theatre equipped forMagic Lantern shows of a particularly sophisticated kind and boasted arepertoire of over 900 slides – some of them as large as two feet across –designed by Childe and Hill. The programme covered everything from


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current affairs (such as front-line reports from the battlefields of theEmpire) through to fairy-tale narratives.

These shows involved the use of several lanterns and quantities of large hand-painted slides to produce ‘dissolving views’, multiple effects and illusions ofmovement. The slides that these men painted are the finest that were everproduced by hand painting. The images produced were often 2000 square feetor more, and the use of the beautiful but highly dangerous hydrogen-oxygen‘limelight’ enabled these images to be shown to large audiences. Behind thescreen the appropriate music and sound effects were produced.371

Limelight – which was now in regular use for other forms of theatre lighting –was created by squirting a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen onto a limestonebase. Once the gases were set alight, the limestone itself became incandescent,emitting a light which was ‘as powerful as a modern movie projector’.372

During the Victorian era (the golden age of Magic Lantern projection) hand-painted slides gave way to – or were complemented by – photographic ones. Thepossibility of mass production meant that the aesthetic qualities of the slidesthemselves tended to deteriorate even as the lantern mechanisms became moretechnically sophisticated. While the Magic Lantern retained its function as aform of entertainment (including the illicit thrills of parlour showings of moresophisticated kinds of adult entertainment) it was also a vehicle for education,for the dissemination of news and current affairs, for moral exhortation(temperance and religious lectures were given using Magic Lanterns) and forthe demonstration of scientific principles.

But of all the variations on the ‘Magic Lantern’ theme, one of the moststriking originated in Paris: the ‘Fantasmagorie’, or Phantasmagoria, of ÉtienneGaspard Robert, or Robertson as he called himself. This light/shadow show wasfirst seen in Paris, just after the French Revolution, and retained its popularityin both Europe and America throughout the first fifty years of the nineteenthcentury. It started – as many of the ‘wonders’ of the age started – as a straightscientific lecture, illustrating optical principles, but Robertson had the instinctsof the showman rather than the scientific demonstrator, and his audience, in theyears following the Terror, had developed a taste for the macabre and theuncanny. In 1799 Robertson opened a new kind of light and shadow show – andone of the earliest examples of that very modern art form, the technologicallydriven site-specific performance. The audience was led by lantern-lightthrough the grounds and the passageways of an old, abandoned and ruinedCapuchin monastery (convent). The walls were hung with strange pictures,skulls and bones – the bones, they were told of long-dead monks. The innersanctum was hung with black velvet and illuminated by a single lamp. HereRobertson began what seemed like another scientific lecture – an apparently


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psychological discussion of the effects on the psyche which were created bythoughts of phantoms and witches. Then,

suddenly the lamp went out. Thunder roared and lightning flashed. Church bellstolled, the lightning and thunder increased, and a tiny figure – half-human, half-demon – appeared in the air, shimmering and ghostly. Gradually the figureseemed to approach, growing larger and larger, until suddenly it disappeared witha wail. Bats fluttered on the walls, ghosts and goblins groaned, skeletons camehurtling toward the audience. Women who had come to the show fainted interror. Bold men hid their eyes. The show was a smash success – the toast ofParis.373

Robertson’s Phantasmagoria was created through a comparatively simple trickof projection. Behind the screens which the audience faced, six assistantsprovided sound effects and operated several lanterns, back-projecting distortedhuman images onto the obscured and semi-transparent screen. Some were onwheels and could be moved silently back and forth behind the screen, makingthe images grow and shrink, approach and retreat, appear and disappear. Otherswere hand-held allowing bats and ghosts to swoop around the room. Theroutine, however, was given added power by its setting: the Capuchin monasterywas the very stuff of Gothic fiction, with its ruined abbeys and demonic monks.The framework of Robertson’s lantern show was one in which scientific truthwas interrupted by, and collapsed into, the supernatural, playing expertly on atension in the audience’s psyche between the rational and the irrational.Robertson’s show spawned a host of imitators. Sir David Brewster’s descriptionof a Phantasmagoria, which a showman called Philipstrahl exhibited inEdinburgh in 1802, is particularly vivid:

The small theatre of exhibition was lighted only by one hanging lamp, theflame of which was drawn up into an opaque chimney or shade when theperformance began. In this darkness visible, the curtain rose, and displayeda cave, with skeletons and other terrific figures in relief upon its walls. Theflickering light was then drawn up within its shroud, and the spectators intotal darkness found themselves in the middle of thunder and lightning…[These] were followed by the figures of ghosts, skeletons, and knownindividuals, whose eyes and mouths were made to move by the shifting ofcombined slides. After the first figure had been exhibited for a short time, itbegan to grow less and less, as if removed to a great distance, and at lastvanished in a small cloud of light. Out of this same cloud the germ of anotherfigure began to appear, and gradually grew larger and larger, and approachedthe spectators, until it attained its perfect development… [F]igures whichretired with the freshness of life came back in the form of skeletons, and the


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retiring skeletons returned in the drapery of flesh and blood… The effect ofthis part of the exhibition was naturally the most impressive. The spectatorswere not only surprised, but agitated, and many of them were of the opinionthat they could have touched the figures.374

Even without the aid of the atmospheric setting – but with the aid of atechnologically well-equipped performance space – Philipstrahl’s Phantasmagoria,even more vividly than Robertson’s, creates a nightmare world in which theboundaries of life and death dissolve, in which solid figures dematerialize,bodies turn into skeletons and vice versa. It is a surreal show which bearscomparison with some of the best work of George Méliès. Images from showssuch as these fed back into the more traditional lantern slide shows of thetravelling lanternists, for whom the aspect of the macabre became one of themost popular elements within the variety bill which was the standard fare oftheir shows.

Meanwhile, at the time of the Lumière brothers’ soiree, one of the mostpopular illusions on the London stage was ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ , an illusion of aphantom, produced by cunningly angled mirrors, which had started life in thelecture hall as a demonstration of principles of optics. It became a regularentertainment at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic – that strange hybridplace of erudition and entertainment – and then found its way both into magicshows and eventually into the mainstream theatre, where scenes such as thatin Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers were written expressly to exploit itspotential for supernatural illusion. Thus, as Pepper’s Ghost moved from thelecture hall to the theatre it changed its function and its epistemologicalstatus: as a theatrical device its function was to produce that most unscientific ofeffects – a ghost. What started out as a scientific demonstration of Enlightenmentrationalism turned into a producer of the irrational.

Magicians at the Salon IndienThus the moving Cinematographe images which the La Poste reviewer(quoted above) saw at the Salon Indien had been anticipated by the MagicLantern shows and the Phantasmagorias of the previous century. But there isa significant difference in the way in which the two kinds of entertainmentwere received by their different audiences: if Robertson, Philipstrahl and theircolleagues used the available technology to create a sense of the abnormal andthe supernatural, the reviewer from La Poste is caught by the veryordinariness of the pictures which he saw. This is what stimulated such apowerful sense of awe in him: walking, moving images of men and womenwho, through continual re-presenting, would continue their phantom life, notas fictions of the storyteller, but as themselves, caught on film in all theirmundane reality.


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For the La Poste reviewer, the future of the cinematograph seemed to lie inthe hands of the amateur enthusiast rather than the professional film-maker. Inthis he was not entirely wrong, of course: home movies became a flourishingpastime among twentieth-century enthusiasts, although it was not until nearlya hundred years later that the user-friendly video camera made amateur ‘movie-making’ truly ubiquitous. Moreover, the films which he saw at the Salon Indienwere, as the majority of early films from the 1890s and 1900s would be, muchmore like home movies in both form and content than they were like featurefilms: street scenes with horses and carts and passers-by, made by apparentamateurs for whom the delight of motion photography is such a novelty that‘the camera was turned on anything which moved sufficiently to demonstratethe ability of the equipment to capture it. Street scenes could providemultitudinous lines of movement, the outdoor locations suggesting boundlessoff-screen space’.375

This, though, is what the reviewer finds so amazing – a way of perpetuatingeveryday life in all the reality of its ordinary motion and bustle, in such a way as tochallenge the finality even of death. In the audience that evening, however, at theSalon Indien, was the thirty-four-year-old Georges Méliès: a struggling theatreproprietor and occasional conjuror whose technical experiments would marrythe emerging realist tradition with the older traditions of the Phantasmagoria andthe nineteenth-century conjuring show in such a way as to establish the basisof a whole vocabulary of film-making.

Méliès was not one of the great magical innovators of his time. On thecontrary, as might be inferred from his acquisition and refurbishment of theThéâtre Robert Houdin, he seems to have seen his role in life as being toperpetuate the conjuring traditions of previous generations. Along with thetheatre itself Méliès had also acquired and renovated many of the mechanicalmarvels created by Robert-Houdin himself. Even in Robert-Houdin’s heydaythere may have been something slightly retrograde about these mechanicaldevices, but by the time Méliès inherited them at the end of the nineteenthcentury the art of the conjuror had moved on, and many of these automatamust have seemed outdated and quaint.376 Ironically, the man who was soon toestablish a vocabulary for the twentieth century’s most innovative art form wascurating a collection of memorabilia of performances from a bygone era.

Equally traditional were the items with which Méliès frequently ended hisevening’s programmes. As in Robert-Houdin’s own programmes, and like thoseof Maskelyne and Cooke at the Egyptian Hall, Méliès’ finales often involvedMagic Lantern shows, or shadow-puppet shows – old favourites which hadmaintained their popularity in the late nineteenth century and were guaranteedcrowd-pleasers. This meant that for many years before he encountered theCinematographe, Méliès was both technically proficient at projecting imagesand was also used to regarding them as an integral part of a magic performance.


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Indeed, this was his first reaction when invited to the Lumières’ exhibition atthe Salon Indien. According to Méliès,

[t]he other guests and I found ourselves in front of a small screen, similar tothose we use for projections, and after a few minutes, a stationary photographshowing the Place Bellcour in Lyons was projected. A little surprised, I scarcely had time to say to my neighbour: ‘Have we been brought here tosee projections? I’ve been doing these for ten years.’ No sooner had I stoppedspeaking when a horse pulling a cart started to walk towards us followed byother vehicles, then a passerby. In short, all the hustle and bustle of a street.We sat with our mouths open, without speaking, filled with amazement.377

What nobody seems to have foreseen at the Salon Indien was the revolution incommercial entertainment that the projected moving image would precipitate.Even the Lumière brothers, like Maskelyne, believed that the craze for movingimages would be short-lived. While the craze was alive, however, there was acrowd of people demanding to get on the bandwagon. In what Erik Barnouw hascalled ‘The Scramble’378 – the great rush, following the first public projections ofmoving images, to find ways of capitalizing on the new technology – magicianswere frequently at the front of the queue. The Lumières entrusted the UKmarketing of their Cinematograph to Felicien Trewey – a master magician of theprevious generation, whose speciality had been shadowgraphy – another form oflight-magic. Devant, using Paul’s rival equipment, ran three provincial touringtheatrograph companies as well as his projections at the Egyptian Hall. TheAlgerian Isola brothers, Emile and Vincent, whose magic theatre was in directcompetition with the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, also attended the Lumières’demonstration at the Grand Café and within months had started not onlyshowing films at their Théâtre Isola but marketed their own ‘Isolatagraph’projectors. Carl Hertz, one of the best-known magicians in Europe, bulliedRobert William Paul into selling him a Theatrograph just in time to set off on aworld tour – thereby initiating the history of film in both Africa and Australia.

His journeys criss-crossed those of other entrepreneurs. A Lumière opérateurbeat him to Bombay, but Hertz had already beaten him to Australia. Along withHertz, other magic acts were descending on India with cinematographicmarvels: the arrivals included a ‘Hughes Photo-Motoscope’ and ‘ProfessorAnderson and Mlle. Blanche and their Andersonoscopograph’.379

David Devant, the first president of the Magic Circle was no great movie directoror performer, but he too has his place in the history of early cinema, in Britain atleast. In fact, it may have been Devant, rather than Méliès, who was actually thefirst to use stop-action photography in a film. He certainly claimed to be the first


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magician to appear in an animated film, and it is also true that he sold Méliès hisfirst moving picture apparatus. The Magic Circle owns a copy of a short piece offilm, also dated 1896, in which Devant performs a series of metamorphoses inwhich he, too, is clearly using stop-action photography.380 Out of his top hatDevant pulls rabbits, cards, a carafe of wine, and then another top hat. A smallbunch of flowers instantly becomes a large bunch of flowers, then, as a climax tothe act, metamorphoses into a cage full of birds which suddenly vanishes. It looksutterly dreadful. The stop-action technique is clumsy and jerky, while Devant,who looks painfully ill at ease in front of the camera, has no notion how to time hisactions against the camerawork. The forced smile with which he finishes hisperformance has an air of terrible desperation about it.381 Whether or notDevant’s film pre-dates Méliès’ Escamotage (and if it does it would be only by amatter of weeks) his counterclaim does nothing to challenge Méliès’ claim to aplace in history: in fact it rather tends to strengthen it. By demonstrating how easyit is to use the camera badly, Devant’s short film allows us to see just how effectiveMéliès is at creating his own conjunction of cinematography and conjuring.

Devant’s place in film history, then, is as an entrepreneur rather than as acreative artist. He had been present on 20th February 1896 at the Regent StreetPolytechnic at a demonstration of the Lumière brothers’ Cinematographe. Atthat time he was partnering John Nevil Maskelyne at the Egyptian Hall inEngland’s most famous magic soiree. He was extremely impressed with theCinematographe, but he was unable to convince the Lumières to sell, ratherthan hire, one to him. Nor was he able to convince Maskelyne of the long-termviability of moving picture shows – especially at the £100 per week that theLumières were asking. So, while Maskelyne maintained that the movies werejust a passing fad, and the Lumières refused to sell their invention, Devantbought a similar machine (a ‘Theatrograph’) from the British inventor RobertWilliam Paul and struck a deal with Paul whereby he received commission forselling others and became the first independent licensed operator in the UK.382

In terms of performance, however, Devant wisely stayed with his live act.Other magicians who saw the potential for including moving picture

projections in their acts included Leopoldo Fregoli, Alexander Victor (‘Alexanderthe Great’), Walter R. Booth, Billy Bitzer, Albert E. Smith, J. Stuart Blackton andHarry Houdini.383 But in the early years, it was Méliès above all who was able tosee the creative potential for the magical aspects of this new medium.

Méliès, like Devant, had attempted to buy a Cinematographe from theLumière brothers, but they refused to sell, and so he acquired (from Devant)two of Robert William Paul’s rival Theatrographs.384 He then modified these ina rather do-it-yourself way, using spare mechanical parts from his theatricalworkshop, so that it could be used as a camera as well as a projector. Mélièspatented his ‘Kinétographe’ in September 1896, but in fact did not continuelong with the manufacture of it. Apparatus manufactured by Leon Gaumont,


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Charles Pathé, Georges Démeny and the Lumières themselves turned out to bemore efficient, both for showing and for producing short films. Between 1896and 1913 Méliès produced over 500 of these,385 only a few of which now survive.

His first attempt had been a one-minute film called Une Partie de Cartes(1896) a home movie showing himself, his brother Gaston and a friend playingcards in the garden of their home at Montreuil-sur-Bois. It was made in frankimitation of a similar Lumière brothers’ movie from the previous year, Partied'Écarté. That year, 1896, saw Méliès make eighty more short films. Their titlesgive an indication of their content: many of them were travelogues & newsdocumentaries such as Sauvetage en Rivière (River Rescue), street scenes fromParisian locations such as Bois de Boulogne and Boulevard des Italiens, and theoccasional, more theatrical, comic sketch such as Les Ivrognes (the Drunks).While Méliès is now best known for his fantasy films, he actually set out, likemost early film-makers, to make documentary-style, ‘slice-of-life’ factual films.Given his personal and professional interest in the theme of magic, it is notsurprising that some of these, such as Le Mystère Indien Fakir (The MysteriousIndian Fakir), Séance de Prestidigitation (An Evening of Conjuring) and DixChapeaux en 60 Secondes (Conjuror Making 10 Hats in 60 Seconds), tookconjuring as their theme. But it was not so much the theme of Méliès film ashis technical innovations that secured his place in the annals of film history.

According to Méliès own testimony, the discovery which changed his careerhappened by accident – and (ironically enough) while he was making one of hisdocumentary-style ‘shorts’. The camera he was using in the early days was avery basic one, with a tendency to tear or jam the film:

One day early in my career as I was casually photographing the Place del'Opéra, my camera jammed… with unexpected results. It took me a minuteto release the film and start cranking the camera again. During that minutethe passersby, the buses and the cars had of course moved. Later, when Iprojected the filmstrip… I saw a ‘Madeleine-Bastille’ bus suddenly changeinto a hearse, and some men become women. In this way the substitutiontrick, the so-called ‘stop-action technique’ was discovered…386

It is possible that the story happened just as accidentally as Méliès tells it, and thatit was as much a surprise to him as he claims. It is perhaps a little hard to believe:Méliès was, after all, an experienced showman, familiar with the techniques ofprojected images. The Magic Lanterns which he had been using for many yearsin his theatre used a similar kind of stop-action technique to effect imagetransformations, as well as sophisticated dissolves and metamorphoses. Perhaps,though, what so astonished Méliès was the realization of the sort of effects whichcould be obtained simply by applying some of these old magic-lantern principlesto the realistically photographed human body – and then finding the frameworks


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which would turn a technical trick into a narrative of wonder. Fittingly, it was theconjuror’s trick, Bualtier de Kolta’s Vanishing Lady which provided the first ofthese frameworks.

Méliès’ unique genius – and eventually his limitation – lay in perceiving andexploiting the similarity between the creative possibilities of film and the pleasureof the conjuror’s act. Watching the buses turning into hearses and the menturning into women in his film of the Place de l’Opéra, he recognized thesemetamorphoses as being akin to those that conjurors had been performing, usingthe techniques of live conjuring, at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. The realizationthat what had happened accidentally could be made to work deliberately ledhim to make Escamotage d’une Dame chez Robert-Houdin. In a macabre reversalof the enthusiastic notice of the Lumière’s soiree in La Poste, Méliès created anillusion, not of eternal life but of sudden, grotesque and symbolic death. Lessimpressive in scale and macabre symbolism, perhaps, than the omnibus whichturns into a hearse, Méliès nonetheless tamed the grotesque metamorphosis ofhis accidental discovery and reproduced it as a music hall routine.

Yet Escamotage was not regarded as a great success by Méliès himself, nor,apparently by his earliest audiences: ‘Evidently the whole thing appearedchildish on the screen. The audience… did not get the idea.’387 In fact, it is aparadoxical film, and one which does not fully engage with the possibilities ofthe new art form. Although it plays – as a conjuror plays – with the limits of thepossible, it is framed as a slice of cinematic realism, not very different in kindfrom the street scenes, and scenes of family life which were the staple of thefirst few years of film-making. It is, to all intents and purposes, a realisticdocument of an item of popular entertainment. For many years, Bualtier deKolta and other magicians, had been performing ‘The Vanishing Lady’, or avirtually identical trick, live to audiences. Most of what the audience sees onscreen could have indeed been seen on the stage of the Robert-Houdin andmany other theatres – effected by means of a trick chair which allowed the lady,beneath the cloth, to slide down into a trapdoor. Méliès uses a different, andcinematic, technique to get the same effect on screen, but he then presents hisfilm as if it were an exact reproduction of the de Kolta routine. Even so, therewas one element which could not have been performed live: the instantaneousappearance, (from nowhere, and without the conjuror’s traditional coveringcloth) of the skeleton in the chair. That really does need the trickery of stop-action photography: one moment the chair is empty, the next, the skeleton hasappeared in it. The essence of the live trick is maintained but elaborated uponby the camera in the figure of Death.

InnovationsIf Escamotage was only a qualified success, Méliès’ next steps, however, movedthings on significantly. Having discovered the potential of the new moving


pictures for producing surreal, fantastic or impossible images, he set aboutexploiting it to the full, inventing on the way several genres which would later betaken up by the Hollywood studios. Other films of 1896 included the first‘monster movie’, Une Nuit Terrible (A Terrible Night) in which a man wakes tosee a giant beetle threatening him; meanwhile the three-minute ‘feature’ LeManoir du Diable (The Devil’s Castle) may well have been the first vampire film.

In a medieval hall a bat circles and transforms into Mephistopheles, (Méliès),who waves his hand and a large cauldron appears. At another wave of his handa beautiful woman emerges from a puff of smoke and an old man appearsfrom the floor carrying a book. Everything disappears at a sign from the evilone then a cavalier arrives holding a cross causes the Devil to throw up hisarms and disappear in a cloud of smoke.388

At the end of 1896 he launched his own production company Star Films: theirslogan ‘The Whole World Within Reach’ gives a sense of how Méliès saw films aschanging the world. By 1897 he had opened his own greenhouse-like studio inthe grounds of the family home, where nearly all his subsequent films were shot.While he continued to manage the Théâtre Robert-Houdin (including four large-scale ‘spectaculars’ mounted between 1905 and 1907), much of his energy was nowspent on producing, scripting, directing, designing, editing and acting in his films.

He continued to experiment with conjuring-style effects in films. Some ofthem are, like the first Escamotage, framed as documentary-style representationsof conjurors on stage at the Robert-Houdin Théâtre. In others, Méliès expandsthe conjuring routines of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin to provide the narratives ofthe film: a routine called The Tricks of the Moon, for example, became the film TheMoon at Arm’s Length (La Lune à un Metre, 1898). In others he draws on theimagery of the conjuror’s act to create a world of horrors, fantasies, and startlingeffects which prefigure the dream-logic of the surrealists. In this Mélièsresembles Charles Ludwig Dodgson, the mathematician and amateur conjurorwho, as Lewis Carroll, took the playing cards, top hats, pocket watches and whiterabbits from the magician’s act and turned them into the grotesque and comicdystopia of Wonderland.

Méliès’ continued to experiment during the 1890s:

One trick leads to another. In the face of the success of this new style, I setmyself to discover new processes, and in succession I conceived dissolvesfrom scene to scene effected by a special arrangement in the camera;apparitions, disappearances, metamorphoses obtained by superimpositionon black backgrounds, or portions of the screen reserved for décors; thensuperimpositions on white backgrounds already exposed which are obtainedby a device which I am not going to reveal, since imitators have not penetrated


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the whole secret. Then came tricks of decapitation, of doubling the characters,of scenes played by a single actor… Finally, in employing the special knowledgeof illusions which 25 years in the Théâtre Robert-Houdin had given me, Iintroduced into the cinema the tricks of machinery, mechanics, optics,prestidigitation etc. With all these processes mixed one with another and usedwith competence, I do not hesitate to say that in cinematography it is todaypossible to realise the most impossible and the most improbable things.389

Thus, during 1897, for example, his films included titles such as Le Cabinetde Mephistopheles (Mephistopheles’ Cabinet) and Le Château Haunté (TheHaunted Castle) – in both of which he played the Devil. The fantasy of Gugusseet l�Automate (The Clown and the Automaton) harked back to earlier days ofmediatized magic; in L�Auberge Ensorcelé (The Bewitched Inn) a travellerstaying at the inn is terrified by his clothes coming to life and dancing aroundof their own accord; Le Magnetiseur portrayed a hypnotist at work.390 The sameyear Méliès developed what he called ‘Spirit photography’ in films such asLa Caverne Maudite (Cave of Demons, 1897). The term is reminiscent of thoseprojects by which spiritualists (both genuine and bogus) attempted to reunitescience and spirituality by capturing the spirit-world on photographic stock.Méliès’ technique, however, is closer to Robertson’s Phantasmagoria than it is toKirlian photography: it refers to double-exposed sequences in which the walls ofa cave can be seen through the translucent ghosts and skeletons which haunt it.

The following year in Un Homme de Têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads,1898), a man’s heads take on a life of their own, multiply and float around theroom, using the cinema’s first split-screen shot: that is to say a shot in which anactor plays opposite ‘himself ’. Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1899) was a large-scaleproduction – over seven minutes long and using over thirty actors! Here, too,Méliès proved to be a pioneer in the development of a cinematic language. At atime when most films were single-shot affairs, he was editing scenes togetherto produce a chronological narrative. Yet once again we see Méliès’ achievementto be one based as much in tradition as in radical innovation: Cendrillon alsofeatured the first successful cinematic adaptation of the old ‘dissolve’ techniquefavoured by Magic Lanternists.

Méliès used the cinema as a box of magic tricks, from which he pulled dream-like sequences as well as realist newsreels, documentaries and slices of life. To dothis, he inevitably borrowed from existing narrative genres. As well as the stockroutines of the conjuror, he also drew on folk tales and melodramas; on gothicfantasies such as Bluebeard; and on pantomime stories such as Cinderella. Andwhile Méliès would have been familiar with the conventions of the Britishpantomime from his youthful stay in London, Katherine Singer Kovacs has alsopointed out that he would have had much greater familiarity with a native Frenchgenre which is virtually unheard of today: the French popular theatrical genre of


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the féerie.391 Similar in some ways to the pantomime, but also closely allied to thetradition of melodrama,392 the féerie was a specifically French form which haddeveloped in the years soon after the Revolution. It played to a largely uneducatedworking-class audience, one which was hungry for entertainment. It gave themfairy-tale adventure narratives, which enacted a battle between good and evil. Asthe name suggests, the féeries of the Parisian theatre were peopled bysupernatural beings such as fairies, genies, monsters, gnomes and witches, aswell as by stock characters from a popular theatrical tradition which stretchesback to commedia dell’ arte: the heroine, her handsome lover, the lazy servant andthe grotesque rival. It made full use, too, of the theatre’s capacity for thespectacular: metamorphoses, flying, instantaneous scene changes, mime anddance, magical transformations – and happy endings. These féeries were ahistorical precursor of the fantasy genre of films and literature, a magical narrativefor adults. Here, too, Méliès is a pioneer: his most famous fantasy film, A Trip tothe Moon (1902), is generally acknowledged to be one of the defining films in thegenre of science fiction. A comic fantasy of space flight, the film was a box officesmash, and remains an acknowledged classic of early cinema.

In its first few years, cinema was driven by forces other than storytelling, andearly cinema-going may have been driven not by a desire for narrative but by thespectators’ fascination with the spectacle and – crucially – with the technologywhich created it. Tom Gunning has coined the phrase ‘the cinema of attractions’for what he sees as the dominant mode of cinema in the period up to 1906.

Rather than being an involvement with narrative action or empathy withcharacter psychology, the cinema of attractions solicits a highly consciousawareness of the film image engaging the viewer’s curiosity. The spectatordoes not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of theact of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment.393

Gunning’s definition of dramatic/cinematic narrative is, perhaps, a littleoversimplified: as Brecht well knew, there have always been modes ofengagement with narrative which do not involve this kind of loss of self in thefictional world. But Gunning’s larger point is an important one. He argues thatwhile early film-makers such as Méliès and Porter have been studied primarilyfrom the viewpoint of their contribution to film as a storytelling medium, this isan approach which potentially distorts

both the work of these film-makers and the actual forces shaping cinemabefore 1906… [Early audiences’] viewing experiences relate more to theattractions of the fairground than to the traditions of the legitimate theatre.The relation between films and the emergence of the great amusementparks, such as Coney Island, at the turn of the century provides rich ground


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for rethinking the roots of early cinema. Nor should we forget that in theearliest years of exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction. Earlyaudiences went to exhibitions to see machines demonstrated… rather thanto see films. It was the Cinematographe, the Biograph or the Vitascope thatwere advertised on the variety bill in which they premiered, not LeDéjeuner de Bébé or The Black Diamond Express.394

Méliès’ experimental films seem both to fulfil Gunning’s criteria and to exceedthem. They do indeed have an element of the fairground attraction – or indeedthe magic show – about them, but they also frame themselves within the contextof folk tales, myths and contemporary theatrical genres. Their narratives may notbe complex in any psychological sense, but the games they play with realitydemand an agile imaginative response from a spectator who is engaged in thestory being told. The audience is being given a bravura demonstration of thetechnical possibilities of the movies, one which appeals to their informed interestin the technology of motion picture projection, to the ‘excitement of curiosity andits fulfilment’ – but it is also being led into a fairy-tale dreamworld, a world ofmake-believe.

George Méliès’ sympathy for the devilAs well as pioneering the science-fiction film, Méliès could also claim to be thefirst horror movie maker. Many of his early cinematic fantasies echo thedisturbing images of death and disfigurement of the nearby ‘Théâtre GrandGuignol’ – a theatre offering a particularly Parisian form of popular culture,featuring nightly programmes which played to the more sadistic elements of thespectators’ responses.

‘Grand Guignol’ (which means ‘Big Puppet Show’, or ‘Puppet Show ForAdults’) is loosely used to refer to a mode of theatre in general – a ‘theatre ofhorror’ which blends some of the pleasures of Gothic drama and melodramawith elements of a more ‘realistic’ style of writing and playing which shows theinfluence of nineteenth-century European naturalism even while its narrativesdeal with the grotesque, the outlandish and the horrific. More strictly, however,the term refers to those plays written for and staged at the particular theatreopened by Oscar Metenier in 1897, the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in the rueChaptal in Montmartre. Metenier had spent six years as a collaborator ofAndre Antoine at the Théâtre Libre, one of the totemic theatres of the naturalistmovement. It was arguably the tension between a theatrical naturalism whichwas always threatening to break down under the effect of its grotesque subjectmatter, and the more highly wrought, stylized and presentational style ofperformance with which audiences would have been familiar from earliermelodramas, which made Grand Guignol theatre so mesmerizing to audiencesin the early years of the twentieth century.395


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There are already several points of similarity between the original GrandGuignol and contemporary magic/conjuring shows. Both depend on an elementof illusion: the theatre of Grand Guignol and its derivatives, like their slightly lessdisreputable cousin the melodrama, made use of – and indeed depended on – thekinds of trompe- l’oeuil effect which was at the heart of several kinds of magictricks. At the affective level, magic and the Grand Guignol both deal with theoutlandish, the extreme. The Grand Guignol was a theatre of horror, and here,too, many magic tricks offered a kind of frisson of danger – of decapitation, ofimpalement, of dismemberment – which was similar in kind to the thrill of thetheatrical genre. An evening at the Guignol and at a conjuring show were similarlystructured: in an age in which the two dominant modes of performativeentertainment were the single substantial performance (e.g. opera, naturalisticplay) and the variety bill (cabaret, music hall, circus), both the theatre of theGrand Guignol and the magic show of the Golden Age tended towards the latter.The two forms played to similar audiences, employed similar forms of publicity,and had similar places in the overall cultural ‘map’ of imaginative and theatricalentertainments. Méliès drew on both in order to create his own particular form ofcinema.

Méliès, however, like many of today’s horror film-makers, was drawn towardsthe combination of horror and laughter which the new medium offered. Just asthe lady in Escamotage was restored to life, so the gruesome in Méliès filmstended usually to be redeemed by the humorous. Maybe at some level Mélièsrealized that the newness of this medium had such potential for transformingreality that it needed to be kept under control in some way.

Perhaps Méliès most ambitious production of the 1890s was also his mostappropriate one. In 1897 he adapted a short section of the Faust legend, for hisown Faust and Marguerite in which Faust makes a pact with the Devil. This usesGounod’s operatic version of the story. According to John C. Tibbetts,

Gounod�s Faust has been adapted to the screen (for better or worse) morethan any other opera. In 1897 the Lumières produced two short scenes fromthe opera – Mephistopheles�s supernatural apparition and Faust�stransformation from wizened old scholar to stalwart youth. In 1904 Méliès’sFaust et Marguerite stomped the opera into a twenty-minute adaptation intwenty short tableaux [in which] Méliès… portrayed Mephistopheles…396

Tibbetts’ statement is suggestive, although his chronology and attributions areopen to debate: like the history of magic, the history of early film is not always easyto reconstruct.397 What is certain, though, is that Méliès was fascinated with theFaust legend and returned to it several times in his film-making career. Nor was hethe only film pioneer who found the story particularly enthralling. Here is the fulllist of Faust films from the silent era of which reliable documentation still remains:


1897 a) Faust et Marguerite. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès. With Jeanned�Alcy.

b) Cabinet de Méphistophélès. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès.

1898 a) Faust and Mephistopheles. (UK) Dir. George Albert Smith. b) La Damnation de Faust. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès.

1900 Faust and Marguerite. (USA) Dir. Edwin S. Porter.

1903 Faust aux enfers. (France) Dir. Georges Méliès. Faust et Méphistophéles. (France) Dir. Alice Guy.

1909 Faust. (USA) Dir. Edwin S. Porter. With William Sorelle.

1910 Faust. (UK & France) Dir. Henri Andréani and David Barnett. With Fernanda Negri Pouget, Tom Santschi.

1911 Faust. (UK) Directed by Cecil M. Hepworth. With: Hay Plumb, Claire Pridelle, Jack Hulcup, Frank Wilson.

1913 Der Student von Prag [The Student of Prague]. (Germany) Dir.Stellan Rye, Screenplay Hanns Heinz Ewers.

1922 Don Juan et Faust. (France) Dir. Marcel L�Herbier.

1923 Faust. (UK) Dir. Bertram Phillips. Screenplay Frank Miller III.

1925 La Damnation de Faust. (France) Dir.Victor Charpentier andStéphane Passet.

1926 Faust - eine deutsche Volkssage [Faust: a German Folk Legend].(Germany) Dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. With Gösta Ekmann,Emil Jannings and Camilla Horn.

Méliès, Alice Guy, F. W. Murnau: it is an extraordinary list. Even Edwin S. Porter has a go at a Faustus scene – which is particularly surprising in view ofthe fact that Porter is usually thought of as representing a very different traditionfrom Méliès. As the maker of the ground-breaking Great Train Robbery (1902)he is hailed as the father of the Western movie – a genre whose habitual mode isa form of heightened realism rather than fantasy. The catalogue describes hisFaustus and Marguerite (1900) in the following terms:

Marguerite is seated before the fireplace, Faust standing by her side.Mephistopheles enters and offers his sword to Faust, commanding him tobehead the fair Marguerite. Faust refuses, whereupon Mephistopheles drawsthe sword across the throat of the lady and she suddenly disappears and Faustis seated in her place.398


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Porter’s narrative seems to be based on Méliès’ Escamotage. In both itsnarrative and its title it refers back to Méliès’ own first Faust film, Faust andMarguerite. Méliès dreamed a dream which was shared by the rest of thepioneers of early cinematography.

In his paper ‘Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians’Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult’, Fred Nadis argues that althoughmagicians such as Kellar, Maskelyne, Thurston and Houdini made use ofplayful posters showing them communicating with ‘little devils whisperinghelpful secrets in their ears’, magicians at the turn of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries went out of the way to deny any real occult status, to ‘makeit clear that their effects were the result of trick mechanisms, practice andstagecraft’. 399 The new magicians of the cinema were, it seems, less nervousabout seeming to sup with the devil: indeed the Faustus legend haunts earlyfilm-making, and the Devil is always around…

Méliès returned to the Faust theme not once but several times in his film-making career – and in these and other films he returned time after time to whatappeared to be his favourite role: ‘Méliès’ numerous appearances as the Devilmust far outnumber that of any other actor, having appeared in as many as 24manifestations in his films.’400 The slogan of Star Films in the 1890s – ‘Thewhole world within reach’ is an uncanny echo of the fantasies of omnipotencewhich haunt Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the first great play of that name fromthe 1590s.

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please?…I’ll have them fly to India for gold,Ransack the ocean for orient pearlAnd search all corners of the new-found worldFor pleasant fruits and princely delicates…[I’ll] make a bridge through the airTo pass the ocean. With a band of menI’ll join the hills that bind the Affrick shore,And make that country continent to SpainAnd both contributory to my crown.401

Globalization and imperialism combine in this dream of luxury. But thefascination of Méliès and the early film-makers with the Faust legend does morethan offer an ironic and unconscious harbinger of the role of the film industryin the global economy in the later twentieth century. It also gestures – almostguiltily, as if the film-makers were aware of something of the power of these newinventions – towards that long Christian tradition which sees the Devil as acreator of illusions. The Devil conjures lies which imitate the true creation – for


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he cannot truly create but only imitate. The Devil ‘summons images in themind’s eye, playing on desires and weaknesses. He toys with us, especiallywhen creating spectacles that are not there, for the word “illusion” itself comesfrom “ludere”, “to play” in Latin’.402 And no story plays on this theme morepersistently than the Faust legend. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in particular,the devil in the person of Mephistopheles (Méliès’ role) becomes a diabolicshowman-cum-projectionist. He conjures visions for Faustus, and more thanonce, at points when Faustus appears to be relenting and turning back to God,the Devil distracts him with shows, pageants and illusions. Devils dance beforehim and Faustus asks ‘What means this show?’; Mephistophilis replies ‘Nothing,Faustus but to delight thy mind’.403 At another point, when once more hethreatens to turn back to God, he is diverted by the pageant of the Seven DeadlySins. Finally, in the play’s closing phase, the vision of Helen of Troy ‘sucks forth’Faustus’s soul404 and seals his damnation.

The deal that Faustus made turned out to be bad business. Méliès, too, was apoor businessman. As proprietor of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin before hebecame involved in movies, he had often been running at a loss. As a film-maker,his strengths were also his weaknesses: as public passion for realist narratives likePorter’s Great Train Robbery grew, Méliès’ experiments with cinematic magicseemed more and more peripheral to the direction in which the movies weregoing. It would be several years before the full force of his influence and hisexperimental discoveries would be felt. And on a commercial level, he madeseveral disastrous decisions. For example, in 1909, as chair of the CongressInternational des Editeurs du Film, Méliès presided over their resolution to rentall films rather than sell them outright – a practice already being adopted by Pathébut one which would adversely affect his own financial interests.405 Even hismasterpiece A Trip to the Moon, which was hugely popular at the box office, wasalso one of the most intensely pirated films of its time. Copyright problems – orrather the lack of clear copyright legislation – meant that Méliès never profited tothe extent he should have done from his films. In 1915, financial difficultiesforced him to sell the Théâtre Robert-Houdin – ironically enough, to a cinemaoperator.

In one sense then, the movies – or at least that aspect of the movies whichbecame the ‘Dream Factory’ – was born out of late nineteenth-century magicshows. But one of the classic myths of our civilization is that of the child thatdestroys its father: the Oedipal relationship between the growing film industryand its parents seemed doomed to end with the child flourishing at the expenseof the parent: magic, it seemed was to be killed by the success of the electronicmedia.

The question of ‘liveness’ is not only one of theory: it is also about verypractical issues such as theatre economics. In the early years of the twentiethcentury, vaudeville artists found themselves in competition with the new


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media: first of all the growing movie industry, then radio and eventuallytelevision. The entertainment industry as a whole expanded, but that sector ofit which was devoted to the live variety act, shrank as people chose to spendtheir leisure time and their surplus income in cinemas (and later in their ownhomes) rather than variety halls or magic theatres. The Egyptian Hall and itssuccessor, St George’s Hall, managed to survive a little while into the movie erabut not very long. With hindsight, many of Méliès’ generation of conjurorsmight have felt that that the pact they made with the new art form turned outto be a Faustian one after all.


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Chapter Eight

Narrative ambiguity and contestedmeanings: interpreting Harry Houdini

My brain is the key that sets me freeAll the world is a theatre to me.

Harry Houdini406

Creation myths: Houdini and his originsThe story of Harry Houdini has been told frequently. It has become a popularsubject not only amongst aficionados of magic and conjuring, but also amongstcultural historians. He was one of the showbiz superstars of his own day: GeorgeBernard Shaw is reputed to have said that the two most famous men in the worldafter Jesus Christ were Houdini and Sherlock Holmes.407 It is an interestingcoupling, since both the escape artist and the detective of Baker Street werecreatures who inhabited the borderline between fantasy and reality. And likeSherlock Holmes, the fame has endured: since his death Houdini has attainediconic status. Today, a hundred years after his rise to fame, a Houdini fan culturekeeps the flame alive and maintains an interest in his life and career throughinstitutions such as the Houdini Historical Centre in Wisconsin and the HoudiniMuseum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and also through open-access Internet sitessuch as Houdiniana.com. Houdini continues, too, to be an inspiration not only tomagicians but to playwrights and contemporary performance artists such asTalking Birds, Lisa Watts and Brian McClave.408 At the time of writing, SimonBent’s play The Escapologist, based partly on Houdini’s biography, is touring inthe UK in a production by Suspect Culture. To write about Houdini, though, isto repeat uncertainties, for much of his life is surrounded in myth. A famous self-publicist, Houdini made up his own legends, weaving together fact and fantasyto create an illusory figure who became in many ways more real than thehistorical Ehrich Weiss who first invented him.

As with so much else about him ‘Harry Houdini’s origins are complex issues.Biographer Ruth Brandon describes his life as being ‘defiantly American’409 butthis oversimplifies it. ‘I don’t like America so well, although I am a full-bloodedAmerican’,410 he once told a reporter, and his self-proclaimed ‘full-bloodedAmerican-ness’ is itself ambiguous. As with many of America’s Europeanimmigrants in that period, the exact details of Houdini’s place and date of birthare uncertain. Modern biographers,411 with documentary evidence to back themup, are now more or less agreed that he was born Erik (later spelled Ehrich)Weisz (later Weiss) in Budapest on 24th March 1874, son of Rabbi Samuel Weisz

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and his second wife, Cecilia, and that Cecilia and the four-year-old Ehrichmoved to Appleton, Wisconsin in 1878 to join Samuel, who had been offered aposition as rabbi to the small Jewish community there through the offices of afriend (having, in the process, his name changed to ‘Weiss’ by US immigrationofficials). Houdini and his family always maintained vigorously that they hadmoved to Appleton by 1874, and that Ehrich’s birth took place there on 6th Aprilof that year. Wisconsin census records contradict this, however, and from thetone of some of Houdini’s own remarks, it appears that he himself was notentirely convinced of the literal truth of his American origins. There also seemsto have been some debate about his birth date within the family. In November1913, a few months after his mother’s death, Houdini wrote to his brotherTheodore (‘Dash’):

Re the Birthdays, I shall celebrate mine? (sic) always April 6th.

It hurts me to think I cant talk it over with Darling Mother and as SHE alwayswrote me on April 6th, that will be my adopted birthdate.412

It seems that Houdini makes a very definite decision to ‘adopt’ 6th April as thedate of his birth. It is a choice made in the face of other possibilities and made onthe basis of his mother’s account. The choice is symptomatic: for Houdini, theliteral and historical truth of his birth date is less important than the consistencyof a narrative which he inherited from his mother: a narrative which alsoestablishes him as ‘a full-blooded American’.

And, of course, this may well have been Cecilia’s intention, arising from thecommon need felt by recent immigrant families, to establish a firm claim to theirnew nationality. Thus, to the extent that the family’s ‘official’ story of its ownpast insisted on the American birth of the young Houdini, reinventing him as acitizen of the New World, he is indeed defiantly American. But the immigrantexperience is frequently a schizophrenic one, in which old identities vie with thenew ones, and tales and memories of the old country overlay the reality of thenew. In the domestic mythology of the Weiss family these tales seem to have beenof a particularly romantic kind, in which fantasy blotted out the bleak actuality oftheir early American life, and in which a more vivid and colourful narrativeemerges – again one which acts as a template for an understanding of the laterHoudini.

In reality Houdini’s father, Samuel, was a failure in his scholarly and pastoralcalling. Fired by his Appleton congregation and unable to sustain a positionas a rabbi in Wisconsin, Milwaukee or New York, he found it ever harder tosupport his increasingly impoverished family. He ended up as a productionworker in a necktie factory (working alongside the teenage Ehrich413) anddied ‘a disappointed and impoverished man, one of the many invisibleimmigrants unable to adapt in the increasingly prosperous New World’.414

NARRATIVE AMBIGUITY AND CONTESTED MEANINGS

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In the Houdini/Weiss mythology, however, Samuel was a dashing scholar-hero,whose flight from the old country was surrounded by romantic embellishment.

Father insulted by prince Erik – challenged to dule – which was foughtfollowing morning and Father killing his opponent then fled to London andstayed there for a time after which he took sailing vessel to New York. Afterreaching New York kept going to Appleton, Wis. where he… sent for Mrs. W.and soon after her arrival Houdini was born 6th April 1874. And he was namedEhrich Prach after Prince Ehrich.415

Quite apart from the inherent romanticism of the narrative, the marginalizedsocial situation of Jews in the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian empiremake it virtually impossible that this event should have taken place. But in anycase it is more interesting as fiction than as fact.

It is often assumed that Houdini himself concocted these tales: Ruth Brandonimplies as much when she talks of Houdini ‘portraying his parents as he wouldhave wished them to be: as romantic participants in the cultural and noble life ofBudapest’.416 And, indeed perhaps he did; it is by no means impossible that thisis his own personal fantasy, or even a deliberately self-romanticizing publicitylegend, since Houdini as self-publicist is almost as impressive as Houdini theillusionist and escapologist. But another explanation is also likely. The versionquoted above is related as fact, not by Houdini but by his brother Theodore(known in the family as Dash, and later on the professional stage as Hardeen).Other similar domestic myths seem to have been current in the Weiss family,all of them emphasizing the family’s importance back in Hungary. Thus, forinstance, Houdini’s younger sister told of another family story, again repeated asfact but equally unlikely, which she had inherited from their mother Cecilia: inthis, the Kaiserin Josephine had made frequent visits to their Weiss family homein Budapest, ‘to pay respect to our important and intellectual dad’. It might wellbe that Cecilia was the actual originator of the family legends, and that just asHoudini received from her the story, which he decided to believe, of his Appletonand April birth date,417 so too he learned from her the fabulous stories of theimportance of the family back in the homeland. Perhaps they were invented by themother as compensation for the reality of her husband’s decline and the family’sincreasingly unsuccessful circumstances in the New World. Such stories form asubstantial genre in the folklore of American immigrants – and they frequentlyembody an ambiguous attitude towards the past which has been left behind.

In such stories, the surface details may be invented, but a deeper structuralreality might be being unconsciously articulated. In the case of the Weiss familylegend, the increasing anti-Semitism of late-nineteenth-century Europe might wellbe figured in the ‘insult’ which the supposed Prince – a representative narrativefigure standing for the authorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – offered


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to the rabbi. In the ‘duel’ we see an image of the antagonism which Samuelmight well have felt between himself and that society and, in his killing of theprince, a wish-fulfilment of some imagined victory over it, ending in his escape(indeed on one level the escape may well have been, in one sense, the victory).But if these tales personify on one level the antagonisms which lead theimmigrant to leave the old country they also, on another level, frequentlydramatize a form of celebration of that old country, and a reconciliation with it.In the case of the Weiss family legend, this reconciliation is located in the figureof Ehrich himself: ‘And he was named Ehrich Prach after Prince Ehrich.’ Theantagonist’s name is reconfigured in the name of the son: it combines victoryand reconciliation – and (again) self-aggrandizement.

Whoever actually originated this tale of the family’s importance, andmelodramatic romanticization, with its themes of honour and death, exile andrecovery, they fit well with the sorts of professional mythologizing which Houdinihimself practiced later in his life. ‘Houdini’ was a narrative invention of EhrichWeiss, a narrative which may well have had its roots in the uncertain relationshipof the first-generation immigrant to his adopted country. Houdini, in fact, seemsto have been what Ivan Kalmar has termed an ‘eji’.418 The term, which ispronounced, with deliberate punning in mind, as ‘edgy’ is an acronym for‘Embarrassed Jewish Individual’ – embarrassed in relation to his own background:not exactly renouncing his own Jewish identity, but uncertain how this backgroundrelates to his newer identity, often wondering the extent to which as a Jew he willremain always an outsider, defined by his Jewishness.419 Ehrich Weiss became themore generically European ‘Harry Houdini’: like the good magician he was, hechose a name which would misdirect the attention. Ernst and Carrington quote atleast one contemporary who asserted confidently that while ‘Houdini was reared inthe Hebrew religion… he gave up Judaism’.420 But Houdini never denied hisJewishness, although he did marry outside the faith. Moreover, in later years,Houdini seems to have identified himself more strongly with his religious roots: in1918 he founded the Rabbis’ Sons’ Theatrical Association (President: HarryHoudini; Vice-presidents Al Jolson and Irving Berlin).

Hardeen’s German spelling seems to have been as poor as his English.He gives ‘Prach’ as Ehrich’s second name, with the connotation of ‘Prince’(although quite where this word appears in Ehrich’s name is not clear: it is noton any of the census documents which relate to Ehrich). The German word –and German was the everyday language of the Weiss household – is actually‘Pracht’. It means not literally ‘Prince’ but a cluster of closely related concepts:‘finery’, ‘gorgeousness’ and so on. Houdini was, from his first stage appearances,to revivify it and its meanings. At the age of nine he appeared before an audienceas a trapeze artist and contortionist, ‘Ehrich, Prince of the Air’. The young boyfinds his princely identity in the stage name and makes cross-linguistic puns onthe sounds of his own: Ehrich/air. Within the family the pun was even more


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noticeable: Ehrich’s pet name was ‘Ehrie’, which later became the ‘Harry’ ofhis public persona. When Ehrich Weiss grew up to become Harry Houdini,the contortionist became the escapologist, twisting his way out of his bondsand the Prince of the Air metamorphosed into the ‘Handcuff King’(and sometimesthe less catchy ‘Monarch of Leg Shackles’). Yet Houdini retained a fascination –even an obsession – with the air. Whether suspended high above the city streets,struggling to escape the straitjacket; or learning to fly and setting himself thechallenge of becoming the first man to fly an aeroplane in Australia;421 or doinghis own aerial stunts in his movies, the trace of Ehrich, Prince of the Air remains.

Two other elements from the archetypal narrative find their way into Houdini’slater career. First there is the ‘challenge to dule’ (sic) which is the initial conflictof the drama; this becomes a repeated theme of Houdini’s stage career, which waseffectively based on a series of challenges. Secondly, of course, the fantasy father’sgreat feat was not only to uphold his honour, but also to escape afterwards. It wasthe escape which became the essence of Houdini’s career: an escape whichrepeated that of the fantasy father, but which also – in the tradition of greatimmigrant narratives – in real life provided the material means to escape from thepoverty to which the father’s actual failure had led them. Houdini escaped notonly from ties, but also from tie-cutting on the workbench.

Dramatizing deliverance: Freudian narrativesRuth Brandon insists – perhaps as a riposte to some oversimplifiedpsychoanalytical readings – that Houdini was ‘pre-Freudian’,422 but in a literalsense this is not exactly the case. On the contrary, the two men werecontemporaries, and the rise to fame of Houdini coincides neatly with thatof that other Austro-Hungarian Jewish genius: in the first twenty years of thetwentieth century the imagery and the mythology of both men cast a spell overthe western imagination.

Moreover, it is hard to ignore the Oedipal resonances in Houdini’s life. Hisfather’s failure as a rabbi meant a loss of status and authority both in society andwithin the family. At an early age, Ehrich found himself, if not actually replacinghis father as the family breadwinner and protector, at least of near-equal statuswith him, as they worked side by side in the necktie factory. For the rest of his lifehe took his role as his mother’s protector with immense seriousness – indeed hisobsessively close relationship with his mother up to the time of her death is oneof the most notable facts about Ehrich’s private life. A famous photograph from1907 shows him in his mid-thirties, with his arms round both his mother and hiswife;423 his handwritten inscription ‘My two sweethearts’ might be a conventionalcompliment; in fact it indicates the extent to which the two women in his lifemerged into each other in his mind.

Samuel died when Ehrich was eighteen. Denied the completion of theOedipal struggle by the actual death of his father, Harry found a new and


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mythical father figure in the legendary conjurer Robert-Houdin, whose name headapted and adopted as his own, turning himself from Ehrich to Harry in themeantime. Later, when Houdini had reached maturity as a performer, he turnedagainst this second father, writing an exposé of the ‘dishonesty’ of Robert-Houdin in a vitriolic outburst entitled The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin,424 inwhich he claims to set the record straight regarding Robert-Houdin’s actualcontribution to the history of magic. In fact, The Unmasking is a strange andillogical attack on the great nineteenth-century conjuror, and one which seemsto have been driven by Houdini’s own sense of professional rivalry with the pastmaster rather than by any scholarly or historical impulse. On a psychic level,however, it allowed him a version of the archetypal confrontation with the fatherfigure which the death of his actual parent had denied him.

In fact, conjuring and escapology as forms of entertainment have their ownFreudian dimension. This has less to do with Oedipal patterns than with anotherkey Freudian narrative – one to which Freud himself came comparatively late inhis career, but which is no less resonant for that. Watching his grandson at play,Freud observed a repeated pattern of play whereby the child happily throws histoys away, making at the same time a sound which Freud and the child’s motheragreed represented the German word ‘fort’ [‘gone’].

I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of anyof his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation whichconfirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tiedround it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reelby the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, sothat it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’.He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed itsreappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. This then was the complete game –disappearance and return. As a rule, one only witnessed its first act, whichwas repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that thegreater pleasure was attached to the second act.

The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement – the instinctual renunciation (that isthe renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowinghis mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this,as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objectswithin his reach.425

The conjuror plays a game of fort/da with the audience – or more precisely, heinvites the audience to play the game in their own minds. As he makes objectsdisappear and reappear, the primal game of absence and presence is re-staged in


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an ambiguous show of collusion between stage and audience. The audience isplaced in a multiplicity of different interpretative positions, the pleasure beingthe inability they have in deciding between them. Somewhere between therational and the superstitious lies the pleasure: the sense that while everybodyknows that there is no thing as magic, nonetheless perhaps… The audience‘knows’ that what they are being offered is not miraculous, yet the skilfulconjuror arranges things so that other explanations do not quite work. A puzzleis proposed and a series of possible resolutions of that puzzle are offered, yetnone is entirely satisfactory. The essential mode of the conjuror is that of thechallenger: ‘Here, I shall do something and you will not be able to guess how Idid it – will you?’ The conjuror’s skill in leaving his audience balanced betweenexplanations usually depends on one of a very limited number of actualities.The trick may be effected by means of a downright lie: the apparently innocentbystander or audience member is actually an assistant, an accomplice, andin on the act. Or else it relies on a more or less elaborate mechanical device: amarked deck of cards, a specially built cabinet with a hinged wall, a dummypiece of rope that parts in the middle, handcuffs with a prepared lock. Orperhaps it depends upon a trick of timing: the substitution took place before thetrick even appeared to have begun. Then again, maybe it is set up by careful andprosaic preparation: the mystic knows you have a deceased Aunty Mollybecause she found out by asking around a few days earlier… These techniqueswere Houdini’s stock-in-trade.

But the escapologist offers a special refinement on the fort/da sequence – arefinement which relies on the notion that, as Freud says, ‘the greater pleasure[is] attached to the second act’ – the act of reappearance. The object which ismade to disappear and reappear – either literally, in cabinets, coffins and tanksfull of water, or on a more symbolic level in the handcuffs and restraints – is theperformer’s body itself. The reappearance of the liberated body is the momentof triumph, the ‘da’ of the equation. The ‘pleasure’ of the act is the apparentthreat that such reappearance or release cannot, after all, take place: the locks aretoo strong, the knots too tight, the casket too solid. Yet reappear he does!

Dime museum narrativesHoudini was, as a friend of the family put it, ‘a product of his early professionalyears. He thought the freak world was normal and the straights were freaks’.426 Butfirst and foremost he was a conjuror,427 and he learned his trade in travelling showsand dime museums, with sleight of hand acts as well as his specialist handcuffescapes. We can get a sense of the range of Houdini’s general magic act byconsidering an early publication – H. Houdini’s Magic Book – a slim volume alsoknown as Magic Made Easy, which ‘Professor Harry Houdini, King of Cards andHandcuffs’ published in 1898, before he had established himself as a famousmagician or escapologist. In reality the book was more or less a catalogue in which


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Houdini advertised tricks and apparatus for sale through what he called his ‘Schoolof Magic’ – a mail-order magic business which the young travelling magician hadestablished at a time when it was by no means clear that he would be able to makea decent living as a performer. ‘This book’, he writes in the Preface,

is especially prepared for LEARNERS and is the A.B.C. of magic. I TEACHand INSTRUCT thoroughly by mail in all branches of Spiritualism, SlateWriting and Sleight of Hand… In submitting this supplementary list to yournotice, my object is to introduce to the exponents of the Art a class of goodssuperior to any hitherto offered for sale.428

This superior class of goods included everything from party tricks and jokesto spiritualist and fortune-telling routines, from sets of marked cards (‘A littlestudy makes you an expert’), to the secret drawings of the Trilby aerialsuspension ‘as done by Hermann the great… $1.00’, to expensive performanceapparatus such as ‘The Maniac’s Strategy’ ($100.00).429

The confident-sounding rhetoric of the descriptions of the tricks (‘A mostexcellent trick, not to be had elsewhere… A marvellous deception’)430 fails toconceal the anxiety of a young conjurer who is by no means confident that he willbe able to make his way in the world through performance alone. The cataloguegives away some secrets immediately – such as ‘How to Blow over a Bottle orHeavy Object’ (‘Put it upon a paper bag and blow into the bag, which puffs upand overthrows the bottle’)431 – while it advertises others for sale. Houdini’sclaim that…

I am not offering for sale a lot of worthless secrets or cheap ideas, butsupplying the necessary apparatus incidental to the business. Everything inthis list is new, of the best quality and made by experienced mechanics;therefore purchasers may rely upon receiving value for their money, and willfind everything just as represented.432

…is clearly overstated. Many of the items are far from new, and the questionof value for money well be a moot one in several cases. Yet included in thecatalogue are some notable items. For example, the ‘Hindoo Needle Trick’ –which later became almost as famous a part of Houdini’s repertoire as hisescapes – is offered for $5.00 as ‘one of the best and easiest tricks to do’. Alsoavailable – but presumably at a much higher rate, since these are listed as ‘Priceon application’ – is a complete Handcuff Act, as well as details and diagrams ofthe trick with which Harry and his wife/assistant, Bess, were beginning to makea reputation for themselves: the ‘Metamorphosis Substitution’.433

‘Don’t expose your tricks, as they lose their value when too common’ warns theProfessor in his ‘Hints for Amateurs’ early in the volume,434 yet here is the same


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man apparently offering his own secrets to all and sundry on the open market!The myth that magicians never tell their secrets is just that – a myth. Selling thesecrets – selectively, of course! – has always been a lucrative part of the conjurer’strade, and the archives of magic are full of books by the most famous conjurers oftheir day, in which they demonstrate to amateurs as well as fellow professionalsjust how (some of) it is done. Even so, there is an air of desperation about MagicMade Easy. On the one hand there is the attempt to claim some sort of gravitasand authority. The twenty-four-year-old Harry promotes himself as ‘Professor’Houdini, ‘Inventor, Originator, and Manufacturing Magician’, and Principal of a‘School of Magic’. On the other hand, the impoverished ‘Professor’ is advertisingin the same catalogue his ‘Money Making Secrets’ such as ‘Tooth Ache Remedy’and ‘Eruption Ointment for Frosted Feet’:435 the pose of scholar and mystic givesway here to the blandishments of the snake oil salesman from the travellingmedicine shows with which the young Houdini was all too familiar. A finaladvertisement gives the game away:

To Advertise My School of Magic

I Will Send to any Address, Postage Paid for 25c. the following, viz:118 Magic Tricks and Mysterious Experiments.85 Puzzles Illustrated.101 Conundrums and Riddles.Secret of Second Sight and Mind Reading.How to Eat Fire.100 Recipes for Making Money Secrets.100 Secrets of How to Become Beautiful.255 Selections for Autograph Albums.10 Model Love Letters.Fortune Telling by Palmistry, Tea or Coffee Grounds and White of an Egg.A Complete Dictionary of Dreams.Guide of Flirtation with Fan, Eyes, Parasol and Gloves.Cure for Bashfulness. Language of Gems and Flowers.Love’s Telegraph. How to Tell One’s Age.15 Versions of Love. Some of Nature’s Wonders.25 Pictures of Famous Actresses.Pictures of the Presidents of the United States.21 Songs, with Words and Music.Formulas for Making Invisible Inks for Secret Correspondence.436

There is something wonderfully random about the list. It is easy to see how the‘118 Magic Tricks and Mysterious Experiments’ might be used to promote aSchool of Magic. It is far less clear how the Pictures of the Presidents of theUnited States or the 10 model love letters or the 255 selections for autograph


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albums would contribute to that project. An intriguing number of items on thelist seem to have more to do with sexual attraction, courtship skills and eroticsavoir-faire than they do with the training of magicians or conjurers. The Schoolof Magic is actually a Curiosity Shop, selling whatever its readership might fancy.The eclectic sales pitches of Magic Made Easy constitute another of the untoldstories of Harry Houdini: a ragbag of early-twentieth-century capitalism, clearlyfrom the same world as – but without the moral imperatives of – an aspirationalyoung man in a Horatio Alger novel.

During those early professional years Harry Houdini lived and worked with thedenizens of freak shows and circuses, playing the travelling medicine shows,music halls, theatres, beer halls and dime museums across America. As anemployee of Welsh Brothers’ All-United Golden Shows, he sat snarling in a cageas the Wild Man from the Java jungle, who lived on a diet of raw meat and tobacco;he also worked as an actor in melodramas, as a Punch and Judy man, and as partof a comedy double act with his wife, Bess (‘The Rahners… America’s GreatestComedy Act’).437 Elements of many of these early acts appear in his later persona.For example, his escapes from dungeons, chains and straitjackets – and especiallythe apparently life-threatening feats of his middle period shows where he divedinto rivers, hung from tall buildings, or allowed himself to be ‘tortured’ inelaborate contraptions such as the water-torture cell, had more than a hint ofmelodrama about them: the narrative of peril and escape is a central feature ofthe melodramatic imagination.

The symbolism of escape is a powerful motif, and the escapologist as popularentertainer has a strong mythical dimension. Bound in chains, imprisoned ina dungeon or locked into a coffin-like box, buried beneath the icy waters of a riveror trapped inside a tank of water, the escape artist stares death in the face, teaseshis audience with the possibility that he may indeed not be able to survive – andthen, with a dramatic gesture returns to the land of the living. In his analysisof the shamanistic origins of popular entertainments, E. T. Kirby has foregroundedthe use which shamans in various cultures have made of the images andtechniques of escapology:

The Cree shaman allows himself to be stripped nearly naked and tied tightlywithin an elk’s skin. After a lengthy incantation, he escapes suddenly from hisbonds. (Hoffman, 142) Ojibwa shamans will ‘permit themselves to be securelytied, placed within the jugglery, and a moment later be at liberty and cords atsome other locality.’ (Hoffman, 143) The practice is also common throughoutAlaska, where it is elaborated upon in terms of spectacle and ‘real life drama’.…A Kwaikutl shaman appears to have her head cut off or to be run through witha sword. She is then sealed in a wooden box which is consumed in a fire untilonly bones remain, and the ‘spirit’ of the woman then speaks from the fire…The woman later appears unharmed, of course.438


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The shaman returns from the spirit world with the power to heal. Perhaps,too, for the crowds who assembled in theatres and on river banks to watchHoudini return, time after time, from the brink of defeat or of death, there wassomething cathartic about the experience.

On a more mundane level of myth, Houdini’s act in its early days retainedsomething about it of the Punch and Judy show which he had once operated.Houdini himself resembles a more benevolent version of Mr. Punch, themenacing trickster who escapes the gallows and takes revenge on those whowould do him down by substituting his persecutors as victims, and whoperpetrates symbolic violence upon his doll-wife. Consider the symbolicreverberations of Mr. Punch in the iconic trick with which Houdini first made hisname: ‘Metamorphosis’.

Metamorphosis

Exchange made in three seconds

The Greatest Novelty Mystery Act in the World!

All the Apparatus used in this Act is inspected by a Committee selected fromthe Audience.

Mons. Houdini’s hands are fastened behind his back and the knots are sealed;then placed in a massive Box which is locked and strapped, the box is then rolledinto a small cabinet, and Mlle. Houdini draws the curtain and claps her handthree times, at the last clap of her hands the curtain is drawn open by Mons.Houdini and Mlle. Houdini has disappeared, and upon the box being openedshe is found in his place in the bag, the seals unbroken and her hands tied inprecisely the same manner as were Mons. Houdini’s when first entering the bag.

Just think over this, the time consumed in making the change is THREE SECONDS!

We Challenge the World to produce an act done with greater Mystery, speed,or dexterity.

Respectfully yours, the Houdinis.439

‘Metamorphosis’ stages a ritualized dance of dominance and submission,captivity and freedom as the Punch and Judy man plays public victim games with‘Mlle. Houdini’ (his wife/sister?) in the routine which first brought them fame.Perhaps, too, there was a more private drama of dominance and submissiontaking place within their relationship. Consider the following stories from RuthBrandon’s biography of Houdini:

Bess relates [an incident] which took place about a year after they weremarried… She insisted upon going to see a show which Houdini, obsessively


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uncomfortable with any hint of the risqué, had forbidden. ‘He said the showwas unfit for me and if I disobeyed him he would spank me and send mehome. Naturally after that warning I went to the show. He followed me, carriedme out, spanked me thoroughly, divided all our poor savings and led me firmlyto the railroad station, bought my ticket to Bridgeport where my sister lived,and put me on the train… At the last minute, lifting his hat courteously, hesaid: “I always keep my word. Goodbye, Mrs. Houdini.” My heart was breakingand I was on the edge of hysteria, but the memory of the spanking rankled andenabled me to reply with a pretence of calm dignity: “Goodbye, Mr. Houdini”.…Six hours later, at 2 a.m. the bell rang and I heard Houdini’s voice. I flew tothe door and we fell into each other’s arms, weeping. “See, darling,” saidHoudini, “I told you I would send you away if you disobeyed, but I didn’t say Iwouldn’t fly after you and bring you back.”’440

A single incident should not, it is true, be used to speculate about an entirerelationship yet there is so much that is suggestive about this. For a start, thereis Houdini’s obsessive discomfort with any hint of the carnal. The first episodein this short narrative involves Houdini’s attempt to prevent his wife from seeinga show, keeping her away from the risqué and the sexual. It should beremembered that Bess was hardly more than a child when the two married andthat her slight figure (which she herself hated) made her seem, in terms of thefashions of the day, somewhat unwomanly. Houdini’s choice of wife was a slim,boyish adolescent: Bess is frequently pictured in boys’ costumes, which she worefor their act. In this incident he attempts to keep her de-sexualized – therebytaking over a parental role to some extent, since Bess’s own mother, a strictCatholic ‘thought all theatre wicked’.441 Playing out the parent/child scenario,Bess disobeys and the punishing husband-father ‘spanks’ her and sends herhome. The Houdini’s marriage seems to be one which involves some of thesado-masochistic role-playing which is also (though differently) articulated inHoudini’s professional act. The stiff formality of the conversational exchange atthe station adds a further dimension: Mr. and Mrs. Houdini address each otherin a strangely ritualized way, dignified and distant, like the relationship betweenso many distant Victorian fathers and their children. The narrative context (told,we remember, by Bess herself) represents the abusive incident as a father’sauthoritarian discipline, within the rituals of domestic punishment of thedisobedient child, while Bess’s own reaction is characterized by a suppression ofthe emotions of loss which the incident stirred in her. Significantly, it was only inthis role and in relation to Bess, that Harry Houdini was able to play the father:he and Bess had a childless marriage.

Here, though, is another ‘take’ on the relationship. In – of all places – atestimony before a Senate committee who were investigating spiritualism,Houdini called on Bess to act as a character witness in the following way:



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Houdini: Step this way Mrs. Houdini. One of the witnesses said that I wasa brute, that I was vile and that I was crazy… I will have been married, on June22, thirty-two years to this girl… Outside of my great mother, Mrs. Houdinihas been my greatest friend. Have I shown traces of being crazy unless it wasabout you?Mrs. H. : No.Houdini: Am I a good boy?Mrs. H. : Yes.Houdini: Thank you, Mrs. Houdini.442

The relationship between context and content is extraordinary. Witness to aSenate investigation, Houdini then – lawyer-like – produces witnesses of hisown, demanding questions of her in rhetoric which is appropriate to thecourtroom but sounds equally like the patter of the stage conjuror (‘Have weever met before?’ ‘No’ ‘Thank you.’) The witness he produces is ‘this girl’. Besswas nearly 50 at the time.

Masculine qualitiesAccording to his friend and eventual antagonist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, HarryHoudini ‘had the essential masculine quality of courage to a supreme degree’.443

The notion of masculinity has become particularly important in recentinterpretations of the meanings of Houdini’s act, such as the recent study byJohn F. Kasson, which analyses the gender implications of the Houdiniphenomenon. Kasson places Houdini in the tradition of bodybuilders and malebody culturists, linking him with Eugene Sandor the famous nineteenth-centurystrong man who

adapted older traditions of manly physical challenge to promote a new massculture of entertainment. And as he made the exposed male body acompelling spectacle in live performance, he also drew on classical arttraditions to pioneer its dissemination… Sandor revealed how the erotics ofthe male body could be broadly exposed precisely because it was neverexplicitly mentioned. Studious concentration on antique sculpture andmuscular development provided the crucial fig leaf.444

Certainly, Houdini’s exposure of the male body was relentless. As he began tospecialize in escapology routines, the element of bodily display becameincreasingly important in Houdini’s act, and he would frequently perform hisescapes semi-naked, ostensibly to demonstrate that he had no hidden keys orpicklocks about his person. The effect was to increase the sense both of theperformer’s vulnerability and also of his power – since Houdini, though a smallman, was physically muscular.


POSITIVELY

The only Conjuror in the World that escapes out of all Handcuffs, LegShackles, Insane Belts and Strait-Jackets, after being STRIPPED STARKNAKED, mouth sealed up, and thoroughly searched from head to foot,proving he carries no KEYS, SPRINGS, WIRES or other concealedaccessories…445

Such nakedness is, of course part of the act, and part of the challenge. It is aform of guarantee that there is nothing hidden up the sleeve, since there is nosleeve. The naked body is used to validate the essential truthfulness of theconjuror – to answer the charge of deception. There may be other levels ofmeaning involved too, whether intentionally or not. Ruth Brandon has suggestedthe ‘sexual agenda underlying Houdini’s insistent professional nudity.’446 In asuggestive parallel argument, Adam Phillips has – not entirely whimsically –suggested a similarity between Houdini and the pornographer:

As with pornography, the audience knew what they would be getting, but theyneeded a minimum of variation to sustain their excitement: in Houdini’s casenot a different body, but different props and new positions. In a senseHoudini was to escapism what pornography is to sex: dazzlingly literal,demanding nothing of the consumer but his money and his fascination.Because their arts depend on simplifying rather than complicating what theydepict, the escape artist, like the pornographer, doesn’t want to change hisaudience, he wants to keep them the same…447

What Kasson, Brandon and Phillips all indicate is the extent to which Houdiniwas ‘performing the body’ – and, in particular, performing a version of the malebody which positioned it both as victim and as victor. Writers on Houdini, manyof whom are fans and champions, tend to stress the latter: the figure of thevictorious escapologist, having successfully challenged death orimmobilization, emerging from the tank, the river, the cell, the shackles.Within current academic masculinity studies, Harry Houdini has begun toassume some importance among the various iconic ‘masculine’ figures to whomreference is frequently made (along with screen personae such as those ofSylvester Stallone and John Wayne, examples of physical perfection such asEugene Sandow or Johnny Weissmuller, or sporting icons such as Mike Tysonor David Beckham). Like these icons of popular culture Houdini has come tobe seen as embodying certain kinds of historically gendered meanings –enacting, for example, narratives of mastery in the face of helplessness, ofauthority in the face of subjection. John F. Kasson, for example, reads him inthe following way:


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By performing amazing feats of mastery over objects and situations, themagician became an exemplary masculine figure to complement thestrongman. Both spoke to dreams of dominance and authority in the modernworld… [Houdini’s special take on this involved] making themes of risk andcontrol, helplessness and mastery, central to his art and to the male body… Inan age of often bewildering obstacles and intimidating authorities, he dramatized the ability of a lone figure to triumph over the most formidablerestraints and the most implacable foes and against the most impossibleodds… the masculine power he embodied was a claim of invincibility.448

There is certainly some validity to Kasson’s reading. Houdini’s escape actdramatized an archetypal narrative, in which the male body is displayed,subjected to imprisonment or danger, and then shown to triumph over itssubjection. I would argue, though, that Houdini is a more ambivalent figurethan Kasson’s interpretation suggests, and that the iconography of his escapeacts, in the middle of his career, as ‘Handcuff King’, performs a more complexkind of cultural work than simply ‘embodying a claim of invincibility’.

Let us look in detail at a couple of instances of Houdini’s live act at the heightof his fame. For example, the publicity material from his 1914 tour of Britainannounces ‘The Shipwrights’ Challenge to Houdini’ in the following terms:

January 12th 1914

Dear Sir,

We, the undersigned, Shipwrights employed at the yard of Vickers Limited,having heard of your ability to escape from apparently impossible andpeculiar places, challenge you to allow us to construct a large and strongPacking Case of 8’ x 1’ timber, secured by 3’ French wire nails, into whichwe will rope and nail you, and believe that you will not be able to escapetherefrom.

If you accept this challenge it must be clearly understood that you arenot to demolish the box in your attempt to escape.

We will send Box for examination, but reserve the right to re-nail eachand every board, to prevent any preparation on your part.

Clement H. Dennis, Joseph Benson,James Flett, Thomas C. DennisShipwrightsEmployees of Vickers Ltd.

Houdini accepts the above challenge for the Second House, WednesdayJanuary 14th, 1914, on the Stage of the Tivoli Theatre, Barrow-in-Furness,under the condition that the Box is not air-tight.449


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This is a fairly typical publicity tactic of Houdini at this stage in his career. Heis travelling from town to town both in the United States and in Europe on aninternational variety circuit, doing what is in essence an extremely repetitive, ifcompelling, routine. He escapes from things. In order to keep up public interestin his escape act he regularly invites (or arranges) public challenges fromparticular sectors of the communities to whom he was about to perform. Isuggested earlier in this book that the implicit contract between the conjurorand the audience involves challenge rather than co-operation, as the spectatorsattempt to outguess the performer who is trying to fool them. Houdini, however,made challenges an explicit and central element of his act, using them tostructure his show and to give it both variety and local interest. Thesechallenges usually came either from the legal or medical authorities (especiallythose with access to cells and straitjackets) or else from fraternities of industrialworkers. His most famous challenges were of those from police forces, but hewas challenged too by life guards, locksmiths, packers, shippers, brewers,riggers, dairymen, construction workers, mental hospital physicians, envelopemanufacturers, leather manufacturers, sailors, as well as various individuals,physical culturists and rival magicians.

As well as being an integral part of the conjuror’s relationship to the audience,the repeated ploy of the public challenge may also be regarded as a stereotypicallymasculine way of framing a stage performance. It is an aggressive form ofshowmanship, which shares a mythology with the knight errant, the gunfighter,the wandering Eastern master of martial arts – or indeed with the championWestern fist fighter, either in the fairground booth or in the professional ring.450

And it became one of the high points of Houdini’s act as his reputation grew. Hechallenged the world at large to restrain him, and he in his turn was challengedto escape by all manners of institutions and individuals.

Thus Houdini effectively dramatizes himself as the ordinary man, one of thetoiling masses, pitting himself against the apparatus of a mechanized and mass-producing industrial society, with its locks, bolts, chains, boxes, trunks, packingcases, cells, milk churns – the images of containment and containerization whichare both the products and the producers of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century capitalism and its systems of control. In his biography of Charles Dickens,Peter Ackroyd talks of Dickens as being ‘heroic’ because he dramatized the twokey institutions of nineteenth-century western society, the factory and the prison.To this extent, Houdini is, in a strange way, Dickens’ successor, stripping thesethemes of the nineteenth-century novel down to their very basics and bringingthem up-to-date for a variety-show audience by focusing them on the image ofhis own body. His roots in the performances and images of the nineteenth centuryare tangible, but he is also very much of the modernist period, too, dramatizingthe triumph of the will, the inner strength and coherence of the individual whichare the recurrent themes of modernism.


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And like those other great early-twentieth-century exponents of physicaltheatre, Chaplin and Keaton, Houdini represents the vulnerable man as hero.Indeed, this was his essential routine: repeatedly to make himself vulnerablein order to become the victorious hero, emerging unscathed from society’sapparatuses of restraint. He creates a narrative of heroic escape from apparenthumiliation or doom, putting centre stage the escape motif which had been adramatic and literary theme from the early Jack Sheppard plays through to thecliffhanger structures of the emerging movie serials which Houdini himself sodesperately wanted to master.

The challenges led Houdini into some strange versions of his escape act. Atthe Oxford Music Hall at 14/16 Oxford Street in November 1908, he topped thebill (above both Harry Randall and ‘Max Gruber’s Horse, Pony and Elephant’451)and engaged in a typical series of dramatic and rather surreal Friday nightconfrontations. On 13th November, he was challenged by the Alliance Dairy, whohad thrown down the gauntlet in the belief that Houdini’s famous ‘Milk Churn’escape was possible only because Houdini could see through the water. ‘If you willallow us to send along 60 gallons of Milk and fill up the Can’, the dairymen added,‘…our opinion is that you will be unable to make your escape in this fashion’;452

the following week, on the 20th, he was challenged by an unlikely soundingquartet of Chinese seamen called ‘Ching, Wang, Chang and Youn’, who requestedto be allowed to ‘come on stage so that we can bind you to a Sangnau’ – whichthey explained was ‘a form used for punishing criminals in our own country’.453

And on the 27th November Houdini answered the following challenge:

OXFORDSUFFRAGETTES CHALLENGE TO HOUDINI

Mr Harry Houdini,Dear Sir,

We, the undersigned Members of the Women Suffragettes, having heardthat it is impossible for you to be secured, and so far, only men have triedto fasten you, we wish you would allow us to secure you to a Mattress withSheets and Bandages; and think that we will be able to fasten you so thatyou will not be able to effect your escape.

We challenge you to allow us to come on the stage of the Oxford MusicHall, any night during your engagement, and allow us to put our theoryinto practice.

(Signed)

Peggy Wheatley, Mabel Stacy53 Camberwell Road, 16 Old Kent Road, Peckham


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Ethel Gibson M. Guy-Browne26 Stafford Road Clarence GateRoman Road, Bow

R. Cecil Maud FernClapham Park 23 Holmes Road,

Kentish Town NW

The test will take place at the OXFORD, Friday Nov. 27454

Very few women feature in biographies of Harry Houdini. Notable exceptionsare the ever-present figure of his mother, whom he adored, and his wife, Bess,to whom he was likewise devoted. The rest are bit-part players, such as theactresses who co-starred with him in his rather dreadful movies, and with whomhe was too physically awkward and embarrassed ever to manage a decent screenkiss. Which makes these suffragettes, who pose their challenge to Houdini inspecifically gendered (and thus political) terms, all the more interesting becauseof their comparative rarity.

Gendered readings of magicians’ routines can often be fairly simple. Thereis, of course, the aspect of power which lies at the heart of the magic act:the performance of the magician constitutes a theatrical display of power andcontrol – over the natural world, over the very laws of Nature themselves, whichthe rational world since the Enlightenment had understood to underlie all being.The overwhelming majority of these performers of power on the stage havebeen men. While there was plenty of room on the European stage for femaleactors, singers, dancers, acrobats and other kinds of performing artist sincethe eighteenth century, female magicians were always (and continue to be) in theminority.455 At any rate, the magician’s appearance often constructed in termswhich refer to both gender and class. The typical magician’s costume – the classictop hat, white tie and tails – signifies power and authority which is class-specific,but also when contrasted with the more submissive and decorative costumingof his equally typical ‘lovely assistant’ (which is either domestically demure orenticingly under-clad) gender-specific.

This can be taken further. It is hardly controversial to point out that lots offairly terrible fantasies have been acted out on the bodies of women – in the guiseof this lovely assistant – during the past century or so of conjuring acts. They havebeen locked in cabinets, stuffed into baskets, pierced and impaled with swords,daggers, spears and knives, made to disappear, dismembered, decapitated and –most famously – sawn in two. Houdini’s encounter with the suffragettes at theOxford Playhouse represents a different – and more complex – staging of a genderconfrontation. He is challenged not only by women but by self-identifiedsuffragettes: the political group whose own theatrical and performative tactics ofprotest contributed to the raising of public awareness which eventually resulted


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in the Emancipation of the People Act of 1918. Their challenge, moreover, iscouched in the terms of gender politics. Men have not subdued Houdini, theyproclaim – but we will. The challenge – like so many of Houdini’s challenges – isgood publicity for both sides. And, of course, the challenge ends in masculinetriumph: Houdini – eventually – escapes.456

Tension, followed by release. It is perhaps the most basic of narrativepatterns. The escapologist’s performance, in a way, is the distillation of thisnarrative – it is the narrative stripped down to its most basic elements. In HarryHoudini’s version of this, there is perhaps a particularly gendered meaning. Hisrepeated insistence on bodily display turns the performance into a narrativeabout masculinity, a small morality play in which subjection is followed byescape; submission followed by the re-establishment of authority. If the malebody is – briefly – feminized by being bound and subjected, it then – through itsown resources – reclaims its dominance by escaping.

John F. Kasson’s reading of Houdini, places him, appropriately enough,between the real-life Sandow and the fictional Tarzan. It also casts him inthe role of hero and victor, as exemplar of a triumphant (and triumphalist)masculinity. This interpretation works well on one level: it is a gender-inflectedreading of the overt narrative that Houdini himself appears to be consciouslypresenting. It is, however, incomplete: the masculine exemplar is beingoversimplified. And Houdini is anything but a simple figure. We can see this inthe complex relationships between the public figure Harry Houdini and theprivate man Ehrich Weiss; in the way in which the relentless energy whichwas invested in acting the part of Harry Houdini onstage and off eventually ledto the virtual obliteration of Ehrich Weiss; in Houdini’s obsessive relationshipwith his mother; in his projection of that relationship onto his relationshipwith his wife and his extreme diffidence in the company of any other women;in his almost pathological attempt to destroy the reputation of his adoptedfather figure, Robert-Houdin; in the metaphorical or psycho-sexual meaningswhich his repeated performance of a sado-masochistic gestus might havehad for Houdini himself. All of these will reveal a complex and contradictoryfigure. But these complexities and contradictions are not just backstageaffairs; they also permeate the theatrical experience of Houdini’s public personaand performances.

If we see in Houdini only the figure of the heroic masculine it may be becausewe are oversimplifying the narrative ‘transaction’ in which his performancesengaged their audiences. Tension is followed by release, certainly – but thereading which stresses ‘the ability of the lone figure to triumph… against the mostimpossible odds’ focuses only on the second part of that equation. Freud pointedout that the greater pleasure of the fort/da sequence is attached to ‘the secondact’ – but this is not the only pleasure. Meaning lies not only in the outcome ofthe story but in the experience of the performance as a whole: the journey


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towards the ending is important, as well as the ending itself. The imaginativecollaboration between the audience and the stage certainly involves awareness ofgeneric elements – such as the importance of the happy ending in a comedy,or the knowledge of impending downfall in a tragedy. But the meaning of thewhole is not totally determined by that awareness. In fact, it is often the case thatin those performative forms where generic markers are at their strongest,those generic markers are, for an audience, the least engaging part of the wholeexperience, not the most engaging. We do not go to see action/adventure moviemerely to see if the hero will prevail, but to take part in the struggle that leads tothe outcome. We do not watch a tragedy to see if the heroine will die, but to sharevicariously her journey towards that death.

Something similar operates with the escapology act. The generic markers ofthe escapologist’s act are extremely strong: the audience knows what the endingis going to be – it is going to be the artist’s escape. Consequently, in the audience’sexperience of the performance, the climax of the achieved escape becomes, insome ways, the least interesting thing about what is happening, because it canbe taken for granted. The climax of the performance is also its anti-climax. Andso, paradoxically, the escapologist needs to stress the restraint rather than theliberation, in order to invite the audience not only to witness, but also in somesense to share imaginatively in the hero’s predicament.

Houdini the showman knew this perfectly well. As one of his brother’s pupilsput it, Houdini’s genius was that ‘he could make it look extremely tough’457 –even when it wasn’t! One of his famous challenges, at the Euston Palace ofVarieties, involved an apparently impenetrable bank safe. Houdini invitedaudience members to inspect the safe, and to search him for hidden devices; heshook their hands and was locked into the safe. The audience watched withmounting tension as nothing happened. Concern turned to anxiety; anxiety tofear, fear to panic. Eventually,

the audience… went wild with anxiety and after 45 minutes demanded he bereleased. A sweating, haggard Houdini emerged exhausted from the safe. Whatthe audience didn’t know was that Houdini had been watching them throughthe curtains, having escaped in a matter of seconds thanks to a three-prongedgimmick attached to the finger-ring of the last person to shake his hand.458

To escape in three seconds is poor showmanship. What matters is whatprecedes it: the build-up of suspense, the playing on the audience’s fears, andincreasing its involvement with the plight of the apparent victim. Moreover, themode of that involvement may be quite complex. The audience is, after all,watching someone suffer. Or to be precise, actually, very often they’re notwatching at all – the escapologist in his chains, his bank safe, his milk churn ishidden, for very good practical reasons, behind a curtain. But that, of course,


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allows the spectator’s imagination even more room to imagine what unseentortures the escape artist might be going through.

The audience, then, creates in its own imagination the scenes of horror whichtake place behind the curtain. And just as recent film theorists have argued aboutthe subject position of the spectator in the Hollywood horror film, and the extentto which that position is constructed in terms of a sadistic or a masochistic gaze,so the audience who witnesses the escapologist act is offered a range of subjectpositions. The very sparseness of the narrative allows great freedom of choice inthis respect, and, indeed, may allow for more than one position at any one time:empathy and Schadenfreude may not be mutually exclusive responses.

Theatrical spectatorship is more complex since the stage, even at its mostnaturalistic, offers only an incomplete image which always leaves something tothe imagination, a dimension which the audience itself must supply in order tocomplete the imaginative transaction. Then, in Houdini’s escapes, the spectator’ssubject position is problematized still further by the contradictory messageswhich the audience receives concerning the level of actual difficulty or dangerwhich is involved. On the one hand it is watching a show: sitting (usually) intheatre seats having paid money for an evening’s theatrical entertainment. On theother hand, what it is watching may involve actual physical risk – and even thedeath of the performer.

The messages are contradictory, but once more generic expectations becomeimportant. On the whole, the audience is able to indulge, without too much guilt,some of the darker pleasures of witnessing suffering because they know thatthis is NOT a public execution, or a traffic accident, or a public punishment, butpart of an ‘act’. Houdini’s escapes were his trademark, but in performance hesurrounded them with other, more traditional, conjuror’s illusions: makingobjects vanish, making them appear, transposing them… The escape act setsthe notion of physical danger within the broader context of the conjuror’sperformance as a whole, which (on one level at least) the audience knows – orsuspects that it knows – is a fake, all done with smoke and mirrors.

To read Houdini as a kind of exemplar of the heroic masculine is not wrong,but it is only part of the picture. Houdini is a fascinating figure for those who aretrying to make sense of twentieth-century masculinities, but not because heembodies the hero who triumphs against the most impossible odds. Houdiniexemplifies something far more kaleidoscopic: he is a figure who changeswith the change of the light; not a heroic unity so much as a fragmentation of meanings, an appropriate elusiveness which defies a single reading. Thus thegeneric expectations associated with the magician mean that the heroicmasculinity you are being presented with is already encoded as an illusion, acheat. What you see is not what you get. The masculine power he embodied wasnot so much invincibility as contradiction – which, in another sense makes hima very appropriate icon of that slippery, ill-defined thing called ‘masculinity’.


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I have not discovered any first-hand verbal descriptions of Houdini’schallenge from the suffragettes at the Oxford playhouse in 1908. There is,however, a pictorial record of the event, in the form of two (posed?) performancephotographs. The first shows Houdini, the ‘justly world famous self-liberator’as his publicity described him,459 being secured with sheets and bandages by thesix respectably bonneted suffragettes; the second shows him lying, almostpeacefully, in his bonds, beginning the attempt to escape.460 The posts and legsof the metal-frame bed seem to be adorned with ribbons – in the symboliccolours of the Suffragette movement? The whole image takes on a surrealnature: very different from the usual ones associated with the muscular heroicescape artist. Here we have instead a grown-up child, tucked up in bed by a bevyof mother-nurses, who seem both comforting and threatening. If we want tounderstand Houdini’s performances of masculinity in all their complexity, weneed to pay attention to this picture as well as all the others.


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Chapter Nine

Mediums and the media

Doyle interprets HoudiniEhrich Weiss, then, created a complex projection of himself which became thequasi-mythical ‘Harry Houdini’ – an ambiguous figure who for later generationshas become a site of contested meanings. One of the starkest disagreementsabout the ‘interpretation’ of Harry Houdini, however, took place betweenHoudini himself and his erstwhile friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It concernedHoudini’s relationship to the spirit world.

Much of the latter part of Houdini’s career was spent in the unmasking offraudulent ‘mediums’. In terms of performance traditions, the step from theworld of escapology to that of spiritualism was not a large one. On a metaphoricallevel, there is clearly an element of ‘liberation’ in the spiritualist enterprise: bothfor the medium who escapes the limitations of the flesh, and for the spirit voiceswho are freed back into the world of the living. On a more mundane level,however, the escape artist and the stage medium shared a common heritageof performance, since many of the spiritualist acts of the previous generationwere also effectively escapology acts. Bound and restrained in various ways inorder to ‘prove’ that the spirit-effects could not be made by any human agency,the Victorian medium’s act depended on an ability to free him- or herselfsurreptitiously. Houdini and his fellow escapologists simply made explicit andcentral what had been functional and implicit.

It may be that here, too, there was something of a ‘gender agenda’ at work.Escapology, it is suggested, is a particularly masculine mode of magicperformance, demanding muscularity, physical prowess and what Conan Doylecalled ‘the essential masculine quality of courage’461 and related to the masculinearts of display like that of the physical culturist. Spiritualism, on the other hand,was one of the few areas of magic which offered women the chance of competingon anything like equal terms with their male counterparts. There were, of course,many male mediums, such as Daniel Dunglas Home and the Davenport brothers.But the female medium played into a convenient Victorian and Edwardianstereotype of women as being more ‘spiritual’ than men, and female mediumssuch as the Fox sisters, Florence Cooke and Houdini’s particular antagonist, MinaCrandon (‘Margery’), were just as numerous, and just as successful, as men. At asymbolic level, the spiritualist phenomenon may have suggested an element of afeminine magical power with which Houdini was particularly uncomfortable.462

At an overt level, however, Houdini presented the issue simply as thedistinction between the honest illusion of the performer and the dishonesty ofthose who imply that their powers may be more than just make-believe. In the


early years, before he became the Handcuff King, and well before he turned hisenergies to exposing fake mediums, Houdini worked as a jobbing performerin travelling shows, across America. Among his many early acts was one heperformed with Bess: a spiritualist routine, consisting of psychic demonstrationsand ‘tent-show séances’.463 Harry and Bess used all the usual tricks of the stagepsychic, gathering information beforehand about likely audience members.

Houdini compiled a book containing lists of people who attended séancesin various towns. To add to his stock of information, the magician visitedgraveyards to make careful notes from tombstones and attended places wherelocal gossip was to be heard. In the guise of a canvasser he would call athouses and obtain opportunities to inspect family Bibles which oftencontained much useful information.464

Paid tipsters would also pass on information about the identities of thosein the audience, and Houdini’s memory, his ‘cold reading’ skills465 and hisshowmanship would then provide the spectators with the paranormal experiencesthey craved, while Bess fell into trances to receive messages from ‘the other side’.According to Houdini, they eventually gave up the Spiritualism routine out of asense of guilt: people were too easily fooled, and the belief which they had in thereality of the Houdinis’ powers made him uncomfortable. ‘When I noted the deepearnestness with which my utterances were received… I felt the game had gonefar enough, for I most certainly did not relish the idea of treading on the sacredfeelings of my admirers.’466 Houdini had both an expert inside knowledge of thetricks of the spiritualist trade, and a moralistic distaste for them.

It is particularly ironic then, that in later years, when these feelings resurfaced,leading Houdini to attempt to make clear distinctions, after all, between the freakworld and the normal world, and to mount a campaign of exposure against allfraudulent (and therefore, as he came to believe, against all) mediums, he foundhimself, paradoxically, having to defend himself against the charge – made bydefenders of Spiritualism – that he himself possessed genuine paranormalpowers and was able to perform some of his feats by dematerialisation, or by useof psychic energy.467 ‘It has been stated in print by a staunch believer inSpiritualism’, he complained, ‘that I possess psychic power, but were I to acceptthat statement as being true, I should be pluming myself with false feathers’.468

Despite his vigorous defence of the claims of material reality, and his insistentdebunking of the claims of the mediums and spiritualists, many refused to takehim at his word, and continued to attribute to him supernatural powers whichthey simply believed he himself suppressed and/or denied.

The most famous – and one of the most insistent – of those who tried toconvince Houdini of his own powers as a medium was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Itis perhaps not surprising that Doyle was a great fan of Houdini: his own most

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famous creation, Sherlock Holmes had something of the magician’s style abouthim – producing startling and unexpected results from a logical chain whichremains hidden to the observer until the maestro deigns to explain it. Holmeshimself notes the similarity in ‘A Study in Scarlet’: refusing to explain hisreasoning to the long-suffering Watson, he remarks, ‘You know a conjuror gets nocredit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of mymethod of working you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinaryindividual after all.’469 The budding friendship between the two men foundered,however, on their disagreement about spiritualism. Doyle was as fervent a believeras Houdini was a sceptic. Not only did Doyle believe in Spiritualism in general, healso believed in fairies: he was an outspoken champion of the Cottingley ‘spiritphotographs’, the famous hoax in which two young girls convinced the Britishpress that they had captured images of fairies on film.470 Doyle believed, too, thatHoudini himself was in touch with the spirit world, and that Houdini’s own claimsthat he performed all his feats through a combination of physical prowess andsleight of hand were either disingenuous or simple denial. Before their friendshipcompletely soured, Doyle asked Houdini:

My dear chap, why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occultwhen you are giving one all the time? Mrs Guppy could dematerialize, and socould many folk in Holy Writ, and I do honestly believe that you can also… Myreason tells me you have this wonderful power, for there is no alternative.471

Doyle’s words contain an echo of the famous words of his own creation,Sherlock Holmes: ‘How often have I said to you’ Holmes scolds Watson, ‘thatwhen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, howeverimprobable, must be the truth?’472 But Doyle and Houdini clearly differed intheir assessment of what falls into the category of ‘the impossible’. They alsodiffered in their interpretation of what was going on in Houdini’s own act: Doylewas convinced that Houdini misunderstood the nature of his own powers andthat what Houdini performed as entertainment was (unbeknown to theperformer himself) actually accomplished through his ‘mediumistic powers’. Itwas a belief Doyle never renounced. A few years after Houdini’s death, Doylewrote to Houdini’s first biographer, Harold Kellock:

I have written a little pamphlet, expounding my reasons for thinking thatHoudini had mediumistic powers, as the Davenports undoubtedly had, and thathe used them upon the stage. My reasoning is cumulative, coming from manyquarters, and all pointing to the same end, though he was most clever about theuse of trick boxes and so on, in concealing the true source of his powers.473

Houdini, on the other hand, had no doubt that the source of his powers hadnothing to do with the spirit world. He knew how to perform all the mediums’


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effects – and he was continually astounded and appalled by Doyle’s naïveté aboutthe simplest conjuring tricks. He refused to take seriously the claims of thespiritualists, and looked upon Doyle as a well-meaning and sincere but gullibleromantic.

On one level, both men had an urgent desire to see proof of contact beyond thegrave, since Doyle had lost a beloved son in the First World War, while the death ofHoudini’s adored mother, Cecilia, had shaken the conjuror to the core. But whileHoudini remained sceptical, Doyle was thoroughly persuaded not only that his sonhad contacted him through professional mediums, but also that his own wife wasable to speak to the spirit world. In June 1922 the friendship between Houdini andDoyle finally foundered on a particularly disastrous attempt by the Doyles toconvince the hitherto politely sceptical Houdini. Arthur invited the Houdinis tostay with them in Atlantic City, where a séance was arranged. In this séance, LadyDoyle ‘contacted’ Houdini’s mother through spirit writing, producing someexceptionally unconvincing messages (in English – a language his mother couldnot read, speak or write) which Houdini found embarrassing in their improbability.Left with the choice between two possibilities, that Lady Doyle was fooling him orwas fooling herself, Houdini was in no doubt that it was the latter. However, theintellectual debate had taken too personal a turn, and the friendship cooled.

The story is famous partly because there is something iconic about it. Itportrays a clash of world-views, the rational versus the irrational – but with a twist.Promoting the cause of the irrational is Doyle: highly educated, publicly honouredby the British establishment, a doctor and man of science turned novelist, thecreator of the ultra-rationalist Sherlock Holmes. On the side of pragmaticrationalism is the showman and purveyor of illusions, the self-educated Houdini,an American popular hero and man of the people. The high culture of the oldworld confronts the popular culture of the new – and it is the champion ofAmerican popular culture who, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century,seems to have got it right and to have been more ‘scientific’ in his outlook thanhis opponent.

Sisters and BrothersDoyle’s position, of course, was hardly an isolated one. He was taking a position ina larger argument about communication with the dead which had begun in themiddle of the nineteenth century and continued to be hotly debated until themiddle of the twentieth. His obsession with talking to the dead was, to this extent,very much of its time. It is easy to look back with superiority and condescension atthose who took Doyle’s line. The image of the medium in the darkened room,asking in a tremulous voice ‘Is anybody there?’ has become a cultural cliché. Andit is true that Doyle and his fellow believers were in some fairly uninspiringcompany: it seems hard to credit how some of the most famous figures ofnineteenth-century spiritualism were ever taken seriously. The origins of theSpiritualist movement are generally traced back to 1848, when the Fox family of




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Hydesville, New York began to experience a series of random and mysteriousrapping sounds around their farmhouse.474 Two young daughters, Margaret (8)and Kate (6), appeared to be at the centre of it all. They called the presence thatcaused it ‘Mr. Splitfoot’ and seemed to be able to interpret his rappings asmessages from the beyond the grave. Their older married sister, Leah, took chargeof the children, formed a society to promote spiritualism – and in particular topromote the talents of her two sisters, who became instant celebrities, puttingaudiences and individuals in touch with the spirit world at $100–$150 per night,475

first of all in Rochester, then New York and Philadelphia, and then on tour acrossAmerica and Europe, promoted by – amongst others – the great showman andentrepreneur P. T. Barnum. Child celebrity brought with it the inevitable problemsin adulthood: drink, depression and eventual poverty. In 1888, Margaret, feelingbetrayed and exploited by her elder sister, made a public confession of the tricksshe had used to produce the effects of spirit rapping, such as hidden strings andbeing able to click her toe joints against the floor. By now the spiritualist craze hadgrown into a religious movement, however, and Margaret’s confession was simplydiscounted by many believers – especially when the story emerged that she and hersister had been offered a large sum of money by a reporter for their confession.Margaret later recanted, but neither her confession nor her recantation mademuch difference to a movement that had entirely outgrown them. Spiritualism hadtaken on a life of its own, and the possible fraud of an eight-year-old girl forty yearsearlier could have little effect on its progress.

Nor could the unmasking of other stage spiritualists such as William and IraDavenport – brothers who, at the age of about 9 and 10 years old had first seenthe Fox sisters in Rochester and, who soon after, began to give their own privateséances in darkened rooms in New York State and New York City.476 Afterincidents in which they were discovered wandering round the room, makingnoises on the ‘spirit instruments’ which were supposed to be their means ofcommunication with the dead, they developed a stage act in which their spiritcommunications took place while they were tied up inside a special cabinet.Like the performances of the Cree and Ojibwa shamans, communication withthe spirit world is enabled by escapology.

The spirit cabinet within which the Davenports conducted their conversationswith spirits was simply a large wooden box. However, as Jim Steinmeyer haspointed out, this meant that

[t]he performers could standardize the rope tying, control the sequences,and carry the ‘darkness’ with them – the headline-making subject ofSpiritualism could take the stage and be exhibited before hundreds of peopleat a time. Over the years their various cabinets were pawned, lost, or brokento bits by angry mobs. The Davenports would appear in the next city with asketch for a local carpenter and would quickly be back in business.477



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The Davenports, in fact, seem to have been repeatedly unmasked. Their initialAmerican tours between 1855 and 1864 were comparatively successful, but whenthe American Civil War affected business and they attempted to transfer their actto the UK, they found the audiences far more suspicious. P. T. Barnum describeswith great Schadenfreude how they ‘suffered an unpleasant exposure inLiverpool, England’478 when they refused to be tied by a particular member ofthe committee, walked offstage and left the crowd demanding their money back.Similar fiascos followed in Huddersfield and Leeds and on the Continent.

In later years, the great John Nevil Maskelyne claimed to have begun his owncareer of stage magic by unmasking the Davenports. He was sitting to one sideof the stage at a performance in Cheltenham when

a small piece of drapery fell from the window behind me. A ray of sunshineshot into the cabinet, lighting up Ira Davenport, whose actions thus becamevisible to me. There sat Ira, with one hand behind him, and the other in theact of throwing the instruments out… I had discovered the secret.479

But it hardly needed Maskelyne to expose the brothers’ techniques. ThisCheltenham performance took place in March 1865 – weeks after the Northerntour had left the Davenports’ reputation in tatters. Unmasking the Davenports, infact, was fast becoming a favourite audience occupation, not only in Britain butalso in continental Europe, where audiences waited eagerly for the chance to showup the frauds for what they were. Yet, despite P. T. Barnum’s claim that ‘the verythorough exposure of the Davenports… is an additional proof – if such wereneeded of the truth of what I have alleged about the impostures perpetrated bythem and their “mysterious” brethren of the exhibiting sort’,480 both spiritualismand the Davenports thrived. The Davenports thrived because their growingreputation for fallibility seemed to attract audiences rather than deter them.Spiritualism thrived because ‘the exhibiting sort’ were only peripheral to its mainpopularity. By the 1860s it had become both a mass religious phenomenon and animportant area for scientific investigation.

Science and spiritualismThis is one of the reasons why Spiritualism is such an important culturalphenomenon in the nineteenth century. On one level it might appear to be aromantic reaction against the increasingly mechanistic and materialist world-view of nineteenth-century Europe and America – and for some people that isundoubtedly how it was experienced. But it also offered the possibility for areunion between a religious and a scientific world-view. It arose at a time whenthe two great ways of explaining the universe, religion and science, seemed seton opposite paths; when each major scientific discovery made the hypothesis ofa divine creator seem less and less necessary; and when Christian theologians



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made their strongest arguments for faith in despite of, rather than because of,scientific advances. A belief in both science and Christianity was by no meansimpossible, but attempts to reconcile these two kinds of knowledge and beliefwere becoming increasingly problematic – and not infrequently led thoseindividuals who tried to catastrophic crises of faith and of conscience.481 Thepossibility that, through an understanding of spiritualism, science and religionmight once more be reunited was a deeply seductive one.

The question provoked immense scientific controversy, the importance ofwhich went far beyond the reputations of the Fox sisters or the Davenportbrothers. Many of the greatest scientific minds of the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries were engaged in the debate on one side or the other – andmany of them as committed spiritualists or defenders of the spiritualistmovement. As a recent BBC television programme put it:

Some of science�s biggest names have not only dabbled in, but been entirelyconvinced by the world of the seance. Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander GrahamBell and John Logie Baird are familiar to most for the household indispensablesthey invented. But the attraction to spiritualism they all shared is definitely notpart of the GCSE science syllabus. All three men, and many other Victorianscientific pioneers, became involved with the religion, which depended onstrange forces being demonstrated through bizarre phenomena.482

Towards the end of his life Edison seems to have seriously considered thepossibility of a machine which he hoped would do just that and be able tocommunicate with the dead. In an article in Scientific American for 30th October1920 he argued that

[i]f our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assumethat it retains memory, intellect and other faculties and knowledge that weacquire on this Earth. Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death,it is reasonable to conclude that those who leave this Earth would like tocommunicate with those they have left here… I am inclined to believe thatour personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning becorrect, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected ormoved or manipulated… by our personality as it survives in the next life, suchan instrument, when made available, ought to record something’. 483

There is no evidence of Edison’s having attempted to construct a machine – thatwas left to others such as F. R. Melton, a Nottinghamshire inventor who, in the1920s, developed a ‘spirit telephone’ with which he believed he would be able toamplify psychic voices which were already in the ether.484 However, afterEdison’s death, John Logie Baird – another of the pioneers of television – claimed


to have been at a séance in which the spirit of Edison was contacted.485 GuglielmoMarconi and Nikolai Tesla, both of whom take some share of the credit for theinvention of radio, were both reported to have received strange and unexpectedsignals on their wireless equipment, sounds which they believed to becommunications from another world.486 Oliver Lodge, the British physicist whosecontributions to the development of wireless telegraphy led him to become thefirst person to transmit a radio signal, a year before Marconi, looked to acombination of psychical and physical research to provide the missing linkbetween the spiritual and the material.487 He was a friend of Doyle; like him hehad lost a son in the First World War, and believed that he was in spirit contactwith his lost boy.488

Perhaps the most impressive of all the scientific spiritualists was Sir WilliamCrookes – an extraordinary experimental scientist, a chemist and physicist whowas at various times in his life President of the Chemical Society, the Institutionof Electrical Engineers, the Society of Chemical Industry, the British Associationand the Royal Society. His work touched on a number of key areas in early-twentieth-century science, including the identification of elements, spectroscopyand radiography. His investigations into cathode rays, including early versions ofthe cathode ray tube, led to the development of television technology. Crookesfirst approached Spiritualism in a spirit of scepticism, intending to apply a strictlyscientific rigour to the study, and assuming it to be superstition and trickery. Hisstudies of celebrated mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home and FlorenceCook, however, convinced him of the reality of Spirit phenomena, and he wroteseveral books and papers on the subject.489 Speaking to the British Associationin 1898 he said, ‘Thirty years have passed since I published an account ofexperiments tending to show that outside our scientific knowledge there exists aForce exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence commonto mortals. I have nothing to retract. I adhere to my already published statements.Indeed, I might add much thereto.’490

It is important not to overstate the case or to swing to the opposite extremeand suggest that the weight of orthodox scientific opinion was actually on theside of the spiritualists. There was plenty of opposition too. Foremost amongstthe sceptics was the fundamentalist Christian and the most brilliant physicist ofhis generation, Michael Faraday, who, in letters to The Times and lectures to theRoyal Society, proclaimed his contempt for the claims of spiritualism.491 Andwhile Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, is often enlisted insupport of the spiritualists, and was indeed interested in its possibilities as ayoung man, he soon rejected the possibility of spirit communication. He wroteto his fiancée, Mabel Hubbard, in 1875:

The subject of ‘Spiritualism’ is one that interests me exceedingly although Ihaven’t a particle of belief in the reality of the manifestations… My brother


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Melville and I were at one time much interested in Spiritualism. We made asolemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour tocommunicate with the other if it were possible to do so… It is now betweenfive and six years since my brother died, but nothing has happened to makeme alter my opinion concerning Spiritualism.492

The point is that while many scientists remained sceptical about the claims ofspiritualism, the argument about spiritualism was not between science andsuperstition: it was taking place within the scientific community itself. Houdinihimself acknowledged this even while pouring his contempt on

the credulous, wonder-loving scientist [who] still abides with us, and whilehis serious-minded brothers are wringing from Nature her jealously guardedsecrets, the knowledge of which benefits all mankind, he gravely follows thatWill-of-the-wisp, spiritism, and lays the flattering unction to his soul that heis investigating ‘psychic phenomena’.493

The caricature which Houdini draws of his opponents does not fit the reality.It was major figures from the scientific establishment who showed seriousinterest in the possibilities of Spiritualism over a period of nearly a hundredyears. Some of them, such as Crookes and Lodge, devoted much of their energyto an attempt to establish a scientific basis for the study of spirit communication.In his disagreement with Houdini, Doyle was not simply seduced by a lunaticfringe: he was taking an intellectual position which was not only theoreticallytenable within the scientific paradigms of the day, but actually supported bymany of the most practical and forward-looking of the great names in science:the pioneers whose work laid the foundation for the communications revolutionof the twentieth century. It is a fortuitous pun: those scientists who were mostwilling to countenance the spiritualist mediums were the ones who inventedthe electronic media. It is perhaps not surprising that those who were workingwith the ‘invisible’ communication technologies that would come to dominatethe twentieth century should show most interest in imagining how far theimplications of their discoveries might extend into the realms of metaphysics.Seen from this perspective, Doyle’s argument with Houdini becomes more thanjust the conflict between the naïve (and rather romantic) novelist and the hard-headed showman. If Doyle’s position meant that he was aligned with thediscredited Fox sisters and Davenport brothers, it also meant that he wasaligned with Marconi, Edison, Crookes, Tesla, Logie Baird and Lodge.494

There is another philosophical conflict underlying this one. Houdini’s careerwas built on an aesthetic of bodily presence: the escapologist displayed hisbody, allowed his body to be restrained, liberated his body from bonds… Liveperformance and bodily presence were the essence of his act – so much so that


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when he attempted to transfer his performance to the movies the results weredisastrous. Thanks to pioneers such as Edison, Marconi, Crookes and Lodge,however, the twentieth century was to be the century in which the greatdiscovery – even before the digital revolution – would be that

[e]lectricity has made angels of us all… spirit freed from flesh, capable ofinstant transportation anywhere… In preliterate societies, the separation ofspirit from flesh is thought to occur in the surrealist realm of dream, art,ritual, myth. Daily life, in the field or on the hunt, is intensely sensate, withall senses alert, and the spirit imprisoned in the body. We reverse this. Ourelectronic workaday world divorces images from physical reality.495

Not that Doyle saw things in this metaphorical way. In a sense, he too was aliteralist, and for him the real task was to establish and maintain communicationwith those individuals who had died and ‘passed over’. He continued to believethat the blatantly phoney Davenport Brothers ‘undoubtedly’ had mediumisticpowers.496 And when he invited Harry and Bess Houdini to the fateful séance inAtlantic City, he was there to investigate a huge and powerful radio amplifierwhich he believed might prove useful in communicating with the spirit world.497


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Chapter Ten

Magic, media and postmodernism

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or theconcept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: ahyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It isnevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – thatengenders the territory…

Jean Baudrillard498

Who wants to work on TV? There’s no money in it. Television is the crap endof magic. It’s the bottom end of showbusiness…

Paul Daniels499

Magic and the postmodernA theme of this book has been the way in which the meanings of magic changein relation to the society in which the magic is produced. Magic has one kindof meaning in the Renaissance, another in the Enlightenment, yet another inthe era of high industrial capitalism. The logic of the argument means thatinevitably this final chapter should address the recent past: the era of themodern and, more significantly, the postmodern condition.

The term ‘postmodern’ can hardly be avoided by anyone attempting to writeabout contemporary culture – especially contemporary popular culture. But howuseful is the word in a discussion of magic and conjuring? The twin projects ofexploring the direct influence which postmodern thinking has had on particularaspects of contemporary culture, and of using the standpoint of postmodernismas a theoretical perspective from which to analyse all sorts of cultural phenomenaboth past and present, amount by now to a respectable, and even a venerabletradition in academic inquiry. The tradition, however, has its problems.

Firstly, there is no real agreement as to what postmodernism actually is. Insofaras it is a technical term, many of its key philosophers themselves differ or disagreeabout its definition. For Jean-François Lyotard, it is about ‘an incredulity towardsmetanarratives’;500 for Jean Baudrillard (see epigraph abov) it is about a world ofsimulations, simulacra and hyperreality… In more general intellectual discoursethe word is used to refer to a whole range of overlapping concepts drawn from arange of largely French philosophers. These concepts include the refusal of‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ (such as Marxism and Christianity); afragmentation of the self and the rejection of the unified subject; avant-garde

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experiments with form, especially those involving a degree of aestheticfragmentation, self-reference or intertextuality; a mistrust of language’s abilityaccurately to describe the world; a rejection of categorical certainties and acorresponding dissolution of distinctions between (e.g.) high and low culture;and a mistrust of the truth claims of previously privileged discourses. At timesthe word seems to be used to refer to so many things that it ceases to be usefulas a category – which is, of course, ironically in keeping with some of postmodernism’s own tenets. Besides, many of the distinct features nowcommonly associated with it are not in themselves new or unique topostmodernism: experiments with fragmentation of aesthetic form pre-datepostmodernism, as does irony (a term which now seems hardly to exist in its ownright without the ‘postmodern’ tag). At the most basic level, postmodernismmight be defined as the result of the abandonment of the Enlightenment projectof rational enquiry into the human condition.501 Yet even this broad conceptneeds to be treated with some care lest it turn into a kind of grand narrative itself:no movement is ever total – we are only ever talking about tendencies. Just as theEnlightenment itself was not only about rational, scientific humanism, so thepostmodern age is postmodern only in parts. In 1984 Fredric Jameson claimedthat postmodernism is the cultural dominant of late or multinationalcapitalism;502 in 2006 the revival of religious fervour which is a dominant factorin global politics suggests a resurgent commitment to grand narratives on thepart of societies and individuals. Thus, for example, the beliefs and concernsof the American religious right, mediated through the policies of a Republicanpresidency, have a massive, and apparently increasing, impact on the everydaylives of a large proportion of the planet’s population.

Despite all these caveats, postmodernism is a term which cannot beignored. It has dominated cultural analysis over the last twenty or so years,and, consequently, it is important to take seriously those descriptions of thecontemporary world offered by postmodern philosophers and cultural critics. Inmany ways, moreover, the conjunction seems an appropriate one. Magicians, aswe have seen, have traditionally blurred the line between truth and reality. Aworld characterized by the hyper-real, by the ‘precession of simulacra’, and by adistrust of the rational, a world in which traditional epistemological distinctions,hierarchies and categories have been replaced by relativism, and where ‘the realand the imaginary continually collapse into each other’503 seems like fertileground for the magician. Earlier in the book, I was attempting to show howeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century conjuring operated in terms of anEnlightenment world-view; I now want consider its operation in terms of theapparent abandonment of that world-view. The point of this is not to prove thatsuch-and-such a performer can be fitted into the box marked ‘postmodernism’,or to insist that magic is relevant, cool or sexy because it is postmodern, but toexplore some of the ways in which the alleged abandonment of that

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Enlightenment project of rational criticism has influenced this aspect of popularculture. And since postmodernism is, among other things, a response to a worlddominated by mass communication and mediated reality, the rest of this chapterwill focus on conjuring in the broadcast media, and will look in particular at thework of David Blaine, who is, at the time of writing, the magician who is usingthat media most intensely and receiving its most constant attention.

Magic on televisionWe have already considered the ways in which magic and recorded media firstencountered each other: as the twentieth century progressed, conjurors foundvarious ways of coming to terms with the impact which recorded and broadcastmedia had on a performance art which initially appeared viable only in a livesituation. Houdini had a few unsatisfactory forays into film-making, whileHoward Thurstone and Harry Blackstone followed a more traditional route byincorporating films as part of the entertainment in their live shows.504 Moresuccessful, paradoxically, were experiments which utilized the medium of radio.In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, for example, ‘Blackstone’ (actually played by actorEd Jerome) featured on prime-time US radio as ‘The Magic Detective’, a serieswhich exploited structural similarities between the narrative of the conjuror’s actand that of the detective story. Called in to help solve various crimes, Blackstonewould mystify his friends, his glamorous assistant and the hapless criminals byapplying the techniques of the conjuror to the process of detection. At the endof each episode he then explained to listeners how to perform a simple magictrick.505 (This combination of conjuring and crime-busting was revived on UStelevision by the Magician series in the 1970s, and again on British television in the1990s with BBC’s Jonathan Creek, which added a conjuring twist to the classiclocked-room mystery format).

And in fact, television has been quite hospitable to ‘straight’ conjuring acts –partly because broadcast television in its early days was live, and thus able toescape, in part at least, the stigma of what Houdini called ‘camera trix’.506 In theUnited States the earliest successful television magician was Mark Wilson, whoseTime for Magic on WFAA local TV station in Texas in the Fifties was picked up byABC and became The Magic Land of Alakazam, the US’s first networked magicseries, which aired for five years on ABC and CBS507 from 1959. The pricetelevision demanded, initially at least, was that conjuring should increasingly learnto package itself as family viewing, downplaying any suggestions of danger ordarkness. This was especially true in America, where television advertisers andsponsors were particularly influential in the decisions of the programmers. Thus,a trick such as P. T. Selbit’s ‘Sawing the lady in half’, which in its theatricalmanifestation had an unquestionable sense of danger, becomes in Wilson’s handssomething much less threatening.508 In Britain, Robert Harbin (who had appearedon television as early as the 1940s) transformed the routine into ‘The Zig-Zag Girl’


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– an equally effective magic illusion, but one whose imagery is light-heartedlycomic rather than grotesque.509 Comedy and magic, in fact, become a regularcombination in television conjuring in the UK: the avuncular David Nixondeveloped a gentle comic routine; Paul Daniels adopted a persona which combinedconjuring skills with the patter and audience rapport of the Northern stand-up;while the great Tommy Cooper made his apparent ineptitude as a magician acentral part of his comedy act. More recently, the misanthropic, iconoclastic andoften very funny Jerry Sadowitz has two showbiz personae: as magician and stand-up comedian. His TV anti-talk show, An Audience with Jerry Sadowitz, ran from1998 to 2001 on Channel 5, and the distance between Sadowitz and Tommy Coopersays much about the changing relationship between television and conjuring.

One of the most brilliant TV magicians, however, was Uri Geller, who firstrose to fame in the Sixties and the early Seventies. He used – and at the time ofwriting continues to use – television as an essential tool of his magic, standing onits head the commonplace that magic only really works in a live setting: thetheatre, street or the close-up of table magic. Geller’s most effective stage wasnot the theatre, or even the televised magic spectacular. It was the TV chat show– a genre of popular entertainment which appears to position itself as a form oflive encounter. The chat show creates and exploits celebrity at the same time asits contrived intimacy appears to deny the falseness of celebrity, since it carrieswith it the implication that the audience is being given a privileged – and honest– view behind the scenes of celebrity life. It is, in effect, an extremely effectiveform of misdirection in itself. Thus, bending spoons on stage in a magic show isone thing: doing it in the relaxed environment of the chat show is another thingentirely. In that context, Geller was implicitly saying – ‘This is not showbiz; thisis me. I’m really doing this. Look, come closer, bring the cameras in as close asyou like. This is reality.’ The patter is the same but the framework is different.This is the showman apparently offstage. And as a piece of showmanship it issuperb. By claiming a genuine paranormal power he sets himself apart not onlyfrom rival conjurors, but also from the dominant ways in which the western mindhas traditionally explained the universe. He is making a huge claim: if, as hesuggests, he can bend the spoon or make your watch stop simply by the power ofhis will, then we have to re-think the whole way in which we understand the lawsof nature and our place in the cosmos. Little wonder that fellow magiciansdenounced him: not only was Geller breaking some kind of unwritten rule byclaiming paranormal powers, he was doing so in a way that was commerciallyenormously successful. He was turning himself into a celebrity – one of the mostpowerful forms of twentieth-century metamorphosis.

Fellow conjuror James Randi has carried on a debunking campaign againstGeller which is comparable to Houdini’s crusade against the spiritualist Marjorie.In this ongoing confrontation, Randi takes the part of the Enlightenmentrationalist. In fact Randi has developed his initial position of rational scepticism


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into a kind of intellectual mission: the website of the ‘James Randi EducationalFoundation’ is no ten-cent School of Magic like the young Professor Houdini’s,but a well-presented, wide-ranging and intelligent ‘non-profit learning resourceaimed at promoting critical thinking everywhere’.510 But where does that leaveGeller? Randi would say it leaves him among the ‘miracle-mongers’ who attemptto deceive a gullible world by claiming that their sleights of hand are genuinewonders. Another way of looking at it, however, is to see Geller as exploiting thevery condition of postmodernity which Baudrillard terms the ‘precession ofsimulacra’, where, in societies saturated by images, distinctions between thesimulated and the real have collapsed.

These are societies in which men and women make offers of marriage tocharacters in soap operas; where television villains are confronted in thestreet and warned about the possible future consequences of their villainousbehaviour; where television doctors, television lawyers and televisiondetectives regularly receive requests for help and advice.511

In this context, perhaps Uri Geller should be seen, not as a traditional charlatanbut as the first truly postmodern magician?

Other contenders for that title, in very different mode, include David Blaine(of whom more later), Penn and Teller, with their self-referential and ironic modeof performance, and the British conjuror Simon Drake. During the early 1990s,Drake’s Secret Cabaret was a rare example of a conjuring act which achieved ameasure of ‘cool’, in terms of success with young adult audiences. Magic wasnever quite the ‘new rock and roll’ but Drake himself was certainly capable ofplaying to the rock audience: he developed his idiosyncratic style touring large-scale rock venues with Kate Bush, and has appeared live with many other rockbands. The success of magicians such as Blaine and Derren Brown, as well asChannel 5’s Monkey Magic, now means that there is a widespread audience forconjuring of one kind or another, but when Drake’s Secret Cabaret was firstbroadcast this was by no means the case. Nonetheless, The Secret Cabaretbecame a cult TV show on Channel 4. Using the structural techniques of the rockvideo, it drew on the imagery of horror films: lighting, set, costume and musicworked together to evoke the world of the vampire movie, the slasher movie, orthe supernatural thriller, in which darkly erotic figures were threatened withgruesome deaths, tied to sacrificial altars or impaled on monstrous spikes. Playingto an audience well educated in such conventions of popular culture, Drakeinvited them to read his illusions intertextually, and to conflate the pleasures ofthe horror film with those of the conjuring performance. On the one hand theaudience was invited into the fantasy world of the horror movie, in which thespectator’s gratification lies in a complex interplay of ‘spectator-positions’, inwhich the sadistic pleasure of watching the horrors unfold on the body of the


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victim is intertwined with the masochistic one of identification with the victimhim- or herself. On the other, it was challenged – as a conjuror’s audience istypically challenged – to guess how it is done.

In fact The Secret Cabaret is an effective exercise in Brechtian theatricaltechnique. Brecht’s theories of theatre are rooted in his famous distinctionbetween Aristotelian theatre (which draws the spectator into sympathetic feelingfor the protagonist) and Epic theatre which continually interrupts that involvementby means of various techniques of alienation, forcing the spectator to step back andevaluate what she has just seen. The intertextual play between the horror movieand the conjuring trick which lay at the heart of The Secret Cabaret meant that thespectator was always caught between these two modes of engagement. The act wasexperienced by most spectators as a television programme, as part of the Channel4 series – but for the live audience there was the additional level of the liveness ofthe performer’s body; the tantalizing possibility, never present in the screening ofa horror movie, that there might be some real blood this time. Thus, Drake’sillusions become ironic reflections on illusion itself, on the very notion of whatColeridge called ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, whichconstitutes poetic faith’,512 and on the nature of the fantasies through which (say)the horror movie engages its audience. Such complex ironies and intertextualitiesare now habitually referred to as postmodern. Is it also ironic that Drake nowmaintains a successful career in corporate entertainment, specialising in ‘light-hearted amputations and decapitations of senior executives for corporate eventsand private functions’? And how postmodern is that?

If, as I suggested earlier, performances such as those of Stelarc and hisprosthetics ask one kind of question about the integrity of the unified humansubject, another kind of question is raised by the revival of the ‘mentalist’ act inthe hands of modern conjurors such as Derren Brown. Mental magic had itsheyday in the golden age of magic during the nineteenth century – although, aswe have seen, the basic techniques of the ‘mind-reading’ routine had beenestablished several centuries earlier. As ever, the magician was ready to learn –or steal – from the scientist, and the advent of clinical hypnotism. Franz AntonMesmer’s theories of mesmerism/hypnotism began with attempts to curepatients using magnets, from which, in the 1770s, he developed his celebratedtheory of ‘animal magnetism’, which he described as a physical fluid in thebloodstream. Mesmer himself was somewhat of a paradox: before his fame, hehad been a successful doctor in Vienna, but in all probability had plagiarized thedoctoral dissertation which won him his qualification.513 His demonstrations of‘animal magnetism’, laced with equal parts of showmanship and mysticism,were not universally accepted in his lifetime: many of his peers believed him tobe a fraud. Nonetheless, the therapeutic claims Mesmer made for his theorywere attractive to large sections of society in the Paris of the Enlightenment,who saw in them the promise of a rational explanation for all kinds of illness


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whose causes were otherwise unknown. As Robert Silverberg puts it, ‘Mesmerwas a charlatan who grew rich from the foolishness of his patients, but thestrange part of his story is that his notion of animal magnetism is still with ustoday, and is widely used in medicine as well as in the world ofentertainment.’.514 Freud’s investigation of the subconscious began with his useof hypnotism, which he had learned from Charcot, as a therapeutic tool in thetreatment of hysteria.

In fact, stage hypnotism as a branch of entertainment has undergone asudden and serious decline in very recent years, at least in the UK.515 A seriesof incidents in which subjects suffered real-life psychological disturbances afterbeing hypnotized on stage, and in particular the legal case of Howarth vGreen,516 have dealt a body blow to the profession. What had been a thrivingbranch of show business in the early Nineties, when hypnotist Paul McKennawas one of Britain’s best-paid and most successful television entertainers, isnow struggling for survival. Interestingly, McKenna himself, who was asuccessful defendant in one of these negligence cases, has successfully re-launched his career, not as an entertainer, but as a life skills guru. His bookChange Your Life in 7 Days (including free mind-programming CD) was a best-seller in 2004. A broadly sensible self-help book, which says little that has notbeen said by self-help books before it, Change Your Life in 7 Days, along withMcKenna’s books and DVDs on weight loss, smoking and self-confidence, showus the showman changing back into shaman, healer and therapist.

Postmodernist philosophy rejects the liberal-humanist concept of theunified subject, but in truth both hypnosis and Freud already threaten thatconcept – the one by demonstrating that the mind can be invaded and controlledfrom outside, the other by positing a multifaceted subjectivity, split between theconscious and the subconscious and consisting of an ego, a superego and an id,all of which frequently pull in different directions. (For that matter, the Goodand Bad Angels of Doctor Faustus’s conscience do something very similar forthe Renaissance subject!) But a particularly postmodern twist is added to thementalist act by Derren Brown, whose ‘Mind Control’ act skilfully skirts roundthe muddied waters of stage hypnotism, re-inventing old routines for a newaudience, insisting that he does not read his subjects’ minds nor hypnotizethem, but influences their thoughts. In particular, Brown explains, he operatesthrough the planting of various subliminal images, manipulating his subjects ata deep unconscious level in the same way that advertisers are supposed tomanipulate us through subliminal advertising.

One of the most memorable routines in his television show Mind Control wasone in which he used as voluntary subjects two men from the advertising industry.They had been asked – under closed conditions – to come up with a logo fora particular firm (of taxidermists). When they produced their designs, Brownopened an envelope to demonstrate that he had predicted precisely that design on


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their part. Then – to explain how it had been done – he played back to them partsof the programme which had been shown earlier, to demonstrate that earlier onthey had been subject to a series of subliminal messages. In the taxi on the wayto the experiment and in the lobby of the building in which it had been carriedout, they had been deliberately exposed to images which subconsciously theyhad then incorporated into their final design because he, Brown, had manipulatedthem into doing so. It was particularly sweet to see advertising executives on thereceiving end of such manipulation!

It was explained to the advertising executives that they had been influencedby subliminal advertising – that form of hidden persuasion whereby the publiccan be coerced into making certain decisions by means of images and messageswhich do not even register with the conscious mind. This term ‘subliminaladvertising’ comes from the late 1950s, from the work of James Vicary, whoconducted a series of experiments on cinema viewers in a New Jersey movietheatre in order to prove that by flashing advertising suggestions (‘Drink Coca-Cola’ and ‘Hungry? Eat Pop-Corn’) onto the screen during the playing of themovie, for just 1/3000th of a second at a time, below the threshold of consciousperception, the audience could be coerced into buying these products. Vicary’sexperiment seemed to result in a 57.8 per cent rise in popcorn sales and an18.1 per cent rise in Coca-Cola sales.

In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Brown’s 2005 live touring show,subliminal advertising featured again: the finale involved a long and complexsequence which involves sealed envelopes and audience volunteers. Through aseries of correct predictions, Brown eliminated all but the final envelope – whichwas locked inside a suitcase much earlier in the show. Once more, a series ofsteps led to a final prediction: a word, taken from an article in that day’s paper,was on a card inside the case. The audience as a whole had made the choicewhich newspaper to go for: it had turned out, on the night I saw it, to be the DailyMail; a variety of audience volunteers had chosen which page of the paper (pagethirteen), which article on the page, which word in the article… By a series ofseparate stages, each one apparently random, the word ‘executive’ was selected –and that was the word in the sealed envelope, locked within the suitcase!

By way of finale, Brown again ‘explains’ the trick. It’s similar to theadvertising-exec routine, but in the context of a live performance, and with us,the audience, as the victims. A video camera (the audience had been shown itearlier in the show but not told its function) had been running throughout theperformance, we are informed. Brown now plays back videotaped momentsfrom earlier in the show to demonstrate that he had implanted similarsubliminal messages in our minds. The word ‘Mail’, the number 13, the word‘executive’ itself – all these were, as the edited footage now proves to us in actionreplay, continually repeated to us at odd times and in unlikely contexts duringthe earlier parts of the show in order to influence us. We, the audience, acting


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both communally and individually, had made a series of unconscious choiceswhich took us to the point where the word ‘executive’ on that piece of paper was(Brown explains) the inevitable choice. We, like the advertising executives, hadbeen manipulated into choosing what Brown wanted us to choose. The detailedexplanation of how we had been fooled forms the climax to the show. All isrevealed, and Brown’s powers – not as a psychic, not as a prestidigitator, but asa ‘Jedi Master’517 of mass psychology – are confirmed. We go home, no longerasking how he did it, but knowing how it was done – and both amazed anddisturbed. We, like the advertising executives on the television show, had beenthe victims of a form of subliminal advertising.

That, at least, is the narrative which we are asked to accept. The camera afterall never lies… And we all know about the subtle ways in which late capitalismseeks to manipulate us as consumers, we know that mass media has the powerto influence us at levels which we ourselves do not perceive. Subliminaladvertising clearly works. Except that it doesn’t. While subliminal perception isa well-substantiated psychological phenomenon (our senses can indeed takethings in which our conscious minds do not register), there is no evidence tosuggest that such sense-impressions can be used to influence us directly – tomake us buy, choose, vote in a particular way.518 James Vicary’s experiment wasa fraud: subsequent attempts to duplicate it failed to establish any increasedpattern of purchasing, and Vicary himself eventually admitted that he hadfalsified his original experimental data. The power of subliminal advertising isnothing but an urban myth.

It is, however a very potent one. The experiments and their apparentconclusions remain in the public memory: the US Congress drafted legislationforbidding subliminal advertising, the Federal Communications Commissionbanned it from TV and radio broadcasting in 1974. Later writers repeated Vicary’sunsubstantiated claims about the efficacy of subliminal advertising, while Vicary’sown confession of his fraud received very little media coverage, and was soonforgotten. It seems that there is a will to believe in the almost limitless power ofthe advertising industry. If Vicary’s experiment chimed very much with the moodof its own time (1957 was also the year that Vance Packer’s The Hidden Persuadersmade the best-seller lists with its analysis of the power of the advertisingindustry) it continues to resonate with ours. In a culture which is saturated byadvertising, it is hard not to believe in the almost limitless power of the hiddenpersuaders to creep beneath the thresholds of our consciousness and tinker withour minds. Derren Brown’s explanation – his apparent demonstration – of hispower to do this, is satisfying to us on a deep cultural level. The routine – and,most importantly, his explanation of it – offers a satisfactory explanation forotherwise amazing phenomenon because it mobilizes our expectations of beingmanipulated by mass media, by the advertising industry, by politicians, byindustrial/military complex etc. And, by his use of the video camera, and the


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instant editing it affords, Brown wittily employs the technology of the mass mediato do it. Witty, self-referential and ironic – it is a very sophisticated routine, andone well-suited to the postmodern age of late capitalism.519

David Blaine: acting the part of a martyr

I felt I was in the middle of a Kafka novel.David Blaine520

Resolution – the tidy ending – is the tradition in magic… Someonedisappears, he reappears. The ambiguity in contemporary film and literaturehad been missing from magic. It�s time for magic’s postmodern period.

David Copperfield521

If any one conjuror might be credited with (or accused of) taking contemporarymagic into the ambiguous postmodern period that David Copperfield describes,it is probably David Blaine. Like Houdini (with whom he himself constantlyinvites comparison) Blaine is a celebrity figure. His friends include – or haveincluded – film and pop megastars such as Leonardo di Caprio and MichaelJackson as well as magicians from previous eras such as Uri Geller. LikeHoudini, Blaine is capable of pulling large crowds and of staging performanceswhich seem in some way to have some cultural importance – to matter. UnlikeHoudini, however, who was elected President of the American Association ofMagicians, Blaine does not, it seems, have a very high reputation among fellowconjurors. Discussions on TalkMagic, a UK online chat forum for enthusiastsand practitioners reveal evidence of scepticism about him: one contributorwrites, ‘I was a bit baffled when Blaine was stuck up that pole, in a little box,in London for so long. He didn�t escape or anything! That *might* beendurance, but it�s not *magic* for me! Actually it was very, very, very, veryboring!’ Another adds, ‘David Blaine is just a good club level magician that gotlucky’.522 Whereas most celebrities are constructed in the public consciousnesson the basis of a spurious ‘knowability’ or familiarity, one of the interestingthings about Blaine is the difficulty which so many people have of knowing whatto make of him.

The consensus among conjurors seems to be that Blaine is a competent butnot spectacularly good performer, and that his real skill is for self-publicity. Notthat this is such a bad thing for a magician: Houdini was as skilled a self-publicistas he was an illusionist, and the arts of illusion and self-publicity are closelyaligned. In the history of stage magic it is virtually a cliché to say that one ofHoudini’s greatest tricks was the creation of Houdini; like so many clichés,however, this points to an important truth. Ehrich Weiss created his alter ego,


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Harry Houdini, who grew from a popular entertainer into (eventually) a quasi-mythical figure – a carefully constructed nexus of symbols and suggestions whichpushed important buttons in the psyche of early- twentieth-century America andEurope. It may be that Blaine is a controversial figure in the world of magic (andpopular entertainment in general) because he, too, pushes such buttons, createssuch mythical resonances in the figure of the conjuror. But where Houdini’smyth-making is regarded with affection, Blaine’s is frequently derided. Thediscussion of Blaine’s performance on TalkMagic continues:

A: …when I hear people comparing Houdini with Blaine, my blood boils.Simply put, there is no real comparison. Houdini was a master of controllingthe media and he did this on his own. Blaine has a team of publicists. Possibly,you could compare Blaine’s collective publicists to Houdini, but not Blainehimself. Add to this the fact that Houdini was loved by the general populaceand Blaine’s latest stunt, ‘Over the Under,’ [sic] left him the butt of many jokesin England and quite despised, and the comparisons really begin falling apart.

B: Blaine�s ego was obviously demonstrated in his poor judgment of staging‘Above the Below’ here in Britain. He expected every body to stop and actuallytake notice of him when in actual fact people merely mocked him.523

To the outsider the professional criticisms of Blaine seem somewhat mean-minded: Blaine paid his dues as a jobbing magician and made his name withclose-up magic in restaurants and clubs before embarking on a media career thatsuccessfully brought some of the excitement of street magic to the small screenwith the networked show ‘Street Magic’. As one or two of the more generousvoices on TalkMagic acknowledge, he ‘made magic cool again’.524 It was only laterthat he progressed to larger stunts, like Above the Below and Frozen in Time inwhich he was entombed in a block of ice for three days, Vertigo which saw himstand perched on a ninety-foot-high pole for 35 hours, or the self-explanatoryBuried Alive. Perhaps some of the responses can be put down to professionaljealousy: in a profession in which few are able to make a living wage, Blaine’smedia status, and the reputed dollars which accompany it,525 make him a naturaltarget for resentment. But even taking this into account, Blaine’s reputation was– and remains – remarkably low amongst his fellow magicians.

Perhaps even more difficult to explain is the violent and aggressive response tohis act by many members of the public. Blaine has plenty of fans, yet those whotake against him do so, it seems, in particularly vitriolic ways. ‘People merelymocked him’, says one of the contributors to TalkMagic – but the word hardly doesjustice to some of the responses from the crowd below. Blaine-baiting took variousforms during ‘Above the Below’. One man with a golf iron and several dozen ballsused Blaine’s perspex cage as target practice. Another attached a beefburger to aremote-controlled toy helicopter and flew it up to his box to taunt him. Men bared


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their arses at him and women their breasts; one woman mockingly displayedherself naked beneath the box in order to arouse him sexually. More common werethe eggs, paint and various foodstuffs with which some of the onlookers jeeringlypelted the dangling conjuror.526 It may be that Blaine was on the receiving end of arising feeling of anti-Americanism in the wake of the Second Gulf War earlier inthe year, and the failure of the hunt for the illusory weapons of mass destructionon which the British involvement in the invasion of Iraq had been predicated.Certainly the nationalistic suggestion made by the TalkMagic contributors quotedabove – that American audiences may be stupid enough to be fooled by Blaine’santics, but that he is making a mistake trying it on with the sceptical British –captured a sentiment that was commonly expressed at the time.

Fiona McCade’s wittily unsympathetic review of Above the Below sums upthe general tone of anti-Blaine camp, together with an explanation based onnational character. The British audience, she tells us,

were just bored and hoping for a seizure, or at least a small haemorrhage, torelieve the monotony. It’s all very well being told that someone’s internalorgans are digesting themselves, but unless you’re watching When GoodOrgans Go Bad on the Discovery Channel, self-absorption – be it physical ormental – is a dull business.

What the American Blaine failed to grasp is that the British like their magicto be magical. A white rabbit starving to death in a top hat would have beena better idea, but then the old British love of animals would have kicked in.Much as Blaine’s head would have been if he’d messed with a bunny.

We’d have appreciated Paul Daniels, entombed in concrete for, well, as longas you like really, but even that wouldn’t have entranced us. When a magiciansteadfastly refuses to be magical – and Blaine’s friend Uri Geller, who hasmade a whole career out of not being magical, insisted Blaine’s ordeal wasofficially Not Magic – then what’s left? As a stunt, it was crap… So what wasit? …It was pointless, self-obsessed and involved bad hygiene and Perspex. Inshort, the perfect modern art installation.527

A more sympathetic review had appeared a few weeks before McCade’s in theGuardian – one which was given weight by the fact that it was written byMichael Billington, for twenty years probably the most continually influentialtheatre critic in the UK. Billington talks of how he started off in a mood ofBeckettian scepticism. However,

what gradually hits me is that, having arrived at the South Bank as ametaphorical Blaine-basher, I am now succumbing to the carnivalatmosphere. The sunshine, of course, helps. But the bizarre paradox is that


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Blaine�s act of imprisonment seems to have a liberating effect on the rest ofus. Stay there long enough and you not only begin to forget your own rusheddaily routine but meet lots of interesting new people. It says something aboutour own form of solitary confinement that it takes a man in a glass box to getus to open up to other human beings.

It may not be drama or magic but the Blaine experiment also has the powerof a puzzle. George Stratis, supervising a party of busily sketching 11-year-olds from Alexandra Park School, said to me: ‘The question I keep asking is�Why?� What drives him? Is it self-fulfilment, money, vanity, exhibitionism,the desire to test human powers of endurance?’

That was the same question everyone was asking, though rarely so succinctlyexpressed. There is no easy answer: the truth is that Blaine, as Churchillonce said of Russia, is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. But,precisely because we can all attach our own private meaning to Blaine�saction, this strange public confinement in the end acquires something of theunresolvable ambiguity of art. 528

For Billington, as for McCade, ‘the intriguing question is: what are we reallywatching? A piece of performance art? A 44-day play? A theatrical illusion?’ Hecontrasts Blaine’s stunt to an account of a Houdini escape from a locked trunk,in which Houdini escaped very quickly but then let the audience sweat it out for45 minutes before appearing, apparently exhausted. But in the case of Blaine, asBillington acknowledges, ‘there is no gimmick: he really does seem to be goingthrough a form of living hell.’

Magic that ‘steadfastly refuses to be magical’ breaks certain boundaries, notleast by refusing the audience’s expectation of being fooled. An article in TheIndependent on the same day observed that ‘Plenty of people have turned out tosee Blaine. But hardly anyone is willing, it seems, to believe that what they see iswhat they get.’529 Houdini insisted that his act was based on mechanisms andtricks – and Doyle refused to believe him. Blaine insisted that all he was doingwas sitting in a box losing weight, and the audience wanted to know where thetricks were. Various theories circulated among the crowd which watched belowat Tower Bridge, from the plausible to the preposterous. Did the water which wassupposed to be Blaine’s only sustenance for 44 days actually contain an invisiblebut nutritious soup? Was his lip salve impregnated with nutrients? Was there asecret escape hatch which allowed him to leave the box at night for a slap-upmeal, leaving behind a hologram or automaton or body double in his place? Wasthe duvet which was his only covering, actually made of a giant marshmallowwhich he secretly ate, replacing the lost mass with inflatable material…?530 Thepossible explanations proliferate: whether your conclusion is that ‘as a stunt itwas crap’ or that ‘Blaine’s action acquires something of the unresolvable


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ambiguity of art’, hardly anybody is willing to believe that what they see is whatthey get. The questions raised by Blaine’s act are, in a sense, the kinds ofquestions that avant-garde art forms tend to attract: on the one hand, questionsof categorization – what are we dealing with here? – and, on the other hand,questions about justification: what’s the point? They pose an epistemologicalconundrum: what does it all mean?

Yet, paradoxically, the main difficulty with understanding Blaine’s act has lessto do with an absence of meaning than with an excess of possible meanings.David Blaine resolutely and repeatedly stages illusions – if they are illusions –which operate intertextually and referentially. This, of course, hardly makes himunique among magicians. There is something implicitly intertextual in the moststandard of magic routines: the meaning of which is derived from the way inwhich it both repeats and varies narratives derived from earlier practitioners.When a magician produces a dove from nowhere, he does so in the fullknowledge – a knowledge which he knows the audience shares – that he isrepeating a routine performed by previous practitioners. The skilful magicianallows the audience both the pleasure of recognition – the knowledge of the kindof trick they are about to see – and of novelty: this time the trick is done slightlydifferently or has a twist. So if Blaine’s act seems to gesture towards earlierillusionists, it does so in company with nearly every other magician who everperformed. Nonetheless, there is something particularly knowing about thereferential nature of Blaine’s performances: the references to other magiciansare part of the meaning of the act itself. It is not surprising that he has written abook, Mysterious Stranger, in which autobiography is interwoven with a historyof magic. As I have already suggested, when magicians write about magic, theyare engaged in a performative act. Blaine’s book is a good example of this:Mysterious Stranger is part of that larger social performance which is the DavidBlaine show, and in which Blaine writes himself into the history of magic. Hedoes this both by means of his illusions and by the way in which the narrative ofmagic history is woven into those illusions. As writer and as performer, Blainepresents himself both as a practitioner and as a scholar of magic. Theintertextuality with which he engages is most often with the great illusionists ofthe past. He re-creates the first recorded magic trick, Dedi’s decapitationroutine, on the streets of New York. Even more obvious is the way in whichBlaine’s illusions continually refer to Harry Houdini. It is, perhaps, hard for anillusionist to escape the shadow of Houdini. It is a comparison which Blaineencourages and exploits – and which so irritated the contributors to TalkMagic.The posters for Buried Alive (like much of Blaine’s publicity) were couched in agraphic style redolent of the 1920s: the connotations of Houdini are alreadyunmistakeable. Blaine has made no secret of his admiration for the greatescapologist; and the public, crowd-gathering feats of endurance andconfinement which constitute many of Blaine’s most high-profile acts make it


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almost inevitable that journalists would attach such labels as ‘The Next Houdini’to him (as, for example, on the cover page of the ‘Now’ section of New York’sDaily News for 5 April 1999). After the successful completion of the feat, theNew York Post reported how Blaine

said he devised the ‘Buried Alive’ stunt because his idol, Houdini, had beencontemplating a similar feat before his death in 1926.

But yesterday Houdini’s niece said the master escapist would not havesurvived seven days… ‘My uncle did some amazing things but he couldn’thave done this,’ said Marie Blood. ‘He was so athletic and active that hewouldn’t have had the patience that David showed.’531

The compliment is perhaps a little double-edged. Later, in Mysterious Stranger,Blaine himself elaborates the comparison. He reproduces a poster which Houdinidesigned for a live burial routine within his stage act, adding dryly, ‘He neverperformed it’,532 and quotes Houdini’s own account of a bet he had made, that hecould be buried alive six feet underground and escape:

Houdini’s only condition was that the burials be graded, first escaping fromone foot under, then two, slowly working his way to six feet deep. Houdini andhis party left Los Angeles and drove to Santa Ana, where he knew the soil wassandy and would allow some oxygen to penetrate it. He breezed throughthe shallow burials, but he had some difficulty with the four- and five-footplantings. Then, when he attempted to escape from a six-foot grave, he gotthe scare of his life.533

Houdini panicked, yelled and only barely escaped with his life. ‘My friends aboutthe grave’, writes Houdini, ‘said that, chalky and pale and wild-eyed as I was,I presented a perfect imitation of a dead man rising’.534 The point of thenarrative in Mysterious Stranger is to underline the sense in which he, Blaine,competes with – and in this case outdoes – Houdini.

But if one of the referential sets which Blaine mobilizes is comparison with greatfigures from the history of magic, another is altogether more mythical. Blaine’sperformances continually draw on imagery from religious traditions. In theMysterious Stranger account of ‘Buried Alive’, he stresses not only the links withHoudini, but also with traditions of sacred endurance, from, for example, India:

By the 1950s burying oneself alive was common practice in India. Thesincere holy men who attempted this feat without resorting to trickeryinvariably wound up suffocated and dead. Their numbers were so large thatin 1955, the Indian government formally outlawed living burials.535


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Much more significantly, however, Blaine draws on Christian traditions. Theimage of death and resurrection which is implicit in ‘Buried Alive’ has, of course,huge resonances within Christian thought. How disingenuous, then is Blainebeing, when he casually drops into his description of this feat the fact that ‘I hadoriginally planned to be buried on Good Friday, and I was going to spend mybirthday, which fell that year on Easter Sunday, underground, but we delayed ituntil the religious holiday was over’?536 A similar theme of death and resurrectionis apparent elsewhere in Blaine’s routines: ‘Frozen in Time’ sees him frozen inice for the religiously symbolic period of three days. ‘Vertigo’ in which he stood ona high column, re-enacts the feat of the mystical figure of St. Simeon Stylites –‘the first and probably the most famous of the long succession of stylitoe, or “pillar-hermits”, who during more than six centuries acquired by theirstrange form of asceticism a great reputation for holiness throughout easternChristendom.’537 Simeon, a fourth-century Christian monk, undertookincreasingly intense feats of self-deprivation, fasting, mortifying his own body, andeventually withdrawing to the desert where he imprisoned himself on a platformon a pillar fifty feet above the ground. Paradoxically, his (apparently sincere)attempt to retreat from society only increased his celebrity: crowds of pilgrimsfollowed him into the wilderness in an attempt to benefit from his enlightenment.

Blaine’s ‘Above the Below’ exploits similar connotations. A man sits in abox, fasting, an object of curiosity and fascination to the crowds below. For morethan forty days he exists without food and sustenance. When he emerges fromhis self-imposed seclusion he addresses the crowd, sharing with them theenlightenment he has attained through his ordeal, blessing them, weeping:

This has been one of the most important experiences of my life. I’ve learnedmore in that – in that little box than I have in years. I learned… nothing makesany sense anyway. I learned how strong we all are as human beings – howstrong we all are. But most importantly, I learned to appreciate all the simplethings in life. A smile from a strange one or a loved one. The sunrise, thesunset. Everything that God has given us. And I thank you all so much.538

It is a performance which is distilled from a heady mix of Houdini, Christiantraditions, high art and popular culture.

The high art comes courtesy of Franz Kafka. Blaine’s own reference to Kafkain the epigraph to this section is significant, for Kafka inhabits the same kind ofcultural niche as the performance artist, in whose terms Blaine seems to framehis own act. Of Above the Below, Blaine has said, ‘I think of it as [a] performance-art piece… it also had to do with the Kafka short story called “The HungerArtist”, about this performer that put himself on display in a little cage andstarved himself.’ 539 Kafka’s ‘Hunger Artist’ is written to be understood on ametaphorical level, as a parable of the suffering artist. Blaine, however, engages


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with it on a literal level – and actually does so in a very precise way, recreatingthe conditions of Kafka’s fiction in terms which would not have been apparentto the audience of Above the Below. The spectators in Kafka’s story lose interestin the Hunger Artist because they are never quite convinced that he is reallysuffering; Blaine’s performance-art piece evoked the same puzzle for many of thespectators at Tower Bridge.

Kafka’s narrative seems idiosyncratically surreal. In fact, behind this fantasyof the hunger artist lies a tradition of real-life figures. The nineteenth-century’sfascination with the body as exhibit, the same fascination which gave rise to thefreak show, leads to some outlandish places. The German poet Heinrich Heinedescribed one example in which the real-life hunger artist appears as politicalpropagandist.

Near the Porte Saint-Martin there lay on the damp pavement a death pale,hoarsely coughing man, of whom the crowd said that he was dying of hunger.But my companion assured me that this man died of hunger every day inanother street and got his living by it, being paid for it by the Carlists, in orderthat the mob by such a sight might be goaded against the government. Itwould appear however, that this cannot be a very remunerative calling,because such numbers of those who follow it actually do starve to death.540

In another context, of course, periodic fasting is a traditional activity within manyreligions, done for the sake of purification, mortification or enlightenment. It cantake various forms: it may be governed by the calendar or by the needs of the individual; it may be undertaken communally or in solitude ; it may be ofvarying degrees of intensity – from the comparatively light abstinence of Lentin contemporary western culture, which might involve giving up a luxury, to the intense deprivations of the devotee in the desert. It may be a matter of privatedevotion, or of public celebrity, and it may not always be easy to tell the differencebetween the two. In the Middle Ages, saints such as Saint Catherine of Sienawere known to establish their holiness by periods of intense fasting – often, likeSimeon Stylites, achieving fame in their own lifetimes in the process. In fact,fasting as a way of making one’s name as a holy man or woman becameincreasingly disturbing to the medieval church – which had originally been quiteenthusiastic about the mortification of the flesh. In 1573 the Church officiallyrequested St Catherine to stop her fasting; she replied however that although shehad prayed to God for the ability to take food, she was simply unable to do so.The Church accepted this as a sign of her holiness, accepting, too, that whetherthey wanted it or not, they had a celebrity on their hands. A more moderndiagnosis would probably read her symptoms as a sign of anorexia.

Catherine may have achieved sainthood, but many others simply starved.With the benefit of such hindsight, it is certainly tempting to look to a simple


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medical model to explain the strange phenomenon of ‘fasting girls’ which wasa feature of both European and American folk culture. The most famous ofthe nineteenth-century British instances was Sarah Jacobs, the ‘Welsh FastingGirl’.541 Sarah’s case was first brought to national attention by a local minister,to whom Sarah seemed to be a saintly figure, in the tradition of the fasting saintsand holy men and women of the Middle Ages. He wrote to his local paper, andSarah, who was already a local celebrity, soon became a national one, the focusof theological as well as medical attention. Although she was confined to her bedand suffered from various ailments, Sarah was not emaciated or wasted; on thecontrary her many visitors were continually impressed by her vivacity and herprettiness. Many, like the minister, saw her as a holy figure: her nickname, the‘Wonderful Little Girl’, attests to the reverence which some felt for her.

The legal authorities, however, saw things differently. Sarah died and Evan andHannah Jacob, her parents, were committed on 15 March 1870 and tried at theassizes for the manslaughter of their daughter. Both were found guilty: Evan wassentenced to a year’s hard labour and Hannah to six months. Their gaunt facesstare out of the mugshots in the Carmarthen Record of Felons: numb, shocked,bewildered.

It is here, in the interstices of the canonized and the anathematized, ofthe holy and the pathological, that David Blaine’s unusual and much-deridedperformance is located. So much of Blaine’s act is quotation. Above the Belowquotes not only Houdini’s many heroic escapes and gestures towards the themeof death-and-resurrection, it also engages with the traditions of popularsainthood exemplified by both Catherine of Siena and Sarah Jacob. Its subjectmatter is deprivation, mortification of the flesh, confinement and starvation –those traditional themes of the performance of Sainthood. Its form is moreradical: Billington’s comparison with performance art is appropriate, for Blaine’sperformance has the same relation to traditional magic routines as some kindsof performance art has to traditional drama. This is non-matrixed magic, aform of performance which deliberately eschews the pleasures of the well-madeplay, abandoning narrative and concentrating on the fact of its own being to theextent that the spectator seems to become irrelevant. If it is not Magic, asksFiona McCade in her grumpy review of Above the Below, then what is it? It ismyth-making: conscious and pre-meditated. And – at some deep level –perhaps it is that consciousness, that pre-meditation that generates theambivalence that Blaine seems to generate in so many of his audiences andfellow-professionals.

The conjuror, said Robert-Houdin, is an actor playing the part of the magician.But what part is the magician playing? Houdini played the part of the hero, firstof all as the handcuff king, escaping miraculously against the odds, and, secondly,as the self-appointed nemesis of fraudsters and charlatans. Blaine chooses a moredramatic, or more grandiose, role still: that of Saint and martyr. It is a more


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difficult and complicated part to play than that of the hero or the fool, since whenpeople start to suspect the probity of the Saint they can turn nasty. There is,however, a paradox in this: on one level, the paint- and egg-throwing, the missiles,the taunting actually help to create the very effect that Blaine is seeking. Theaudience become part of the performance, and the rituals of humiliation whichthey perform contribute to the very drama of martyrdom which Blaine is enacting.

Even so, Above the Below remains problematic, and the memory it leaves inthe cultural consciousness is not one of success.542 The contributors to theTalkMagic forum locate the problem as being rooted in Blaine’s ‘ego’ on the onehand and his ‘team of publicists’ on the other. When Ehrich Weiss created theheroic figure of Houdini, he did so more or less unconsciously: the Houdini mythwas an experiment, undertaken at a time when the mass media was still in itsbirth throes, and when neither the forms nor the consequences of celebrity werefully understood. And Houdini shared the authorship of his own myth with hispublic: the most important part of its creation took place in the minds and theimaginations of those Americans and Europeans who responded to thatvulnerable, heroic figure. Blaine, by contrast, seems to know what the blueprintis. Nearly a century on from Houdini, Blaine’s books, websites, TV programmes,videos and DVDs are the inevitable product of an age where the process ofcanonization through celebrity is conducted so much more efficiently: thesuspicion arises that, like most celebrities, Blaine’s saintly figures appear some-what commodified. It is a particular hazard of postmodern art: to be subsumedby the global technologies by which you were initially enabled. No longer theauthor of his own script, Blaine is that which has been scripted – by Channel 4,by Sky TV, by Random House, by TimeWarner/AOL.

Magic in an age of technological rationalism

A real magic show is not an arena for secular distraction, but a relatively safe placefor us to experience the sacred.

Burger and Neale543

Magic is very real to the Haitians, and it has sinister connotations. As much asI tried to explain that what I was doing was entertainment, not real magic, theyweren’t buying it… Compared with Haiti, doing magic for the YanomamoIndians of the Venezuelan rain forest was a walk in the park.

David Blaine544

David Blaine is one of the many modern conjurors who have explored theencounter between his own illusions and the ritual performances of shamans insocieties where magic is, as he puts it, ‘very real’. It throws into sharp relief the


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argument, which we considered in Chapter One, that the art of the conjurorcontains a level of hidden symbolism which links us with a sacred past, remnantsof pre-industrial beliefs, echoes of shamanic rituals and magical practices nowemptied of their efficacy and re-born as entertainment. If this is so, the conjurorseems to offer a form of compensation for something lost: in an age of science andtechnology, belief in magic (which came naturally to earlier societies) is no longeravailable to us. By engaging in a theatrical context with the skills of the stageconjuror, however, we can experience imaginatively a kind of echo of the past andconvince ourselves temporarily that the world is still full of wonder and magic.

Yet to describe our culture as being ‘an age of science and technology’ is tooversimplify things – especially if we then assume that scientific/technologicalthinking has somehow made irrational belief impossible. In fact, the age isactually schizophrenic – or more accurately, multiphrenic – in its attitude toquestions of magic, wonder, the irrational. If the dominant mode of modernknowing is rational, sceptical and scientific in tone, there is also a rich alternativeculture. Magic is certainly in the air: the popular culture of the late twentieth andearly twenty-first century is saturated with images of magic.

It is possible to construct a provisional taxonomy of magic in contemporarypopular culture. In the area of popular fictions the phenomenally successfulHarry Potter books and films, the re-emergence of The Lord of the Rings as asignificant cultural presence and the revived interest in the magical Christianallegories of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia all offer magic as an ingredient of that fantasystaple, the eternal battle of good and evil. These, though, are only the tip of theiceberg. Fantasy programmes about witches (teenage and otherwise) and vampireslayers with magical powers are scattered liberally through the televisionschedules, while the descendants of Eighties ‘Swords-and-Sorcery’ fictions arethe basis of a large percentage of digital role-playing games. In most of these,magic tends to be seen largely in terms of thaumaturgical self-defence: it is asurvival tool, whether in the corridors of Hogwarts School or in the last great battleagainst the Dark Lord. The implied audience is often of teenage years (though theactual audience demographic may be much wider) and the heroes are frequentlyeither actually children or, in some way, childlike. The magical powers of thesefictional narratives offer the fantasy of being able to win out against the greaterodds of an adult world whose own powers appear supernaturally destructive.

Another kind of magic – the magic of being able to communicate with spirits –is the subject matter of documentary-style television series such as Living TV’sMost Haunted, in which teams of reporters explore reputedly haunted buildingsin order to investigate and experience the presence of the paranormal: ghostlyshapes, footfalls, unexplained fluctuations in temperature, objects that move ontheir own and other paranormal activities are repeated features of the series. Thesuccess of programmes such as this bear witness to the continuing importance ofthe supernatural in many peoples’ cultural lives. In a similar vein, but with a much


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broader frame of reference, the magazine Fortean Times, the ‘monthly magazineof news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities,prodigies and portents’,545 is thriving. It covers such topics as ghosts, mythicalbeasts, crop circles, flying saucers, psychic healing, alien contact, urban myths,calendrical customs, symbology and earth mysteries, while maintaining ‘aposition of benevolent scepticism towards both the orthodox and theunorthodox’546 which often amounts to a drily ironic attitude. Both television andthe printed media have found a substantial contemporary market which bothexploits and perpetuates folkloric beliefs in the uncanny.

Outside the world of the media, of course, the rise of alternative spiritualitieshas proved to be a significant phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. RobertForman has argued that the apparently diverse activities of unaffiliated individualswho practice their own private spirituality, as well as of groups such as ‘Buddhists,Neo-advaitan meditators, esoteric Christians, renewal Jews, Taoists, spiritualhealers, the spirituality in business consultants and so on… may well develop intosomething like a community across the great religious divides.’547 To this mightbe added the various branches of pagan and neo-pagan spiritualities, with theirvarious Wiccan, Druidic, Celtic, Norse, Roman, Greek and Egyptian variations.While not recognized as standard religious denominations in most countries,many of these new religions are sufficiently developed to be classed as fully-fledged faith communities with legal rights (such as the right of access to a pagan‘chaplain’ in UK prisons), and not all of them would claim a ‘magical’ dimension.Nonetheless, their status on the fringes of mainstream religious belief, togetherwith a surviving mystical strand of New Age thinking, remains popular enoughthat few English towns are without a shop in which you can buy crystals, charms,amulets, potions and books of spells for all sorts of purposes.

Within the mainstream Christian Church itself, forms of magical beliefcontinue to exercise massive influence on millions of people in various ways. Sixmillion pilgrims travel to Lourdes each year in the hope of a miraculous cure forailments. In America an ABC News poll in February 2004 found that 61 per centof Americans believe in the literal truth of Biblical narratives including theCreation story and Moses’ parting of the Red Sea.548 At the same time, as centristreligious institutions see attendances fall, the rise of ‘magical’ religiousfundamentalism of various kinds continues. Sometimes it goes beyondfundamentalism. In July 2005, Sita Kisanga, Sebastian Pinto and one otherunnamed woman, members of a North London Church, were gaoled for tenyears, four years and ten years respectively for torturing an 8-year-old girl theybelieved to be a witch. According to one member of the North London communityin which the torture took place, ‘In our community ndoki [witchcraft] happensbecause it is killing people. In our community in the UK everyone believes init.’549 Witchcraft beliefs are alive and well and thriving in North London.

Nor are such forms of occultism limited to marginalized sectors of thecommunity in the West: in a way that makes the X-Files look mundane, there are


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substantiated reports that a sector of US Military command has moved on fromits long-standing fascination with UFOs and has been developing a special unitfor use in the ‘war against terror’: the First Earth Battalion, by using New Agetechniques such as meditation, yoga, and guided imagery, aims at turning outwarriors who are a combination of Ninja, Jedi knight and advanced Zen master,capable of telepathy, of walking through walls, and of killing an animal – or ahuman being – simply by staring at it.550

What is this about? Is it some nostalgic reaction against the scepticalsecularism of the rational, technological age which characterizes late capitalism?Is it a protest against the alienation of contemporary urban life? A consequence ofchanges in traditional roles relating to gender, the family and authority in general?The result of intercultural encounters on a spiritual level due to immigration andtravel? A simultaneous disenchantment both with the established churches andwith scientific orthodoxy? A combination of all of these, combined with ‘an innatehuman drive for spirituality’?551 Whatever its causes, it goes extraordinarily deep.The journalist Francis Wheen, in a tirade against the ‘mumbo jumbo’ which hesees as having conquered the world, has argued despairingly that the values of theEnlightenment – ‘an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of traditionand authority as the infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry andpersecution, a commitment to free inquiry, a belief that (in Francis Bacon�swords) knowledge is indeed power’552 – are being undermined by New Agemystics, by religious fanatics, by postmodern relativists, by crystal-gazers andacademics, management gurus and alternative therapists… The list goes on. Arecent article in New Scientist by Richard Koch and Chris Smith (the former UKMinister of Culture) talks of the ‘widespread western, and especially American,descent into superstition… There is an apparent belief in magic that has noparallel since the Middle Ages.’553

The sociological and cultural causes which lie behind the current appetitefor fantasy magic, and the persistence of what Wheen refers to dismissivelyas ‘Mumbo-Jumbo’ are subjects too large to tackle here in any detail, althoughKoch and Smith’s thesis is worth consideration: that western science has eatenaway at the very intellectual conditions (i.e., a cosmology based in a belief in a oneall-powerful God whose perfect creation awaited rational scientific explanation)which made it possible in the first place. More to the point: does the currentcultural fascination with boy wizards and teenage witches, with astrology andgrimoires, have anything to do with conjuring and stage magic? I would say thatit does, and that this should alert us to some of the complexities of the functionof performed magic in the present day. Certainly there are areas of overlap. Forexample, Fortean Times concentrates mainly on the uncanny, but it also has ahealthy interest in the doings of conjurors, prestidigitators and stage illusionists:thus the July 2004 issue contains an interview-based article on Derren Brown, inwhich the author concludes: ‘I for one am looking forward to being furtherdeceived and enchanted – but Brown’s version of magic is not merely


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entertaining; it challenges you to examine your own beliefs.’554 The same issuealso has two articles on magicians, conjurors and illusionists at war, coveringincidents ranging from Robert-Houdin’s deception of the Marabouts (seeChapter Six) to Jasper Maskelyne’s large-scale illusions which managed to makethe Suez Canal invisible to enemy aircraft during the Second World War.555

Moreover, it is significant that the current appetite for magic and occultphenomena in the more general sense has coincided with a general revival ofinterest in magic in the sense of conjuring and illusion, especially among theyoung. Television programmes on magic are thriving like never before. Particularlysuccessful at the present time are performers whose work suggests somethingrather more ambiguous than the traditional skills of legerdemain associated withthe conventional stage conjuror: performers such as Derren Brown and DavidBlaine. If we do see something vestigial in the act of the contemporary conjuror,something which bears traces of an efficacious ritual, we should be careful howwe represent the implications of this. It seems natural to identify our ‘own’ culturewith the values of reason and science, and cultures of the past (or the distantpresent) with superstition and magic. Yet we too have our magical beliefs and thecomplexity of present-day culture allows for many strands.

Magical thinking in children has been studied in quite some detail. Magicalthinking in contemporary western adults has received rather less attention. It is,however, a widespread phenomenon, and one which is thrown into sharp reliefwhen brought up against stage magic and conjuring tricks. Psychologist AndreasHergovich conducted a series of experiments in which two groups of subjects –believers in paranormal phenomena and sceptics – were shown a series ofconjuring tricks (‘pseudo-psychic demonstrations’) and asked about what theythought they had experienced. Not surprisingly the experiments proved that

…belief in paranormal phenomena has a major effect on the reception ofpseudo-psychic demonstrations. Independently of whether a magic trick or aparanormal demonstration is expected, believers in paranormal phenomena inline with the results of Wiseman and Morris (1995) have a greater tendency tocategorise the presentation as paranormal than do sceptics. They exhibit agreater degree of amazement and do not assume that such phenomena arebased on fraud or a simple trick. The same mechanism of ‘‘immunisation’’ ofone’s own position also seems to apply to sceptics. They remain sceptical evenafter being told that they are about to witness a paranormal phenomenon.They have a greater tendency to assume fraud or dismiss the whole thingas a trick. Moreover, they are less amazed than believers in paranormalphenomena. Sceptics tend to be more impressed when the trick is declared tobe a magic trick from the start, while the opposite is true for believers inparanormal phenomena. They are more amazed when told that they are aboutto witness a demonstration of a paranormal phenomenon.556


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It is easy to be critical of such an apparently predictable – not say circular –conclusion: that believers in the paranormal are more likely to see paranormalmeanings in a magic trick, whereas sceptics are more likely to be sceptical. Butthe point is that the experiments of Hergovich and others indicate there are astatistically significant number of subjects for whom the paranormal explanationof a magic trick is plausible. Magical thinking, in the broadest sense of thephrase, is not limited to ‘primitive’ cultures; nor is it simply the false beliefs ofpre-literate peoples. Indeed, it is by no means incompatible with an informedunderstanding of modern technology: Wiccans and other pagan groups can claima high percentage of university-educated members, many of whom work in fieldssuch as information technology, electronics and new media. Magical thinking isnot merely something which mankind is destined to transcend as rationalismand science triumph: that linear/progressive view, which was once the acceptedethnological wisdom, appears to fly in the face of experience.

In the technology-driven societies of the western world in the twenty-firstcentury, believers in the paranormal, practisers of New Age spiritualities,followers of nature religions and western shamans join together with horoscopereaders, occultists and esotericists of all kinds in actively engaging in anexploration of alternate kinds of connections between man and the natural world.These explorations may in part be historically specific responses to a globalized,postmodern world; they may be something more deeply rooted in the humanpsyche: an aspect of being human, a way of being in the world which we sharewith our earliest ancestors. Either way, they represent a vein of contemporaryconsciousness which writers and film-makers have not been slow to tap into.The conjuror, as always, exploits it in two apparently contradictory ways:debunking mysticism in the name of rationalism, while simultaneously offeringtantalizing glimpses of wonder which suggest that, perhaps, after all, there arepossibilities that lie beyond the everyday realities of ‘common sense’. It is adouble-game which magicians have played through the ages. The conjuror’s actis made out of sleights of hand, trick equipment, lies and misdirections. We knowthat. And yet its effectiveness depends on its ability to make suckers of usnonetheless. In the process, sometimes it leaves us as disillusioned as theeighteenth-century London audience waiting in vain for the ‘Bottle-conjuror’ toappear. Sometimes it leaves us wanting to insist, as Houdini’s spiritualistadmirers insisted, that there is something more marvellous going on than theconjuror himself will admit. And at its most effective, perhaps, it leaves us in twominds and somewhere in-between: sceptical still, but with an odd suspicion that,as Edmund Wilson says, there may indeed be

…more to these feats and to our pleasure in them than we are likely to beconscious of… And the magician who escapes from the box: what is he butAdonis and Attis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise?557


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Endnotes1 Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (London: Bloomsbury

Publishing, 2004) p. 11.

2 Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Seattle: HermeticPress Ltd. 1995) p. 97.

3 See Dick Hebdige ‘Postmodernism and ‘The Other Side’’ in John Storey (ed.)Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. A Reader Second edition (1998) p. 372.

4 Reginald Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions of witchescontracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary, erroniousconceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, by ReginaldScot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 83.

5 I shall be using both terms, largely for the sake of variety.

6 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: an Introduction (New York andLondon: Routledge, 2002) p. 2.

7 Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004) pp. 90–91, 92.

8 Selbit’s claim to be the trick’s originator was vigorously challenged at the timeby Horace Goldin. See Horace Goldin, It’s Fun to Be Fooled (London: StanleyPaul & Co., 1937).

9 Women over thirty had been granted the vote in 1918.

10 I believe that this is a perfectly valid historical reading of Selbit’s routine –though the three-year gap between the legislation and the appearance of thetrick suggests that if this is to be seen as repressed male revenge, then perhapsthat revenge was on a rather slow burn. Equally, however, it could be pointedout that the routine involves not only dissection but also subsequentrestoration. A more optimistic reading might stress the resilience of the female.

11 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972) quoted in JohnStorey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture; A Reader (Harlow: LongmanPearson, 1998) p. 117.

12 Milburne Christopher, Magic: A Picture History (New York: Dover 1991.Reprint of Panorama of Magic, 1962) p. 190.

13 Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning, pp. 96, 98.

14 For what it is worth, my own preference is for the historically- and gender-specific reading. The trick is ‘Sawing a Woman in Half ’ – not ‘Sawing an

Footnote.qxd 4/2/07 6:36 PM Page 196

Assistant in Half ’. This, of course, has something to do with the ease withwhich a small-bodied woman will fit inside the trick box – but I believe that italso has something to do with the way in which gender politics operates in themind of the trick’s typical audience.

15 Una Chaudhuri, ‘Zoo Stories: ‘Boundary Work’ in Theater History’ in PeterHolland and W. B. Worthen (eds.) Theorizing Practice: Redefining TheatreHistory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) pp. 136–150.

16 Edwin A. Dawes, The Great Illusionists (Newton Abbot: David and Charles,1979).

17 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossibleand Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003).

18 Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (London: Hale, 1987).

19 David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger, (London: Channel 4 Books, 2002).

20 Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005).

21 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck. A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000).

22 Peter Lamont, The Indian Rope Trick (London: Abacus, 2005); Peter Lamont,The First Psychic: The Peculiar Mystery of a Victorian Wizard (London:Little, Brown, 2005).

23 See Steven Connor, ‘Sleights of Voice: Ventriloquism, Magic and The HarryPrice Collection’ (talk given to the Friends of the University Library. Archivedonline at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc/hpc/ Accessed 8th June 2004.

24 Gary Brown and Michael Edwards, ‘Dusty Tomes: A Guide to the History ofMagic’, in Magical Past-Times: The On-Line Journal of Magic History.http://illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=39&type=articles (2004) Accessed7th August 2005.

25 Sara Crasson, ‘Magic History and Magical Myths: The Historian�s Challenge’,in Magical Past-Times: The On-Line Journal of Magic Historyhttp://illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=77&type=articles (1999) Accessed20th January 2006.

26 This phrase is used differently in some other contexts. An older use of theterm would mean simply ‘writing for performance’: playwriting, scriptwriting,theatrical devising, or composing performance poetry. For an educationalist,on the other hand, the phrase can mean simply ‘writing to demonstrate whatknowledge you�ve acquired when you�ve performed your lab experiment, yourresearch, your note-taking in class, your reading of the textbook’ (James Seitz,

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quoted by Peter Hart in ‘Using Writing to Promote Learning’, UniversityTimes (University of Pittsburgh) 35: 7 (November 2002). http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/35/021121/13.html Accessed 25th February 2005). I want todistinguish the way in which the phrase is used in performance studies fromthese.

27 Ann Daly, ‘Ann Daly: Performative Criticism’ http://www.anndaly.com/educator/syll-perfcrit.html Accessed 25th February 2005.

28 See for example Della Pollock, ‘Performative Writing’, in Peggy Phelan and JillLane (eds), The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University Press,1998; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Teaching “Experimental Critical Writing”’, inPeggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds, The Ends of Performance, New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1998.

29 Unattributed notes to ‘Houdini on conjuring’, Encyclopaedia BritannicaOnline http://www.britannica.com/original?content_id=1323. Accessed 11thJune 2004.

30 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossibleand Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003) p. 108.

31 See Christopher, Magic: A Picture History pp. 148–9; Albert A. Hopkins (ed.)Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography(New York: Munn / Scientific American, 1898) Reprinted as Magic: StageIllusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography (New York: DoverPublications, 1976) p. 367; Steinmeyer Hiding the Elephant pp. 103–4.

32 John Algernon Clarke, ‘Magic, White’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica 9th Edition(Edinburgh: Algernon and Charles Black, 1875–1889) cited in SteinmeyerHiding the Elephant p. 108.

33 Macmillan’s Magazine, January 1876.

34 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions ofwitches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary,erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, byReginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651).

35 Samuel Rid, The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (London: 1612) sig. Bv.

36 For a more detailed account of gypsy culture and its history see J. P. Clébert,The Gypsies trans. Duff (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Peter Burke, inPopular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice Temple Smith,1978; revised 1996 and reprinted Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2002) argues forthe importance of the gypsy tradition in early modern popular culture.

37 Judith Okeley, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983) p. 3. See also B. Vesey-Fitzgerald, Gypsies of Britain (Newton


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Abbott: David and Charles, 1944. Enlarged edn. 1973) pp. 21, 28 and Clébert,The Gypsies p. 27.

38 Thomas Frost, The Lives of the Conjurors (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876)Chapter One. Archived online at http://thelearnedpig.com.pa/magos/books/frost/index.html Accessed 15th January 2006.

39 David Blaine Mysterious Stranger (London: Channel 4 Books, 2002) p. 24.

40 See ‘The Westcar Papyrus’, http://www.magicandillusion.com/libr/orig/west/west01.html See also Third Dynasty http://www.crystalinks.com/thirdynasty.html Both Accessed 16th August 2005.

41 See also Blaine Mysterious Stranger p. 122.

42 Milbourne Christopher, Magic: A Picture History (New York: Dover 1991.Reprint of Panorama of Magic, 1962) p. 1.

43 Geoffrey Graham, papyrus Westcar (website) http://www.rostau.org.uk/WESTCAR/PURPOSE.HTM#anchor688833 Accessed 16th August 2005.

44 Donald Mackenzie, Egyptian Myth and Legend, (London: Gresham PublishingCo., 1907) Archived online at http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/texts/westcar_papyrus.htm Accessed 16th August 2005.

45 Mackenzie, Egyptian Myth and Legend.

46 Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Seattle: HermeticPress, 1995) p. 65.

47 James Randi, Conjuring (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992) p. xi cited inBurger and Neale Magic and Meaning p. 66.

48 Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (London: Robert Haleand Co., 1973) p. 12 cited in Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning pp. 65–6.

49 Albert A. Hopkins (ed.) Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions,including Trick Photography (New York: Munn / Scientific American, 1898)Reprinted as Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography(New York: Dover Publications, 1976) p. 219.

50 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, or the Refutation of all Heresies. Formerlyattributed to Origen, but now to Hippolytus, Bishop and Martyr, who flourishedabout 220 A.D. trans. F. Legge (London and New York: Society for PromotingChristian Knowledge, 1921) p. 96.

51 Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 123.

52 Letter from John Hoker of Maidstone to ‘Bullinger’, 24 February 1538 cited inButterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage p. 124.



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53 ‘Myth’ The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Ed. JohnBowker. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t101.e5023Accessed 18th August 2005 The complex field of myth interpretation is stillcontentious. Successive attempts to define what myths meant to the cultureswhich produced them have led to a broad range of interpretive strategies. SeeMircea Eliade, Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper& Row, 1963).

54 Burger and Neale Magic and Meaning p. 68.



57 Edmund Wilson, ‘John Mulholland and the Art of Illusion’, in Classics andCommercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties.(New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1950) pp. 147–152.

58 The word ‘shaman’ and its cognates, like so many words that we have to dealwith, has a range of meanings. In its original, limited and technical sense itrefers to social functions and belief systems specific to peoples of theSiberian Tungus, and which became an object of fascination for Europeans inthe eighteenth century (see Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the EighteenthCentury (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). A secondmeaning expands the term to include similar practices and beliefs held inother tribal peoples in Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia:these practices include ‘all kinds of ceremonial systems combining curing bymeans of spirit journey and exorcism with techniques drawn from theperforming arts’ (Schechner, Performance Theory p. 65n.). Even morebroadly, the term is now used to refer to a variety of contemporary culturalpractices ranging from New Age consciousness-raising techniques tomodern modes of experimental performance. I am using the term in itssecond sense.

59 We may want to compare this to the arguments between Catholics andProtestants at the time of the Reformation (and subsequently) as to whatactually happened during the Mass. The Protestant insistence on the symbolicnature of the bread and the wine may be contrasted with the Catholic doctrineof transubstantiation, in which the body and blood of Christ are made manifestin the consecrated host.

60 Margaret Lantis, Alaskan Eskimo Ceremonialism (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1947) p. 88.

61 Walter Hoffman, The Menomini Indians (Washington: Government PrintingOffice, 1896) pp. 97–9.


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62 E. T. Kirby ‘The Shamanistic Origins of Popular Entertainments’ The DramaReview 18: 1 (March, 1974) p. 14.

63 Quesalid’s story is recounted and analysed by many commentators. See ClaudeLévi-Strauss Structural Anthropology trans. Claire Jacobson and BrookeGrundfest Schoepf (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) pp. 175–81; and RichardSchechner Performance Theory Revised edition (London and New York:Routledge, 1988) pp. 225–7.

64 E. T. Kirby describes this trick as being ‘characteristic of shamanism the worldover, the apparent extraction of the disease agent from the patient in the formof some material object – a bone, stone or tuft of fibres – that has beenconcealed in the shaman’s mouth and is produced at the crucial moment’. SeeKirby, ‘Shamanistic Origins’ p. 7.

65 Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology p. 176.

66 Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology p. 178.

67 Kirby, ‘Shamanistic Origins’ pp. 5–15.

68 Rogan Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, (London: Reed, 1985) p. 44.

69 Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, p. 44.

70 Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, p. 62.

71 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic; or, How tobecome a Wizard… Translated and edited, with notes, by ProfessorHoffmann [pseud., i.e. Angelo John Lewis] (London: George Routledge &Sons, 1878) p. 43.

72 Ivan A. Lopatin, The Social Life and Religion of Indians in Kitimat, BritishColumbia (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1945).

73 Lopatin, Social Life of Indians in Kitimat p. 77, cited in Taylor Death andResurrection Show p. 48.

74 Lopatin, Social Life of Indians in Kitimat p. 78, cited in Taylor Death andResurrection Show p. 49.

75 Taylor, Death and Resurrection Show p. 48.

76 Elsewhere, more suggestively, Taylor talks about modern showbusiness as a‘consciously worked disguise of [the shamanic] mystery’ (p. 50).

77 Schechner, Performance Theory p. 120.

78 Schechner, Performance Theory p. 123.

79 Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show, passim.



202

80 Although there are exceptions to this rule: see the final chapter of this book.

81 Henry Hay, The Amateur Magician’s Handbook, 4th edition (Edison NJ:Castle Books, 1982) p. 2.

82 Louis Hennepin, Description of Louisiana (Paris, 1683). Cited in Flaherty,Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century p. 31.

83 Exodus VII 6–12. (New International Version).

84 Exodus IV 5 (New International Version).

85 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions ofwitches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary,erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, byReginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 222. Compare toRobert-Houdin, in The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, where he asserts that‘The Egyptians, the Chaldees, the Ethiopians and the Persians have eachboasted many experts in this mysterious art [such as] Jannes and Jambres, themagicians of Pharaoh, who ventured to compete with the miracles of Moses’.Note the slight but important distinction that he makes between Pharaoh’s‘magicians’ (whom he names, according to tradition, Jannes and Jambres) andthe true ‘miracles’ of the prophets of Jehovah.

86 Henry Ridgely Evans ‘Introduction. The Mysteries of Modern Magic’ in AlbertA. Hopkins (ed.) Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, includingTrick Photography (New York: Munn/Scientific American, 1898) Reprintedunaltered as Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography(New York: Dover Publications, 1976) p. 1.

87 Evans ‘Introduction’ in Hopkins Magic p. 1.

88 Christopher Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems edited by E. D. Pendry andJ. C. Maxwell (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976) p. 513.

89 The ‘Heriots’ concerned is almost certainly Thomas Hariot (1560–1621), whowas much more than a ‘juggler’ in the sense Baines uses the word (i.e. aconjuror). Supported by Raleigh’s patronage, Hariot was a respectedmathematician, astronomer and naturalist in his own right.

90 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, or the Refutation of all Heresies. Formerlyattributed to Origen, but now to Hippolytus, Bishop and Martyr, who flourishedabout 220 A.D. trans. F. Legge (London and New York: Society for PromotingChristian Knowledge, 1921) p. 92.

91 Hippolytus, Philosophumena, p. 101.




ENDNOTES

203

94 Acts 8:9–24 (Quotations from NIV Study Bible).

95 Acts 8:11.

96 Acts 8:19–21.

97 J. K. Elliott (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament. A Collection of ApocryphalLiterature in an English Translation based on M. R. James (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1993) p. 392.

98 Jerald C. Brauer (ed.) Westminster Dictionary of Church History (Philadelphia,Pennsylvania: Westminster Press, 1971) p. 362.

99 Acts of Peter Chapter Thirty One From M. R. James (trans) The Apocryphal NewTestament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) Online publication by Peter Kirby,Early Christian Writings http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/actspeter.htmlAccessed 29th August 2005.

100 Acts of Peter Chapter Thirty Two.

101 Brauer(ed.), Westminster Dictionary of Church History p. 362.

102 Acts of Peter Chapter Thirty Two.

103 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: PeregrineBooks, 1978) p. 68.

104 Thomas Religion and the Decline of Magic p. 68.

105 Daniel Defoe, cited in Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic andScience in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 37.

106 Alizon Brunning, ‘Jonson�s Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse inVolpone.’ Early Modern Literary Studies 6.2 (September, 2000): 4.1–32Archived online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-2/brunvol.htm Accessed 15th January 2006.

107 Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems p. 513.

108 Samuel Rid, The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (London: 1612) sig. B2 v.

109 David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975) p. 331.Strictly, according to the account in Exodus Chapter Seven it was Aaron whosestaff metamorphosed. The Wakefield authors, who had a good sense for thedramatic, concentrate all the power in Moses.

110 This has been of increasing interest to scholars of the early modern theatre. Ina useful seminal article, Louis B. Wright catalogues and analyses over fiftyexamples of and references to conjuring, juggling and illusions in plays before1642. See Louis B. Wright, ‘Juggling Tricks and Conjury on the English StageBefore 1642’, Modern Philology (1927) vol. 24 pp. 269–284. More recently,



204

Philip Butterworth’s Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005), which appeared too late for me to usemore extensively in this chapter, looks at the whole issue in more detail.

111 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus Epilogue ll 25, 27 in ChristopherMarlowe, Complete Plays and Poems, edited by E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell(London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976) p. 326.

112 Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers; the Magician in EnglishRenaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984) p. 146.

113 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923)p. 423.

114 Thomas Frost The Lives of the Conjurors (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876)Chapter V. Archived online at http://thelearnedpig.com.pa/magos/books/frost/index.html Accessed 15th August 2005.

115 Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (London: RobertHale and Co., 1973) pp. 16–17.

116 Philip Butterworth, ‘Brandon, Feats and Hocus Pocus: Jugglers Three’ inTheatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the BritishTheatre vol. 57 number 2 pp. 89–106. See also Butterworth Magic and theEarly English Stage pp. 9–14.

117 There may well have been some overlap between the professional clown and thejuggler. See Wright, ‘Juggling Tricks and Conjury on the English Stage’ p. 270.

118 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions ofwitches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary,erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, byReginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 217.

119 Scot, Discovery p. 217.

120 Frost, Lives of the Conjurors Chapter V.


122 Similarly, the ‘man named Reatius’ who is mentioned in passing by MilbourneChristopher (Illustrated History pp. 16–17; see above) seems to have beenclaiming to do real magic, rather than being one of those ‘innocent victims’who ‘claimed no demonic powers’. Otherwise it is hard to see why – asChristopher tells it – he had to be tortured before admitting to achieving hisillusions by means of legerdemain.

123 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller ed. J. B. Steane, (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1972) p. 297.


ENDNOTES

205

124 Christopher, Illustrated History pp. 21–2.

125 See Eva, Griffith, ‘Banks, William (fl. 1591–1637).’ Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP,2004. Archived online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1292Accessed 12th August 2005. Also Butterworth Magic on the the Early Englishstage pp. 59–73. Most English accounts give Banks’ first name as William,although ‘Richard’ occurs in a few German sources.

126 Dawes, Great Illusionists p. 27.

127 Shakespeare, William Love’s Labor’s Lost, (1598) in The Norton Shakespeare,edited by Stephen B. Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard andKatherine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co.,1997) p. 742; Ben Jonson Works ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson,(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–53) vol. VIII, p. 88; Thomas Nashe, TheUnfortunate Traveller, (1594) ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1972) p. 275, Anon Tarlton’s Jests (1611) (reprinted London: LondonShakespeare Society, 1844) pp. 23–4; See also William D’Avenant, The LongVacation in London, (London, 1697) p. 24.

128 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. G-Gv.

129 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. Gv.

130 John Dando and Harry Runt, Maroccus Extaticus. Or, Bankes’ Bay Horse in aTrance. A Discourse set downe in a merry Dialogue, between Bankes and hisbeast: Anatomizing some abuses and bad trickes of this age (London: CuthbertBurby, 1595).

131 Dando and Runt, Maroccus Extaticus sig. Cv.

132 Thomas Morton, A direct answer vnto the scandalous exceptions, whichTheophilus Higgons hath lately obiected against D. Morton (London: EdmundWeaver, 1609) p. 11.

133 Morton, A direct answer p. 11.

134 Ben Jonson, ‘On the Famous Voyage’ ll.156–8, in The Complete Poems editedby George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) p. 91.

135 According to most accounts, Banks was still alive in the 1637 – probably ekingout his retirement as a vintner in Cheapside. The publishing history ofJonson’s ‘On The Famous Voyage’ is complex, and the poem was subject torevisions, but the lines about Banks and Morocco being burned date from nolater than 1625.

136 Frost, Lives of the Conjurors Chapter V.



206

137 Frost Lives of the Conjurors Chapter V.

138 But see below for a discussion of likely authorship.

139 Hill, Thomas, A Book of Elizabethan Magic. Thomas Hill’s Naturall andArtificiall Conclusions (1567) edited by Thomas Ross (Regensburg: VerlagHans Carl, 1974) p. 13.

140 Hill Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions p. 58.

141 Hill Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions p. 9.

142 Recently, a contemporary conjuror has gone one better, in claiming to re-create the miracle of the Virgin Birth. A report in the Guardian for 20/10/05announced that ‘the illusionist David Copperfield is promising to impregnatea girl on stage. Speaking to German magazine Galore, he said: ‘In my next show I’m going to make a girl pregnant on stage… naturally it will bewithout sex.’ Archived online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1596125,00.html Accessed 9th January 2006.

143 Thomas Ross in Hill, Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions p. 8.

144 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: PeregrineBooks, 1978) pp. 252–300.


146 See Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the ModernWorld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 40.

147 James I, Daemonologie (Edinburgh: R. Waldegrave, 1597).







154 Scot, Discovery pp. 233–4.






ENDNOTES

207






164 See, for example, pp. 285, 296, 314.

165 See, for example, pp. 219, 324, 332.


167 The name contains a pun: Archimago is both an ‘arch-magician’ (compareScot’s ‘arch-conjuror’) and also an arch-image – i.e., something false anduntrustworthy.

168 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. B2v.

169 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. B3.

170 Rid, Art of Jugling sig. E3v.



173 Compare the language of the spells which Faustus and his confederates use toconjure the Devil in Marlowe’s play.

174 Scot, Discovery p. 185. Scot, as we have seen, sets little store by such charms,but he describes in detail the practises of those who do.

175 Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark shewing the divine cause of the distractionsof the whole nation of England and of the Christian world (London: for RobertIbbotson, 1655) p. 36.

176 ‘The senses are never deceived about their own objects.’

177 Ady, A Candle in the Dark p. 40. I have not been able to find out who‘Cooper’ is.

178 Rid Art of Jugling sig. B2v-B3.


180 N. W. Bawcutt, ‘William Vincent, Alias Hocus Pocus: A Travelling Entertainerof the Seventeenth Century’ Theatre Notebook 54:3 (2000) pp. 130–8. PhilipButterworth confirms Bawcutt’s identification. For the alternative view, that‘Hocus Pocus’ was not so much the name of individual as ‘the generic name



208

for legerdemain performers’ see Louis B. Wright ‘Juggling Tricks and Conjuryon the English Stage’ p. 271.

181 ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’ [William Vincent?], Hocus Pocus Junior The anatomy oflegerdemain. Or, The art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainly,and exactly; so that an ignorant person may thereby learn the full perfection ofthe same, after a little practise. Unto each trick is added the figure, where it isneedfull for instruction. 3rd edition (London : Printed by I. D[awson] forR. M[ab] and are to be sold by Francis Grove at his shop upon Snow-hill, neerthe Sarazens-head, 1638) sig. G3v-G4.

182 ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’, The anatomy of legerdemain sig. H3v.

183 ‘Hocus Pocus Junior’. The anatomy of legerdemain sig. H3v-H4.

184 See Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage p. 24.

185 Ady, A Candle in the Dark p. 29.

186 Bawcutt, ‘William Vincent alias Hocus Pocus’ p. 131.

187 The last witch in England to be executed was Alice Molland, hanged in 1684 –coincidentally, at Exeter, which seems to have been a place particularlysusceptible to superstition.

188 Theodor Adorno, ‘Theses against Occultism’ in Minima Moralia: Reflectionsfrom Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974)p. 240.

189 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London; Methuen,1981) p. 19.

190 Jackson, Fantasy p. 19.

191 There are times, it is true, when the distinction between the audience and theauthorities is not clear-cut. Brandon’s audience, in performing the pigeon trick,is the King himself – who is also the ultimate legal authority. In this case Henry’sown response seems to have been ambivalent. He responds legalistically insofaras he forbids Brandon to repeat the trick, but takes no further action.

192 Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) edited by Robin Robbins.2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) p. 17.

193 Browne, Pseudodoxia pp. 19–20.


195 The word ‘Puritans’, which is usually used to refer to the anti-theatricalcontingent, is really a convenient shorthand: the theatre’s enemies were morebroadly based than the sectarian label suggests.


ENDNOTES

209

196 ‘Note of acts’, Journal of the House of Lords: volume 1: 1509–1577 (1802), p. 728. Archived online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=31838 . Accessed 19th January 2006.

197 William Rankins A Mirror For Monsters (London, 1587) fol. 2v.

198 William Shakespeare, Henry V Prologue ll. 23–8.

199 Samuel Rid, The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, (London: 1612) sig. Bv.

200 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft proving the common opinions ofwitches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars… to be but imaginary,erronious conceptions and novelties… written and published in anno 1584, byReginald Scot, Esquire. (London: [Richard Cotes] 1651) p. 342.

201 William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors in The Norton Shakespeare, editedby Stephen B. Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and KatherineEisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997) V.i. ll.238–43.

202 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Beggars Bush (London: HumphreyMoseley, 1647). The play, first performed in 1622, remained popularthroughout the Restoration period and into the eighteenth century. It waschosen as the production with which Thomas Killigrew and the King’sCompany reopened their re-built Drury Lane Theatre in 1674.

203 In this context the word ‘Boor’ means ‘countryman’ – the Flemish equivalent ofa yokel. (The play is set in Bruges.)

204 Beaumont and Fletcher, Beggars Bush III i, ll. 44 ff.

205 Beaumont and Fletcher, Beggars Bush III i, ll. 77–89.

206 Beaumont and Fletcher, Beggars Bush III i, ll. 120–5.

207 The standard modern collection of Elizabethan coney-catching pamphlets isstill Gamini Salgado’s Coney-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1972).

208 N. W. Bawcutt ‘William Vincent, alias Hocus Pocus: a travelling entertainer ofthe seventeenth century’ Theatre Notebook 54:3 (2000) p. 130; PhilipButterworth ‘Brandon, Feats and Hocus Pocus: Jugglers Three’ in TheatreNotebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre vol. 57:2(2003) pp. 89–106, 98–9.

209 This is a necessarily condensed account of a complex pattern of social changestaking place over a century or so.

210 John Donne, ‘An Anatomy of the World’ (London: Samuel Macham, 1611)line 205.



210

211 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 1054.

212 Edwin A. Dawes, The Great Illusionists (Newton Abbot: David and Charles,1979) p. 46.

213 Dawes, The Great Illusionists p. 48.

214 See J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1974) p. 59.

215 Compare, for example, the figure of Dullness in the Dunciad, written by Gay’sfriend Alexander Pope.

216 John Gay, Fable XLII ‘The Jugglers’, ll. 6–11 in The Poetical Works edited byG. C. Faber (London: Oxford University Press / Humphrey Milford, 1926) pp. 267–8.

217 Gay ‘The Jugglers’ ll. pp. 15–26.



220 Jonathan Swift Miscellanies. The Third Volume (London: for Benjamin Motteand Charles Bathurst, Lawton Gilliver and John Clarke, 1736) pp. 59–62. Gayand Arbuthnot also contributed to this volume, but the Dublin setting makesit almost certain that Swift was indeed the author.

221 Jonathan Swift A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor peoplefrom being a burthen to their parents, or the country, and for making thembeneficial to the publick. (Dublin: S. Harding, 1729) p. 7.

222 Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (London: RobertHale and Co., 1973) p. 83.

223 George Winchester Stone, The London Stage 1660–1800, A Calendar of Plays,Entertainments and Afterpieces Part four. 1747–1766 (Carbondale, Ill.: SouthIllinois University Press, 1960) p. cxcvii. See also pp. cxcviii and 59.

224 General Advertiser 17 January 1749, cited in Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 91.

225 Such as the anonymous Letter to the Town Concerning the Man and the Bottle(London: 1749). See Stone London Stage Pt Four pp. 90–3.

226 Dudley Bradstreet, The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Capt. DudleyBradstreet. Being the most Genuine and Extraordinary, perhaps, ever published(Dublin: S. Powell, 1755) p. 334. See also below.

227 Christopher, Illustrated History p. 83.

228 Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 93.


ENDNOTES

211

229 Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 93.

230 The village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire was legendary for the supposedstupidity of its inhabitants.

231 See Christopher, Illustrated History pp. 83–4, Dawes, The Great Illusionistspp. 48–51 and Stone London Stage Pt Four p. 59.

232 Bradstreet, Life, title-page.

233 Bradstreet, Life pp. 249–333.


235 Bradstreet, Life p. 304.




239 Bradstreet, Life p. 334 (Although Bradstreet is wrong in his reading of this if,as I suspect, he is referring to the ironic advertisement for Don John deNasquitine – see above).

240 Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. cxcviii.

241 David Hume, ‘An Essay on Miracles’ (1748) in Essays and Treatises on SeveralSubjects. A New Edition (London: A. Millar, 1758). The essay also appearedlater in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a work which Humerevised continually until his death in 1776.

242 Hume, Essays p. 354.

243 Daily Advertiser 17th January 1749, cited in Stone, London Stage Pt Four p. 90.

244 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation translated by Sheila Faria Glaser(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) pp. 133, 136.

245 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1984) pp. 34–5. See also Susan Greenwood,The Nature of Magic. An Anthropology of Consciousness (Oxford and NewYork: Berg, 2005) pp. 1–4.

246 See Charlotte Fell-Smith John Dee (London: Constable and Co. 1909) pp. 3–4and John Dee Essential Readings edited by Gerald Suster (Great Britain:Crucible, 1986) p. 10.

247 John Collier, Essays on the progress of the vital principle from the vegetable tothe animal kingdoms and the soul of man, introductory to contemplations ondeity (London: T. Gillett, Nathaniel Scarlett, 1800) pp. 128–9.



212

248 Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (London: Penguin, 2000) p. 144.

249 Newton’s third law of motion, formulated in Principia MathematicaPhilosophiae Naturalis (1686).

250 Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 7.

251 Poster for Signor Castelli and his dog Munito.

252 Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous histories, designed for the instruction of children,respecting their treatment of animals (Dublin, 1794) p. 68.

253 Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous histories pp. 72–3.

254 William Frederick Pinchbeck, The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled.Delineated in a series of letters, between a friend and his correspondent.Comprising the learned pig, invisible lady and acoustic temple, philosophicalswan, penetrating spy glasses, optical and magnetic, and various othercuriosities on similar principles: also, a few of the most wonderful feats asperformed by the art of legerdemain: with some reflections on ventriloquism.(Boston: 1805) Preface ‘To the Public’.

255 Pinchbeck, The Expositor Letter I, from AB to WFP.

256 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: 1817) Chapter XIV.Archived online at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html Accessed 20th June 2005.

257 Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (Londonand New York: Routledge, 2002) p. 13.

258 Advertisement for P. T. Barnum’s 1842 exhibition, cited by Goodall,Performance and Evolution p. 24. Conversely, when George Shaw, the Keeper ofthe Department of Natural History of the British Museum, received fromAustralia in 1799 a stuffed duckbilled platypus, it took some time for him andhis fellow naturalists to be convinced that this was not simply a hoax: a moleskinwith a duck’s bill attached. See Ann Moyal, Platypus: The Extraordinary Storyof How a Curious Creature Baffled the World. (New York and London: Allen &Unwin. 2002).

259 And both have been the subject of successful feature films: Ron Howard’sSplash (1984) and Chris Noonan’s Babe (1995) respectively revive the fantasyof the liminal space between human and animal – or fish!

260 Ernst T. A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sand-man’ (1817) from Weird Tales, volume 1,translated by J. T. Bealby (New York: Charles Scribner�s Sons, 1885). Onlineversion at http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/sandman.htm Accessed 29th December2005.


ENDNOTES

213

261 Pinchbeck, The Expositor Letter IX ‘From A.B. to W.F.P.’

262 Pinchbeck, Expositor Letter IX ‘From A.B. to W.F.P.’

263 Pinchbeck, Expositor Letter IX ‘From A.B. to W.F.P.’

264 Also, confusingly, surnamed Pinchbeck.

265 Sylvio Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata in the History of Technology’ Technologyand Culture 5 (winter 1964) reproduced online at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/b_edini.html Accessed 20th December 2005.

266 Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata’.

267 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation translated by Sheila Faria Glaser(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Donna Haraway, ‘A CyborgManifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the LateTwentieth Century,’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention ofNature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181; N. Katherine Hayles HowWe Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature andInformatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Philip Auslander,Liveness (London and New York, 1999) and ‘Humanoid Boogie, Reflectionson Robotic Performance’, (unpublished paper).

268 Jessica Riskin, ‘The Defecating Duck, or the Ambiguous Origins of ArtificialLife’ Critical Inquiry summer 2003 29:4 p. 602.

269 Vaucanson, Jacques An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton trans. J. T.Desaguliers (London: T. Parker for Stephen Varillon, 1742) p. 21.

270 Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 601.


272 Vaucanson, Account of the Mechanism title page.

273 Friedrich Nicolai, Chronique à travers 1’Allemagne et la Suisse, 2 vols. (Berlin,1783), vol. 1 p. 284.

274 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin¸Ambassador,Author and Conjuror Written by Himself translated by Lascelles Wraxall(London: Chapman and Hall, 1859; reprinted by T. Werner Laurie Ltd.,1942) p. 140.

275 See Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 609 note 18.

276 For a detailed account of von Kempelen’s automaton, see Tom Standage, TheMechanical Turk (London: Penguin, 2002).

277 Standage, The Mechanical Turk p. 52.

278 Standage, The Mechanical Turk p. 229.



214

279 ‘Eliza’ [Jozef Stefan Institute], ‘ELIZA – a friend you could never have before’Online at http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html Accessed 15th December 2005.

280 Royal College of Psychiatrists press release 1st July 2003. http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/press/preleases/pr/pr_445.htm Accessed 15th December 2005.

281 Riskin, ‘Defecating Duck’ p. 623. See also Katie Hafner ‘In an Ancient Game,Computing’s Future’ New York Times 1st August 2002 p. 5.

282 cf Philip Auslander, ‘Humanoid Boogie, Reflections on Robotic Performance’,paper presented at the Centre for Performance Research’s Towards Tomorrowconference (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2005).

283 Pinchbeck, Expositor Letter IX.

284 Standage, The Mechanical Turk pp. 206–7.

285 Porter Enlightenment p. 422.

286 William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributesof the Deity. Collected from the Appearances of Nature. (London 1802; 12thedition 1809).

287 Paley, Natural Theology p. 3.

288 An image which writers on the human condition have been revisiting eversince Paley coined it; see, for example, Richard Dawkins, The BlindWatchmaker: why the evidence of Evolution reveals a world without design(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).



291 William Blake, ‘Milton’ II:37 line 46 in Complete Writings edited by GeoffreyKeynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 528.

292 William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22nd November 1802, in CompleteWritings edited by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972)p. 816.

293 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’ (1798) ll. 96,101, 103 in Poems Volume 1, edited by John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1977) p. 360.


295 See Jackson Fantasy p. 65. My account of the multiple meanings of ‘dasUnheimliche’ is indebted to Jackson’s response to Freud.

296 Margaret Iversen, ‘The Uncanny’ review of Michael Kelley The Uncanny(Cologne: Walther König, 2004) in Papers on Surrealism Issue 3 winter/ spring


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2005, http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3/acrobat_files/iversen_review.pdf Accessed 20th July 2005.

297 Christophe Lombardi ‘The Cyborg Magician’ in Visions: the Online Journal ofthe Art of Magic www.online-visions.com/other/0405christophe.html Accessed2nd January 2005.

298 Stelarc ‘The Body is Obsolete’, Stelarc website at http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/index2.html Accessed 3rd January 2006.

299 See Hopkins Magic p. 69. Other versions of (essentially) the same trick were‘The Living Half-woman’ and ‘The Decapitated Princess’. Compare, too, themythical talking brazen head which was supposed to be owned by the medievalscholar/wizard Roger Bacon.

300 Stelarc et al., ‘Stelarc – Prosthetic Head’ Australian Centre for the Moving Image,website http://www.acmi.net.au/7E8A5C8E6F304A839116C3C74F81440C.htmAccessed 2nd January 2006. At the Centre for Performance Research’s conference‘Towards Tomorrow’ Conference (Aberystwyth, 2005) Stelarc presented hisProsthetic Head to a large audience of sophisticated Performance Studies scholarsin conference mode. The audience responded with a wave of naïve delight.

301 Bernard Beckermann, Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience, and Act(London: Routledge, 1990) p. 33.

302 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic; or, Howto become a Wizard… Translated and edited, with notes, by ProfessorHoffmann [pseud., i.e. Angelo John Lewis] (London: George Routledge &Sons, 1878) p. 43.

303 Marvin Carlson, Performance: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 54.

304 Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre (Pennsylvania: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1987) and ‘On Acting and Not-Acting.’ [1972] in Acting (Re)Considered,edited by Phillip Zarrilli, (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 43–58.

305 Schechner, Performance Studies: an Introduction (New York and London:Routledge, 2002) p. 147.

306 Schechner, Performance Studies p. 147.

307 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic; or, How tobecome a Wizard… Translated and edited, with notes, by Professor Hoffmann[pseud., i.e., Angelo John Lewis] (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1878).

308 ‘Escamotage (conjuring) comes from the Arab word escamote, signifying thelittle cork ball subsequently known as a muscade (nutmeg), from a fanciedresemblance to that fruit. Originally the term Escamotage was applied solelyto cup-and-ball conjuring, but it was subsequently used as a comprehensive



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term to describe the performance of conjuring tricks generally.’ (Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 42).

309 Hoffman wrote some of the classic nineteenth-century books on magic, bookssuch as Modern Magic, More Magic, Later Magic and Latest Magic. Theliterary critic Edmund Wilson described these as being ‘a series of treatises inthe soundest tradition of British expository writing: dense, comprehensive,exact and ornamented with Latin quotations’ (in Classics and Commercials: ALiterary Chronicle of the Forties. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950)p. 148.

310 The debate was an ongoing one for Robert-Houdin, who on other occasionsdoes in fact refer to himself as a ‘Prestidigitator’.

311 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic p. 43.

312 This seems to be Robert-Houdin’s own phrase, and it is rather a good one:‘fictitious magic’ is, perhaps a better phrase than ‘stage magic’ since itacknowledges that not all magic of this kind is performed upon a stage or in atheatre. By implication, however, it leaves open the possibility that there existsanother, non-fictitious kind of magic.


314 Thomas Frost, The Lives of the Conjurors (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876)chapter VI.

315 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of theCondition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work,and Those That Will Not Work, volume. III, (London: Griffin, Bohn andCompany, 1861) p. 104.

316 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 106.

317 Mayhew, London Labour vol. III p. 104. Ramo Samee was a well-knownpopular entertainer whose career in the US and the UK spanned the yearsfrom 1819 until his death in 1850. Described in the Salem Gazette for5 October 1819 as ‘East Indian’, Samee’s success both contributed to and wasa consequence of the rise of the vogue for orientalism in nineteenth-centurypopular culture. Samee’s act included sword-swallowing and prestidigitationas well as juggling, and he is credited with being the first famous performerof the Needle Swallowing Trick, which he performed at the Garrick Theatrein London.





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322 Maskelyne and Cooke’s thirty-year residency at the Egyptian Hall in Londonbegan in 1873, but the Hall had been the home of magic and illusion for manyyears before that.

323 Mayhew also interviews two ‘Street-Conjurors’, who confirm this impression.See London Labour, vol. III pp. 107–113.

324 Mayhew, London Labour, vol. III p. 104. It should be noted that the streetconjurors also see ‘dexterity’ as the foundation of their art – although several ofthe tricks they describe involve dubious bets with the audience.







331 Milbourne Christopher, Magic: A Picture History (New York: Dover 1991.Reprint of Panorama of Magic, 1962) p. 76.

332 Robert-Houdin, Secrets of Conjuring and Magic pp. 29–30.





337 Christopher, Magic: A Picture History p. 77.

338 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador,Author and Conjuror Written by Himself translated by Lascelles Wraxall(London: Chapman and Hall, 1859; reprinted by T. Werner Laurie Ltd.,1942) pp. 269–70.

339 Elsewhere in his Memoirs (pp. 223–6) Robert-Houdin tells the story of theyoung woman, slightly disturbed, who was so impressed by the ‘sorcery’ withwhich he read her mind that she immediately attempted to hire him to put acurse on her enemies.

340 Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the ModernWorld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) pp. 208–9.



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341 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs pp. 320–1.

342 Robert-Houdin, Memoirs p. 327.







349 Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented theImpossible and Learned How to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf,2003) p. 141.




353 Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant p. 143. Steinmeyer adds ‘In recent yearsresearchers have discovered a more likely story. A wealthy amateur magiciannamed Mr. David was a friend of Jean Robert’s uncle. He probably providedthe youth with the rudiments of the art.’

354 Oddly, in his mid-life attack on his childhood hero, Harry Houdini ‘unmasked’all sorts of things about Robert-Houdin (many of them utterly mistakenly) butcompletely missed this imposture. Houdini never guessed that Torrini wasnothing more than a literary construct.



357 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations translated by Harry Zorn (London: PinlicoPress, 1999) p. 214.

358 The clip can be viewed online at http://www.mshepley.btinternet.co.uk/vlady.rm See also Méliès the Magician DVD (Chicago: Facets Multimedia,2002).

359 Philip Auslander, Liveness (London and New York, 1999) p. 1.

360 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge,1993).

361 Auslander, Liveness, p. 2.


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362 Marina Warner, ‘Camera Ludica’ in Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes andMarina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004)p. 20. The embedded quotation is from Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant:How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (New York:Carroll & Graf, 2003).

363 See, for example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: AnIntroduction. Second edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) p. 347.

364 Cited by M. Shepley, ‘Méliès and Early Film’ in The Missing Link,http://www.mshepley.btinternet.co.uk/Méliès2.htm Accessed 22nd December2005. This useful website concentrates on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cinema, and gives a very good account of Méliès’contribution to film-making in this period. It also contains links to clips ofmany of the extant films discussed.

365 See below, Chapter Seven.

366 For the debate as to whether Kircher or Huygens should be credited with theinvention of the Magic Lantern, see the webpages of the Magic LanternSociety at http://www.luikerwaal.com/newframe_uk.htm?/mls_uk.htmAccessed 20th December 2005.

367 Joscelyn Godwin, Athenasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest forLost Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979) p. 83.

368 Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magnae Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1646).

369 Marina Warner, ‘Camera Ludica’ in Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes andMarina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004)p. 14.

370 More information about Skladanowski and Magic Lanterns can be found inDeac Rossell ‘Max Skladanowsky’ in Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: AWorldwide Survey ed. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, (London:British Film Institute, 1996) Archived online at http://www.victorian-cinema.net/skladanowsky.htm Accessed 25th March 2005); Terry Borton,‘Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows’, published in The Bulletin of TheLeague of Historic American Theaters, (Nov. 1998). Archived online athttp://www.magiclanternshows.com/history.htm Accessed 20th September2005; Janet Tamblin, ‘A Brief History of the Magic Lantern’ (c. 1979), handbillin Bill Douglas Collection, University of Exeter. Full text available online athttp://toytheatre.info/Technic/Magic/History.htm Accessed 22nd December2005; Mannoni, Nekes and Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions; and MervynHeard, The History of the Phantasmagoria (unpublished Ph.D., University ofExeter, 2001).

371 Tamblin, ‘A Brief History of the Magic Lantern’.



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372 Borton, ‘Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows’.

373 Borton, ‘Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows’.

374 Sir David Brewster, cited in Frost Lives of the Conjurors Chapter III.

375 Dan North, ‘Magic and Illusion in Early Cinema’ in Studies in French Cinema;1: 2 (2001) p. 76.

376 Maskelyne, it is true, was still making good use of ‘Psycho’ at this point –though even he was a bit faded, having been first exhibited twenty years earlier.

377 Cited by M. Shepley, ‘Méliès and Early Film’ website.

378 Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York and Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1981) pp. 45ff.

379 Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema p. 60. The ‘Professor Anderson’mentioned here is not the famous ‘Wizard of the North’, who had died in 1874 –though it may have been one of his erstwhile assistants, now operating under‘the Professor’s’ name.

380 Exhibited publicly summer 2005 at the British Library in the exhibition HeyPresto! which commemorated the centenary of the Magic Circle.

381 Another clip from 1896, shown in the same exhibition, features a much moreassured J. N. Maskelyne doing his multiple plate-spinning routine. Because ofits simplicity, its reliance on physical skill, and its absence of ‘camera trix’ thisworks surprisingly well on celluloid.

382 Edwin A. Dawes, ‘Devant, David (1868–1941)’, Oxford Dictionary of NationalBiography (Oxford: OUP, 2004). Archived online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/60049 Accessed 7th September 2005.

383 Houdini’s serious involvement with films did not start until 1918, with TheMaster Mystery, in which he tried doggedly but unsuccessfully to turn his liveshow persona into an action hero of the silent screen. However, he was alsoinvolved in that early scramble to marry magic and the movies. In the early1900s (the exact date is unknown) he made a short film – probably about threeand a half minutes long – for Pathé-Frères called Merveilleux Exploits duCélèbre Houdini à Paris, fragments of which still exist. The story involvesHoudini’s wrongful arrest on a Paris street, followed by (inevitably) his escapefrom straitjacket, handcuffs and cell. For a more detailed description, seeKenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York:HarperCollins, 1996) p. 96.

384 From David Devant. See below.

385 IMDB credits him with 564 separate titles as Director – though a few of theseappear to be reissues of the same footage. Even so, 500+ is a conservative


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estimate: other sources suggest that Méliès had as many as 1200 short films tohis name. See North, ‘Magic and illusion in early cinema’, p. 74.

386 Georges Méliès, cited in Georges Sadoul, Georges Méliès (Paris: EditionsSeghers, 1970) pp. 106–7.

387 Méliès, cited in North, ‘Magic and illusion in early cinema’ p. 74.

388 K. Jenkins, The Missing Link http://www.kjenkins49.fsnet.co.uk/ Accessed9th August 2005.

389 Cited M. Shepley in ‘Méliès and Early Films’, The Missing Linkhttp://www.mshepley.btinternet.co.uk/Méliès2.htm Accessed 9th August 2005.

390 ‘A Hypnotist at Work’ was the title of the film for its American release.

391 See Katherine Singer Kovacs ‘Georges Méliès and the Féerie’ in Film BeforeGriffith ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) pp. 244–57.

392 The féerie was never a pure form. In its early days the term melodrama-féeriewas often used to designate these plays. Later on there were, in addition,pantomime-féeries, opéra-féeries and vaudeville-féeries.

393 Tom Gunning, ‘An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulousspectator’ in L. Williams (ed.) Viewing positions: ways of seeing film (NewBrunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

394 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’ in T. Elsaesser & A. Barker (eds.)Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI 1990).

395 See Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: the French Theatreof Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002) pp. 34–8.

396 John C. Tibbetts, ‘The Voice that Fills the House: Opera Fills the Screen’ inLiterature/Film Quarterly, 32: 1 (2004) Archived online at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200401/ai_n9406989 Accessed 30th March 2005.

397 It is possible that the Lumières produced an 1897 Faust short, but the usuallyauthoritative Internet Movie DataBase has no record of it – nor indeed of anyfilm on the Faust theme by the Lumières. It may be that Tibbetts is thinkingof Méliès own Faust et Marguerite. Again, IMDB has no record of a 1904version of Faust et Marguerite, although M. Shepley, in The Missing Link,affirms that that year Faust et Marguerite ‘featured a synchronised soundtrackof Gounaud’s (sic) opera that was played alongside the projection of the film’.Meanwhile, Jacques Malthête, in the filmography of his book Méliès: Image etIllusions (Paris: Éditions Exporégie, 1996) lists a production in 1902 of Faustaux Enfers with the subtitle Pièce Fantastique en 16 Tableaux. This could wellbe the twenty-minute adaptation of Gounod to which Tibbett refers. In 1904,



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again according to Malthête (but not IMDB), Méliès returned to the Fausttheme with Le Damnation de Docteur Faust – which itself may have beeneither a re-make or a re-release of his own 1898 Le Damnation de Faust!

398 Plot summary written by Edison Films Catalogue. Online version athttp://us.imdb.com/title/tt0000301/plotsummary. Accessed 30th March 2005.

399 Fred Nadis, ‘Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians’Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult’ Journal of Millennial Studies(winter 2000) p. 1 www.mille.org/publications/winter2000/nadis.PDFAccessed 8th September 2005.

400 M. Shepley, ‘Méliès and Early Films’.

401 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus I.i. 78–84 and I.iv. 105–9.

402 Marina Warner, ‘Camera Ludica’ in Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes andMarina Warner, Eyes, Lies and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004) p. 14.

403 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus II.i l.85, in Complete Plays and Poemsedited by E.D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976)p. 286.

404 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus V. ii l.102 in Complete Plays and Poems p. 320.

405 Chronomedia, http://www.terramedia.co.uk/Chronomedia/years/1909.htmAccessed 9th September 2005.

406 Quoted in Ruth Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini(London: Mandarin, 1994), p. 52.

407 There is, as far as I can find, no published source for this in any of Shaw’swritings; it appears to be one of the many reported verbal witticisms attributedto him. It is, however, quoted with confidence in reputable popular educationalsites such as PBS’s The American Experience Teacher’s Guide (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/houdini/tguide/ Accessed 30th December 2005) andMassimo Polidoro’s lecture site (http://www.massimopolidoro.com/eng/lectures/lecfindex.html Accessed 30th December 2005).

408 Talking Birds’ Smoke, Mirrors and the Art of Escapology. http://www.talkingbirds.co.uk/indexes/index2.html Accessed 31st December 2005 andhttp://www.theatredesign.org.uk/arcdet/xjava.htm Accessed 31st December2005; Lisa Watts and Brian McClave Escape Mechanism http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/shootinglive/2002/wattsmcclave/ Accessed 31st December 2005.

409 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 11.

410 Silverman, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins,1996) p. 107.


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411 As well as those of Brandon and Silverman mentioned above, authoritativebiographies of Houdini include Milbourne Christopher, Houdini: The UntoldStory (London: Cassell, 1969); Bernard C Meyer, Houdini: A Mind in Chains APsychoanalytic Portrait (New York: Dutton, 1976); James Randi and BertRandolph Sugar Houdini: His Mind and Art (New York: Grosset and Dunlap,1976). Adam Phillips Houdini’s Box. On the Arts of Escape (London: Faber andFaber, 2001) and John F. Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: theWhite Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hilland Wang, 2001) are not strictly speaking biographies, but both contain muchuseful biographical insight.

412 Letter to Theodore Weiss, November 22nd 1913. Reproduced in Frank KovalThe Illustrated Houdini Research Diary Parts 1 and 2 (Oldham andChadderton: Koval, 1992) p. 29.

413 Silverman, Houdini!!! p. 7.

414 Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 7.

415 Manuscript by Theodore Weiss quoted in Brandon, Life and Many Deaths(p. 8). Brandon retains Theodore’s original spelling.


417 See Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 11.

418 Ivan Kalmar, The Trotskys, Freuds and Woody Allens (London: Viking, 1993).

419 He was quite justified in this. Conan Doyle, who became for some while a closefriend of Houdini, never felt he understood him and put his inability to do sodown to Houdini’s ‘Oriental’ nature, which he shared with ‘our own Disraeli’(quoted Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 234).

420 Walter F. Prince, in The Enchanted Boundary (Boston: Boston Society forPsychic Research, 1930) p. 152, cited and corrected by Bernard Ernst andHereward Carrington in Houdini and Conan Doyle: the story of a strangefriendship. (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1933) p. 41.

421 He failed – just. He is recorded as the first person to complete an ‘officiallyrecorded, controlled powered flight’ in Australia – an impressive three-and-a-half-minute flight at the height of a hundred feet on 18th March 1910 atDigger’s Rest, Victoria. The previous day, however, near Sydney, a racingdriver named Fred Custance had flown a Bleriot monoplane for five and a halfminutes – but reaching a height of no more than a dozen feet before trying ahigher flight in which he lost control and crashed the plane. As KennethSilverman says, Custance ‘may not have flown so much as hopped’(Houdini!!! p. 147).



224

422 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths.

423 Walter B. Gibson and Morris N. Young, Houdini on Magic (New York: DoverBooks, 1953) opposite p. 269.

424 Harry Houdini, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (New York: PublishersPrinting Co., 1908). See also Brian Lead and Roger Woods, Houdini the MythMaker: the Unmasking of Harry Houdini (Accrington: Caxton Printing, 1987).

425 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Reprinted in Anna Freud (ed.)The Essentials of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) p. 225.

426 Jack Flosso quoted in Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 53.

427 Though opinion differs as to how good a conjuror he was. See Jim Steinmeyer,Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and LearnedHow to Disappear (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003) p. 5 ff. for his argumentthat ‘Houdini was a terrible magician’.

428 Magic Made Easy is reproduced in facsimile in Walter B Gibson, The OriginalHoudini Scrapbook (New York, London and Sidney: Corwin Sterling and OakTree Press, 1977) pp. 79–94. All quotations are taken from the Gibsonfacsimile. This quotation p. 81.

429 Houdini, Magic Made Easy pp. 85, 87, 82.

430 Houdini, Magic Made Easy pp. 83, 86.

431 Houdini, Magic Made Easy p. 84.






437 The National Cyclopedia of American Biography vol XIV states that Houdini’sduties in his early days included ‘handling the Punch and Judy show, performinga ventriloquial act, acting the clown, and playing cymbals in a band’ (cited inKovals Illustrated Houdini Research Diary p. 34). Also, according to Webster’sNew Biographical Dictionary (Merriam-Webster Inc. Springfield, Mass. 1983)he was ‘a trapeze artist’ (p. 490), though this is more likely a reference to one ofthe stories about his childhood persona, ‘Ehrich, Prince of the Air’.

438 E. T. Kirby, ‘The Shamanistic Origins of Popular Entertainments’ The DramaReview vol. 18 no. 1 (March, 1974) pp. 7–8.


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439 Poster advertising the Houdinis’ act, printed in Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan p. 90.

440 Brandon, Life and Many Deaths pp. 44–45.



443 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Edge of the Unknown (London: John Murray,1930) p. 2, quoted by Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 153.

444 Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man p. 76.

445 Publicity for Houdini, cited in Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 109.


447 Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 119.

448 Kasson Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man pp. 79, 154.

449 Local poster from Houdini’s tour of northern Britain, 1913–14.

450 The Los Angeles Record of 1st December 1915 chronicled a strangeconfrontation between Houdini and the then world heavyweight boxingchampion Jess Willard ‘precipitated by Willard’s gruff refusal to comply with afriendly request made by Houdini that he act on a committee to watch theperformer’s act from the stage.’ Quoted in Walter B. Gibson, The OriginalHoudini Scrapbook (New York, London and Sidney: Corwin Sterling and OakTree Press, 1977) p. 167.

451 Houdini, Publicity poster, reproduced in Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 100.




455 This gender imbalance, incidentally, could be read in more than one way. Itcould be a testament to the secure grip which patriarchy has always had onrepresentations of power. Conversely, it could signal one of those repressedanxieties about women which patriarchy so often throws up: a fear of thefemale as ‘other’, a fear that the feminine may really be possessed of someform of darker power and that to represent this however light-heartedly maybe dangerous.

456 Although one of Houdini’s foremost chroniclers, Walter S. Gibson, who knewmany of Houdini’s friends and family noted (but on what evidence?) that theillusionist ‘regarded this as one of his most difficult escapes’ (The HoudiniScrapbook p. 39).



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457 Silverman, Houdini!! p. 97.

458 Michael Billington, ‘After 22 days of turning starvation into a stunt, the puzzle of David Blaine’s ordeal remains – why?’ The Guardian, 27th September 2003.

459 Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 101.

460 Reproduced in Gibson, Houdini Scrapbook p. 39.

461 Quoted in Brandon, Life and Many Deaths p. 153.

462 See Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man p. 141ff.

463 National Cyclopaedia of American Biography vol. 4 cited Koval ResearchDiary p. 34. See also Phillips Houdini’s Box p. 123.

464 J. C. Cannell, The Secrets of Houdini (New York: Dover Publication, 1973)p. 22.

465 Cold reading is the generic term referring to the techniques used by manypseudo-psychics to persuade a subject that the reader, through some sort ofmysterious special ability, knows supposedly hidden details about him orher.

466 Cited in Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 123.

467 See, for example, James Hewat Mackenzie, Spirit Intercourse: its theory andpractice (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1916).

468 Walter B. Gibson and Morris N. Young, Houdini on Magic (New York: DoverBooks, 1953) p. 124.

469 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in The Penguin CompleteSherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 33.

470 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event…’Strand Magazine. An Illustrated Monthly December 1920 pp. 463–8.

471 Cited in Phillips, Houdini’s Box p. 126 and Brandon, Life and Many Deathsp. 240.

472 Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes p. 111.

473 Ernst and Carrington, Houdini and Conan Doyle p. 175.

474 For a detailed recent account of the Fox sisters, see Barbara Weisberg, Talkingto the Dead; Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (San Francisco:HarperSanFrancisco, 2004). For a contemporary account, see Reuben BriggsDavenport, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism: being the true story of the Foxsisters, as revealed by authority of Margaret Fox Kane and Catherine FoxJencken. (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1888).


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475 Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant p. 54.

476 P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World. An account of humbugs,delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in allages. (New York: Carleton, 1866.) pp. 74–5.

477 Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant p. 57.

478 Barnum, The Humbugs of the World. p. 135–6.

479 J. N. Maskelyne, ‘My Reminiscences’ Strand Magazine 39 (1910) pp. 17–24

480 Barnum, The Humbugs of the World. p. 137.

481 One of the most dramatic and poignant accounts of such a crisis isEdmund Gosse’s Father and Son (London: Heinemann, 1907).

482 Hannah Goff, ‘Science and the Séance’, article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4185356.stm Accessed 5th September 2005. The programme wasbroadcast on BBC2, 31st August 2005.

483 Cited in Ronald W. Clark, Edison – The Man Who Made the Future(London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977).

484 D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless, Phone Calls from the Dead(London: New English Library, 1979) pp. 136–9.

485 John Logie Baird, Sermons, Soap and Television – Autobiographical Notes(London: Royal Television Society, 1988) pp. 68–9.

486 Margaret Cheney Tesla: Man Out Of Time (New York: Dorset, 1981) p. 151.

487 Lodge, Sir Oliver My Philosophy. Representing my views on the manyfunctions of the ether of space. (London: Ernest Benn, 1933).

488 See Oliver Lodge, Raymond. Or Life and Death (London: Methuen &Co., 1916).

489 Collected in R. G. Medhurst (ed.) Crookes and the spirit world: acollection of writings by or concerning the work of Sir William Crookes inthe field of psychical research. (London: Souvenir, 1972).

490 Sir William Crookes, Presidential Address to the British Association,1898.

491 Michael Faraday, Letter to The Times 30th June 1853; ‘Mental Education’,Lecture to Royal Institution, 6th May 1854.

492 Alexander Graham Bell, Letter to Mabel Hubbard [Bell], 26th September1875, in The Alexander Graham Bell Collection in the Library of Congress.Online version at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/magbell:@field(DOCID+@lit(magbell03400114)) Accessed 5th September 2005.



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493 Houdini, Miracle-Mongers and their Methods: A Complete Exposé (Buffalo,N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993) pp. 96–7.

494 Similar debates continue to simmer. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme,2nd October 2001, Sue MacGregor chaired a debate arising out of ‘a stir in thescientific community because of claims made in a booklet [of Royal Mailstamps issued to commemorate the Nobel prize] that telepathy, and otherparanormal activity, will one day be explained by modern physics.’ The claimwas made by Professor Brian Josephson, professor of physics at CambridgeUniversity, and a winner of the Nobel prize for physics himself – no scientificlightweight. Among Josephson’s critics on the programme was magician JamesRandi.

495 Edward Carpenter, Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! (St. Alban’s:Paladin, 1976) pp. 11, 19.

496 Ernst and Carrington, Houdini and Conan Doyle, p. 175.

497 Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The career of Ehrich Weiss (New York:HarperCollins, 1996) p. 280.

498 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulationtrans. Sheila Fariah Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) p. 1.

499 Interview in Radio Times 26 March–1 April 2005 p. 35.

500 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1986) p. xxiv.

501 Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, Cultural theory: the key concepts (Londonand New York: Routledge, 2002) p. 294.

502 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ NewLeft Review 146 (1984) pp. 53–92.

503 John Storey (ed.), Cultural theory and Popular Culture. A Reader 2nd edition(Harlow: Longman Pearson, 1998) p. 347.

504 Harry Blackstone Jr, with Charles and Regina Reynolds, The Blackstone Bookof Magic and Illusion (New York: Newmarket Press, 1985) p. 64.

505 Jerry Haendiges, Vintage Radio Logs http://otrsite.com/logs/logb1020.htm.Accessed 2nd January 2006. A large selection of these radio shows arereproduced on José Antonio Gonzalez (ed.) TLPP Magic CD 3 (The LearnedPig Project, 2005).

506 See above, Chapter Seven.

507 Anonymous article on MagicWeb Channel http://www.magicwebchannel.com/hall_wilson.htm. Accessed 2nd January 2006.


ENDNOTES

229

508 See Introduction.

509 In marked contrast, during this same period the South American illusionistRichiardi, who used a buzz saw for the illusion in his live shows, retained andemphasized all the horror of the routine. His son, Richiardi, Jr., continued theact with equal effect. A detailed account of Richiardi’s sawing can be found inEugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Seattle: HermeticPress, 1995) pp. 90–93.

510 James Randi, The James Randi Educational Foundation, http://www. randi.orgAccessed 4th January 2006.

511 Storer, Cultural Theory p. 346.

512 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: 1817) ChapterXIV. Archived online at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html Accessed 20th June 2005.

513 Pattie, F. A. Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History ofMedicine. Unpublished manuscript. Lexington, KY 1989.

514 Robert Silverberg, Scientists and Scoundrels: A Book of Hoaxes (New York:Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965) Archived online at Questia website, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=14913056 Accessed 4th January 2006.

515 In some other European countries, such as Norway and Sweden, it is bannedaltogether.

516 Howarth v Green [2001] All England Law Reports (D).

517 The phrase is used in the programme for the show.

518 Some social psychology experiments have suggested, that, for example,‘people with a competitive disposition were more likely to compete in a gameafter subliminal exposures to competitive words’. See S. L. Neuberg,‘Behavioral implications of information presented outside of consciousawareness: The effect of subliminal presentation of trait information onbehavior in the prisoner’s dilemma game’, Social Cognition, 6, (1988)pp. 207–230. This seems a very long way from the kinds of targeted precisionimplied by Brown’s routine.

519 Elsewhere Derren Brown presents himself very much as Enlightenmentsceptic, however. His TV special Messiah (broadcast on Channel 4, 10thJanuary 2005), in which he attempted to pass himself off as the real thing tovarious American New Age and charismatic Christian groups carried on theHoudini/ James Randi tradition of debunking mysticism.

520 David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger (London: Channel 4 Books, 2002) p. 78.



230

521 Quoted in Magic Times 36: 1082 (15th December 2000) http://www.magictimes.com/archives/2000/2000-12_11-17.htm Accessed 31st December2005.

522 Contributors to the TalkMagic forum at http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic2099-0-asc-15.php Posted 9th November 2004 and 28th November 2004.Accessed 9th June 2005.

523 Contributors to the TalkMagic forum at http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic2099-0-asc-15.php. Posted 9th November, 28th November and 30th July2004 Accessed 9th June 2005.

524 Contributor to the TalkMagic forum at http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic2099-0-asc-30.php Posted 3rd May 2005 Accessed 9th June 2005.

525 Blaine’s fee for the stunt was reported in the media at $600,000. See JamesDoherty, ‘After 44 days, Blaine’s out of his box’ The Scotsman Monday 20th October 2003. Archived online at http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1158142003 Accessed 5th September 2005.

526 Doherty, ‘After 44 days, Blaine’s out of his box’.

527 Fiona McCade, ‘Maybe Blaine had the right idea after all’ The Scotsman 20thOctober 2003.

528 Michael Billington, ‘After 22 days of turning starvation into a stunt, thepuzzle of David Blaine’s ordeal remains – why?’ The Guardian 27thSeptember 2003.

529 The Independent 20th October 2003.

530 See Doherty, ‘After 44 days, Blaine’s out of his box’. All these explanationswere seriously proposed.

531 Marie Blood, interview in New York Post 13th April 1999, p. 14.

532 Blaine Mysterious Stranger p. 88.


534 Cited in Blaine, Mysterious Stranger p. 159.



537 The Catholic Encyclopaedia Archived online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13795a.htm Accessed 9th June 2005.

538 David Blaine, interviewed in video Above the Below, directed by HarmonyKorine (Video Collection Int. Ltd., 2003).


ENDNOTES

231

539 Quoted in Fiona McCade, ‘Maybe Blaine had the right idea after all’ TheScotsman 20th October 2003.

540 Heinrick Heine, Works, translated by Charles Leland. (London: Heinemann,1893) p. 130.

541 See William A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions ofNervous Derangement (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1876) Chapter XIV.Online at http://www.hutch.demon.co.uk/fasting_girl.htm Accessed 4thJanuary 2006.

542 In one end-of-year media poll, Blaine was voted the biggest failure of 2003. ‘Onein four Britons ranked the American illusionist as the top flop of the last 12months for his 44-day starvation stunt. He ranked higher than ousted Toryleader Iain Duncan Smith, Eurovision duo Jemini and the entire Australiannation in a poll of 1000 people to find the failures of 2003.’ Edinburgh EveningNews 29th December 2003. Archived online at http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=577&id=1418592003 Accessed 5th September 2005.

543 Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning p. 98.

544 Blaine, Mysterious Stranger pp. 116–7.

545 Fortean Times, July 2004, p. 78.

546 ibid.

547 Robert Forman, Grassroots Spirituality: What it is, Why it is here, Where it isgoing (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004) pp. 17–18. Reviewed by William S.Haney II in Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 6:1 (April 2005)http://www.aber.ac.uk/cla/archive/forman.html Accessed 3rd May 2006.

548 Jennifer Harper, ‘Most Americans Take the Bible Stories Literally’Washington Times, 17th February 2004. Archived online at http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040216-113955-2061r.htm. Accessed 12th January2006. The sample was relatively small (just over 1,000 respondents) but othersurveys have produced similar figures.

549 The Times 9th July 2005.

550 Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (London: Picador, 2004).

551 Forman, Grassroots Spirituality p. 132.

552 Francis Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. A Short History ofModern Delusions (London: HarperCollins, 2004) pp. 5–6.

553 Richard Koch and Chris Smith, ‘The Fall of Reason’ New Scientist 190: 2557(24th June 2006) p. 25.


554 Jack Phoenix, ‘The Modern Mentalist’ in Fortean Times 185 (July 2004)pp. 28–32.

555 David Sutton, ‘Bodyguard of Lies’ in Fortean Times 185 (July 2004) pp. 38–45. Gordon Rutter, ‘Magic Goes to War’ in Fortean Times 185 (July2004) pp. 46–50.

556 Andreas Hergovich, ‘The effect of pseudo-psychic demonstrations asdependent on belief in paranormal phenomena and suggestibility’, Personalityand Individual Differences 36 (2004) p. 378.

557 Edmund Wilson, ‘John Mulholland and the Art of Illusion’, in Classics andCommercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. (New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1950) pp. 147–152.


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Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of ConjuringBy Michael Mangan

Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality.

It brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by examining it in the context of performance studies, and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts in which their performances were received, and the meanings which they have attracted.

‘This is an erudite book which wears its scholarship lightly and is a pleasure to read. Complex theoretical frameworks are introduced in ways that will make them accessible to the general reader, and the book’s argument opens up new implications and applications for the study of magic as performance...’ – Roberta Mock, Department of Theatre and

Performance, University of Plymouth

intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE UK / www.intellectbooks.com

Performing

Michael Mangan holds the Chair in Drama at Exeter University. His main research interests lie in theatre and society – more specifically, he has published in the subjects of theatre and gender, Shakespeare and Renaissancetheatre, the cultural history of popular performance, and contemporary British theatre. He has also worked as a playwright, a director, a literary manager, a dramaturg and an actor.

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Michael Mangan - Performing Dark Arts. a Cultural History of Conjuring (2007)

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