The Secret History of Magic

Chapter 1

Origin Myths

A long time ago, in ancient Egypt, there was a magician whose name was Djedi. On one particular day, Djedi was summoned to appear before the Pharaoh. So he went to the palace and stood before the Pharaoh. And he performed a miraculous feat with a goose.

He severed the head of the goose from its body. He placed the head of the goose on one side of the great hall and the body of the goose on the other side of the hall. He then uttered some magic words, and the body of the goose stood up. It began to walk toward its own head. The head and the body became reconnected, and the goose stood up and cackled at the Pharaoh. Djedi then proceeded to do the same thing with a long-legged bird. Then with an ox.

"This," according to the historian of magic Sidney Clarke, "is the earliest conjuring performance of which any record has come down to us." Clarke wrote that in the 1920s, and since then, historians of magic have agreed. For almost a century, they (no, we, because we are historians of magic, too) have claimed that the first recorded magic trick was the decapitation and resurrection of a goose.

In fact, the story is a myth. It appears in the Westcar Papyrus, which was discovered in the 1820s. The story is one of a series of five tales that describe miraculous deeds. Djedi himself is described in mythical terms: it is said that he is 110 years old and is able to consume five hundred loaves of bread, half an ox, and one hundred jugs of beer. He also promises to make it rain and predicts the birth of future kings. Beyond this romantic tale, there is little reason to believe that Djedi even existed.

Nevertheless, if you read a standard history of magic, this is how it begins. Historians are not trying to deceive you. This is not an attempt to conceal reality in order to create an illusion. Historians of magic, in certain respects, have been more like a magic audience. Sometimes we have not looked closely enough, or we have looked in the wrong place. Too often, we have listened to what magicians have claimed and believed too easily what we have been told. As a result, in the story of magic, things are not always as they appear to be. If you want to know what really happened, then you need to distinguish between myth and reality.

When you take a closer look, behind the unbelievable tales, you discover the more extraordinary truth. The real history of magic is a story of people from humble roots who traveled the world, made and lost fortunes, and deceived kings and queens. In order to survive, they concealed many secrets; yet they revealed some, and they stole others. They exposed the methods of mediums and psychics, and they pilfered those of rivals. They engaged in deception, exposure, and betrayal in an ongoing quest to make impossible things happen. And they managed to survive in a modern world of wonders by providing us with a unique kind of wonder.

First, however, we must begin the story, and we cannot begin with the antics of Djedi. After all, this story is fact, not fiction. So the first thing we must do is find a beginning, and if it is not Djedi, then where to start? As it happens, there has long been an alternative. The Westcar Papyrus was not translated for decades, until the end of the nineteenth century. By then, however, histories of magic had already appeared, such as Thomas Frost's The Lives of the Conjurors, which was published in 1876. Knowing nothing of Djedi and his resilient goose, Frost had to begin with a different trick. How, then, according to Frost, did the story of magic begin?

C

A long time ago, in ancient Egypt, there were two men whose names were Moses and Aaron. On one particular day, they were summoned to appear before the Pharaoh. So they went to the palace and stood before the Pharaoh. And they performed a miraculous feat with a stick.

Aaron cast his rod to the ground, and it transformed into a serpent. So the Pharaoh summoned his local magicians, and they performed a similar feat. Aaron proceeded to turn the waters of the Nile into blood, and then he made a plague of frogs appear. And, according to the book of Exodus, the Egyptian magicians did the same.

At the end of the nineteenth century, before the Westcar Papyrus was translated, we thought that the first recorded magic trick was a rod that transformed into a serpent. Thomas Frost did not explain how it was done, though he believed that it required "a high degree of skill." However, Henry Ridgely Evans, who wrote the next history of magic, suggested a theory. The rod, he reckoned, was not really a rod but a hypnotized serpent, stiff as a pole, which awoke from its trance when it hit the ground. This, they reckoned, was the first recorded magic trick, but Aaron was not the first magician. It was the Egyptian magicians, who did the same afterward, who were given credit for the first illusion. Aaron's version did not count, because it was considered a genuine miracle.

If you want to understand the history of magic, then you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, as this story reveals, this is not so easy. Of course, you must consider the reliability of the sources, but people interpret these differently. In the case of the Westcar Papyrus, for example, you merely need to take a closer look to see that it is a series of fables. However, in the case of the Bible, many people believe that it is true. Thus, what some regard as fiction, others believe to be real. Indeed, when the early histories of magic were being written, this was the standard view. It was believed that Moses and Aaron could perform miracles, but as heathens, the Egyptian magicians could not. Hence the conclusion that they resorted to trickery.

This made sense at the time, though it now seems a rather odd conclusion. But we always interpret the past in a way that fits with our present assumptions. We do this now, we did it then, and we did it long before. A few centuries earlier, for example, early modern folk took a different view. Like the Victorians, they believed in miracles, but most of them also believed in witchcraft. So when they discussed the book of Exodus, they considered other options. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, demonologists were eager to stress the dangers of witchcraft. In order to convince folk that witchcraft was real, they appealed to what everyone then regarded as the most reliable source: the Bible. In short, if witchcraft was in the Bible, then witchcraft must be real. And, according to the demonologists, the first case of witchcraft was when the Egyptian magicians managed to duplicate the miracles of Aaron.

However, while most early modern folk believed that witchcraft was real, some were skeptical. These skeptics saw innocent people being persecuted, subjected to torture and sometimes death, and they tried to persuade the majority that witchcraft was a delusion. But they did not question the accuracy of the Bible, so they had to provide an explanation for how the Egyptian magicians did what they did. Their strategy was to make the case that these were merely magic tricks. In an attempt to make this more convincing, some suggested how the tricks were done.

According to one skeptic, Thomas Ady, the first feat was accomplished by using "slight of hand to throw down an artificial Serpent instead of his staffe." Another skeptic, John Webster, added a few more details. He claimed that the fake snake was made of "painted linen, perfectly resembling a serpent, with Eyes and all." And, to make it seem more lifelike, "with the wiar . . . he maketh it to move." How, we might wonder, did he manage to duplicate the other miracles of Aaron? "As for the changing water into blood, and the producing of Frogs," Webster continued, "they were so easy to be done after the same manner, that they need not any particular explication."

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that this explanation sounds rather vague. That is certainly what demonologists such as Joseph Glanvill thought. Glanvill pointed out a basic flaw in the theory. He wondered how "those jugglers should know what signs Moses and Aaron would shew, and accordingly furnish themselves with counterfeit Serpents, Blood and Frogs . . . or had they those always in their pockets? If not, it was great luck for them that Moses and Aaron should shew those very miracles." His point, of course, was intended to prove that the Egyptian magicians had relied on witchcraft. Nevertheless, it is a very good point.

Over the centuries, then, we have argued about various kinds of magic. We have interpreted evidence in different ways, based on different assumptions about what magic is and whether it is real. There have been times when it was normal to believe in witchcraft or in the miracles of a particular god. We continue to believe in a variety of psychic and supernatural phenomena. Some of us, on the other hand, would say that we do not believe in any kind of magic. But we believe in the existence of unseen things, of places unvisited, and of goals not yet reached. We believe in phenomena that are unobservable, such as gravity and democracy. We can see things fall and people vote and so can believe in invisible powers. We believe in such things because we assume that they exist, in some sense, beyond our vision.

We do not see such things as magical, of course, because they seem so ordinary. They are part of our daily experience, and so we take them for granted. But we also take other things for granted, such as mobile phones and air travel, which our ancestors would have regarded as impossible. Few of us truly understand how such things work, though we find them unremarkable. In other words, our ideas about what is possible and what is not have changed. And yet, as they have changed over the centuries and we have become harder to impress, magicians have continued to astonish us with magic tricks. The story of magic is a story of how, no matter what we take for granted, we can always be astonished.

First, however, we must begin the story, and we cannot begin with the antics of Djedi or with the miracle stories of Exodus. These were clearly not magic tricks, so they are not the earliest recorded magic tricks. As we shall see, the earliest references to what are clearly magic tricks do not appear until later. Meanwhile, we still need an origin story before we can begin. Origin stories are fundamental to understanding what we are talking about. Origin stories are, in fact, forms of definition. By describing how we began, they tell us something about who we are. The story of Genesis tells us that we are part of God's creation. The story of evolution tells us that we are part of the natural world. The story of how we came to be is a definition of who we are.

History, in general, is a form of definition. We tell stories about the past in order to understand the present. We tell stories about our ancestors in order to understand ourselves. The stories we tell, and the ones we prefer, define us in particular ways. They provide us with traditions that we can embrace, which shape how we see ourselves. And when we begin a history of something at a particular point, we are saying that this is when it began. Whatever happened earlier was something else; if not, then we would have begun at an earlier point. So choosing a beginning is important, because it should tell us something about the subject at hand. With this in mind, here is a new origin myth, though it may sound rather familiar. It is no truer than the story from the book of Exodus, though it is a little earlier. More important, it is a form of definition, which tells us something about what magic is.

C

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form. Then He made light appear, and He saw that it was good. And it was indeed good, because now He could see that the earth was without form. And so He decided to improve things. He separated the land from the seas, and the day from the night, and He created vegetation and a variety of beasts. And He saw that it was good, and it was indeed good. But nobody else could see how good it looked, and so He created the first audience. But hereÕs the thing: Adam and Eve did not express the slightest sense of wonder. Indeed, throughout the book of Genesis, there is not a single expression of wonder.

This is a better origin myth for magic, because it tells us something about the experience of magic. In the beginning, like the characters in Genesis, we live in a world of constant wonders. As infants, we experience the world as chaos because we do not understand the rules. Before we can experience magical things, we first need to understand that they should not happen. This is why young infants are not impressed by magic tricks, because they do not yet understand, for example, that objects are not supposed to appear and disappear. We have to learn the rules of what is possible before we can understand what is impossible. We need to form a worldview that rules out certain events before we can marvel at what should not happen. Until then, we live in a world in which anything is possible, but nothing is extraordinary.

The experience of magic depends on beliefs about what is possible and what is not. The problem for magicians throughout history has been that the limits of possibility have changed. Over the centuries, we have encountered a series of extraordinary technological developments. We have discovered the power of steam and electricity. We have been given the telephone, the television, and cinema. We are now surrounded by automobiles and airplanes, and we depend on computers and the internet. Our world has become full of technological wonders that our ancestors would have viewed as magical. Today, we take them for granted. Meanwhile, as all of this has been happening, magicians have had to find new ways to astonish us. Otherwise, they could not have survived.

This is the story of how they succeeded. This is the story of how they reminded us not to take extraordinary things for granted.