Defying natural law – centuries of ‘magic’

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This ‘astonishingly rich’ book on magic ‘is a wonder in itself’ says Phil Baker

Magic 1400s–1950s
 edited by Noel Daniel and Ricky Jay

The occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) chose to spell his activities as ‘Magick’, to distinguish them from the magic of conjuring. But even as occultism has striven to distance itself from the stage magician, stage magic has wanted to embrace the idea of the occult – so if there's an overall tendency clear in this astonishingly rich book about the visual culture of conjuring, it’s the way that the iconography of occultism has carried over into the iconography of stage trickery and illusion.

Neatly defined by Ricky Jay, in his introduction, as ‘the theatrical representation of the defiance of natural law’, stage trickery has an intrinsic relationship to the occult, since the supernatural has also been defined as that which seems to defy natural causality. Trickery is the low-tech equivalent of Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. Again and again the occult is the inescapable comparison, and the result is a parade of spirits, imps, crystal balls, ghosts, fakirs, and devils.

There were conjurors – as opposed to sorcerers – in ancient Egypt and mediaeval Europe, but the book is particularly abundant in material from the late Victorian and Edwardian period, which seems to have been the Golden Age not only of magic but of poster design. There are endless examples of great inventiveness and style, often with a ‘period’ visual warmth and luxuriousness reminiscent of old cigar-box labels.

After Ricky Jay’s introduction the book contains eight essays by Jim Steinmeyer and Mike Caveney. Steinmeyer writes on illusion, deception, the supernatural world, and danger (magical fires, chains, bullets and saws), and Caveney on ‘black magic to modern magic’, the great touring shows, vaudeville and night-club magic, and the Masters of the Golden Age. These include Kellar, celebrated for his self-decapitation trick, the slightly later Howard Thurston, touted as Kellar’s successor, and Alexander Herrmann (‘The Great Herrmann’). Herrmann exemplifies what was once the distinctive ‘look’ of the Victorian stage magician, with a tailcoat, moustache and pointed beard, reminiscent of Mephistopheles.

‘Real’ occultism is largely psychological – when the witch doctor points the lethal bone at his victim he needs no sleight of hand – but Mike Caveney recounts an extraordinary confusion of stage magic and the supernatural carried out in North Africa, in the service of French colonialism, by Jean Robert-Houdin. Robert-Houdin was a Paris magician who had his own little theatre at the Palais-Royal, where his specialities included a dwarf-sized clockwork acrobat. In 1856 the French government asked him out of retirement to quell Muslim rebellion in Algeria, which featured supernaturally inclined religious leaders or ‘marabouts’. Robert-Houdin invited one of the strongest marabouts to lift a heavy chest, which he did, before the colonial conjuror made a show of magically sapping his strength. The marabout then found the trunk impossible to lift, before receiving a painful shock and fleeing the stage. Electromagnetism and straightforward electricity had carried the day, and there was no more trouble from the marabouts.

Back in Europe and America, Eastern exoticism overlapped with the occult as the natural accompaniment to magic powers. Alexander (Claude Conlin) was one of the many magicians to don a turban, although in reality he was from Dakota. Ancient Egypt – also esteemed by occultists and freemasons – was a favourite fantasy location, along with the Far East, and Chinese magicians became an exotic stereotype in their own right. The most celebrated of these was Chung Ling Soo (killed on stage in 1918 when his bullet catching trick went wrong); his real name was William Ellsworth Robinson, but he never spoke English in public.

Chung Ling Soo based some of his persona and tricks on those of Ching Ling Foo, who was noteworthy in that he really was Chinese. These Chinese or pseudo-Chinese magicians, men of inscrutable celestial genius, were such a phenomenon that they influenced Sax Rohmer in the creation of his diabolical Chinese mastermind Doctor Fu Manchu. This borrowing came full circle with conjuror David Bamberg (son of Theodore Bamberg, the pseudo-Japanese ‘Okito’) who adopted the magic stage name of ‘Fu Manchu’.  

It is almost a relief to say that this enormous book – 15 inches high, and slightly smaller than its 2009 first edition, but still elephantine by normal standards – contains less text than you might imagine. Despite the 540-odd pages, the eight essays are only around seven or eight pages each, and those are heavily illustrated. The book is bulked out by being tri-lingual, with each essay appearing in English, French, and German. The book’s greatest value – with over 850 posters, photos and pieces of ephemera illustrated in colour – is as a visual resource of the kind increasingly associated not with books but with CDs and the Internet. Massive and almost defiantly bookish, looking as if it should be chained to a lectern, this book is a wonder in itself.

Magic 1400s-1950s  
edited by Noel Daniel and Ricky Jay, with essays by Jim Steinmeyer and Mike Caveney is published by
Taschen. 544pp., fully illustrated, £44.99.
 ISBN 978 3 8365 2807 8