I think construction deserves more respect; it cannot be name-called out of (or into) existence, ridiculed and shamed into yielding up its powers. And if its very nature seems to prevent us – for are we not also socially constructed? – from peering deeply therein, that very same nature also cries out for something other than analysis… For in construction’s place – what? No more invention, or more invention? And if the latter, as is assuredly the case, why don’t we start inventing?
– Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity
One Saturday night a friend and I wandered into the D Las Vegas Casino to play their vintage mechanical horse racing game, which only accepts bets in quarters.
Some girls from Texas and a married couple joined us at the table. Under the plexiglass top, five miniature horses lined up to run the oval, surrounded on all sides by glowing odds. In the infield, more figurines lounged in a copse of fake trees. The starting bell rang. United by a shared delusion, we pounded our fists on the machine, yelling “Go Three! Go Three!” as the little metal horses shuddered along their tracks. Mere quarters to taste the hope of possibility.
We left ten bucks richer and stepped out onto Fremont Street. Four blocks of pedestrian streets were covered in LED paneled ceilings showing flames and ads and psychedelic patterns, underneath which ran a zip line that flung people screaming above our heads, which layered into the several songs blasting simultaneously from different speakers, which sat above the open doors of casinos that flashed and chimed with slot machines, in front of which showgirls in pink feathered headdresses wandered around in pairs and gamblers laughed and drank and fell over.
Here we ran into my magician friend Richard performing at his little foldable velvet table. Across from him a middle-aged man with a plastic cup of beer stood swaying with a wry smirk on his face. For many, an encounter with magic is a battle with the magician to not be fooled. Richard proceeded to fool him good by making four aces jump to the top of the deck. Since this was Fremont Street after all, Richard proclaimed theatrically, he must be bold and ask for money. The man pulled out his wallet, squinting at it to make his double vision snap back to one, and dropped a twenty into Richard’s bucket.
The man’s wife joined us, sliding her arm into his. She was sober and looked up at him with fond exasperation. For his final trick, Richard had the husband sign his name on the back of a card and declared that all of this, really, was a trick; the real magic was love. He shuffled the card back into the deck and had the wife sign the front of a different card and shuffled again. Then out came the card, with the husband’s signature, and Richard revealed as he turned it over that love had brought them together, and on the other side was the wife’s signature. Richard handed the card to the husband, who stared at it in disbelief, shaking his head and turning it back and forth. He dropped another twenty into the bucket, and the couple wandered off pleasantly baffled, still staring at the card and forty bucks lighter.
When I first started hanging out with magicians in Las Vegas, I wanted to test a hypothesis: that the magician could create two realities at once. There was the audience’s reality, where two signatures on separate cards magically unite into one, and the magician’s reality, where a fairly simple manipulation disguises how they signed the same card.
This was the logic of the casino, too: the gamblers’ reality where we made a lucky bet on a mechanical horse, and the casino’s reality where the law of large numbers makes luck a predictable operating expense.
And couldn’t this be what happens in our broader reality too? The magician, the casino owner, the politician, the banker, and so on. The power to make something really real with a sleight of hand.
~
For half a year, I attended the Las Vegas Magic Club. It met weekly in the back room of Tommy Rocker’s Mojave Beach Bar, just west of the I-15. Magicians from across the city came to have a drink, eat a Chicken Monterrey or a Rodeo Burger, and try to fool each other with tricks they had developed. In its forty-year history, the Magic Club has played host to everyone from Siegfried and Roy to Lance Burton to David Copperfield. The regulars, though, were buskers, amateurs, hobbyists, and retirees.
There was Kosi, a Thai-American, who was a pure hobbyist. He occasionally sold gimmicked decks, trick DVDs, and close-up mats1As opposed to stage magic, close-up magic is magic done right under the nose of the spectator. Close-up mats are pieces of felt or velvet the size of placemats that make it easier for magicians to pick up and manipulate cards and coins in close-up settings. out of his trunk.
There was Robert, who had just moved back to Vegas and was having a midlife magic renaissance performing at weddings. He’d gotten into magic at a middle school assembly when a magician appeared on stage in a burst of doves – an image still seared into his memory.
There was Victor, who worked Fremont Street and grocery store parking lots. When he was nineteen, he told me, he got permanently banned from the Bellagio Casino for counting cards – though not before taking them for $5,000. Every now and then he goes back in to see if they’ll still kick him out, and they always do. He was born in Japan, where his parents were on contract as the world’s top magic act with doves. Their act had taken the family to Japan, New Zealand, and Bermuda before they settled in Vegas when Victor was a teen. Victor was black, and his parents had discouraged him from taking up magic because of the racism they’d faced, but he couldn’t stay away.
(For that matter, there were close to zero women in the club. There was Vicky, who was vice-president of the Las Vegas Circle of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and who I saw only twice. There was a friend of a regular who I saw two or three times. And one time I brought my friend Meg, who could barely walk three feet without another magician asking if she “wanted to see something cool,” or if she “liked magic,” before pulling out a coin or a deck of cards.)
There was Gary, who was retired. At the club, he did close-up card routines with raunchy patter (“Oh lord, someone get the KY jelly!”) that brought jacks, queens, and kings together in raunchy ways. Publicly, he did wordless vaudevillian-style magic performances at assisted living facilities. After one of his shows he was anxious to know if I thought the disappearing cigar had been too small.
He started learning magic when he was ten, he said, because with magic you didn’t need anyone else to entertain yourself. He got back into it in his twenties out of his fear of going to prison, which was and is his biggest fear. If he got stuck in a cell, but had a pack of cards to practice with, it might not be so bad.
“Why were you afraid of going to prison?” I asked him.
“Just some misdemeanors, and some bigger stuff that came later on,” he said, shuffling a pack of cards.
I shrugged.
“Corroboration,” he said, and smacked his deck on the table and started talking to another magician about a trick he was working on.
There was Dan, another retiree, who had a scrolling LED screen pinned to his chest that read “Dan the Magic Man.” Dan was also retired, had a black goatee streaked with white and a gold chain from which a gold cross and a chess knight hung. Beneath his fleece jacket, I caught glances of what appeared to be a tactical vest filled with magic tricks, from which he could pull at a moment’s notice different packs of cards, props, coins, and more. Why did he get into magic? “Because I’m not that smart,” he told me. “And I wanted something where I could be better than other people. Athletes have their sports; musicians have their music. You have your writing. I wanted my thing.” When people meet you, he said, they put you in a box. In high school people called Dan a nerd. They categorize you as a type of person, but if you can do magic, you make part of yourself mysterious and unknowable. People won’t be able to put you in a box. Now he was looking for restaurant gigs.
And there was Hiram Strait, another retiree. He wasn’t always called Hiram Strait. He used to be a kid in Ohio, practicing magic in his room, before he gave it up to be a full-time stained-glass artist. They built a lot of churches in the late fifties, he told me, and the work took him across the country, and eventually, in the early sixties, to San Francisco, where he was swept up in the hippie counterculture. He practiced yoga. He dropped acid and experienced ego death. He changed his name. He traded DMT for mystical bones and opals.
He hitchhiked and bummed around.
Some evening amidst all this, he told me, he lay in bed with a girl called Amber Past in a beach-side hippie shack. They were watching a magic show on TV. Amber was astonished by what she saw, but Hiram rolled his eyes.
“I can do that,” he said.
“No you can’t,” Amber said, rolling her eyes.So he showed her, did it right in front of her with a pack of cards. “Hiram,” she said. “You should be a magician.”
From that moment on, he told me, he spent six hours a day practicing magic in front of a mirror. He got free board working as a night watchman in a factory near San Francisco’s Embarcadero, and when he needed some cash he made a stained-glass window or two. And then he became a performing magician. He even worked at the famous Magic Castle in LA for a few years.
Eventually he changed tracks and became a restaurant equipment dealer. Did he find his magic skills translated to restaurant equipment?
No, he told me flatly.
And now he spent Wednesdays in the magic club. He showed up every week in a two-piece suit with cufflinks, drinking whiskey on the rocks and teaching newer magicians like Victor some of the sleights he knew.
“I’m old and I’ve got a lot of knowledge,” he told me, “and I have no intention of taking it with me when I go.”
~
And for a while, I was a regular too. I showed up and ate my Rodeo Burger and talked to everyone. They would ask how long I’d been doing magic, or what kind of magic I did (close-up, mentalism, stage), and I would tell them that I wasn’t actually a magician but a writer. What was I writing about? I tried to explain my idea about the two realities existing at once, but most of the time I fumbled it. That didn’t really bother them, and they mostly forgot anyways; “So Carmen,” Gary often asked me, “how’s the close-up stuff going?”
I was happy to fly under the radar; it would help me with access. It also left room for my interest in magic for its own sake. Intellectual and writerly interests aside, I wanted to learn some tricks.
For a period when I was twelve, I had wanted to be a magician. I was lonely and unpopular. I loved fantasy books with wizardry and dragons. And in precisely the same way, I loved David Blaine, a magician who performed on the street in sunglasses and a backwards hat and nonchalantly blew people’s minds. In both realms, magic was the power to exceed normal human capabilities, or at least to seem like you could. As my own love of David Blaine had proven to me, this made people admire and respect you.
In short, I wanted to be a magician to make friends. It was an accordingly short-lived phase, because aside from the fact that trying to trick people doesn’t make them want to be your friend, really good magic requires you to spend countless hours honing techniques in front of a mirror. And I was looking for a shortcut, not a vocation. (The best magicians, Hiram Strait once told me, are the ones that like practicing, not performing.)
But even as I was disillusioned of some of the promises of magic, that childhood image I had remained in some corner of my dreaming mind, with all the luster of neon burning in a desert night. It did seem to defy categorization, like Dan the Magic Man said. It did seem to destabilize the solid footing of everyday life – and thus to hold possibilities.
The possibilities for me were political in nature. When I began researching magic, both as a form and for its cultural reception, I had a great deal of hope and faith in utopian politics: the idea that our society could become better by first imagining the radical future we want, and then performing the image of those ideas into reality. If magic was about creating multiple realities, couldn’t magic’s techniques be wielded in a broader social and political context? Maybe not a shortcut to a new me, but perhaps a shortcut to new surroundings.
~
The first text in English on theatrical magic was Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1584. The text gives detailed explanations of how to perform magic tricks, or conjurances as Scot calls them, to such an extent that Discovery is still a usable guide to magic. Earlier texts dealt prima facie with magic: much was written about the Pharaoh’s wizards in the Bible, the Kabbalah, magnets, demons, and witches (and why they should be killed). But Scot was the first to write openly about magic as a trick.
His principal goal, though, was not actually instruction. It was rather to prevent the torture and execution of accused witches. Here is an excerpt from the nearly page-length subtitle of the work:
PROVING
The common opinions of Witches con-
tracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars… are but imaginary
Erronious conceptions and novelties;
WHEREIN ALSO
The lewde, unchristian practises of Witchmongers, upon aged,
melancholy, ignorant, and superstious people in extorting con-
fessions, by inhumane terrors and tortures is notably detected.
…
With many other things opened that have long lain hidden: though
very necessary to be known for the undeceiving of Judges, Justices,
and Juries, and for the preservation of poor, aged, deformed, ignorant
people; frequently taken, arraigned, condemned and executed for
Witches2 Reginald Scot, Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), p. 1.
In short, Scot describes the trick in order to prove there was no magic, and thus no witches or wizards, and thus that judges and justices and jurors were frequently killing innocent people.
The goal is utterly serious, but it doesn’t stop him from having fun while explaining tricks, such as how “to make a Groat or a Testor to leap out of a pot, or to run alongst upon a table,”3Ibid., 230. how to “cut half your nose asunder, and to heal it again presently without any salve,”4Ibid., 245. and how to kill a chicken and bring it back to life.5Ibid, 345. He’s a great admirer and defender of these kinds of tricks, which he writes, “are not only tolerable, but greatly commendable.”6Ibid, 226. Given the depth of his knowledge, he himself was probably a magician.
Scot even expresses his regret at revealing these techniques, “to the hinderance of such poor men as live thereby,”7Ibid, 226. breaking the code of magicians to never reveal their secrets. (Just as, during my time with Las Vegas magicians, they were annoyed at a magician called Murray, who performed at the Tropicana until it was demolished to build a baseball stadium, because he showed how to do tricks on TikTok.)
Scot is at pains to distinguish theatrical magicians, those who “confess at the end that there are no supernatural actions, but devices of men, and nimble conveyances,”8Ibid, 248. from the magician who might “take upon him more than lieth in humane power to perform”9Ibid, 219. – which is to say, claim supernatural powers. Even the people that really claim to be involved in witchcraft aren’t witches. The miraculous wrought by man is “a knack of Knavery; and no miracle at all.”10Ibid, 219.
“There is nothing paranormal in tonight’s performance. Banachek will use his five senses to duplicate the illusion of a sixth sense to simulate what psychic powers would look like,” reads a screen before Steve Banachek’s nightly performance of mentalism at Las Vegas’s Strat Casino. After one of Mac King’s shows at the Excalibur casino, a woman from the audience was nearly pleading with him to admit that he had supernatural powers, but he told her again and again it was just a trick. On Fremont Street, Richard proclaimed that it was all a trick and that the only real magic was love.
As the magicians at the club liked to repeat, the magician is an “honest liar,” the only one upfront about the fact that they’re cheating you. The skilled magician doesn’t convince the audience of his or her genuine supernatural abilities, but merely leaves them impressed and amazed.
“Everything I’m about to tell you is a lie… including this,” Dan the Magic Man says at the beginning of each restaurant performance. Or that’s what he would say if he could find a gig.
“Remind me what your study is about,” Hiram asked me one evening.
“Well, originally I wanted to study the phenomenon of the trick,” I said. “Like how when magicians perform a trick, two realities exist simultaneously – the one in which the audience lives, where the coin has really disappeared, and the one in which the magician lives, in which the coin is in their watchband. I just felt like there would be a lot to learn from this, especially on a political level.” Hiram nodded, thinking for a moment.
“Let me tell you something about magic,” Hiram Strait said to me one night.
We normally understand the world through cause and effect, he said. Everything that happens is because of something that happened before it, and we can usually trace back the cause of a given effect if we want to. But magic exists in the disruption of cause and effect. A magic trick requires a magical cause for a given effect. It requires an impossible cause for a given effect.
He holds out both hands palm up with a coin in the right. He turns them over and closes them at the same time, and then reveals the coin in the left hand.
“Without me saying it’s magic, it’s just skilled manipulation. When a magician snaps their fingers, waves a wand, says a magic word, this is the magical cause of the card appearing at the top of the deck or the rabbit emerging from the empty hat.
And, Hiram said, the disruption of cause and effect relies on deception and a secret knowledge held by the magician. The magician knows how they get the card to the top of the deck, but they have to deceive the audience, to disguise the true cause and to imply a different one.
Ultimately, he said, this secret knowledge is how the magician derives power. It’s only through keeping their methods unknown that they can exert their wonders over the audience, tricking them and making them briefly doubt the normal causal relations of our world.
But, he told me, those people who use this technique of secrecy and deception in any number of other contexts, without confessing to trickery, are “con artists.” Those with a Knack of Knavery.
“And we see this all the time in politics,” he said.
I nodded vigorously.
“For instance,” Hiram said, “can two planes bring down three buildings?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s a simple question,” he said dryly. “Can two planes bring down three buildings?”
I guessed not.
“Exactly,” he said. The government is suggesting an impossible cause for a given effect, he explained. There has to be a different cause for the collapse of Tower Seven that they don’t want to tell us about. They hold a secret knowledge of 9/11 that they use to wield power over us.
“Or Lee Harvey Oswald,” he offered. “There’s no way that guy, with no training, could hit a target that far away, through trees and leaves, with a rifle of that caliber.”
~
Driving back from Tommy Rocker’s each Wednesday, I could see the Paris Casino’s Eiffel Tower, New York-New York’s Chrysler Building, the Venetian’s Doge’s Palace. It’s probably possible to take a picture of one of them in such a way that it looks like its faraway exemplar, but no one actually thinks these replicas are the originals.
Neither do most people really think that they have a fair chance of winning off the casino. You can calculate the odds of a roulette wheel spin in your head; you can look up the odds of a blackjack hand; you can see the odds on a board for sports betting. It’s fun to pretend otherwise, but everyone knows the house always wins. “The honest fakery of the neon,” critic Dave Hickey writes.11Dave Hickey, “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz.” Air Guitar (1997), p.52
And neither were the magicians creating a different reality in the moment of the trick. Everyone knows it’s an illusion, and the magicians themselves are insistent about it. So my hypothesis had been wrong, I thought, going north on the I-15 in the glow of the Strip. I thought if I could study the trick up close, I could see the reality of the magician and the reality of the audience at the same time. But magic wasn’t about two realities; it was about proving there’s only one. It never had the power to build new worlds, but only to set us back in our own more firmly. When you do a magic trick, people want to know how it’s done.
And learning the trick is like seeing a movie with a twist ending. On the first watch, when you don’t know the plot, you are shocked, amazed, bewildered. After that, there’s no magic.
The realization was deflating. There wasn’t any shortcut to social change. I was me and the world was the world and magic was one more withered possibility. Everything was barren reality. To act otherwise was con-artistry.
Like Uri Geller, who bends spoons on stage and still insists that he’s a real psychokinetic. Richard told me he personally knew the magicians that taught Geller his tricks.
Or like Peter Popoff, a faith healer who would divinely intuit people’s illnesses, cure cancer, make the wheelchair-bound rise and walk, and get people in the pews to throw away their prescription medications after he’d healed them. He was exposed for using audience plants and radio communication with his wife backstage – the same techniques that mentalists like Steve Banachek use.
In fact, Popoff was exposed in an investigation led by the magician James Randi and his young protégé, Steve Banachek.12See the documentary An Honest Liar (2014) by Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom. They found his act so repugnant that they took it upon themselves to intercept and record the radio communications from Popoff ’s wife, which were shockingly disdainful of the supplicants.
Such is the materialist conviction of the magician. Harry Houdini himself spent the latter years of his career publicly disproving psychic mediums, showing how their supposed communication with the deceased or their psychokinetic abilities were fraudulent. “The simple fact that a thing looks mysterious to one does not signify anything beyond the necessity of analytic investigation,”13Harry Houdini, A Magician Amongst the Spirits (1924), p.247. he wrote.
All the fantastical architecture of the Strip – the medieval castle, the sphinxes and pyramids of ancient Egypt, the flowing waterfalls and humid jungles of a flamingo habitat – looks better from a distance, or with blurred vision. Up close and sober, you see the frayed strands of fiberglass poking out, the uneven coating of plaster on drywall, the cracks running along walls, the ceiling tiles popping out of their squares.
~
One weekend I went out to shadow Victor while he was busking on Fremont Street. I stood with him for three hours that hundred degree day, and not a single person stopped to see his magic. Victor was dressed in all black, and he sweated and cooled off so many times that he had concentric rings of dried sweat around his armpits. In a nearby busking circle, an old couple sat in chairs singing Motown and soul classics with a bucket in front of them. We realized after an hour or so that they were lip-syncing the lyrics, and didn’t even have their mics on.
Victor performed trick after trick to me in the hopes of catching some passerby’s eye. Victor was a relative novice, and even if I couldn’t repeat the tricks myself, I caught enough clues to guess what was going on. After several hours, I was nearly delirious with what I would later realize was mild sunstroke, and I was thoroughly disinterested in ever again seeing someone make my card jump out of a deck or pass one rubber band through another. For a long time afterwards, I was driven by the strong urge to hug someone or eat a taco or have any other experience that was intensely sensory and real. I didn’t want to build a world out of popsicle sticks and tissue paper.
I kept going to the club anyways, going to shows, meeting up with magicians. Their stories were interesting. Perhaps like anyone, they were strange and surprising people. I spent one evening just talking to Dan the Magic Man, who told me he was working on an intricate typological exegesis of the Book of John. According to Dan the Magic Man, the world was going to end around the year 2070.
“I won’t live to see it,” he said. “But you probably will.”
At times I wondered if my study of magic wasn’t just a study of several retired men.
~
“You know,” Hiram said another night, “if you’re coming around here so much trying to learn about magic, you might as well learn a trick or two.”
He took out a deck and flipped over the top card, an eight of clubs. He flipped it back over, took it off the top of the deck, and stuck it in the middle. Then he snapped his fingers, and flipping over the top card again, showed that the eight of clubs had sprung back up to the top.
The trick was called the double lift. Resting the deck in his left palm with his thumb on the left long edge and his fingers on the right long edge, he showed me how he used his thumb to slide the top two cards to the right so they stuck out a few millimeters over his fingers. Then he slid his left pinky between the top two cards and the rest of the deck, slightly lifting the bottom right corner. With his right hand, he squared the cards back up in his left hand. Sitting across from him, the lifted corner was invisible.
With the top two cards separated, he picked them up as one with his right hand, flipping them over to show the face of the lower card. The motion was so fluid that it looked like he’d flipped over only one card. He bent and snapped the cards to emphasize the illusion that they were just one, and they stuck together perfectly. He flipped them back over. Then he took the top card – the hidden one, the one whose face we’d never seen – and inserted it into the middle of the deck. He snapped his fingers and flipped over the top card to show the eight of clubs again.
That weekend I went to visit my friend Abby, who was also a writer, for a writing session. Sometimes writers try to pretend writing can be a group activity, like we aren’t weird and isolated characters leading ascetic lives of social deprivation. I do my best work when I’m shut up in my room for days at a time.
But still, we have to try. I brought my deck of cards to Abby’s, to practice the double lift. Later I performed it for her to see if I could pull it off. When I snapped my fingers and the card popped back to the top of the deck, she looked up at me angrily.
“I trusted you,” she said, only mostly joking.
I saw another side of magic then, one that perhaps should have been obvious a long time ago: it is an act of deceit, at base an anti social act, one that strains the trust implicit in most quotidian interactions. It was only in the context of performance that it could be acceptable.
What kind of person, really, spends all their time alone in their room training to deceive people? The magician. The card cheat. The con artist. The imposter, rogue, juggler, fraud, varlet, witch, cousener, conjuror, soothsayer, backbiter, Papist, Heretick, prevaricator, confederate, sycophant, or pestiferous carbuncle. The writer, too, of course. Scot’s predecessor Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa actually considered the writer just as dangerous as the worst mountebank. He described poetry as “An Art invented to no other purpose, but with lascivious Rhythmes, measure of Sillables, and the gingling noise of fine words, to allure and charm the Ears of men… There is nothing more dangerous in civil Affairs, than this deluding Mystery.”14Henry Cornelius Agrippa, The Vanity of Arts and Sciences (1676), p.21.
Talking with Richard once, we got on the subject of tarot card reading and psychics. Unlike other performing magicians, psychics really try to convince themselves and their clients of their supernatural perceptions. From a dryly materialist perspective, they draw from the techniques of mentalism, confirmation bias, and psychoanalysis, but they present their technique as supernatural ability. And some people find genuine relief from that – especially because they believe. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argues that in both Freudian psychoanalysis and the shamanistic rituals of the Cuna people, “the [patient’s] conflicts and resistances are resolved, not because of the knowledge, real or alleged, which the sick woman progressively acquires of them, but because this knowledge makes possible a specific experience, in the course of which conflicts materialize in an order and on a level permitting their free development and leading to their resolution.”15Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols.” Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (1963), p.198. The same can certainly be true of tarot, in that whether or not the cards and the reader have supernatural dimensions, the act of discussing the possible meaning and implications of the symbols provides a space “to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious.”16Ibid., 193. And what’s so wrong about that? I wondered aloud. If the tarot reader or psychic (or shaman) could genuinely help people, wasn’t that OK?
The problem with tarot, Richard explained, the reason it was wrong, was that it led people to false belief.
“The most horrible and detestable monster… is the good witch,”17As quoted in Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas, (1971), p. 257. wrote William Perkins, a contemporary of Scot. Both men essentially agree on this point: trickery is fine as long as it is “doone for mirth and recreation,”18Scot, 216 but as soon as “these experiments grow to superstition or impiety,” argues Scot, “they are either to be forsaken as vain, or denied as false,”19Ibid. no matter their goal. As Keith Thomas explains in Religion and the Decline of Magic, the black witch’s “acts of malevolence made him unpopular with the community at large, whereas the remedies offered by the white witch were positively seductive…The black witch might do harm to his neighbor’s body, but the [white witch] struck a mortal blow to his soul.”20Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p. 257.
Scot and Perkins were both Protestants, and in the swelling violence of the Reformation, they entrench their discourse in the binary logic of wartime. Channeling the rationalistic spirit of the Reformation, they argued that the relics and pilgrimages and healing miracles and indulgences of the Catholic Church were magical rites of witchcraft. “I See no difference,” Scot writes, between back-street conjurors “and popish conjurations; for they agree in order, words, and matter, differing in no circumstance, but that the Papists doe it without shame openly, the other doe it in hugger mugger secretly.”21Scot, 173. These were extra-Biblical practices that promised salvation without any material or textual basis. In short, they were magical acts, which were fraudulent acts. The Papists were “good witches” that would strike a mortal blow to the soul. “Popery, in the words of Daniel Defoe,” writes Keith Thomas, “was ‘one entire system of anti Christian magic.’”22Thomas, 69.23
Theatrical magic is the wedge Scot drives as much between the real and the fraudulent as between the Protestant and the Catholic. I also don’t believe in faith healing, but Scot’s vehemence belies something more absolute than measured rationalism. The withering scrutiny of the magician can only ever be fixed to the magician’s own perspective. It’s not so much about eliminating error as it is about the power of arbitrating the real.
In a section titled “How to produce or make Monsters by Art Magicke, and why Pharaohs Magicians could not make Lice,” Scot writes that “the ashes of a Duck, being put between two dishes, and set in a moist place, doth ingender a huge Toad.” Where does this toad sit amongst all the hugger mugger?
“My current study is of ideology,” Hiram Strait told me another night. “Every ideology is a mental illness.”
I nodded.
“Capitalism,” Hiram continued, “is the only rational system,” insisting that it was not an ideology by virtue of its empirically proven supremacy.
“Well, I don’t know about–”
“It’s created the most amount of wealth for the most number of people,” he interrupted.
“Well, some people have definitely made a lot of money, but what about the problems it causes?” I said.
“Such as?”
“I don’t know, outsourced labor to sweatshops… the iPhone factory that has suicide nets so workers can’t kill themselves… climate change,” I said.
I brought up natural disasters and islands sinking into the ocean and heat death.
“Okay, email me some evidence then,” he said smugly. “So what do you believe in then?”
I told him about my leftist utopian ideas.
He scoffed. “Completely impractical”
Hiram believed in capitalism. Hiram believed Darwin was a con artist and that there was no such thing as evolution. Hiram believed that the stone-cutting technologies of civilizations three thousand years ago still exceed our capabilities, thereby proving that an advanced civilization preceded the Egyptians. I believed we don’t need a centralized, hierarchical state to run a society.
Driving back home that night, I thought about Dave Hickey’s love letter to Vegas, “A Home in the Neon.” He writes about the peculiar horizontality he’s experienced here, the lack of social stratification, the fact that even if you’re rich, there’s little in the way of “high” culture that you can engage with to turn money into social capital. I don’t think that’s quite right. What Hickey is talking about is Vegas’ large middle stratum, but Vegas has an underclass, too, whose obscene social position can only be grasped in the glaring lights of the Strip.
Casinos flatter our intellect, tell us they’re leveling with us: they know we know we’re bound to lose. We know there’s nothing supernatural going on. It’s all statistically on the level. When the cash suddenly vanishes there’s a rational explanation. The trick is revealed.
But the revelation of the trick here is in fact a misdirection from trickery on another level. The magician Apollo Robbins tells neuroscientists Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde that saying ‘magicians do misdirection’ “is like saying doctors make people well with their curing skills. The term is so broad that it is next to meaningless.”24Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind (2011), p.66. Take a walk past a Vegas bus stop in the summer and try to make sense of how people get heatstroke a couple minutes from air-conditioned castles filled with cash. “Everyone is tricking you but me,” the casinos insist, as they re plaster the drywall and ingender a huge toad.
Maybe there was some power to be learned from magic after all. Maybe any true conviction, even one with the most rational basis, requires a willful and blind denial of reasonable objections. Maybe that’s just what it means to really act in the world. Maybe you can trick people and not believe it yourself and also really believe it yourself.
The indigenous Tlingit ethnographer and shaman George Hunt (or Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World) writes of a time he cured a woman whom another shaman could not cure. In his description of the cure, he is explicit that he “pretended” to tremble, that “the alleged worm” of the sickness that he sucked out of the woman and spit into his palm was a mix of down and blood he’d hidden in his lip.25George Hunt, “I Desired to Learn the Ways of the Shaman,” trans. Franz Boas, The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians (1930), p.29. Cited in “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism,” by Michael Taussig.
Afterwards, the shaman who failed begged him to reveal the cure. “Tell me what stuck on the palm of your hand last night. Was it the true sickness or was it only made up?”
After a long pause, Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World responded.
“Your saying to me is not quite good.”26Ibid., 31.
~
When I sent Hiram a collection of articles about disappearing islands and climate-related migration, I was relieved by his reply: “These email thrusts, parries and reposts can go on ad tedium. Of the many subjects you and I might profitably discuss, this is least likely productive and least fun.” Instead, he asked me to send some of my writing. And then he started sending me excerpts from Hiram’s Tales from the Sixties, a collection of nonfiction short stories about his time as a hippy.
“Call me Hiram,” a story called “Karma Star” began.
I wore flowers and had gleaming long hair brushed back on my shoulders and bound across my forehead by a beaded leather strap or, sometimes, gathered behind by a rubber band. Psychedelic energy electrified my body, clarified my mind, opened a door in my heart to love all things, earthly, human and divine. My denims were tight and I wore no underwear, the outline of my yang hanging proudly left.
Another one, called “Russell’s Story,” was about his friend Russell going on a yogic retreat to India with a bunch of Americans. They’re led into the jungle on elephants and introduced frequently to “holy men who demonstrated how they could produce mystic rose petals from the ethers and who caused an abundance of magic ash to pour from seemingly empty containers or empty hands.” I could see Hiram the magician behind these lines, knowing he could reproduce these effects.
As they get deeper into the jungle, many of them get dysentery, including Russell. The story climaxes with another mystic, who performs the same rose petal and ash conjurations. Everyone is sick and tired and fed up with the same effects.
Switching tactics, [the holy man] asked if anyone was feeling sick. Russell raised his hand proclaiming no dog had been sicker.
The guru had him come to the front and lie face down on the floor. He straddled Russell, sat down on the small of his back and grabbed him by the shoulders. As Russell tells it, lightning went through his body. He rose as the disgusted Americans fanned out into the jungle for a little privacy.
It took a day for Russell to realize how good he felt. His discomfort was gone, his bowels normal, the swaying of the elephant a gentle rhythm. A glow came over the jungle and its sounds came like music…
As Russell tells it, they were on a mission to find hidden knowledge, but these jungle holy men didn’t know what that meant to the Americans. Hidden knowledge? How about the flower petal trick? No? What about the mystic ash? No? How about I heal your sickness? As Russell tells it, he’s never had a sick day since.
Hiram assured me all his tales from the sixties were true. The skeptic who denied climate change, evolution, and the official narratives of 9/11 and the JFK assassination was here amid the mystery, the unexplained, the methods unknown to and inexplicable by Western science.
What of their origin stories, the tales they told about their starts in magic? Hiram had the beachside shack and the absolute clarity of Amber Past’s directive. Gary had the fear of prison, where magic was a supernatural escape. Robert had the crystal clear image of a burst of doves. The world-famous magician Jeff McBride told me he’d gone to the library as a child to read books about music, but found the magic section right next to it and knew right then that he had to be a magician.
There was a literary flair to all of them, where coincidences were laden with significance. The best of all was Roy Keuppers, who was not a magician but a famous coin trick machinist.27E.g. his “Coin in Bottle” trick: “Imagine being able to borrow & coin & a bottle from a spectator. Inserting the coin into the bottle, & passing it around. You then easily remove the coin from the bottle & return both the coin & the bottle to the spectator. Impossible? Maybe, but not for you! This is a classic in coin magic & can be repeated over & over with no set up.” See: https://roykueppers. com/product/coin-in-bottle-2- fold-coin/ Coins, he told me, had somehow always been a part of his life. As a child, he’d dreamed of them. Sometimes he dreamed his pockets were filled with coins, bulging with them, overflowing. I could picture him pulling out fistfuls of silver tumbling through his fingers and jingling across the ground. Other times, in his dreams, he would tell a friend that the chest of drawers in his bedroom was full of coins, and he needed to wake up and check. In real life, he would wake up, check his drawers and find no coins, and then go back to sleep into the same dream to tell his friend that the coins weren’t there.
As an adult, he’d started making coin tricks in his basement at night and selling them at gas stations. One day a famous magician stumbled on one of his coins and flew him out to Vegas, and since then he’s been surrounded by coins, has literal buckets of them, thinks about them the first moment he wakes up and the last moment before he goes to sleep.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone any of this before.” It was like he’d just realized the coin trick that had played out across decades of his waking and dreaming life.
~
One week, one of the magicians took me aside.
“So you’re writing something about magic, right?” “Yeah, yeah,” I told him.
“You should, like, make your writing be magical,” he said, cocking an eyebrow to emphasize the point.
“Definitely,” I said. “But what do you think that would look like?”
“Just like… something really good, that leaves the reader like… wow,” he said, shrugging.
I thought about it for some time. It would mean withholding something from the reader. It would mean making a reveal that leverages the hidden information to conjure something inexplicable. Pulling up two cards but making it look like one. ~
