Writing from the framework of the emerging field of Performance Studies, Michael Mangan investigates the ways in which different periods in Western history have defined the conjurer. Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring looks at how the development of the modern stage magician occurred in the context of religious perceptions of miracles, priestly power, notions of the occult, the emergence of modern science and technology, and the contemporary movements of spirituality and performance art.

Well up until the sixteenth-century in Europe, the conjurer was often in danger of being mistaken for an occultist, dabbling in demonic energies and in league with the devil. However, after the hysteria of witch hunting subsided, by the time of the Enlightenment, when reason and rationality were the vogue, the conjurer was safely able to evoke an illusion of mystical power around their sleight-of-hand and smoke-and-mirrors trickery. At this point, Mangan suggests an uneasy, and often contested, schism developed between spirituality and performance. Although the conjurer now revelled in their ability to use clichéd religious motifs in their performance, the audience’s perception of their act was more about amazement over the magician’s techniques and secrets rather than a belief in conjurer’s mystical powers.

One of the earliest and most famous tales of conjuring in Western history is that of Moses and Aaron turning staffs into snakes to demonstrate their God. While religious dogma sees this incident as a miracle, Mangan cites a number of scholars and histories of conjuring that instead seek to demystify the act into one of trickery; “it is now left to the reader to infer that Aaron, too, might have been working with hypnotised snakes in order to perform what seems like a miracle” (21). While Mangan is hesitant to play into binary oppositions between the ‘true’ miracle and the ‘false’ illusion, he concedes that this separation existed in the popular imagination for hundreds of years as a way to differentiate the holy power of the priesthood from the unholy workers in the occult. The very suggestion that Moses and Aaron were using the techniques of the street performer to manipulate a Pharaoh and establish a religion, was only made in the late nineteenth-century and “[t]here hundred years earlier, a similar suggestion was enough to get a man killed” (21).

In the early modern period, many of the contemporary standard tricks of the later stage magician were performed on the streets rather than in theatres. The most common acts of the conjurer entailed a form of disappearance and reappearance of an object or person. One of the most famous early acts was the decapitation and re-animation of birds. This trick was accomplished by relying on instinct of the live bird to tuck their head in their wings and remain still. Meanwhile, the conjurer would brandish another bird’s head and seem to re-attach it to the original bird. Such acts of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century marketplace were now divorced from a connection with witchcraft, instead often enjoying royal patronage. However, some tricks still resonated with past fears of the occult and acts that too closely resembled ‘real’ sorcery were often prohibited because, “the relationship between playing at being a magician and actually being thought to be a magician is an unstable and potentially dangerous one” (36).

By the nineteenth-century, the conjurer was well established as a standard theatre act; in many of the early writing about conjuring, done often by magicians themselves, Mangan notes that the creation of illusions continues in their memoirs and textbooks. Later magicians, he also notes, were as good at self-publicity as they were at sleight-of-hand. Today, the early twentieth-century acts of escapologist Harry Houdini have led to a cult following and the fame of his name has surpassed the earlier magician Robert-Houdin who was idolised and imitated by Houdini. Both men succeeded in creating a public image that both denied and relied on a belief in mystical powers. Robert-Houdin understood that staged magic acts relied on both “the best traditions of Romantic theatre’s dependence on the audience’s suspension of disbelief …. [and the magician’s] playful claim to supernatural powers” (100).

Harry Houdini’s name, in association with staged tricks, has now eclipsed that of his predecessor. However, it is from Robert-Houdin that we owe the standard costume of gentlemanly bow tie and tails for stage magician. Robert-Houdin wanted to separate himself from the travelling ‘vagrant’ performers of tricks, although both employed the same techniques in their acts, with only costume and therefore class connotations separating them. A reliance on new technology, the ever-popular automaton, and the traditional sleight-of-hand, formed the basis of a magician’s act, and continue to do so to this day.

The audience’s knowledge that they are being fooled by the traditional magic act does not make it less appealing because “it is not possible to trace a simple line of progression from ‘primitive’ cultures, who believe in magic-as-efficacy, through to ‘sophisticated’ ones … who engage with magic only on the level of entertainment” (33). The link between the ‘showman’ and the ‘shaman’ is not so far apart, and neither are the modern magician/performance artist and the sainted martyr. In discussion of contemporary magician David Blaine, Mangan draws some direct parallels between his endurance performances and the penances of religious zealots wishing to prove their holiness. Blaine’s performance Above the Below where he sat in a clear box above London, triggered hostility and debate among the onlookers and “the audience became part of the performance, and the rituals of humiliation they perform contribute to the very drama of martyrdom that Blaine is enacting” (190).

Our culture continues to engage with the supernatural in its popular fictions, in characters such as Harry Potter and television shows that validate the claims of mediums and spiritualists. One of the most interesting aspects of Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring is the way Mangan charts the many exposures of fakery in many magician’s claims to supernatural powers; although this admission became part of the public record, it did nothing to deter the popularity of magic acts nor the belief in movements such as spiritualism. In the same way that the famous magical acts of cutting a woman in half and then re-assembling her, pay homage to ancient religious myths of dismembered gods who died and were reborn, so too does the modern magician re-enact ancient tribal customs in a world that is perhaps not as modern as it may believe itself to be.


Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring
(2007)

by Michael Mangan
Intellect Books Theatre and Consciousness Series, v. 2 SERIES
(distributed in Australia through Unireps)
ISBN: 978-1-84150-149-9 / ISSN: 1753-3058
280pp AUD$54.54