"The best general theory of magic we have yet in any literature" - Dr. Lawrence Hass
An Essay On Magic
Introductory Remarks by Dr. Lawrence Hass, Publisher
[From An Essay On Magic, The Introduction]
My belief [is] that Bob Neale’s “An Essay on Magic” is the best general theory of magic we have so far. Now, when I say “general theory” what I mean is that it attempts to understand magic and magic performance as it happens throughout the whole of human life and not only by focusing on what theatrical specialists do on stage.
Indeed, most every “theory of magic” by performing practitioners, such as Maskelyne, Fitzkee, Nelms, and Ortiz (among others), begin and end their considerations with onstage magic only, as if all the other forms of human magic making (magical beliefs, behaviors, and rituals) are completely irrelevant to stage magic. Not only does Bob’s general theory demonstrate that this radical separation is highly suspect and myopic, it also shows that you cannot even adequately understand onstage magic this way.
Without a careful understanding of our everyday offstage magical behaviors, the existence of onstage magicians becomes a mystery. Why do we have magicians at all? Why do they exist in every recorded human culture? If all the rest of our human magics are ignorant superstition or religious hokum (the usual assumptions) then performing magicians are really nothing but liars and deceivers, tricksters and con-men. Yet this vague conclusion (based on assumption) doesn’t square at all with the empirical facts that staged magic performance is ancient, utterly universal, and venerated in most cultures, and that the magician is generally regarded as an archetype of great power and promise.
At the same time, the famous academic scholars of magic who focus on everyday magical thinking, behaviors, and rituals don’t really have “general” theories of magic either. Out of either ignorance of or prejudice against actual theater practice, seminal thinkers such as Frazier, Levi-Straus, Evans-Pritchard, Tambiah, Maus, and Eliade typically divorce their “data” from the long-standing, cross-cultural traditions of magical art-making. They write as if everyday magical behaviors are somehow fundamental, objective “facts,” ignoring how those behaviors are themselves fully informed by the theatrical culture of magic performance that surrounds them.
In the end, then, it is my considered view that the most famous theories of magic by scholars and magicians in the past one hundred and fifty years have merely been “local” theories—that is, focused only on this or that region of magic with little care or even awareness that there are other whole regions that matter. Again, this is exactly the short-sightedness that Bob Neale’s theory attempts to overcome.
As complicated as his general theory is, as tricky as it can be to address multiple regions of magic and then articulate their inter-relationships, he is consciously attempting to offer a truly general account of human magic-making rather than one more local, regional study that assumes and pretends it is general.
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Dr. Larry Hass, Pubisher, Theory and Art of Magic Press
A Selection from An Essay on Magic
Chapter 1
Magic Reflecting Magic
Why perform theatrical magic?
Shakespeare offers a clue. Hamlet has no proof that his uncle murdered his father in order to become king, but the appearance of some actors offers an occasion for generating evidence. “The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (II, ii). Hamlet advises the players to perform their play in a way that reveals the daily life of his uncle, including the actions that Hamlet believes will expose his guilt. Hamlet states the principle behind his advice: the “purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature” (III, ii). Again, he says, the purpose of playing, of theater, is to “hold the mirror up to nature.”
In his discussion of this principle, Thomas R. Whitaker interprets it as meaning “that the purpose of playing is to hold the mirror up to ‘playing.’” He understands Shakespeare’s play itself to be a deception in which the members of the audience willingly participate. The outcome is to expose the deception that exists in their own lives: If we willingly enter its field of psychological magic, however, we may find there a participatory mirroring of our consciousness that leads toward a kind of self-knowledge. Perhaps that is why so many plays, regardless of their ostensible themes, lead us into a labyrinth of deception—where we may seek and possibly confront a Minotaur called “truth.”
If theatrical playing holds up the mirror to playing, how much more does magic performance hold up the mirror to magic! We might say, “magic is the thing wherein we catch the consciousness of the audience.” This, then, is the basic theme of this first chapter: magic is the mirror of magic.
At first glance, this sentence may appear to be a meaningless tautology in which something is defined in terms of itself. However, magic is a term that refers to more than one thing. So we begin our exploration with a summary of the many magics and continue with some perspective on how they are related. Thereby I hope to reach a tentative conclusion on the meaning of the magic mirror. The purpose is to explore the connection between theatrical magic and all the other magics, especially that which occurs in our daily lives—magic reflecting magic.
1. The Many Magics
Magic! This is a big word like love, god, and democracy. It is so big, with such great breadth and depth, that no simple definition is possible. In another sense, it is so vague as to be empty, easily accepting all sorts of meanings to fill itself up. How are we to determine what we are talking about?
There appear to be two common understandings of magic. One: magic is tricks done for entertainment— what stage performers do. Two: magic is either superstitious nonsense or evil from the devil—what others do, or what I and we used to do.
Commonly understood, then, magic is either superficial or bad. Both conclusions are justified as far as they go, but I believe that more is involved, much more than we realize, and perhaps far more than stage magicians are inclined to acknowledge. In fact, I suspect that there is more magic and more kinds of magic than I can imagine.
When I first tried to think about this, I created a schema that gave as much attention to stage magic as to all the other magics. This is understandable, given the focused interests of myself and my magician readers, but it revealed a quite unbalanced awareness of the quantity of the other magics. At the very least, my new attempt here to tackle the subject should be more cognizant of the breadth and depth of magics. At the same time, I am more humble about the schema I used then to present the varied categories of magic. I put them out there, but with little attention to the connections between them. The reader should feel free to explore their relationships. Above all, please tentatively accept my use of the plural form of the noun “magics.” I do believe that there is an underlying magic for all the magics, but my initial focus is on the many forms of magics. Reference to magic in the singular has probably limited our appreciation of the variety, whereas use of the word “magics,” however awkward it may be, hopefully pushes us to appreciate more and more kinds of magic.
For a quick overview of where we are going, look at the following diagram:
Life Magics
(natural)
Traditional Magics
(orthodox)
Community — Individual and Group
Modern Magics
(pluralistic)
Acknowledged — Unexplored
Stage Magics
(theatrical)
Reduced — Restored — Reflexive
(Distractive, Deceptive) (Humanistic, Existential) (Magic about Magic)
As the diagram conveys, magic is divided into four areas for our consideration:
- life magics that are natural to human beings,
- traditional magics that have been practiced by
individuals, groups, and communities,
- modern magics that are practices, whether
acknowledged as magic or in areas quite
unexplored for magics, and
- the stage magics with which we are so familiar.
Life magics, however limited our awareness of them, may well be the most prevalent magics we experience as individuals and societies. Traditional and modern magics are also far more pervasive than we are inclined to recognize. Compared with these three categories of magics, stage magics are undoubtedly a tiny drop in the bucket and of practically no concern to anyone other than a small group of people such as me and the readers of this book. In the vast arena of those various magics in human behavior, contemporary stage magic is of very little consequence. It is probably important to recognize this before attempting to be a stage magician of any significance. Moreover, if we proceed with patience and tolerance at the beginning, our look at the many magics may offer both motivation and direction for our stage magic performances.
