For at least a year now, I’ve been making random notes toward what may, in coming decades, if I live long enough, become a book about fiction and magic (and by magic, I mean both prestidigitation and occult ideas). Since I would like these Lexias to be opportunities for trying out ideas, collecting fragments that don’t (yet) cohere, and exploring possibilities … here are some of those notes.
(Reader, let me tell you it has been a great effort of self-control not to keep editing and editing these notes, trying to wrangle them into more consistent and coherent shape, more efficient writing, fewer questionable premises, etc. One day I will do that, but for the sake of ever getting anything else done ever again, today must not be that day.)
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Two of the key figures for my ideas of storytelling magic are the writer and self-professed wizard Alan Moore, and the man who is by many accounts the greatest living sleight of hand artist, Juan Tamariz.
Alan Moore has spoken in numerous interviews about his magic practice and his sense of it as intimately tied to his work as a writer. He discusses it in a recent interview (on YouTube) with Heather Parry for the Scottish Book Trust: “These days, I’d say that representation — i.e., art — and consciousness and writing and magic probably are all part of the same thing and all arose at the same time.” He goes into more detail on these ideas in this older Channel 4 video. And plenty of other places. From what designer John Coulthart says, Alan Moore and the late Steve Moore’s long-awaited Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is slowly making its way toward completion, and I will be an enthusiastic reader.
Juan Tamariz is not nearly as well known to the world (generally speaking) as Alan Moore, but he is, if anything, even more amazing. As Moore is legendary to everyone who writes comics, Tamariz is legendary to everyone who knows anything about sleight of hand. I would bet heaps of money that if you lined up a bunch of the better magicians in the world and asked them who the greatest living sleight of hand artist is, all of them would say Tamariz. (But maybe that’s just because the kinds of sleight of hand artists I tend to be interested in are his disciples and acolytes.) It’s not just that Tamariz is a stunning performer — he is also a generous teacher, making him tremendously influential, and thoughtful writer. Indeed, as a writer and lecturer he is as much a philosopher of magic as an inventor and performer of it.
There’s a lot to be mined in their ideas, but with Tamariz there’s something of a challenge, because I don’t want to reveal anything to everyday audiences that magicians would prefer to keep to themselves. I think this is do-able, though, because Tamariz’s ideas of how an effect can be structured are brilliant but not anything that needs to be kept super secret. But this is something I’m going to have to keep thinking about.
What I think unites Moore and Tamariz is a commitment to wonder and imagination. This is true generally for everybody interested in magic, but Moore and Tamariz make wonder and imagination central to their worldviews, central to their practices, central to everything they do.
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Many magicians don’t like the word trick for what they do. (Most commonly, they prefer the term effect.) The reasons vary, but the one I like is that magic isn’t about tricking you, it’s about creating a sense of wonder. Anybody can trick you — that’s what practical jokes are. If you feel tricked, you may feel someone has taken advantage of you, made a fool of you, made you seem stupid. Magic serves a different purpose. Magic should make you feel delighted and amused. At its best, magic should expand your imagination and maybe even approach a sense of the sublime.
That’s why revealing the methods for effects is so forbidden. No great effects, and few good ones, gain in sense of wonder when their method is revealed. Plenty of effects are impressive in performance and may even be more impressive if you do know the method — there are some gorgeous routines that require a stunning number of hidden moves and years of difficult practice by their performers — but being impressed at someone’s skill rarely strikes so deep as being filled with wonder by seeing the impossible. (There are exceptions, of course. Watch Dealt and learn about Richard Turner and you’ll likely feel a sense of wonder while also being impressed.)
Similarly, fiction that is most impressive for its technique is not the greatest fiction. Writers themselves can get caught up in the beauty and complexity of technique. That’s probably true for people who are invested in any kind of work or practice. It’s the joy of shoptalk. But technique has to be in service to something greater than itself. Vision, imagination, the beautiful and sublime. History is littered with forgotten technicians as well as artists who made an undeniable imprint on culture with what might be seen as faulty technique. Philip K. Dick is a perfect example of this, a writer who certainly had moments of technical achievement but whose writing overall is pretty clumsy — yet his vision became one of the dominant influences on later 20th century culture (mostly after his death).
As with magic, with fiction writing there is a basic level of technique that must be learned if any achievement is to be made. It doesn’t matter how much vision you have if you write nothing but clunky sentences, characters who don’t have any depth, settings that lack definition, plots that are incomprehensible, etc. You can get away with a few of those things, maybe, as long as you’re strong in something and know how to lean in to your strengths. But beyond the basics, it’s anyone’s game, and what triumphs artistically is vision, imagination, originality. It may not sell much, it may struggle to find an audience, but the work of greatness is the work that makes the finer points of technique irrelevant.
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Questions of authenticity can be useful historically and culturally, but they can also be anathema to art, because questions of authenticity seek to undermine wonder.
I grow wary when the word authentic appears. It has its importance and its uses. But too often it is a weapon against imagination and play, a power move by a killjoy. And certainly, sometimes joy needs to be killed, because sometimes one person’s joy is paid for by another person’s misery, but we must be careful.
In the Guardian, there’s a new essay by art critic Jonathan Jones about the history of the tarot, with Jones making the utterly unoriginal move of saying that the tarot is not authentically occult. It existed for at least a century as a card game only, no divination or magic involved. Jones’s essay reads like a gotcha, but he’s got nothing. Everything he says about the history of the tarot has long been known and denied only by people who insist that 18th century crackpots had deeper knowledge of Ancient Egypt than modern archaeologists. Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett write at the beginning of A History of the Occult Tarot (first published in 2002):
Modern cartomancy arose only in the XVIII century: packs of cards were shuffled, dealt and spread in prescribed formats for telling the future. The earliest instance of Tarot cartomancy occurred in Bologna, but the familiar variety, surviving today, descends from French fortune-tellers. First, they assigned divinatory meanings to the cards of the common Piquet pack, which had French suit-signs. Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738-91), a Parisian diviner better known as Etteilla, transferred his Piquet cartomancy to the Tarot. By this time the game of Tarot had ceased to be played in France outside its eastern region so, to Parisian seers, the Tarot seemed mysterious and exotic. Etteilla and others infused the Tarot with occult sciences. This resulted in the production of new Tarots, to be used for common fortunetelling, yet designed to express some cosmic theme. Here were the beginnings of the trend nowadays called Tarotism.
The history is fascinating, whether of the early cards or the occult-influenced cards (check out the wonderful Tarot Wheel site for lots of beautiful historical imagery). Before they could be mass produced, tarot cards were extraordinary objects for rich families. My favorite is the Sola Busca deck, just a wondrous collection of weird art. The Sola Busca is an interesting example here, an authentic tarot game deck, mysterious but not occult, yet also highly influential for the imagery Pamela Coleman Smith created in the early 20th century for what is now the most popular occult deck, the Rider-Waite-Smith (named for the publisher, the Rider Company; the conceiver, Arthur Edward Waite; and the artist).
Most of what has persisted in European occultism derives from the 18th century, and particularly to ideas about Egypt that in later centuries were proved quite wrong by archaeology. Antoine Court de Gébelin was an even less reliable historian than Geoffrey of Monmouth. But pseudo-histories can also be remarkably complex and have complicated relationships to actual history, as the importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth (and Court de Gébelin) to later culture shows. Just look at the depth of history Ronald Hutton pulls from the word pagan, for instance, in his book The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft.
But people like Jonathan Jones, and other adherents to the cult of authenticity, miss that what most matters in history is rarely something’s point of origin. Rather, what matters is how people put ideas and objects to use.
Tarot’s origins as a game are interesting, yes, just as the history of all playing cards is interesting. (I’ve loved playing cards of all sorts since I was a kid. They’re portable art galleries, math problems, and fidget toys all at once.) It’s important to acknowledge facts, but to reduce tarot to nothing but a card game is to throw out most of what has made tarot a cultural presence for centuries.
Here’s another factual history, one I’ve most recently heard expressed by John Michael Greer on the Hermetix podcast: divination of some sort has existed in pretty much every culture that we know of, it is as universal a human desire as there is, so it doesn’t matter whether you believe in one or any form of divination, it’s been a significant force in human life. Further, divination makes use of ordinary objects. Tea leaves, rocks, animal bones, dice, playing cards. None of these things are inherently magical or divinatory. Tarot cards are pieces of cardstock with images printed on them. Through use, we turn them into tools for games and for divination. (Sometimes divination as game. The wonderful magician and mentalist Luke Jermay likes to call tarot “a game of the heart, not the head.”) Through use and belief, we invest ordinary objects with magic.
The bigger, thornier, far more compelling question is not what is authentic? but what is magical?
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In her fascinating book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Kay Larson quotes Cage’s 1948 “A Composer’s Confessions”, wherein Cage states that “it makes little difference if one of us likes one piece and another another; it is rather the age-old process of making and using music and our becoming more integrated as personalities through this making and using that is of real value.”
Making and using are key ideas for understanding the history of culture, including the history of fiction and magic. How did people use ideas of imagination, of language, of the supernatural?
I think of this when I think of the cultural work of spiritualism from the Fox Sisters in 1848 until spiritualism’s decline after the Great Depression — spiritualism served a real purpose for, for instance, marginalized people, especially women, providing them a path toward authority and activism. (Spiritualism also served a valued purpose for its debunkers.) Too much evidence has been lost for the exact truth of spiritualist effects in the 19th century to be definitively known, but the processes and techniques don’t matter nearly so much as how the effects were interpreted. I certainly wish we could know more about how the Fox sisters did what they did, or exactly what William Mumler did to create his spirit photographs (and what he really thought he was doing), but those answers are lost to time. The explanations provided for what the Fox sisters did, including the explanations they offered (and then recanted) late in life, are unconvincing and don’t fit the reported effects. Some of the techniques Mumler used for spirit photographs are obvious now, but how he discovered them, how he hid them from investigators, etc. is unknown and at this point unknowable. It’s easy to get lost in tail-chasing arguments about the veracity of spiritualism, spirit photographs, tarot, etc., which feels pretty fruitless to me. If people want to believe in talking to the dead, they’re going to believe in talking to the dead. And vice versa. There’s not much that can be argued, as the whole history of people arguing these things proves. Call it the Houdini/Conan Doyle problem. Two smart and articulate men who genuinely liked and respected each other, neither Houdini nor Conan Doyle ever convinced the other to change their mind about spiritualism.
If we put arguments about veracity aside, interesting conversations can happen and interesting histories reveal themselves. Magic doesn’t have to be “real” in a scientific, materialist sense to be real in its usefulness. This is something I’ve learned from reading and writing fiction and from being fascinated by stage magic and sleight of hand. Both fiction and conjuring are about crafting deliberate illusions, creating effects in the mind. But those effects aren’t limited to the mind, because minds are not divorced from the physical world, the “real” world. What we call the real world is at least as much a product of mind as of material. Our beliefs, perceptions, assumptions, ideologies, superstitions all have profound consequence on our everyday lives.
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These days, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” has been so often repeated as to be a cliché of a cliché, but the constant reiteration proves the need, or at least the desire, for the concept. It’s a vital concept for both storytelling and magic. Every work of fiction, no matter how realistic it is, asks readers to go on a journey of belief, to indulge in a game of let’s pretend. So, too, magic.
Let’s pretend may sound like a frivolous phrase, but it is the gateway to imagination, and without imagination we are little more than bundles of biological processes wandering from stimulus to stimulus until we die.
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Few people are so rational as to lack all superstition. If you think you are, then get a picture of someone you love and tear it up. Don’t want to? Why not? It’s just a piece of heavy paper.
We are all superstitious because we are all human, and humans are, as Terrence Deacon asserted, the symbolic species. This is also why occult magic and storytelling overlap so well. Stories and magic both arrange symbols into mysterious coherence.
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Like magic, stories are best when they become an experience. Both magic and stories start in the mind. They begin with the mind growing curious: what is this thing? Anxiety grows because we, the audience, want to know more. We begin to anticipate, to guess what might be coming next. Images may grow in our minds, or concepts, or connections. Surprise ensues. By the end, we have new memories of the experience.
One of the hardest things to do as a writer of fiction is to provide the reader with a sense of the story being meaningful. I often struggled with how to express this — the challenge as well as the effect — until I began to think of it in terms of card tricks and why some card tricks, even ones that require great skill, can be utterly without wonder while other card tricks, including some that require very little skill to perform, can ignite an expansive sense of mystery.
Consider a simple effect: one card, let’s say an ace of spades, turns into another card, let’s say an ace of hearts. There are dozens of ways ot achieve this physically — and infinity of ways to use it, explain it, weave it into story.
Because it is story that gives magic meaning. An ace of spades becomes an ace of hearts. Okay, clever, but … so what?
So what? is the question that plagues most banal and uncompelling storytelling, just as it plagues competent but uninspiring magic. Or think of it another way: what are we leaving the audience with?
Imagine this: A person shows you the ace of spades and asks you to think of it as a moment in your past that you are ashamed of, a moment that bothers you, that haunts you, that you just can’t get over. No need to say it aloud, just think of it. Bring it to mind and imagine it as that card in front of you. The person turns that ace of spades face down and now tells you to imagine a happy memory, big or small, but something unambiguously happy, a moment of joy. Hold that memory. In future, the person says, when that bad ace of spades memory comes to you, try to bring this good memory and the feelings you associate with it forward in your mind, let it — and here the person turns the ace of spades over to reveal it has turned into the ace of hearts — wipe that other memory away.
The routine described is simple and sentimental, but it is significantly more effective than just displaying a magic trick. It turns a demonstration of skill into something else, a kind of story. And it gives the audience something to hold onto and think about after the performance is finished.
Now when I think about a story idea I might write, I ask myself: Is this just a card trick? Or is it a card trick whose effect is to create an experience in the reader’s mind? What use might this story be for the reader? What memory of magic might remain?
