Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring

by Michael Mangan

From David Blaine's death-defying feats of will to Harry Potter's boarding-school victories against evil forces, the darker side of magic and its performance clearly strikes a cultural nerve. The conjuror's act of bringing the impossible into being and summoning both the grotesque and marvelous with a sudden gesture challenges spectators' assumptions of reality and fantasy. Performing Dark Arts explores the paradox of the conjuror and the broader...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1841501492
• ISBN13: 9781841501499
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Intellect (UK)
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Shaman Versus Showman

The basic tricks and techniques of magic have not changed over the centuries. Emerging from locked boxes, pulling objects from manifestly empty containers, and so on, can be found in descriptions and magic manuals from the seventeenth century, and legend has it that even if Ancient Egyptian magicians were not sawing a woman in half, they were capable of decapitating geese and restoring their heads to them. They probably did the "cup and balls" trick, too, making a ball show up under a cup where it could not have been or disappearing from under a cup where it just had to be. The shows may have been the same, but what people made of them differed through the ages. Saw a woman in half a few centuries ago and you risked being tried for black magic, for instance, even if it was "just a trick". The conjurer pretends, and the audience helps him get away with it, that he has special powers. In a famous definition by illusionist Robert-Houdin, a conjurer is "an actor playing the part of a magician". The role is of a sorcerer with capacities that defy logic and physics, when of course the conjurer is just playing with the minds of the audience. The boundaries of performance that challenge the spectator's sense of reality, and the changes of those boundaries over time, are the subject of an erudite study by Michael Mangan, _Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring_ (Intellect). You may get hints of how magicians do some of their tricks from this book; if they have been around for millennia, it's to be expected that some of the secrets would slip out. That's not Mangan's point. This is more a study of such tricks as staged illusions in comparison with the "real" spells and black magic that wizards are supposed to be able to do. General opinion has recently gone against such wizardry, but it is still playing a role. In the Bible's most famous account of magicians at work, Moses and Aaron go up against the Egyptian magicians, a duel that involves turning staffs into snakes. Both sides would have wanted to have been seen as working real miracles, but by the time of the Renaissance, the Egyptians in the story were held to be mere tricksters, and a Victorian account says that the same trick was still being done in Cairo, with actual serpents hypnotized into rod-like stiffness, to resume snake-life when thrown upon the ground. Moses and Aaron, however, where held to have used the _real_ magic, the kind that comes from the real God. Religion constantly is mixed with stage magic through the centuries. Magical transformations were held to be the product of human alliance with "The Father of Lies", the devil himself. Unfortunately, once Protestantism took hold, churchmen such as Calvin could maintain that the transubstantiation of the Eucharist was merely a play at a magical incantation and transformation. The "shaman / showman" dichotomy has not left us. There are still those who insist that their illusions are products of the super