Magic

Prestidigitation, or sleight of hand, and grand illusions made illustrious by shimmering lights and tigers in cages, or not, is the typical picture that is painted on the mental canvas when the word ‘magic’ is mentioned. It’s not that these displays of intentional deception are not ‘magic’, but rather that the word itself has adapted (or micro-evolved) linguistically to incorporate these historically peripheral manifestations of actual magic. Magicians were more historically referred to as conjurers and rather than pulling rabbits out of their top hats they conjured – what exactly they were conjuring may be up for debate. Magic used to be synonymous with the phrase ‘the dark arts’, and I assure you there is nothing ‘dark’ about pretending to pull a quarter out of one’s ear or turning the pages of a half-filled coloring book to show children that they helped ‘magically’ color the book. Again, these more silly, pedantic tricks (for that is what they are – tricks – in which a clever adult tricks a child into thinking that he really can pull a coin from out of thin air) were later developments in the ‘arts’ from those who did not truly practice them; the real ‘dark’ part comes from materializing objects physically from a non-physical source. Fortunately for those seeking to be entertained, or fooled (even Penn and Teller have a show called “Fool Us”), some performers and illusionists are so good we believe that they really did make a tiger appear in an empty cage – perhaps because we want to, though the sheer fact that there is a tiger at all, whether it got on stage by immaterial forces does not seem quite so amazing when we consider that virtually everyone believes, ultimately, that the ‘tiger’ did get here by immaterial forces; either by creation of a supernatural God or immaterial nothingness and quantum fluctuations (whatever that rhetorical contortion of nonsense is). Nonetheless, unfortunately, sometimes it is hard to distinguish the genuine reality from its impersonators and, historically, priests would often make those who performed such illusions share their secrets at the threat of being burned at the stake. The true practitioner of ‘magic’ in the proper sense is rare today – at least in Western societies, though in some animistic and shamanistic societies it is quite alive and well, practiced by ‘medicine men’, who used to be called sorcerers, the Greek of which transliterates to ‘pharmakia’ – but we will leave chemists, or pharmacists, alone for now.