From rec.arts.sf.reviews Thu Aug 20 13:30:36 1992 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!stanford.edu!ames!ig!dont-reply-to-paths From: RJB@u.washington.edu Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Siegel's _Net of Magic_ Message-ID: <10C45B73029F806CC4@MAX.U.WASHINGTON.EDU> Date: 18 Aug 92 21:52:17 GMT Sender: mcb@presto.ig.com Lines: 282 Approved: mcb@presto.ig.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India Lee Siegel Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 ISBN 0-226-75686-6 (hard); 0-226-75687-4 (paper) "Anything can happen. That's the pleasure of magic and the terror of it." (Page 423) Not too long ago, really, as historical time goes, anyone pulling a rabbit out of a hat in certain parts of Europe ran the risk of becoming the central figure of an impromptu barbecue thrown by an outraged and horrified populace. Reginald Scot, in his _Discoverie of Witchcraft_ (1584) takes a debunking approach not only to witchcraft beliefs, the paraphernalia of popery, and the manuals of sorcery, but also to the devices of stage magicians and tricks we can recognize easily even now (the decapitations, the gimmicked knives, and so on). Already, by Scot's time, belief in the reality of what stage magicians portrayed had begun to be a sign of membership in the bumpkinry. There were what we would now call urban legends about the rube who thought the lad's head really had been chopped off -- as there were about the fellow who jumped into some show put on by wandering actors and punched out the villain. Ben Jonson could write a play in which tricksters con a rube into believing he was marrying the Queen of the Fairies -- and have it be an acceptable plot device. There are two lines of reflection that naturally flow out of this. One follows the thought (characteristic of what is called the Enlightenment) that the bumpkinry is still with us, along with the gentry who prey on its members, and the unappreciated heroes whose self-appointed and thankless task it is to cleanse the "empowering" mystifications from others' lives. The other follows the thought, both older and newer (in one sense of the Renaissance, in another of anthropology), that there are points of view from which the two senses of magic ("real" magic, and the deceptive (perhaps entertaining) imitation of "real" magic) do not necessarily refer to two different things. Siegel's book intertwines these two lines of thought like the serpents on Hermes' caduceus. Lee Siegel (as we are told several times on and in the book) "is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii and a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians." As a scholar, his area of interest is India; this book is the record of his field work among the traditional street magicians of India. His book book could easily have been turgidly academic. But it isn't. It's a magic show, explicitly inspired by a remark by Robert-Houdin, who said in introducing his own book said, "my audience shall be my reader, my stage this book.". And here's the program: The Code: Elements of Magic * * * On the Street Now: Birds and Fire Scene One: Diving Duck Traveler's Journal 1: Delhi Scene Two: Soaring Pigeon Traveler's Journal 2: Kashmir On the Street Then: Ropes and Air Scene Three: Knots Historian's Notebook 1: Wandering Magicians Scene Four: Cut-and-Restored Historian's Notebook 2: The Indian Rope Trick On the Stage Now: Mirrors and Water Scene Five: East/Spring: The Reflections of Professor M T Bannerji 1 Traveler's Journal 3: North/Summer Scene Six: West/Fall: The Reflections of Professor M T Bannerji 2 Traveler's Journall 4: South/Winter On the Stage Then: Bones and Earth Scene Seven: The Skull of Vishvasiddhi Historian's Notebook 3: Magicians at Court Scene Eight: indrajalasutra: A Skeleton of Magic Historian's Notebook 4: Field Notes on Magic The Coda: Words and Ether I'm obviously not going to try to summarize this extravaganza. This medium doesn't really support lengthy, close analyses. But I will mention some highlights. The book is a dagwood sandwich of field observations, illustrative fictions (historical and contemporary), ethnographic, technical and historical notes, and interpretive speculations, held together by the theme of the search for the Indian Rope Trick, performed "fully surrounded, outside, in broad daylight." It takes place in a multitude of worlds: Las Vegas hotels, professorial Hawaii, and the multiplex worlds of modern and historical India -- street magicians, stage magicians, thieves and scam-artists and their victims, professional self- mutilators, and people who have acquired a notion of respectability that has no possible connection to anything in their lives, for which they nevertheless strive with a melancholy desperation. Siegel explores the tensions and interactions between street and stage magicians. In the Indian context, this involves tensions between the Anglicized and the more or less native traditions, and, in his sample, tensions and differences between Hindu and Muslim practitioners. It also involves a difference in content: in the world of stage magic, the assistant is a woman, and she gets cut in half; in the world of street magic, the assistant is most often a boy, usually the magician's son, and his tongue is cut out, or his head cut off. In addition to recording them, Siegel spends some time trying to account for these differences, to understand what they mean. In his field notes, though, he tries to come to terms with the urge to make sense, recognizing that it's precisely that urge that enables to magician to trick the audience. Another reason he does not pursue these issues with the full machinery of academic analysis is that he's not really interested in the stage magicians: they're there for contrast. His real interest and affection are with the virtuosi of the street. He provides a careful narration of how a street show is mounted, from the first moment in which the child assistant establishes a sacred space with its own unnatural laws, through the beginnings of a curious skit, badinage between father and son (even if in fact they are no relation at all) which modulates into slapstick, then into horror (the child's tongue cut out, or head cut off), then into miracle play (the restoration or resurrection), and again into liturgical drama in which the audience become co- celebrants willing to offer up some money (for the show, or for magic rings, fortune-telling, thief- finding, and other services). (Pages 85-91.) The core motif of this street drama is father/son tension, the core effect is what Siegel calls "cosmological confusion," a disruption of the audience's understanding of what kind of world it lives in, and what kind of events are plausible. This confusion has its ulterior aims. When the going gets heavy, and the magician commands women and children to depart, the implication is that the magic is too intense, both too frightening and too dangerous to allow vulnerable souls to remain. In fact, it's a business decision: it's the men who have the ready money. Women and children crowding round reduce the take. In individual tricks, and in the dramaturgy as a whole, "There is never really any point in trying to figure out how a decent trick is done. Reason always leads us astray. The answer is always simple. But reason overlooks the simple in its need to discern or make connections between causes and effects." [p 85] The idea that horror and cosmological or ontological confusion can be gateways to the holy is not strange to anyone familiar with modern accounts of trance induction, and much that Siegel describes is reminiscent of the manipulations of faith healers and stage hypnotists, and fits well enough with the "non-state" accounts which see hypnosis as a mode of persuasive communication rather than as the induction of a special "state of consciousness." Although Siegel describes events, he wisely does not try to fit them into any explicit theoretical container. He describes, too, other manifestations of magic: the farmer with a reputation for miraculous skill with the rope trick who had never in fact performed it, but only once made a joking comment about it that had reverberated over the rumor circuitry of country life, until the farmer had become a revered figure (often sought out by pilgrims of magic) because he refused to perform the rope trick, although everyone knew he could. (It's tempting to think that magic is what social psychologists did before they could get jobs at universities -- or perhaps to think of social psychologists as domesticated street scammers.) Then there's the magic of the holiness industry. Siegel records in detail the derisory remarks of street magicians, any one of whom could be to Sai Baba what the Amazing Randi is to Uri Geller. In one of his historical fictions, Siegel brings the sage Sankara (preaching a sermon on the ancient idea that the mind is the magician) into contact with court magicians, in a nested series of illusions and tricks. There's the tale of the Indian magician who fulfills his dream of visiting in Las Vegas, and from penniless despair finds himself suddenly renowned as a holy man, demonstrating with (modestly private) miracles the illusory nature of material realities (including his devotees' cash) -- a true wish-fulfillment fantasy, with a pleasantly satiric swipe at the world of the goofily devout. Again, there's a story about Siegel himself, getting a late-night phone call from a friend at a party, cuing him to perform some mentalist tricks in the voice of an "Indian holy man," and the subsequent complications that arose when the guest arrived at his office seeking the guru with the amazing telepathic talent. The tale tells how Siegel, trying to explain how such things were done (but not letting on that he had been the "holy man"), was denounced as a vulgar mocker, unable to appreciate the true holiness of his supposed house-guest, and unworthy of having been his host. Siegel does not quite produce an anatomy of folly, but he does illuminate the ways in which the desire to be duped is satisfied in many more venues than the magic show, though by very similar methods. "Mundus vult decipi," the motto on the coat of arms of Dom Manuel of Poictesme, could well be the mantra of all chroniclers of magic. If it's true that you can't cheat an honest man, not giving a sucker an even break becomes almost an act of justice. If mind is the magician, desire is the hook the audience swallows, and the shows are the worlds we know. Even as the magicians of the street mock the sages who make that claim, they confirm it. [the following paragraph is a spoiler, folks] For his finale, our magician-professor-guide himself takes the stage at US Customs in Honolulu, trying to justify himself to customs agents who shrewdly detect something problematic about someone who claims to be a professor and yet has bags full of magic equipment. It gets worse: the photographs of Indian street magicians and their tropically unclad child confederates ("Are you aware of President and Mrs Reagan's anti-child- pornography campaign?"), and the field notes ("You wrote this? Did you bring any of the hashish, just a little bit of it maybe?"), lead finally to the strip search ("Turn around. Lift up your arms. What did you say you teach? Do you have tenure?") that climaxes with our guide "as naked as the children of Shadipur," in a back room, trying to establish his credibility by saying the magic words and making a cigarette ("No smoking in here") vanish. [end spoiler alert] Your reviewer's recommendation? The idea that magic, religion, and popular entertainment spring from a common root is not a new one. Rogan P. Taylor tried to address it in _ The death and resurrection show : from shaman to superstar_ ( London : A. Blond, 1985). That book suffered from a certain trendy generality, a lack of concrete anchoring. Siegel, on the other hand, tries to keep the minute particulars in focus, and grounds his work in close observation, or a close facsimile of it. The implications of the idea that magic, illusion, religion, politics and art are thoroughly intertwined is pursued with gracious savagery in Michael Swanwick's _Stations of the Tide_, which is itself the magic show it describes. Siegel's book shows something of that kind of artistic ambition, but it is after all an academic book. Its prose is vigorously pedestrian -- a relief, to be sure, after the limping and tic- ridden lurching of utilitarian or fashionable academic texts, but it wouldn't make your hair stand up if you recited it while shaving. (Siegel's field notes mention a planned book: _The Psychology of Amazement, Aesthetics of Wonder, and Soteriology of Awe_, and pointedly include a sample of the prose he fortunately did *not* use in this book.) If you want art or intensity, read Swanwick. But if you'd enjoy an extended and well-informed meditation on illusion, play, and reality, full of nice observations and entertaining episodes, you might want to take a look at _The Net of Magic_. If you care about the staging of magic, it will give you a lot to think about. It's out in one of those expensive, fancy academic paperbacks. Check the local libraries, or try to get it by interlibrary loan, if you want to give it a test drive. But if you're interested in any of the varieties of magic, or in thinking about capitalized abstractions like Religion and Magic and Society, or in contemplating the symbiosis of trickery and piety, it's really worth buying. Call up a local bookstore, or the University of Chicago Press. Skip lunch. Skip breakfast. And feast your eyes and mind instead. --LeGrand %A Siegel, Lee %T Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India %I University of Chicago Press %C Chicago %D 1991 %G ISBN 0-226-75686-6 (hardcover) %G ISBN 0-226-75687-4 (paperback) %P 455pp. (hardcover)