Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  I leaned back in the seat and watched as we rushed toward two carts, separated by a very small space, and we passed between them at full speed with only inches on either side. The air was filled with dust from the road and the incessant honking to say “Watch out!” and “I am here!” and “There you are!” and “We are going!” Dabbu honked—good long blares of the horn—at least once every five or ten seconds whether or not we were near anyone, which appeared to be the standard practice for every vehicle on the road.

  “How long are you being in Varanasi?” Dabbu asked once we were in the relative calm of this major thoroughfare.

  “Another day or so,” I said. “We don’t really have a plan.”

  “One day more you stay in Varanasi,” Dabbu said, as if thinking to himself of all that could possibly be fit into one day in this city.

  “How many years are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-six,” I replied. “How old are you?”

  “I am thirty-one,” he said.

  “Are you married?”

  “I am married,” he said, and when I asked if he had children he replied “Two boys,” but I heard it as “Two wives!” and asked him about it.

  “No! No! One wife. One wife! Muslim families may have many wives, but in Hindu families, just one wife. Two b-o-y-s! One eight years old and one three years old.” He spent a moment chuckling to himself about the absurdity of having two wives, apparently gleeful at having escaped such a predicament.

  He asked about my family.

  “Yes, I am married.”

  “Is your wife here in Varanasi?”

  “No. No, she’s in Iowa.”

  Dabbu was silent for a moment as he drove.

  “Iowa is very far?” he asked.

  “Yes. Iowa is very far.”

  Though I didn’t know it at the time, not everyone who saw my performance that morning appreciated the magic. That afternoon a man approached me near a tea stand and pointed his finger at my chest.

  “Earlier I saw you doing the things,” he said, moving his hands like he was performing a magic trick, “and I said to myself, ‘I do not want to watch that man. I know he is a deceiver.’ ”

  While on tour in the United States I have been protested, heckled, booed, dismissed, ignored, and insulted—sometimes all in the same show—but this man appeared to dislike me more than anyone else I had ever met. He was smiling—in fact, he was all smiles, but it was a mocking, derisive sort of smile, like you find at the sort of parties where everyone is trying to be cleverer than everyone else. He was slightly shorter than me, and rail thin, and he spoke with the unshakable certainty I had come to associate with both religious fundamentalists and hardline atheists, or anyone who considers their beliefs the only possible truth. I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Other people were eager to come and see you,” he continued, “but I was sitting right here and I did not come. I said to myself, ‘He is using tricks. He knows nothing about what is magic. In fact, he knows nothing.’ ” He smiled.

  I thought this was taking it a little far and I asked him how he knew I wasn’t using actual supernatural powers to accomplish my magic—an obnoxious question, certainly, but he had riled me.

  “We have a saying in my tradition. ‘The more a man knows, the more he remains silent.’ If you had supernatural power, you would also have the sense not to show it around on the street corner like a common beggar. Because you are showing it around on the street corner, I am confident you do not have supernatural power. You are using tricks. And I should tell you that not everyone knows you are using tricks. You should be careful of spreading superstition so carelessly.”

  He was not smiling now.

  A few years earlier while on tour in the States I noticed a woman leaving the show early, visibly upset, and an hour later on my way out to the car I found her waiting for me by the theater door. She was convinced I had enlisted the aid of demonic spirits to accomplish the magic and wanted to warn me of the danger.

  “I was uncomfortable during your show,” she said, “because I felt spiritual energy all around you as you did those things onstage. I could hear the voices whispering to you during your show. I could hear them tell you everything you needed to perform that magic.”

  At first I’d thought she was angry, but her voice quavered during this speech and I realized it wasn’t anger. It was fear, and suddenly I was grateful that I couldn’t see the vision of the universe confronting her at that moment.

  “I want you to know that what you’re doing is incredibly dangerous. You are opening yourself up to an awful power that I don’t think you understand.”

  I tried to explain that I was using magic tricks to create the experience of magic and that while I wanted the pieces in the show to feel real in the moment, they weren’t real. They were illusions. “Do you want me to explain how it worked?” I offered.

  “No, those powers are very real,” she said before turning to leave. “You have to be very careful.”

  In the world of professional magic a great debate surrounds the practice of offering a disclaimer at the beginning of a show—something like “In the next hour you may come to believe that I have supernatural powers. I do not, and I want to be clear that I do not. I’m using a set of secret skills and techniques to create the illusion of magic, but none of this is real. Now, on with the show.” Some see this as unnecessary and even unhelpful. Imagine how completely it would ruin the atmosphere if a film director appeared at the beginning of a movie to say “Remember folks, all of this is fake.” But many, many practitioners in my business do this at the beginning of every performance. Partly it’s an artistic choice. If you assume that a modern, intelligent audience will naturally suspect that everything in a magic show is fake, telling them that it’s fake at the beginning of the show and then amazing them anyway forces them to confront the difference between their intellectual understanding and their emotional experience.

  When you’re amazed by something, part of that experience is the rapid realization that your previous understanding of existence was too limited to accommodate this new thing you’ve just seen. This could be as mild as witnessing a display of extraordinary skill—say, a YouTube video of a mountain biker racing down an implausibly narrow ridge, deftly maneuvering the bike over the trail with thousand-foot sheer drops inches away on either side—and having to suddenly expand your assumptions about human bravery and physical ability. It could be as large as looking up into the depths of the Milky Way one night and realizing with awe and regret that somewhere along the way your working awareness of the universe had shrunk to fit the parameters of your everyday life, that you had inflated the importance of small concerns and ignored your connection to the wider world around you. Big or small, these jolts of expanding awareness are a fundamental component of the experience of wonder. Magic tricks are very good at facilitating these moments.

  But there’s also an ethical consideration. If your view of reality already allows for the possibility of vanishing coins, or thoughts traveling from one mind to another by magic, or demonic spirits helping the magician to perform miracles, then a magic trick doesn’t expand your view of reality but instead just reinforces it. If you believe in ghosts, and I do a magic trick where you actually feel that you have seen a ghost, I’m not amazing you so much as confirming what you already believe. You might be surprised—surely most people who believe in ghosts have never actually seen one—but I’m really just giving you evidence in support of your convictions. If I don’t share your convictions or am in a position to benefit from them whether or not they’re true, suddenly I’m treading on pretty thin ethical ice. A magic trick that feels real and forces you to consider the boundaries of your own certainty is a good thing. But if I convince you to believe a magic trick is real and then encourage you to come to me for spiritual guidance, the ice melts entirely. In India, this is a big problem.

  Indian “Godmen” pose as spiritual leaders, or gurus, and deceive their followers
by presenting ordinary, run-of-the-mill sleight-of-hand magic tricks as actual, supernatural miracles. They are the televangelists of India—the snake-oil salesmen, the revivalist preachers with a hidden Tesla coil, promising a 9-volt surge of God’s own healing power for the price of a ten-dollar ticket and a donation to the ministry, credit cards accepted. A recent article in the India Times featured seven Godmen who are now in prison for extorting vast sums of money from their followers, but their exploitation doesn’t end with money. Of the seven, four are also imprisoned for multiple counts of rape, two for the murder of an outspoken critic, and one for running a prostitution ring out of his spiritual learning center. They use magic tricks to establish themselves as miraculous emissaries of the gods on earth—divinely inspired, exempt from the laws and moral codes of the merely mortal.

  Magic—with its ability to deceive even the clever and analytical people in a Godman’s following of thousands—is the perfect tool. Want to levitate in front of your followers? No problem. You can buy the equipment for a rudimentary levitation illusion for about nine hundred dollars. Want to read someone’s mind? Again, no problem. There are hundreds of books that can teach you how to do that, or at least how to fake it.

  Spiritual deception is not just an Indian problem. It happens everywhere, and it has throughout history. In the collection of magic books I discovered at the Ames Public Library as a young boy, I remember a chapter on the history of magic featuring schematic drawings of an ancient Greek temple, equipped with primitive smoke machines and stage effects intended to simulate a divine presence, all triggered by a catch on the temple door. The Greek peasant would mount the steps, open the door, and—cue the smoke, cue the fire, cue the gong—encounter the presence of Zeus, right there on a Thursday morning. From the snake-handling churches of modern America to the false mystics in Nepal who utilize a standard, off-the-shelf levitation illusion available from magic stores worldwide to convince the gullible of their spiritual power, the history of religion is blighted by those who present magic tricks as divinely ordained, supernatural miracles in an effort to elevate their own status.

  But the practice of using traditional sleight-of-hand-style deception to simulate spiritual power has been perfected to the highest possible degree by the modern Indian Godman. The decentralized nature of Hinduism—which has no papacy or other political governing body that might be able to clamp down on this kind of criminality—and the extraordinary sophistication of the modern magician’s technique have created a perfect environment for the unscrupulous guru. The Godman walks into a village—out in the country, maybe, where most of the people are uneducated and less likely to cause trouble—and performs a few miracles. Maybe he secretly sprinkles some potassium permanganate under a few sticks and then blesses them with water—actually glycerine—and they burst into flame. Maybe he walks across a bed of hot coals, or stabs a skewer through his arm without bleeding, or spits fire from his mouth like a dragon. People talk. Word gets around. And when the time comes to ask for a donation, the Godman has already proved himself worthy. Just look at the miracles. He collects their tribute, welcomes them into his following, and moves on.

  So if you’re an aspiring millionaire and have no misgivings about criminal fraud, becoming a Godman can be a profitable business move. The overhead is cheap—all you need is a few simple magic tricks—and you can just make up the spiritual message as you go. One of the imprisoned Godmen still maintains a website—complete with a fully functional online donation system—replete with kernels of his towering spiritual insight such as “We were born to be helpful to others.”

  When I was a child learning about magic, I discovered that Houdini had dedicated the last years of his life to a campaign against a similar phenomenon in America. In the 1920s, hordes of fraudulent mediums used magic techniques to simulate contact with the dead. For a fee, these charlatan psychics would hold a séance and help you communicate with a loved one or a friend who had passed away, and in these years immediately following World War I, speaking with the dead became a very profitable business.

  Houdini’s strategy was brilliant. Each night he packed the theaters and performed his own grand illusions as promised, but he devoted the third act of each show to the exposure of these fraudulent practices. First he would demonstrate a séance and ghosts would dance, invisible bells would ring, messages from the great beyond would appear—and then he would turn on the lights and show everyone how it all worked.

  Today, the magicians of India have launched a similar campaign against the Godmen. Through a partnership with the Indian Rationalist Association they’ve created a series of educational lectures intended to expose these false prophets and explain how their miracles are actually just clever deceptions. First the lecturer enters the village disguised as a Godman, performs the miracles, and attracts as many followers as possible. Then he pulls back the proverbial curtain and teaches everyone the trick.

  The man outside the tea stand reprimanded me for spreading superstition for about fifteen minutes. He resented India’s image in the wider world as a Land of Mystery and worried the country’s mystical heritage overshadowed its accomplishments in the arts and sciences. Many people of the Western world are drawn to India’s magical past—especially magicians—but conversations with locals made it clear that much of India is ready to shed this image of mysticism. “Everything has a scientific explanation,” the man told me emphatically. “In India we believe in science.”

  He’s right, of course. India has the seventh-largest and currently the fastest-growing economy in the world, boasts a number of world-class universities, and—less quantifiably but equally impressive—has largely succeeded in sustaining a population of 1.25 billion people in a part of the world frequently gripped by famine, drought, and shortage. None of this happened by accident or luck. India is chaotic, wild, and turbulent, certainly, but it is also a thriving nation on the path to prosperity. Again and again on my trip I encountered people who voiced the same sentiment: “We believe in science. Everything has a scientific explanation.”

  So why the reputation for mysticism and magic?

  In Peter Lamont’s The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, he traces India’s image as a land of wonder and mystery to the rise of British colonial rule in India and the orientalist—which is to say, racist—lens through which the early-nineteenth-century West perceived the East: uneducated, uncivilized, and in need of a more refined culture to come in and take control. In short, it was in the interests of the ruling powers of the West to portray India as a superstitious backwater in order to justify their occupation and control of its people, government, and markets. But this perception served another need of the West as well. The Enlightenment and its accompanying waves of discovery and innovation had filled in most of the blank spots on the map by the end of the eighteenth century, and everyone likes blank spots on the map. Near the end of his book Lamont writes, “In a modern West that has dis-enchanted itself in the name of science and progress, a magical East was required to satisfy the deeper human need for wonder.”

  In other words, Westerners still want mystery but prefer to keep it safely on the other side of the world. We want our daily existence built on the solid rock of logic and reason, so we pick somewhere far away and say There, that’s where the magic lives—in India, the Land of Mystery.

  When I read about these ideas while on tour in America they felt straightforward and easy to understand, especially because as a magician I’d witnessed this same impulse on a smaller scale over and over again. Every night during my show I’d see people in the audience torn between their inherent love of the unknown and their desire to explain it all away—to take just as much strangeness as was comfortable and attempt to banish the rest.

  But in India the issue felt more complicated. I thought of the man on the train to Varanasi who had first assured me that he believed solely in science and then proceeded to tell me about the time someone cast a spell on his sister using “superior mental strengt
h.” I was willing to believe that much of India’s magical reputation had been created by the West—and certainly, belief in the magical and the supernatural can be found in every country and culture in the history of the world—but you couldn’t escape the abundance of mysticism here. It was everywhere.

  CHOOMANTAR

  As Andy and I drove through Varanasi one night, squeezed into a rickshaw with a man we’d just met an hour before, I reflected that I had no idea where we were going. It’s only an adventure if you’re willing to get lost, I had reasoned fifteen minutes earlier, but as the rickshaw hurtled through the late-evening traffic and the hotel disappeared farther and farther behind us, I came to understand that at this particular moment I was very lost, and the romantic spirit of discovery that marks the beginning of trips like this had given way to the doubt and uncertainty found so easily in the middle.

  Two days earlier, while seeking permits for Andy to film by the river, we’d met a film producer named Rashmi—a high Brahman aristocrat with a full white beard. When he learned I was traveling across India to search for magic he offered to arrange a meeting with someone he knew. “A tantric yogi,” he said. “He might be able to help. Where are you staying?”

  We gave Rashmi our hotel information and he agreed to send a message with the details. He even promised to send his cousin along to take us so we would be sure to find the place. That evening we returned to the hotel to find a message and the cousin, Ratti, who focused mostly on chewing the betel leaves he kept tucked inside his bottom lip. They stained his teeth red and he dabbed at his mouth every few moments with a white handkerchief. Ratti told us that the tantric yogi was about to perform a ceremony and we had to hurry, and though he spoke politely and climbed into the rickshaw without complaint, he didn’t appear to be in a particular hurry to go anywhere and I imagined he had other ways he would have preferred to spend his evening.