* * *
I decided not to invite her after coming across a leaked document, “Show Participation,” containing instructions for his road team on bringing girls backstage. It revealed how Copperfield’s onstage gestures indicated to his team which women he was interested in. Backstage, his assistants had to recite memorized lines, including a mention of Musha Cay: “Hi! How are you? Did you enjoy the show this evening? Good! . . . My name is (name). . . . I work for David. . . . We just wanted to thank you for your participation in the show, and David will be here in a few minutes to also thank you personally. Every time we see somebody in the audience or onstage with a look or personality that is special, we like to get more information so we can possibly contact you in the future . . . and so we can invite you and your family back to the show whenever you are in the city. Did you know that David has recently bought some islands in the Bahamas? Well they are BEAUTIFUL and we are doing a lot of project [sic] for these islands: ads, tv, radio and many other promotions. So we’d like to keep in touch with you in case there is a job in the future we think you would be interested in.”
One section outlined methods of handling models, including important prospects David might want to speak to privately. When “pulling” the guests, assistants were advised to be smooth and discreet, especially with a “special.” There were guidelines on extracting personal information from these female “prospects”: “While they are filling out the form, you should try to chat with them and ask them the following questions: Where are you from? What hotel are you staying in? Who did you come to the show with? Husband? Boyfriend? Friend? Whenever it feels comfortable, you should take a Polaroid photo of them.” If a boyfriend or husband started causing problems, assistants were instructed to do their best to calm things down by referring to the “What to Say” sheet for help.
The document noted that girls he’d bring onstage for a trick called “The Scorpion” were to be given extra attention backstage after the show. The routine needed two volunteers, but usually only one of the participants was brought backstage. “On occasion, David will have you pull in both scorpions, even if he is only interested in one of them, just for comfort.”
The Scorpion. Hadn’t he brought my date up to participate in his Scorpion routine?
* * *
I decided to invite my former bandmate Rafael Katigbak, an amateur magician who’d idolized David Copperfield as a child. Our band had been named We Are Molecules. When we’d still played music together, our mutual interest in magic had led us to cowrite and perform a live musical called The Magic Idea Machine.2 In the song cycle’s plot, a supercomputer could turn any thought into reality. The Magic Idea Machine had only one glitch—an inability to understand the meaning of love. Our songs helped it learn to love.
“I feel like I’ve won the lottery!” Raf yelled when I called to ask if he’d come down to Copperfield’s island with me.
“So you’re in?” I double-checked.
He didn’t answer. There were scuffling sounds in the background.
“What’s going on over there?”
“I’m running around dancing,” he hollered. I could just see him pirouetting through his perpetually cluttered apartment, trampling over the video games, karaoke equipment, musical gear, and vinyl LPs left out after yet another of his frequent parties. A short Filipino hipster with fifties nerd glasses, a swoosh of black hair, and permanently chapped lips, Raf was one of my oldest friends. Since our band had fallen apart a few years earlier, we hadn’t seen much of each other, but this trip would be a way of catching up. “I can’t believe I’m going to meet David Copperfield!” he said. “Every time I try to imagine him, I visualize Julio Iglesias with Coppertone skin. But then I remember what he really looks like: the geekiest guy ever.”
Before Raf got too excited, I filled him in on details about the alleged rape, still pending.
“So we’re going to Rape Island,” Raf joked.
I reiterated that Copperfield hadn’t been found guilty of any wrongdoing. The whole thing might have been an extortion attempt.
Raf didn’t care. “God, I hope he rapes me,” he sighed, faux-dreamily.
Perhaps some levity, courtesy of Raf, would cut through the situation’s seriousness. I wanted him to come not just because of his comedic sensibility, or because he appreciated the strangeness of magic as much as I did, or that he’d help keep things grounded no matter how odd they got—or even to repay him for the time he’d helped me unclog the sump pump I backed up at our friend’s country house—but because Raf had much in common with Copperfield.
They’d both started learning about magic as a way of getting members of the opposite sex to notice them. “I would always fall in love with the girl in the next seat, who would then ignore me and be in love with somebody else,” Copperfield once explained. “But I knew that somehow, someday, I would capture her attention.” He found a solution—by transforming himself into Davino: the Boy Magician.3 “David Kotkin became Davino only to impress girls, for girls were his obsession,” as Bill Zehme wrote in a 1994 Esquire profile.
In his tween years Raf had started frequenting toy stores to buy magic kits, for much the same reasons. “I was a skinny runt with bad skin and a voice that sounded like Steve Urkel with a cold,” Raf once described himself, in an autobiographical column for the local weekly paper. When he’d first started dabbling in illusions, Raf wrote, he was so shy that if a girl spoke to him, he’d blush, get nauseous, and run to the toilet.
Magic didn’t exactly help Raf’s social standing in high school. At a regional public-speaking championship, his grand finale about “the light of peace” hinged on his pulling a napkin off his hand and making a two-foot-tall candle appear out of nowhere. For some reason, the spring didn’t engage, and the candle came out only a few inches high. On top of that, his lighter didn’t work. And the wick wouldn’t light.
By the time we were adults, he’d overcome his timidity and mastered a few tricks. Raf once surprised our friend Seth by performing a card trick for his birthday. Raf fanned out a deck, asking Seth to choose a card at random and then rip it up. Seth gave all the torn pieces back, except one ripped bit. Raf made the rest of the card shards disappear. He then asked someone to go into the kitchen and bring back a green pepper. When our astonished friend sliced the pepper open, it contained the reconstituted card, intact except for the one torn piece, which slipped into place perfectly.
Raf, the most Peter Pan–like person I’d ever met, would be the perfect foil for a fountain-quest to Musha. “There is something similar between me and David Copperfield,” he allowed. “It’s gonna be so interesting to see him in person. I mean, what does a guy like that eat for breakfast?”
* * *
Visitors to Musha get to eat whatever they want for breakfast, as I learned when Martha e-mailed me a form about our favorite foods, our favorite drinks, and all sorts of other preferences they’d take into account while we were on the island. It asked us to rank different meats, poultry, and shellfish, by order of likability. One section asked if we had any special soft-drink requirements. “Write down Tab cola!” said Raf. “Just to see if they really take special soft-drink requirements seriously.”
After filling out the form, I called Copperfield to tell him my date from his show wouldn’t be able to make it. His response sounded distant. “Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m in the middle of nowhere,” he said in garbled tones. “On the tour bus.”
It took a moment for me to realize that I’d woken him up. Capitalizing, I quickly told him about Raf—“he’s a total sweetheart”—emphasizing his interest in magic.
“Sounds good,” Copperfield mumbled.
“Great!” I finalized it. “I’ll let you get back to sleep.”
Not long after that, Copperfield called to say he’d been thinking of bringing his girlfriend of three years to Musha at the same time. He asked if my journalistic code would require me to include personal details about her.
“If you need to write about her, that’s fine, I just won’t bring her,” he offered.
I assured him he could feel free to bring her, that I wouldn’t need to reveal her identity as part of the story. It made no difference whether he’d been with her for three years or not. I reminded myself to focus on his feelings about magic and the fountain, to see if he could help shed light on the idea of belief.
I checked in with Martha to tell her how the two stories were evolving. She said she’d tell Copperfield a bit more about my first book to prep him. The BestLife team was thrilled it was all working out. Everything looked set. Our speedboat to Musha would be leaving in a few weeks.
* * *
1. The organ-puncturing hook happened backstage here in Montreal, after a performance eight decades ago.
2. We did so alongside the third member of our troupe, Liane Balaban, the date who’d accompanied me to David Copperfield’s performance.
3. At the age of fourteen, Davino became the youngest-ever inductee to the Society of American Magicians.
13
Escapology
Robin Leach: What is the magic of magic? What is it that makes the average person so fascinated by magic?
David Copperfield: It is a need. We all possess the need to dream. . . . Dreams are illusions, and we can’t let go of them because we would be dead.
—Las Vegas magazine
“The perfume of Eros!” he repeated and helped himself to wine. “I say, Orr, what the dickens is that?”
“Only the motor force of the universe.”
“What?”
“Yes, indeed. It is the sublimate of love. And love is the source of human activity. It has no other.”
—Edgar Saltus, The Perfume of Eros
IN HISTORY, magic’s origins are inseparable from religious activity. “Magic is no other than the worship of the gods,” explained Plato. The etymology of the word magic goes back to synonyms for “priest” in Proto-Indo-European (magh) and Old Persian (magos). The priestly magi of antiquity were sages and natural philosophers—early scientists. Like shamans, they healed, oversaw ceremonies, and performed sacrifices.
Both magic and religion have always been predicated on the belief in the existence of other realms or dimensions apart from the empirical. Today, we understand religion as that branch of experience focused on venerating and approaching the beyond, whereas magic aims at controlling it and harnessing its powers for personal or communal use. In the beginning, however, we didn’t distinguish much between worshipping deities (religion) and trying to manipulate them to our ends (magic).
A systematized approach to the utilization of hidden natural forces took hold in ancient Egypt. The pharaoh’s magicians were intermediaries between this world and the divine. Rumored to be capable of disentangling their souls from their bodies, they also had books of spells that could help others with everything from fertility problems to protection charms to harming enemies to ensuring posthumous survival. Words arranged in a particular fashion and pronounced in incantatory ways were thought to grant the spellcaster influence over the spiritual world. Peddling in secret knowledge, employing fetishes or talismans, they made offerings to the sacred while also performing rituals intended to make it obey their commands.
Water pops up repeatedly in these spells—not surprisingly, given the essential role it played in Egyptians’ daily lives. Without the beneficial flooding of the Nile, their civilization wouldn’t have flourished. Priests made invocations to imbue liquids with healing powers. In some rituals, water was sprinkled over dead bodies in hopes of pouring a regenerative force into the desiccated cadavers.
For the Egyptians, death wasn’t the end; it was a magical transition that brought renewal and rejuvenation. Just as Ra dies with every sunset and descends into the underworld only to return with each new dawn, each person’s life goes on after death. Immortality, at first the sole purview of the pharaohs, became a civilian birthright. “You sleep that you may wake; you die that you may live,” explained the Pyramid Texts, a collection of magical spells from the third millennium BCE (and one of the oldest religious texts in existence). After dying, souls were ferried through the Nurse Canal, along a winding waterway, and over inundated fields to the place they originally came from, where they were “born again, new and young.”
The hieroglyphic record reveals that, in both magical and religious thought, death for the Egyptians is a gateway. Destinations abound. Souls don’t just float down paths of water to the land of the blessed; they also waft heavenward on smoke plumes of incense, or get sucked into the infernal regions, or get brought “to the house of darkness, where dust lies on door and bolt.” In the Hall of Double Truth, disembodied spirits encounter Osiris, “he who springs from the returning waters.” The foremost god of resurrection, Osiris blesses properly mummified souls with his draft of immortality, the cold water of everlasting life. This precipitates an apotheosis known as Osirification. “I am Osiris, Lord of Eternity!” declares each dead soul, wetly aware of its own immortality. Having become Osiris, souls enter a silent boundlessness, where they remain until everything reverts to its original state of primal floodwaters and starts all over again.
This circularity mirrors the recurring inundation of the Nile. And in ancient Egyptian cosmologies, there is a beginning to all these cycles. Everything started when the creator God Atum emerged from the watery darkness of initial chaos—a static ocean called Nun. Parentless Atum arose miraculously, self-born, auto-conceived, not there and then there, floating in the primordial liquid. Having generated himself, he promptly started masturbating. Atum, the original onanist, swallowed his own semen and spat out the first two gods, Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture). Together they personified the sky and the sea, life and eternity, truth and infinity.
Whether ejaculating or expectorating, Atum exuded bodily fluids full of vitality (his sweat, too, played a theogonic role). His tears became the first humans. And his ka, or vital force, is the animating energy of all living matter. After spewing out the first gods, he hugged them so that his ka entered them. Every human also has a ka, or what we today might call a soul. It is our godlike component, the part that is reunited with its maker after death. This afterlife regeneration can only occur, notes Egyptologist Erik Hornung, “if what is old and worn becomes immersed in the boundless regions that surround creation—in the healing and dissolving powers of the primeval ocean Nun.” The immortal kas enter the otherworldly waters of timelessness, sloughing off physicality and taking on a life in nonexistence.
Even without articulating the idea of a fountain of youth, ancient Egyptians viewed water as having magical and spiritual capacities. They also formulated another central axiom of magical thinking: that a kind of energy exists in nature that can be tapped into. This intangible substance is in all things. Their word for magic was heka, meaning “activating the ka.” (Heka was also the name of the God of Divine Magic.) To practice magic, they believed, adepts must learn first to discern this essence, and then to master it, to bend its iridescence, to make it do their bidding.
Perhaps because it is invisible and an article of magical belief, it’s hard to put this force into words, let alone understand it. Historians of the occult describe it as an imponderable charge, a suprasensible cosmic medium, a nonluminous astral light that penetrates the tangible world, a fluidic emanation that suffuses all of creation. “The existence and possible employment of this force constitute the great secret of Practical Magic,” noted Eliphas Lévi in 1860’s The History of Magic. He spoke of this magical agent as a plastic mediator, something akin to the Imagination of Nature. He also called it “a universal life force.”
This magical energy shows up throughout time, in a disparate range of places, under a variety of names. The Polynesians called it mana. In Malaysia, it was pantang. Native American tribes such as the Iroquois or the Sioux named this nonphysical spirit energy wakanda, or orenda. In the late eighteenth century, Franz Mesmer claimed to be capable of harnessing
animal magnetism; he could heal patients, he said, by shooting magnetic fluid from his fingertips. Wilhelm Reich argued that sitting in orgone accumulators attracted this libidinal life force into our bodies. Occultists have long seen it as the basic ingredient in electricity and in our dreams.
According to the enigmatic Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, ostensibly a summation of Egyptian magical thinking, this current is the strongest of all powers, the Force of all Forces, an energy that ascends and descends between earth and heaven to perform the operation of the magic of One. Anaximander, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, called it apeiron—the infinite, unlimited, boundless. Calling upon this constantly circulating metaphysical force remains a basic assumption of magic. One of David Copperfield’s classic close-up illusions involves materializing water in an empty glass. While performing the trick, he speaks of finding the true source of wonder. “All you have to do is look straight up, because after the planets, and the moon, and the tides,” he says, as live goldfish swarm from his hand into the water, “comes life.”
* * *
Magic tricks aren’t really magical, as anyone who’s seen shows such as Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed can attest. “Real magic,” oxymoronic though that may sound, suggests the possibility of transcending physical laws through secret wisdom or enlisting the spirit world’s assistance. It operates under the assumption that, by performing certain actions, we can affect the outcome of events outside our control. This magick can be defined as the science and art of influencing nature, or causing change to occur in conjunction with will or intention. Lying somewhere between faith and knowledge, its potentialities can be benign or harmful. “Our method is science, our aim is religion,” as one of the twentieth century’s best-known ceremonial magicians, Aleister Crowley, once stated. Using powers from a certain source to alter the outside world and transform lives, real magic is results oriented. It can be akin to sorcery, spiritualism, or witchcraft. To attain physical immortality would be real magic.
Book of Immortality Page 22
