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The esteemed Mr Crowley chose to adopt the term "magick" for his art and science, in order to distinguish between his lofty occult endeavours and mere stage conjuring, sleight of hand and other such skullduggery. I believe that the learned gentleman was missing a trick. This is a thread where we lift the mysterious sliding panel and try to glimpse the hidden join where stage conjuring meets the occult arts.
I'm currently reading Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic. I'm approaching it as if it's a really difficult grimoire, where you have to struggle to read between the lines in order to grasp the real occult meaning hidden within - much like the cryptic works of Kenneth Grant or Michael Bertiaux.
I can now make a spot of cigarette ash leap from one hand to another, penetrate a coin through a silk handkerchief, and perform numerous improbable feats with a pack of cards.
Interesting things take place when you perform conjuring tricks for people. You're creating an illusion of something for a moment. A temporary autonomous zone where the normal rules of physics are at some level suspended, or at least arrested, in the minds of the spectators for a couple of minutes.
To perform such things successfully, I think you need to accomplish a certain sleight of mind yourself. You have to convince yourself that the effect is accomplished by "magic", rather than trickery - whilst another part of your brain executes the physical movements of the trick with expert timing. It seems you have to distract yourself from the mechanics of the trick, in order to effectively distract other people. Misdirection seems to function by engaging the audience in your performance, whilst other processes take place in the background, undetected by the conscious minds of both audience and performer.
I think there are a few parallels here with processes like Austin Osman Spare's concept of lust of result. The idea that magic happens when you're not looking for it. It happens when your conscious mind is distracted and your attention is elsewhere.
I find this quite fascinating, and I'd speculate that it's probably just the tip of the iceberg of interesting parallels between the two arts. Stage conjurers often seem even more eager to drive a wedge between their art of illusion and "the occult" than occultists are... and the two things do mostly seem to exist in isolation from eachother. So my current little project is to see what happens when you approach stage conjuring as a complete system of magic (in the occult sense), so that each trick and sleight has some hidden meaning or application in occult terms, each of the shuffles you learn to perform with a deck of cards is designed to cause specific changes in consciousness, and so on.
What would happen if you start mixing it up? Card tricks with an actual haunted deck of cards, stage magic performance as ritual theatre geared towards a specific intent, the art of conjuring employed as a tool for accomplishing the art of magic.
I have visions of bizarre spirit cabinets with sliding doors, mirrors, detachable sections, false bottoms, secret windows, etc... that can be operated like occult machines for making certain things happen.
Voodoo dolls placed in boxes and sawn in half, put back together with something new added.
Feats of escapology performed in public as symbolic acts of klesha smashing, sturdy chains and handcuffs consecrated to represent a problem or behaviour that the magician seeks to overcome by performing a miraculous escape in front of an astonished audience.
The possibilities seem endless. The world of conjuring actually seems more secretive and difficult to get into than the world of occultism though, so this is a thread for other neophyte conjurers such as myself to swap notes and assist each other in accomplishing the great sleight. Let this thread be a haunted restaurant of strange mirrors and sliding doors where Harry Houdini drinks weird cocktails with Kenneth Grant, Howard Thurston cracks onto Lady Freda Harris, and David Devant and his spirit wife enjoy a physically demanding threesome with Austin Osman Spare. |
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