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Authors: Enrique de Hériz
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The atmosphere of intense competition was even worse since magicians were not only competing with one another for audiences. Spiritualism, which had taken off a few years earlier, led by the Davenport Brothers, was threatening to eclipse magic. Magicians and spiritualists performed exactly the same illusions onstage, among them a star turn that might be called ‘the magic cabinet’ – an ordinary-looking wardrobe in which apparently inexplicable events occurred.
Spiritualists attributed these phenomena to the presence of supernatural forces summoned by them. The public accepted this message with something more dangerous than mere credulity: their need to believe in supernatural elements was so intense that the trick always worked, in spite of the crudeness of some of those who performed it.
Until that point, only the gods – or, at best, their emissaries, the prophets and the saints – had challenged the power of magicians. From the moment the Davenport Brothers and their imitators appeared, magicians discovered that the battle had been brought to earth and must be fought theatre by theatre, seat by seat. Facing down the spiritualists by claiming to havegreater powers over invisible forces than they did would not have been clever. And so, they wielded the only weapon that seemed effective against such an onslaught: the truth. If the Davenport Brothers made London audiences tremble with their ‘spirit cabinet’, the following night John Nevil Maskelyne, generally considered to be the finest magician of his generation, opened his performance at the Egyptian Hall with a direct and brutal reference to them: ‘Last night, someone dared to affirm in this same city,’ he told the audience, ‘that the events we are about to witness are the result of higher incorporeal powers. I propose to prove that they are charlatans. I can equal their feats with the aid of nothing more than science and my own ingenuity.’
It was a sea-change, an act of enormous daring. Having pretended for centuries to possess the ability to perform impossible feats, magicians now saw themselves forced to admit that they performed tricks. In short, that there was no such thing as magic. Rather than fighting for possession of the treasure, they denied the booty existed.
Only in this context is it possible to explain the publication of
Modern Magic
. In fact it is likely that Hoffmann wrote it with the best possible intentions: since everything was based on mechanical science, it made sense to collect it into a manual, a sort of encyclopaedia which might open the eyes of the public, force them to understand, to accept once and for all that the marvels they witnessed did not depend on some occult power.
The truth, however, aside from being a feeble weapon in any argument, frequently has unexpected consequences. A few weeks after Hoffmann’s manual was published, in major cities across the Western world, shops selling magical tricks and paraphernalia found themselves obliged to slash their prices. Overnight, they had gone from being the purveyors of secrets to simple manufacturers. As for the theatres, if they did not empty overnight it was only because impresarios had always padded out magic shows with animal circuses, dancers, clowns and charlatans who now took top billing while the magicians relied for their – much-diminished – success on their ability to perform Hoffmann’s tricks with finesse.
Of course, regardless of what the bogus professor’s intentions were, his contemporaries cursed him as a traitor. There had previously been cases where magicians – in professional publications with limited circulation – had revealed the secrets of tricks they had not invented under the pretext of having perfected them. But it was an unprecedented betrayal that someone should reveal everything in a single book, all the more so when that person, aside from revealing other people’s secrets, had never even bothered to put them into
The atmosphere of intense competition was even worse since magicians were not only competing with one another for audiences. Spiritualism, which had taken off a few years earlier, led by the Davenport Brothers, was threatening to eclipse magic. Magicians and spiritualists performed exactly the same illusions onstage, among them a star turn that might be called ‘the magic cabinet’ – an ordinary-looking wardrobe in which apparently inexplicable events occurred.
Spiritualists attributed these phenomena to the presence of supernatural forces summoned by them. The public accepted this message with something more dangerous than mere credulity: their need to believe in supernatural elements was so intense that the trick always worked, in spite of the crudeness of some of those who performed it.
Until that point, only the gods – or, at best, their emissaries, the prophets and the saints – had challenged the power of magicians. From the moment the Davenport Brothers and their imitators appeared, magicians discovered that the battle had been brought to earth and must be fought theatre by theatre, seat by seat. Facing down the spiritualists by claiming to havegreater powers over invisible forces than they did would not have been clever. And so, they wielded the only weapon that seemed effective against such an onslaught: the truth. If the Davenport Brothers made London audiences tremble with their ‘spirit cabinet’, the following night John Nevil Maskelyne, generally considered to be the finest magician of his generation, opened his performance at the Egyptian Hall with a direct and brutal reference to them: ‘Last night, someone dared to affirm in this same city,’ he told the audience, ‘that the events we are about to witness are the result of higher incorporeal powers. I propose to prove that they are charlatans. I can equal their feats with the aid of nothing more than science and my own ingenuity.’
It was a sea-change, an act of enormous daring. Having pretended for centuries to possess the ability to perform impossible feats, magicians now saw themselves forced to admit that they performed tricks. In short, that there was no such thing as magic. Rather than fighting for possession of the treasure, they denied the booty existed.
Only in this context is it possible to explain the publication of
Modern Magic
. In fact it is likely that Hoffmann wrote it with the best possible intentions: since everything was based on mechanical science, it made sense to collect it into a manual, a sort of encyclopaedia which might open the eyes of the public, force them to understand, to accept once and for all that the marvels they witnessed did not depend on some occult power.
The truth, however, aside from being a feeble weapon in any argument, frequently has unexpected consequences. A few weeks after Hoffmann’s manual was published, in major cities across the Western world, shops selling magical tricks and paraphernalia found themselves obliged to slash their prices. Overnight, they had gone from being the purveyors of secrets to simple manufacturers. As for the theatres, if they did not empty overnight it was only because impresarios had always padded out magic shows with animal circuses, dancers, clowns and charlatans who now took top billing while the magicians relied for their – much-diminished – success on their ability to perform Hoffmann’s tricks with finesse.
Of course, regardless of what the bogus professor’s intentions were, his contemporaries cursed him as a traitor. There had previously been cases where magicians – in professional publications with limited circulation – had revealed the secrets of tricks they had not invented under the pretext of having perfected them. But it was an unprecedented betrayal that someone should reveal everything in a single book, all the more so when that person, aside from revealing other people’s secrets, had never even bothered to put them into
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