A post about magic from a fellow writer, Tom Williams.
PS - do check out his novella, Dark Magic - it's amazing.
I'm delighted to be a guest here on Jennifer's blog.
I "met" Jennifer (we’ve never actually met in real life, such as the way of the Internet age) when I reviewed her book, The Road to Alexander, the first in her Time for Alexander series. It’s a brilliant series with heroes and gods and miracles – and a fair bit of history too. It's the miracles I'm interested in right now, though. Some in the book are unexplained – perhaps they are "real" miracles. Others, though, are very clearly tricks designed by priests to fool worshippers into believing that their gods are real and able to do wonderful things in the presence of their believers.
It's not just back in the mists of time that we see ‘miracles’ to reassure the faithful. In Naples the clotted blood of St Januarius liquifies three times a year and on special occasions like visits from the Pope. Maybe it really is a miracle, but ceremonies like this, with their miraculous elements, may well, in some cases, involve human agency.
While the earliest conjuring tricks may have been related to religious ritual, people were using ‘magic’ as a form of entertainment as early as 2600 BC when the magician Dedi was summoned to the court of King Cheops to perform tricks like decapitating fowls and returning them to life. The Cups and Balls trick – a sort of variant on find the lady but with the ball hidden under one of three cups – was well established by the time of the Romans and is described in accounts by Seneca.
Sophisticated Romans may have distinguished between "real” magic and conjuring tricks for entertainment, but there was always a dangerous confusion and during the Middle Ages conjurors might find themselves taken up as witches. The links between conjuring tricks and the Dark Arts have always been close. While many magicians are happy to entertain children’s parties with a cut and restored rope or a rabbit discovered in a hat, the number of illusions involving cutting women in half, impaling them on swords or beheading them on guillotines speaks to the darker undertones that we still see behind the magician’s art. This is reflected in fictional representations of stage magicians which suggest that they are drawing on supernatural forces – for example in the film The Prestige based on the novel by Christopher Priest.
Even today, magicians like Derren Brown present themselves as vaguely sinister figures with TV shows in which they manipulate members of the public into committing bank robberies or even murder.
I know a few professional magicians, who would never even consider making a pact with the Devil. But the all-too-permeable boundary between stage magic and Black Magic is a gift to the writer of fiction and it is at the core of Dark Magic, my first book that isn’t a historical novel. It’s short and it’s funny (Jennifer described it as “Clever and darkly fun”). And you will never look at a magic show in quite the same way again.
Tom Williams used to write books for business. Now he writes novels set in the 19th century that are generally described as fiction but which are often more honest than the business books. The stories have given him the excuse to travel to Argentina, Egypt and Borneo and call it research.
Tom’s blogs appear regularly on his website, http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk where you can also find details of all his books. You can follow him on Twitter as @TomCW99 or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTomWilliams).
1/ It's funny
2/ It's short
3/ It costs just £1.99 on Kindle
Why aren't you reading it already?
Further reading
If you want an introduction to the history of stage magic you might try Magic and Illusion by Michael Symes (2004)
Click here to buy Dark Magic and check out Tom's website!
I "met" Jennifer (we’ve never actually met in real life, such as the way of the Internet age) when I reviewed her book, The Road to Alexander, the first in her Time for Alexander series. It’s a brilliant series with heroes and gods and miracles – and a fair bit of history too. It's the miracles I'm interested in right now, though. Some in the book are unexplained – perhaps they are "real" miracles. Others, though, are very clearly tricks designed by priests to fool worshippers into believing that their gods are real and able to do wonderful things in the presence of their believers.
It's not just back in the mists of time that we see ‘miracles’ to reassure the faithful. In Naples the clotted blood of St Januarius liquifies three times a year and on special occasions like visits from the Pope. Maybe it really is a miracle, but ceremonies like this, with their miraculous elements, may well, in some cases, involve human agency.
While the earliest conjuring tricks may have been related to religious ritual, people were using ‘magic’ as a form of entertainment as early as 2600 BC when the magician Dedi was summoned to the court of King Cheops to perform tricks like decapitating fowls and returning them to life. The Cups and Balls trick – a sort of variant on find the lady but with the ball hidden under one of three cups – was well established by the time of the Romans and is described in accounts by Seneca.
Sophisticated Romans may have distinguished between "real” magic and conjuring tricks for entertainment, but there was always a dangerous confusion and during the Middle Ages conjurors might find themselves taken up as witches. The links between conjuring tricks and the Dark Arts have always been close. While many magicians are happy to entertain children’s parties with a cut and restored rope or a rabbit discovered in a hat, the number of illusions involving cutting women in half, impaling them on swords or beheading them on guillotines speaks to the darker undertones that we still see behind the magician’s art. This is reflected in fictional representations of stage magicians which suggest that they are drawing on supernatural forces – for example in the film The Prestige based on the novel by Christopher Priest.
Even today, magicians like Derren Brown present themselves as vaguely sinister figures with TV shows in which they manipulate members of the public into committing bank robberies or even murder.
I know a few professional magicians, who would never even consider making a pact with the Devil. But the all-too-permeable boundary between stage magic and Black Magic is a gift to the writer of fiction and it is at the core of Dark Magic, my first book that isn’t a historical novel. It’s short and it’s funny (Jennifer described it as “Clever and darkly fun”). And you will never look at a magic show in quite the same way again.
Tom’s blogs appear regularly on his website, http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk where you can also find details of all his books. You can follow him on Twitter as @TomCW99 or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTomWilliams).
Dark Magic
Three things you need to know.1/ It's funny
2/ It's short
3/ It costs just £1.99 on Kindle
Why aren't you reading it already?
Further reading
If you want an introduction to the history of stage magic you might try Magic and Illusion by Michael Symes (2004)
Click here to buy Dark Magic and check out Tom's website!
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