Subject: Siegel's _Net of Magic_

From: [email-masked]
Date: 18 Aug 92 21:52:17 GMT

Net of Magic:  Wonders and Deceptions in India
                         Lee Siegel

         Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1991
      ISBN 0-226-75686-6 (hard); 0-226-75687-4 (paper)

       "Anything can happen.  That's the pleasure of
                magic and the terror of it."
                         (Page 423)

   Not too long ago, really, as historical time goes, anyone pulling a
rabbit out of a hat in certain parts of Europe ran the risk of becoming
the central figure of an impromptu barbecue thrown by an outraged and
horrified populace.  Reginald Scot, in his  _Discoverie of Witchcraft_
(1584) takes a debunking approach not only to witchcraft beliefs, the
paraphernalia of popery, and the manuals of sorcery, but also to the
devices of stage magicians and tricks we can recognize easily even now
(the decapitations, the gimmicked knives, and so on).  Already, by
Scot's time, belief in the reality of what stage magicians portrayed
had begun to be a sign of membership in the bumpkinry.  There were what
we would now call urban legends about the rube who thought the lad's
head really had been chopped off -- as there were about the fellow who
jumped into some show put on by wandering actors and punched out the
villain.  Ben Jonson could write a play in which tricksters con a rube
into believing he was marrying the Queen of the Fairies -- and have it
be an acceptable plot device.

   There are two lines of reflection that naturally flow out of this.
One follows the thought (characteristic of what is called the
Enlightenment) that the bumpkinry is still with us, along with the
gentry who prey on its members, and the unappreciated heroes whose
self-appointed and thankless task it is to cleanse the "empowering"
mystifications from others' lives.  The other follows the thought, both
older and newer (in one sense of the Renaissance, in another of
anthropology), that there are points of view from which the two senses
of magic ("real" magic, and the deceptive (perhaps entertaining)
imitation of "real" magic) do not necessarily refer to two different
things.  Siegel's book intertwines these two lines of thought like the
serpents on Hermes' caduceus.

   Lee Siegel (as we are told several  times on and in the book) "is a
professor of religion at the University of Hawaii and a member of the
International Brotherhood of Magicians."  As a scholar, his area of
interest is India; this book is the record of his field work among the
traditional street magicians of India.

   His book book could easily have been turgidly academic.  But it
isn't.  It's a magic show, explicitly inspired by a remark by
Robert-Houdin, who said in introducing his own book said, "my audience
shall be my reader, my stage this book.".  And here's the program:

                The Code:  Elements of Magic
                            * * *

                     On the Street Now:
                       Birds and Fire

                   Scene One:  Diving Duck
                Traveler's Journal 1:  Delhi
                 Scene Two:  Soaring Pigeon
               Traveler's Journal 2:  Kashmir

                     On the Street Then:
                        Ropes and Air

                     Scene Three:  Knots
        Historian's Notebook 1:  Wandering Magicians
                Scene Four:  Cut-and-Restored
       Historian's Notebook 2:  The Indian Rope Trick

                      On the Stage Now:
                      Mirrors and Water

       Scene Five:  East/Spring:  The Reflections of
                  Professor M T Bannerji 1
             Traveler's Journal 3:  North/Summer
         Scene Six:  West/Fall:  The Reflections of
                  Professor M T Bannerji 2
            Traveler's Journall 4:  South/Winter

                     On the Stage Then:
                       Bones and Earth

           Scene Seven:  The Skull of Vishvasiddhi
         Historian's Notebook 3:  Magicians at Court
     Scene Eight:  indrajalasutra:  A Skeleton of Magic
        Historian's Notebook 4:  Field Notes on Magic

                 The Coda:  Words and Ether

   I'm obviously not going to try to summarize this extravaganza.  This
medium doesn't really support lengthy, close analyses.  But I will
mention some highlights.

   The book is a dagwood sandwich of field observations, illustrative
fictions (historical and contemporary), ethnographic, technical and
historical notes, and interpretive speculations, held together by the
theme of the search for the Indian Rope Trick, performed "fully
surrounded, outside, in broad daylight."

   It takes place in a multitude of worlds:  Las Vegas hotels,
professorial Hawaii, and the multiplex worlds of modern and historical
India -- street magicians, stage magicians, thieves and scam-artists
and their victims, professional self- mutilators, and people who have
acquired a notion of respectability that has no possible connection to
anything in their lives, for which they nevertheless strive with a
melancholy desperation.

   Siegel explores the tensions and interactions between street and
stage magicians.  In the Indian context, this involves tensions between
the Anglicized and the more or less native traditions, and, in his
sample, tensions and differences between Hindu and Muslim
practitioners.  It also involves a difference in content:  in the world
of stage magic, the assistant is a woman, and she gets cut in half; in
the world of street magic, the assistant is most often a boy, usually
the magician's son, and his tongue is cut out, or his head cut off.

   In addition to recording them, Siegel spends some time trying to
account for these differences, to understand what they mean.  In his
field notes, though, he tries to come to terms with the urge to make
sense, recognizing that it's precisely that urge that enables to
magician to trick the audience.

   Another reason he does not pursue these issues with the full
machinery of academic analysis is that he's not really interested in
the stage magicians:  they're there for contrast.  His real interest
and affection are with the virtuosi of the street.

   He provides a careful narration of how a street show is mounted,
from the first moment in which the child assistant establishes a sacred
space with its own unnatural laws, through the beginnings of a curious
skit, badinage between father and son (even if in fact they are no
relation at all) which modulates into slapstick, then into horror (the
child's tongue cut out, or head cut off), then into miracle play (the
restoration or resurrection), and again into liturgical drama in which
the audience become co- celebrants willing to offer up some money (for
the show, or for magic rings, fortune-telling, thief- finding, and
other services).  (Pages 85-91.)  The core motif of this street drama
is father/son tension, the core effect is what Siegel calls
"cosmological confusion," a disruption of the audience's understanding
of what kind of world it lives in, and what kind of events are
plausible.  This confusion has its ulterior aims.  When the going gets
heavy, and the magician commands women and children to depart, the
implication is that the magic is too intense, both too frightening and
too dangerous to allow vulnerable souls to remain.  In fact, it's a
business decision:  it's the men who have the ready money.  Women and
children crowding round reduce the take.

   In individual tricks, and in the dramaturgy as a whole, "There is
never really any point in trying to figure out how a decent trick is
done.  Reason always leads us astray.  The answer is always simple.
But reason overlooks the simple in its need to discern or make
connections between causes and effects." [p 85]

   The idea that horror and cosmological or ontological confusion can
be gateways to the holy is not strange to anyone familiar with modern
accounts of trance induction, and much that Siegel describes is
reminiscent of the manipulations of faith healers and stage hypnotists,
and fits well enough with the "non-state" accounts which see hypnosis
as a mode of persuasive communication rather than as the induction of a
special "state of consciousness."  Although Siegel describes events, he
wisely does not try to fit them into any explicit theoretical
container.

   He describes, too, other manifestations of magic:  the farmer with a
reputation for miraculous skill with the rope trick who had never in
fact performed it, but only once made a joking comment about it that
had reverberated over the rumor circuitry of country life, until the
farmer had become a revered figure (often sought out by pilgrims of
magic) because he refused to perform the rope trick, although everyone
knew he could.  (It's tempting to think that magic is what social
psychologists did before they could get jobs at universities -- or
perhaps to think of social psychologists as domesticated street
scammers.)

   Then there's the magic of the holiness industry.  Siegel records in
detail the derisory remarks of street magicians, any one of whom could
be to Sai Baba what the Amazing Randi is to Uri Geller.

   In one of his historical fictions,  Siegel brings the sage Sankara
(preaching a sermon on the ancient idea that the mind is the magician)
into contact with court magicians, in a nested series of illusions and
tricks.

   There's the tale of the Indian magician who fulfills his dream of
visiting in Las Vegas, and from penniless despair finds himself
suddenly renowned as a holy man, demonstrating with (modestly private)
miracles the illusory nature of material realities (including his
devotees' cash) -- a true wish-fulfillment fantasy, with a pleasantly
satiric swipe at the world of the goofily devout.

   Again, there's a story about Siegel himself, getting a late-night
phone call from a friend at a party, cuing him to perform some
mentalist tricks in the voice of an "Indian holy man," and the
subsequent complications that arose when the guest arrived at his
office seeking the guru with the amazing telepathic talent.  The tale
tells how Siegel, trying to  explain how such things were done (but not
letting on that he had been the "holy man"), was denounced as a vulgar
mocker, unable to appreciate the true holiness of his supposed
house-guest, and unworthy of having been his host.

   Siegel does not quite produce an anatomy of folly, but he does
illuminate the ways in which the desire to be duped is satisfied in
many more venues than the magic show,  though by very similar methods.
"Mundus vult decipi," the motto on the coat of arms of Dom Manuel of
Poictesme, could well be the mantra of all chroniclers of magic.  If
it's true that you can't cheat an honest man, not giving a sucker an
even break becomes almost an act of justice.

   If mind is the magician, desire is the hook the audience swallows,
and the shows are the worlds we know.  Even as the magicians of the
street mock the sages who make that claim, they confirm it.

        [the following paragraph is a spoiler, folks]

   For his finale, our magician-professor-guide himself takes the stage
at US Customs in Honolulu, trying to justify himself to customs agents
who shrewdly detect something problematic about someone who claims to
be a professor and yet has bags full of magic equipment.  It gets
worse:  the photographs of Indian street magicians and their tropically
unclad child confederates  ("Are you aware of President and Mrs
Reagan's anti-child- pornography campaign?"), and the field notes ("You
wrote this?  Did you bring any of the hashish, just a little bit of it
maybe?"), lead finally to the strip search ("Turn around.  Lift up your
arms.  What did you say you teach?  Do you have tenure?") that climaxes
with our guide "as naked as the children of Shadipur," in a back room,
trying to establish his credibility by saying the magic words and
making a cigarette ("No smoking in here") vanish.

                     [end spoiler alert]

   Your reviewer's recommendation?

   The idea that magic, religion, and popular entertainment spring from
a common root is not a new one.  Rogan P. Taylor tried to address it in
_ The death and resurrection show : from shaman to superstar_ ( London
: A. Blond, 1985).  That book suffered from a certain trendy
generality, a lack of concrete anchoring.  Siegel, on the other hand,
tries to keep the minute particulars in focus, and grounds his work in
close observation, or a close facsimile of it.

   The implications of the idea that magic, illusion, religion,
politics and art are thoroughly intertwined is pursued with gracious
savagery in Michael Swanwick's _Stations of the Tide_, which is itself
the magic show it describes.  Siegel's book shows something of that
kind of artistic ambition, but it is after all an academic book.  Its
prose is vigorously pedestrian -- a relief, to be sure, after the
limping and  tic- ridden lurching of utilitarian or fashionable
academic texts, but it wouldn't make your hair stand up if you recited
it while shaving.  (Siegel's field notes mention a planned book:  _The
Psychology of Amazement, Aesthetics of Wonder, and Soteriology of Awe_,
and pointedly include a sample of the prose he fortunately did *not*
use in this book.)

   If you want art or intensity, read Swanwick.  But if you'd enjoy an
extended and well-informed meditation on illusion, play, and reality,
full of nice observations and entertaining episodes, you might want to
take a look at _The Net of Magic_.  If you care about the staging of
magic, it will give you a lot to think about.

   It's out in one of those expensive, fancy academic paperbacks.
Check the local libraries, or try to get it by interlibrary loan, if
you want to give it a test drive.  But if you're interested in any of
the varieties of magic, or in thinking about capitalized abstractions
like Religion and Magic and Society, or in contemplating the symbiosis
of trickery and piety, it's really worth buying.  Call up a local
bookstore, or the University of Chicago Press.  Skip lunch.  Skip
breakfast.  And feast your eyes and mind instead.

   --LeGrand

%A Siegel, Lee
%T Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India
%I University of Chicago Press
%C Chicago
%D 1991
%G ISBN 0-226-75686-6 (hardcover)
%G ISBN 0-226-75687-4 (paperback)
%P 455pp. (hardcover)