Why I am Studying Illusion...

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” --Albert Einstein

This is why I still haven’t written much about my work with illusions. Any explanation cascades through pages of incoherence the way my cards cascade across the couch, table, and floor when I lose control of them mid-flourish. It would seem that, just like performance-coated cards, these concepts are slick— I need to get this deck of ideas firmly in hand before trying to put it all down properly in writing.

There is frustration bound up in that: partly due to not having the money, at present, to acquire the texts I need to finish properly studying the subject and partly due to a continuing and irrational sense of shame for even engaging in this work. The latter is something I hope to tackle head-on by posting this blog entry.

Yes, I feel shame—stemming, I think, from my early explorations of paganism. I remember distinctly the arguments on the pagan forums at the time over the spelling of the word “magic”. One of the main contentions of those who spelled it with the notorious “k” at the end was that the extra letter was needed to distinguish “real magic” from “stage magic”. The guardians of the English language insisted it wasn’t necessary because the context of a proper sentence would be enough to allow a reader to make the distinction, and if not, the writer was doing English wrong.

What I took away from the argument however, was the insidious suggestion (by both sides) that “stage magic” was somehow less valid, less important, and less useful to the pagan path than was “real magic”. Stage magic, I was subtly taught, was the domain of entertainers and charlatans—it was not a topic of serious religious study and had no bearing on the religious variety of magic. It made sense at the time, but my views started to shift once I found myself on a Kemetic path.

I wound my way back to it when I started to study Heka as it related to myth and story. I stumbled on some research about how even modern storytelling has a greater impact on both ourselves and our societies than we often give it credit for and may be the most “human” thing about us. Then I found this:


And something clicked into place.

Traditional stage magic is a form of storytelling. It turns out that even a superficial survey of the not-so-secret world of magicians reveals that stage magic is one of the most written about topics in modern history. It also has the distinction of being one of the few forms of stage art which has not diminished at all in popularity in the 4000 years of its confirmed history—even we modern folk still flock to see living mysteries, like David Blaine and Chris Angel, perform. There is something there in that ongoing fascination which I sense is eminently useful to my broader study of how storytelling (and media/art in general) is related to our more formalized religious magic.

 I have been trying to unravel exactly what that revelation means and figure out what I’m supposed to do with this wisdom once I have it all parsed out. If what I have experienced so far is any indication, I think I will be with this task for a while yet.

But that’s the news from the front for now…I’ll keep you posted  ;)