MAGlC

What Is Magic?
In the beginning, it was magic.

/2PROXIMATELY 52,000 years ago, a man and a woman emerged from

' a group that was sitting there, on the floor of the cave, next to the fire.
Dressed and made up, the man and the woman moved their bodies rhyth-
mically, let out shouts that increased in speed and shrillness and, with
their sooty hands, made drawings on the cave walls; they picked up mud,
still moist, wrapped it in a large tree leaf and, molding it with t};leir fingers,
fashioned a head; then they picked up stones and placed some on top of
othe:a;s to build a primitive altar in front of which they imitated the growl
of the lion and the bear, and ran after one another; they related something
about a legendary man who, with only his hands, caught the bear and
killed the lion; they simulated the rain with their fingers and imitated the
zigzag flash of a lightning bolt. The man in the cave threw his pine-branch
wand into the air and deftly caught it behind his back, showed his dry hand
and suddenly it was moist; the imaginary lightning bolt burnt his hand
and, upon his passing the pine wand near it, the red bum disappeared.
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The expressions on the faces in the group changed from astonishment to
fear; they huddled together. The man and the woman pointed toward the
sky outside the cave and fell to the ground, exhausted by the frenzy of
the dance. Those in the group shouted and beat their open hands against
their bodies for a long while, after which they too were exhausted and fell
asleep on the ground.
And some dreamed ...
They dreamed that approximately 52,000 years later, what they had
started there, that night in that cave, would be called dance, music, ballet,
singing, theater, sculpture, painting, religion, medicine and magic.
The man's magic of that night was now art (and science and religion)
as well as magic-the magic that spoke of and imitated the power of the
gods, of rites and myths, of desire and dreams, in an ancient, universal and
profound symbolic language.
A young man woke up about 52,000 years after this and met Vernon
and Slydini, saw Lavand and Frakson, visited Fu Manchu and Ascanio,
communicated with Robert-Houdin and Hofzinser through the written
word, saw in a little magic box how Copperfield flew and how Doug
Henning went back to childhood. He played with the ghosts of Leipzig and
Malini, read the Tarbell Course and Stars of Magic, got together with Juan
Anton, Alfredo Florensa, Jose Puchol and Ramon Varela at the Sociedad
Espanola de Ilusionismo (Spain's main magic society), admired Chung
Ling Soo's posters, enjoyed the effects of Fred Kaps, felt the emotion of
the impossible when a pocket knife changed color, a sponge ball disap-
peared (dis-a-ppeared!) and cards separated into blacks and reds.
And he was not the only one who woke up. Others attending that initia-
tory evening in the cave awakened thousands of years later and were able
to see the magicians of the time, and revive the emotions that combined
to tickle the inner layer of their saurian brains, to arouse the profound
sensations of their mammalian brains and the astonishing intellectual
admiration of their external hominid brains, of thinking beings. In a sec-
ond, they felt the arcane power of myth again; the ancestral horror vacui
of disappearance; the horror of death and the victory of resurrection (the
thread from which their life hung was cut and subsequently restored); the
joyful feeling of levitation, the flow, the rising to the heavens; and finally
their three brains-saurian, mammalian, hominid-softened and melded
into one. They felt like children and were able to play.
To play the artistic game, useless and extremely beautiful, with life
and death, the power of the gods; and miracles: card divinations, invisible
travelers, single and multiple changes, here and there, to be or not to be
in a single moment.
And the irradiated playful and positive energy became love: They met
Frakson.
Some among those who awoke approximately 52,000 years later exer-
cise their voices in singing, their bodies in dance, their speech in theater
and storytelling, their words in poetry, novels and tales, their fingers on the
piano keyboard, their steady hands with the brush and the palette knife,
their gestures in pantomime. And some among some, not many among so
many, exercised at one and the same time their fingers, their gestures, their
words, their chatting, their bodies (forward and back, tum, relaxation and
tension ... ), their gazes crossing with their hands, their hands coordinat-
. ing with their words, their voices and even their psychology; all to create
and perform their extremely beautiful and difficult tricks with four Aces,
with ten thimbles, with an Okito Floating Ball, with doves created from
nothing, inexhaustible coins and their triumphs, and the Triumphs of their
astonishing card magic.
An extremely complex art that demands control of fingers, hands,
body, voice, eyes, words and psychology; an extremely beautiful art that
speaks of myths and symbols (with the depth of play!), that enchants and
haunts and fascinates and excites every layer of the brain, that brings
us headfirst into mystery, that speaks to us of desired dreams-that imi-
tates, not the human being as does theater, not the interior rhythm as
does music, not the trill of birds as does singing, not nature (landscapes,
people, sensations) as do painting and sculpture, not dreams as do mov-
ies. Instead it imitates the power of the gods (no less): the fascinating
total art of magic.