The basic tricks and techniques of magic have not changed over the centuries. Emerging from locked boxes, pulling objects from manifestly empty containers, and so on, can be found in descriptions and magic manuals from the seventeenth century, and legend has it that even if Ancient Egyptian magicians were not sawing a woman in half, they were capable of decapitating geese and restoring their heads to them. They probably did the "cup and balls" trick, too, making a ball show up under a cup where it could not have been or disappearing from under a cup where it just had to be. The shows may have been the same, but what people made of them differed through the ages. Saw a woman in half a few centuries ago and you risked being tried for black magic, for instance, even if it was "just a trick". The conjurer pretends, and the audience helps him get away with it, that he has special powers. In a famous definition by illusionist Robert-Houdin, a conjurer is "an actor playing the part of a magician". The role is of a sorcerer with capacities that defy logic and physics, when of course the conjurer is just playing with the minds of the audience. The boundaries of performance that challenge the spectator's sense of reality, and the changes of those boundaries over time, are the subject of an erudite study by Michael Mangan, _Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring_ (Intellect). You may get hints of how magicians do some of their tricks from this book; if they have been around for millennia, it's to be expected that some of the secrets would slip out. That's not Mangan's point. This is more a study of such tricks as staged illusions in comparison with the "real" spells and black magic that wizards are supposed to be able to do. General opinion has recently gone against such wizardry, but it is still playing a role.

In the Bible's most famous account of magicians at work, Moses and Aaron go up against the Egyptian magicians, a duel that involves turning staffs into snakes. Both sides would have wanted to have been seen as working real miracles, but by the time of the Renaissance, the Egyptians in the story were held to be mere tricksters, and a Victorian account says that the same trick was still being done in Cairo, with actual serpents hypnotized into rod-like stiffness, to resume snake-life when thrown upon the ground. Moses and Aaron, however, where held to have used the _real_ magic, the kind that comes from the real God. Religion constantly is mixed with stage magic through the centuries. Magical transformations were held to be the product of human alliance with "The Father of Lies", the devil himself. Unfortunately, once Protestantism took hold, churchmen such as Calvin could maintain that the transubstantiation of the Eucharist was merely a play at a magical incantation and transformation.

The "shaman / showman" dichotomy has not left us. There are still those who insist that their illusions are products of the supernatural. In the twentieth century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was one of the many believers in spiritualism. He was tricked over and over by blatant phonies, and he insisted that his one-time friend Houdini was performing by means of supernatural aid, although Houdini disavowed such practices and famously campaigned against spiritualism. Mangan admits, however, that in believing in spirits and spiritualists, Doyle was merely on the side of such lights as Marconi, Edison, and Tesla. The descendants of spiritualists, those who can channel ancient personalities or those who can in front of an audience make it seem as if they are getting messages from departed relatives, continue to earn their livings from insisting that these are supernatural effects rather than the well-known practice of "cold reading" that stage mentalists can perform. Uri Geller claims he is not bending spoons the way other magicians bend spoons, the way that James Randi bends spoons. Randi takes the role of Enlightenment rationalist, effectively debunking Geller's claims (he also takes on the modern day spiritualists). After all, if Geller is really bending by supernatural means, then modern physics and chemistry will have to be rewritten. Geller's bending spoons, though, and his "I am really doing this without any trickery" stance have transformed a performer of a simple trick into an international celebrity, which as Mangan writes, is "one of the most powerful forms of twentieth-century metamorphosis." There are magicians like Penn and Teller who deliberately call attention to the artificial nature of their tricks, even demonstrating on stage how some are performed, and put on a good show for all that. Conjurers as performers have always had a special niche in exploiting the marvelous or the uncanny and trading upon our hope or fantasy that some real magic may be at work. Mangan's delightful book shows that they will always be able to do so.