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Tuesday 2 December 2008

What has sawing a lady in half to do with global warming?

At this time of year, exactly 70 years ago, I was taken to my first exhibition of professional conjuring.

Professional conjurors have always hated spiritualists, not just because they are women — though that is important — but because they see them as frauds. The conjuror admits he is doing tricks, even though the mechanics of any particular trick is a closely guarded secret. He entertains by honest deception, just like a novelist or playwright. The spiritualist medium, on the other hand, pretends to be presenting the truth, deliberately deceiving vulnerable bereaved people, although her act too depends entirely on trickery. Anyone who half-believes in spiritualism should study the career of the American conjuror and escapologist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss in Hungary). He came up the hard way, doing travelling shows across the States, and one of his early acts, performed with his wife Bess, was a ‘tent-show séance’, in which Bess fell into a trance and then transmitted messages ‘from the other side’ to members of the audience. The essence of the trick was secretly to gather information about the lives of the people present, then use it as messages. Houdini learned the trade thoroughly, then gave it up. He said he felt guilty: ‘People were too easily fooled... They really believed in my powers... I did not relish the idea of trading on the sacred feelings of my admirers.’

Having dropped pseudo-spiritualism, Houdini concentrated on escapes, taking advantage of his extraordinary musculature and physical ability, which made his conjuring the most masculine of all. Then, having become world-famous, he concentrated his activities on exposing the frauds of spiritualists, doing it all the more effectually because he knew all of the tricks. What his efforts revealed, however, and it almost made him despair, was that a great many people passionately wanted to believe in spiritualism and flatly refused to accept the truth of its tricks, no matter how comprehensively he exposed them. Worse, they believed he himself had magic powers and denied he had them for perverse reasons of his own.

We all need to believe something, particularly those of us who most hotly deny faith in anything. If you don’t have a proper religion, like Christianity, you are sure to fall for pseudo-scientific patter, like ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. This appeals strongly to the kind of FRS — physics and biology professors and the like — who once patronised the Society for Psychical Research. Give me honest conjuring any day!

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