The Discoverie ofWitchcraft
The written history ofWestern conjuring, and consequendy close-up magic, begins with a French book, La Première Partie des Subtiles et Plaisantes Inventions (The First Part of Subtle and Pleasant Inventions), by Jean Prévost, published in 1584. Dr. Persi Diaconis is presendy working with a friend on an eageriy awaited English translation of this work. Prévost's book predates Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft by weeks or months — it is not known precisely how long, as Prévost's book was published in January, while the date of Scot's Discoverie was almost certainly later in the year. Prévost set out to write essentially a book of parlor amusements, which included balancing stunts with cudery, mathematical puzzles and conjuring tricks. Prévost and Scot understandably chose to explain many of the same tricks of the time, but there are enough differences in contents to make both works profoundly interesting. Without the benefit of Dr. Diaconis' translation, I am unable to make further comment. For the present, we must begin with fine old Scot.
The Discoverie of Witchcraft is a dense, fascinating and lengthy work, ofwhich only twenty-two pages are devoted to the secrets of conjurers. Scot was not a conjurer himself, but investigated the craft for the broader purpose of debunking the popular superstitions of the times. For his information on the subject he relied on conjurers of his acquaintance, such as John Cauteres, a French immigrant and conjurer who then resided in London. From Scot we get a fair impression of Elizabethan close-up magic as it was practiced in the streets and taverns of the day. Some excellent surprises await the student reading Scot's descriptions; for, as incomplete in detail as they are, we can still recognize many tricks, methods and principles still in wide use today.
As might be expected, Scot begins his exposé with a trick of antiquity, the Cups and Balls. According to Scot, several items were used in his time for the three cups: in particular he mentions small candlesticks with hollow bases, bowls and saltcellars. Many of the Cups-and-Balls sleights still practiced today were well established by 1584. Scot describes various methods of palming, stealing and loading the balls.
Next he offers a diverse collection of coin tricks and sleights. He describes the classic palm, the finger palm and the finger clip. He then teaches a vanish and production of a coin, the transformation of one coin to another, and the magical transference of a coin from hand to hand. For this last feat, methods are given for accomplishing it in the magician's hands, and for having the coin travel to a spectator's hand.
Scot shows how a coin can be vanished from a handkerchief by sewing a duplicate coin into the corner. This, by the way, is given in the context of making the coin pass through a table and into a basin held beneath. Here also we find mention of the use of the lap as a place of concealment, a principle that lay relatively dormant for centuries, until Slydini, in the early 1950s, demonstrated to magicians the far-reaching possibilities of this technique. This oversight by centuries of magicians may be explained by the common fashion of performing during those times, which seldom had the performer sitting.
Another fine idea hidden in The Discoverie of Witchcraft is that of pretending to place a coin in one hand, then picking up a knife with the palming hand and apparently tapping the coin in the hand where it is not, before showing that it has vanished. In reality, the tapping sound is made by the hilt of the knife hitting the palmed coin in the opposite hand. Nothing much seems to have been done with this idea until the 1800s when, in Sach's Sleight-of-Hand (p. 229), a brief description appears of the use of a wand to tap various parts of a spectator s body to discover invisible coins hidden in his clothes. Just a few years ago, David Williamson reinvented this idea and performs a delightful sequence of coin productions based on it.
Scot explains the principle by which a coin can be pressed into someone's hand or to their forehead and made to vanish. The coin on forehead stunt is still widely performed to this day, usually as a party joke. The principle, however, holds far greater potential.
By attaching a long hair to a coin, Scot teaches how it can be made to crawl or jump from a pot. Though not mentioned by him, this same method was also used by conjurers of that rime for causing a chosen card to crawl from a spread deck. The use of a fine hair or thread to cause the animation ofvarious light objects can be traced back for centuries in several cultures. Texts dating back to the early eighteenth century exist in Japan that explain conjuring feats depending on the delicate manipulation of human hair, hair from horses' tails and fine threads drawn from the cocoons of silk worms; and an entire school of magic was developed in that country around such tricks.
There is in Scot's book an explanation for the construction of a double-faced coin, the ancestor of today's copper-silver gimmick. To this special coin the conjurer of that time stuck a normal coin or token that matched the opposite side of the gimmick. With this preparation — and the dim lighting of the times — the double coin could be displayed on both sides. Then the real coin was secredy removed and the contrasting face of the gimmick displayed to effect a change. Later this idea would be refined, upon the invention, in the 1800s, of the shell coin.
Playing cards, introduced to Europe it is thought in the latter half of the 1300s, had been firmly bent to the purposes of conjurers by Scot's time. They receive brief attention in his book, but what information is given is valuable. He opens this chapter with a caution against card and dice cheats, after which he gives instructions for performing the jog shuffle, explaining both the injog and the outjog for controlling one or more cards on the bottom of the deck; and in passing he expresses a preference for the injog. It is interesting to note that Scot prescribes the placement of the first finger on the exposed portion of an outjogged card, and a similar placement of the fourth finger on an injogged card, to help secure them. This valuable tip is repeated in Erdnase's classic 1902 work, The Expert at the Card Table; and in Hugard and Braue's The Royal Road to Card Magic, but in other texts the advice is almost universally ignored.
Also discussed is the classic fan force, this in conjunction with the trick of finding the name of a chosen card written on a billet in a nut. This premise has recently been revived, though significandy altered, by Hiawatha Johnson, Jr., an exceptional American performer.
The tricks using cards in The Discoverie of Witchcraft are few in number, but revealing. Accompanying the several items already mentioned is the idea of following a spectator's gaze to determine which card he mentally selects, and a method for transforming four aces into four jacks. The aces and jacks are alternated on the face of the pack, with an ace lowermost. This ace is shown to the audience, then is apparendy placed face-down on the table. Actually the jack above it is substituted for the ace. This is accomplished by an interesting form of the glide, which has been thoroughly forgotten, yet has merit. While the description lacks many details, here is a likely reconstruction of the handling. Hold the deck face-down in left-hand dealing position. Bring your right hand palm-down over the inner end of the pack and grasp it by the sides. Then, with the right hand, turn the deck ninety degrees counterclockwise, bringing one long edge toward the audience. During this let the left fingertips contact the face of the pack near the free end and secretly push the bottom card (an ace) roughly half an inch to the right. You then grasp the deck by its left end, thumb on the back and fingertips on the face, covering the exposed end of the jack. Raise both hands, lifting the deck to expose the ace on the bottom. The fingers on the ends of the pack mask the jogged position of this card. Once the ace has been cleariy shown, lower the hands and pack, and with the left fingertips immediately slide the jack to the left and from the pack. There is no extraneous motion as the card is taken, for the sleight has been set up in advance. Lay the jack face-down on the table and openly bury the top and bottom cards of the pack. Then repeat the glide, showing the next ace and switching it for the jack above. This procedure is repeated with each ace, until all four jacks have been placed on the table. Then the transformation is revealed.
Other close-up tricks found in Scot's book include the use of simple codes to perform divination effects; the cut, burnt and restored thread (very litde changed in method from the Gypsy thread trick as it is widely performed today); the cut and restored lace (in which an extra piece of lace is substituted for the center of the real one); a version of the paddle trick; a set of folded papers in which small items were made to appear, vanish and change (these days commonly known in the West as the Buddha Papers); the Grandmother's Necklace trick; the pulling of colored laces from the mouth, which Scot classifies as a "stale jest" long used by street peddlers to sell lace and ribbon (the ancestor to the mouth coil of today); and the Magic Coloring Book, still used by thousands of children's entertainers. Scot attributed the invention of this trick to a magician named Clarvis. The construction of the special book is described in some detail by Scot, who concluded with what may well be the first dealer's advertisement: the reader was advised that ready-made books could be had at W. Brome's shop in Powles churchyard. Brome was (»incidentally Scot's publisher.
One last feat found in The Discoverie of Witchcraft that has lasted to this day is the Ring on Stick. It was then performed with a rather grotesque embellishment, typical of the times. Before the ring was passed magically onto the stick, a second ring with a gap in it was substituted for the whole one, and this ring was fitted onto the cheek to appear as if it were penetrating it. Self-mutilation effects were found highly amusing in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It wasn't until the early twentieth century that magicians became more sophisticated, diverting their mutilations from themselves to their assistants.
The Discoverie of Witchcraft proved to be a truly inflammatory work in the eyes of the prevailing powers of Church and State. Indeed, it is the only magic book of which I am aware that has been condemned and destroyed by kingly decree. When James I, a devoted witch hunter, ascended the throne in 1603, he bitteriy denounced the book and ordered it burned. How thorough was the burning is a matter of conjecture, but there is no question that Scot's debunking of the superstitions of his time made his work an important philosophical document, both praised and vilified by many important personages. It is also believed that Shakespeare, when writing his plays, turned to Scot's book for information on witchcraft. The scant section on conjuring tricks was incidental to the far larger issues argued in the text, but those twenty-two pages, during the next two hundred years, would form the basis of most of what came to be written on the subject of conjuring in English. CO
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