advises companies and governments on intelligence and foreign policy issues, and is a national security analyst with MSNBC. The third is regarded among his fellow magicians as something of a living legend and is the author of The Experience of Magic, Gourmet Close-up Magic, Growing in the Art of Magic, Magic and Meaning (coauthor), Mastering the Art of Magic, and Strange Ceremonies. He is also a highly-regarded philosopher and historian of religion with degrees in philosophy and divinity from Yale.
When we tell people what we do, the consulting, the CIA credentials,
and the philosophy and divinity degrees stir interest, but it’s the magic that unfailingly stops them in their tracks. Eyes go wide, and then they narrow to a squint. In some, this is a sign of bewilderment. In others, it’s more like confusion.
Our typical audiences consist of political or community leaders, CEOs or teachers, symphony directors or software developers. And what ignites our own imagination is the experience of seeing audiences return in an instant to the magic of their childhood, to a place where dreams were bigger, where each moment was more present, and where magic was pure and real. What also excites us is when something we do fires the imagination of an audience to envision new possibilities in their own lives and work—to think different, to think magic, to disrupt from within themselves.
Understand, however, that most people have no idea what a magician is. Adults and older children do have an abiding faith in the visible, provable, and usually self-evident chains of cause and effect that create what we call business as usual. Ask a volunteer to pick a card from the deck, memorize it, return it to the deck, then shuffle the deck, and this abiding faith assures everyone watching that it will be very hard for the magician to retrieve the one and only correct card. If, contrary to ingrained expectation, the magician manages to produce it immediately, this faith is shaken—albeit delightfully. If the magician pulls the card not out of the deck, but out of the volunteer’s shirt pocket, faith is not merely shaken, it is shattered. This creates, in some small way, the sensation of a whole new reality. In consequence, the delight is ratcheted up even higher.
But interestingly, when magicians try to capture the same effect before an audience of young children, they soon bump up against the challenge that, for children, this kind of magic is part of their everyday way of thinking. The effect, astounding to adults, challenges no innate assumptions of children. They have not yet had to struggle through the laws of physics or the elements of logic (they are developmentally incapable of doing so), so they assume that this is just “the way things are.” In this sense, their thinking is quite naturally “magical thinking”—the belief that one’s thoughts alone can bring about a tangible effect in the world.
In adults, magical thinking may find expression in religious faith or psychosis. In young children, by contrast, it is the normal way in which the mind creates reality from ages two to seven, as the great twentieth-century child developmentalist and self-described “genetic epistemologist” Jean Piaget demonstrated. A child holds a balloon on a string. In the yard next door, a dog barks. The balloon pops. Through her tears, the child understands that the dog’s barking made her balloon pop—just as the chosen card appeared in the man’s shirt pocket because the magician made it appear.
Magicians find it truly challenging to amaze little people who think magically. Only after we “grow out of” magical thinking does magic come to seem magical as opposed to ordinary—precisely because magic disrupts our expectations. The poet William Wordsworth keenly felt the heavy weight of nostalgia for childhood, which he saw as a wondrous age of magical thinking, a time in which simply to imagine reality was to create it. “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” the thirty-eight-year-old poet asked in his celebrated “Intimations” ode; “Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
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What is a magician? The man or woman who can, in adult life, still summon the visionary gleam, the glory and the dream, and for whom magical thinking is the height of imaginative sanity.
Sanity, for most people, is first control: confidence in your competence to understand and productively impact reality. Second, it is normality: confidence that you have pretty much the same understanding of reality as others have.
But think deeper, and you will soon realize that we go through life feeling remarkably little control over reality: “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” or “Accidents happen,” or “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” or “Bet on red, spin the wheel, hope for the best.” And as for everyone thinking pretty much like everyone else, who among us admires the people who think just like everyone else? In fact, we celebrate the Shakespeares, the Beethovens, the Edisons, the Jobses. We revere the outliers, the people who think, who see, who imagine different. We honor the disrupters.
When the average member of the average audience watches a very good magician, everything in the show looks easy. Want to see a spectacular and inexplicable kink in the chain of cause and effect? Nothing to it. Yearning to witness a miracle? No problem. Very few are even dimly aware of the enormously complex and physically and intellectually elaborate undergirding beneath the surface of the show. Instead, what the audience believes it sees is an entertainingly adept performer spontaneously manipulating reality.
Spontaneity is the opposite of control. To bend the spontaneous moment to your will—that slice of time the content of which is impossible to foretell, a span of seconds utterly up for grabs—to bend this spontaneous moment to your will is to work a real miracle. Or to appear to do so.
A case in point is Max Katz Breit, born in 1873 in Ostrov, a hamlet straddling the Polish-Austrian border. It was a place of mud and misery, dull, oppressive, and hopeless. For a Jewish family like the Breits, it was decidedly a place to leave. They emigrated to America, hoping to find magic in New York. What Max found was the magic in himself by disrupting the status quo claustrophobia of mud, misery, and oppression that had shaped his first reality. His journey was, in every possible sense, a voyage from Old World to New.
Short, bald, and very round—five foot three and portly—Max Katz Breit performed as Max Malini. He astounded monarchs, presidents, senators, celebrities, regular folk, and fellow magicians with the utter audacity of his effects. A great man—an ambassador, a movie star—extends a handshake to him. Malini responds by seizing the proffered hand. Raising it, along with the great man’s jacket cuff, to his mouth, Malini unceremoniously bites off a button.
Animal!
A moment later, amid the shock he has created, Malini magically restores button to cuff, stitches and all.
Bold and audacious, yes. But spontaneous? Hardly.
In the 1920s, Malini spent a year, perhaps two, systematically bribing a Washington, D.C. tailor who was patronized by the city’s political upper crust to sew certain playing cards inside the suit and evening jackets of several of the most prominent United States senators. By now an entertainer who had delighted more than one American president and had delivered a command performance at Buckingham Palace, Max Malini, child of dull, dangerous Ostrov, now citizen of the New World, is at this time an avidly sought-after dinner guest. At a formal D.C. affair, he recognizes one of the senators he knows is a regular customer of the tailor he bribed months before. Malini greets the dignitary, and the man, unsurprisingly, begins cajoling him into doing a piece of magic.
“I’m not prepared!” the magician protests. “Please understand…out of the question…”
The more Malini demurs, the more the senator insists. With a sigh, at length the magician surrenders and asks if anyone—anyone at all—happens to have a deck of cards. Of course, no one brings playing cards to a formal Washington dinner. Indeed, had someone volunteered a deck, the audience rapidly gathering around Malini would have instantly smelled a rat. But no one
