A Magic Lesson From the Bible
/I’ve been reading the bible this year. Have you read this thing before? It’s wild, dude. I decided to read it because I was thinking about some of the old biblical stories and I wanted to hear more about them. Like I wanted to know more about Noah and the ark. Noah builds the ark and takes on two of every animal and then god floods the entire world, killing every animal and human not on the ark. That’s a crazy ass story, I thought. I need to read the full version.
So I get the bible and I start reading and… that is the full version. That’s all there is to the story. God gets mad and kills every living thing and the story about this is two paragraphs long. It’s truly bananas. If the bible moved at a breakneck speed, I might cut it some slack. But there is a lot of super dull parts in there too. There are books of the bible devoted to just a bunch of boring rules. “Here’s what you do if you touch a person with a sore.” “Here’s what to do if your animal falls in a hole.” I was not expecting all the rules and for god to be so chatty as he is in the old testament.
Regardless of that, I did find one thing so far that struck me as relevant to magic. It’s in the book of Mark and it happens right after Jesus has miraculously fed 5000 people until the point they were sated with just five loaves of bread and two fish.
Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray.
Later that night, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was alone on land. He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. Shortly before dawn he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was about to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified.
Immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.
They “had not understood about the loaves.” When he fed 5000 people with almost no food, they just didn’t get it. Only when they see him walking on water do they really wrap their heads around the fact that he can perform miracles. These people were already his disciples, and yet the thing with the loaves was too much for them to comprehend.
This happens way more than you would think with magic. When you first meet someone, you need to gently break them down with your tricks. You want small miracles and/or simple plots. If the effect is too complicated, their brain doesn’t process it like you would want. And if it’s too strong (and it’s the first thing they’ve seen) they’ll find some way to block it out. Bob Farmer was the first magician I heard express this. He said, “You can't start with a really good trick—the audience will not be up to speed and they won't get it.” He’s right.
I’m not quite sure why this is, but I have a few theories:
You’re doing something too far removed from the “magic tricks” they’re used to, so they’re not prepared to process it the way they would need to in order to really understand the impossibility.
If there’s too many moving parts to the trick, there’s more for them to “track.” And therefore there’s more for them to feel like they might have missed. If you have a “big” effect where a lot of things are coming together at the end, it’s easy for them to think they didn’t know to be tuned into some particular thing early on and thus for them to feel like they just “missed” something that would make this all understandable. Like those disciples with the fish and the loaves. “Wait… Jesus is still feeding them? What happened? Was there a loaf delivery? Did someone catch more fish? What did I miss here?”
Being fooled requires being vulnerable. If this is the first thing they’ve seen you perform and they don’t know you that well, they’re not going to open themselves up to being super fooled. They’re going to be guarded. Once they’re comfortable with you and they know you’re not trying to make them look dumb or make yourself look cool, they will be more willing to give themselves over to the experience.
It’s probably some combination of these factors. All I know is, when I look back on the tricks that didn’t “hit” with people, it’s almost always been an issue of a trick being “too much” for the moment.
When you start performing for someone new, especially in a one-on-one situation, I think it’s best to think of it as a seduction. When you meet someone you’re interested in romantically, your first move isn’t to tell them to strap in to your fuck-swing. No, you build up to that. Now, you may build up to that over the course of a year or over the course of a night, but either way there’s almost always going to be some type of progression.
These days, if the fact that I do magic comes up with someone new, the first thing I’ll show them is usually something quick, visual, unobtrusive, and seemingly impromptu. Something visual with some change or a ring. Or maybe moving a fork on the tale with my mind, or something like that. Once that seed has been planted, I can allow them to pursue me into greater depths of magic. So if the fork moves and they’re like, “Wait! What? Show me something else.” I can be like, “Ah, I don’t really… I don’t have anything on me. That fork thing is just an old trick I learned as a kid. The stuff I’m doing these days is a little weirder.” I can then gauge their interest based on that statement and if they seem like they’re on board I can say, “Actually, you’d probably be good for something I’ve been working on. With your dance background you probably have a good sense of your own physicality.” Or whatever. I take something I know about them and indicate why that would be a good trait for this thing I’m working on. Then I transition into something a little more personal and a little stranger, but I still don’t push the envelope too much. In future meetups I will take things a little further and mix-up the sort of effects I show them. After a few interactions, I find people are generally acclimated to seeing magic from me and I can do pretty much any sort of trick I want at that point.
Keep this in mind, most people have never seen close-up magic. If they have, there’s a good chance it hasn’t been that good. Maybe it’s a 3/10. You don’t need to come in with a 10/10 trick. If you come in with a 5/10, you will have something that is significantly better than they have ever seen before. So the instinct to hit them with the strongest magic you have right from the start is unnecessary, and probably counterproductive.
Start with something solid, but simple, and build off that.
Unless you can do something as straightforward and impossible as walking on water, then go ahead and get you that messiah clout.
Jesus (Colorized)