Union Square & Co. - The Book of Wizard Magic: In Which the Apprentice Finds Marvelous Magic Tricks, Mystifying Illusions & Astonishing Tales

In Which the Apprentice Finds
Marvelous Magic Tricks, Mystifying Illusions & Astonishing Tales

Whats the first thing people think of when they think of wizards? Obviously, magical powers that are outside the realm of mere mortals. PRESTO! Appear and disappear. SHAZAAM! Change one thing into another. ALAKAZAAM! Make objects fly, defy gravity, or zip invisibly from one spot to another. So, its time you learned how to do this, young wizardor to make people believe you can, which is almost the same thing.

By learning how to create fabulous illusions and to perform magic tricks, youll join a long line of wizards, magicians, and conjurers who have fun amazing other people by doing the seemingly impossible. Its handy to have a few tricks and illusions up your sleeve while youre still learning to be a real wizard. (And they make a good backup if youre having an off day with your wizardly powers.) So, Im going to share what Ive learned about magic with you, and since Im 600 years old and a wizard myself, thats quite a lot.

Some of our best illusions are hundredseven thousandsof years old, and they come from around the world. Legend says magic is the art of the Magi, the priests of ancient Persia. But the Persians actually learned what they knew from the Egyptians.

If you can read hieroglyphics, theres a 4,000-year-old papyrus in a German museum that tells the story of Dedi, one of our earliest wizards. Remember Cheops, the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid? One rainy afternoon, his sons told him stories of a wizard who changed a life-size wax model of a crocodile into a real animal, then changed it backafter it ate someone. They also described Djadjaemankh, another wizard who said a few magic words to stack half of a lakes water on top of itself so he could retrieve a ladys lost bauble! Boyish fantasies, thought His Royal Magnificence.

But one wizard still lived, insisted the young princes. Named Dedi, he was 110 years old and ate enough food to feed hundreds of people daily. Dedi could reattach heads to decapitated bodies, bringing them back to life, and lions followed him like tame temple cats! Dedi also knew the layout of the secret chambers at the temple of Thoth, the Egyptian god of magic. This got Cheopss attention, because hed always wanted to copy Thoths floor plans for his own tomb in the Great Pyramid. So, the royal barge was sent up the Nile for Dedi.

In front of Cheops, the wizard reattached the severed heads of a goose, a pelican, and an ox, and the animals scampered away. (He declined Cheopss offer of a human.) And sure enough, a lion from the kings zoo padded after Dedi, its leash trailing on the floor, according to the papyrus, anyway.

Im six centuries old, but this all happened long before my time, and I simply cant tell you if Dedi used real wizards magic to make those things happen. Perhaps he secretly reached into his robe to substitute a live goose for the headless one. (Hmm. Im not sure how hed do that with an ox. Its a mystery.) In any event, I forbid you to climb into a cage with a lion or to cut the head off ANYTHING. Were more civilized these days, and this book will teach you plenty of other ways to amaze your family and friends with fantastic illusions from ancient times and faraway lands.

In addition to Egypt, India and China were chock-full of wizards and conjurers who kept busy vanishing up ropes that stretched into the sky (see ). Magicians learned their craft in schools in ancient Greece, and on the streets of Imperial Rome, you could see the trick we still know today as cups and balls! Street magic traveled with the Roman Empire, and magicians performed jugglery, as it was called in England, for commoners in the street and royalty in their castles.

Some people feared conjurers because they thought their powers might really be supernatural. Well, between you and me, heres the big secret: they were right! We wizards like to get out and about as much as the next person. Plus, how else are we going to keep our powers sharp? We all practice in the privacy of our chambers, but its fun to see what we can do in front of an audience.

In the old days, every village had a wizard or witch. Legend says that fairies taught them their magical secrets. Want to hear something funny? When those ridiculous hunts for bad witches began during the Middle Ages, it was actually good for business. Many people became so scared of evil magic, they went running to the good witch next door for protective charms and spells! Let that be a lesson to us all.

Magic became all the rage when Queen Elizabeth I ruled England in the 1500s, and performance magic was as popular as sports and the theater. John Dee was the most famous magician of the era and one of the Queens house wizards. But over the next couple of centuries, as science explained more of the workings of nature, people began to forget the powers we wizards have. If you can believe it, some of us had to go out and start earning a living as illusionists! By the mid-1700s, many of my friends were working as stage magicians, charging admission to their shows. Sometimes theyd even flub a trick on purpose to reassure their audience that nothing too uncanny was happening.

Of course, we wizards also shared some tricks with our non-wizard friends who wanted to make magic too....