There's Method to the Miracles

The answer is what nobody wants to be doing on Labor Day

Aficionados say that a magician never reveals their tricks.

The average rube thinks this is because knowing the secret makes it lose its wonder, and the magician loses their ability to make money.

It’s worse than that. It makes the magician lose his mystique, turning him from a cool sorcerer who can make miracles happen to a weird guy with a lame hobby.

As Penn Gilette said,

You can’t give away real magic tricks. And the reason is they’re too boring. [The secret’s] hard work. And if I were to explain some of our tricks to you, it’d be like an hour and you’d be dozing off halfway through.

The “trick” to magicians’ tricks usually comes down to two factors:

1. “Miracle” Tech

You are being shown technology you do not yet understand, so it seems miraculous.

This often involves the working mechanisms being hidden from you. Think of the fake legs sticking out of the box he’s sawing in half while the “volunteer” tucks her knees into a hidden compartment. Or the false thumb that hides the cloth he’s cramming into his hand.

The Silicon Valley term “Mechanical Turk” comes from a chess-playing robot that was actually a simple contraption with a chess master inside. At one point, these all inspired wonder and awe in their observers, before the “magic” was “dis-spelled” by becoming common knowledge.

2. Endless Practice and Preparation

You can’t imagine someone would endure this much labor and hardship to perform it. Card throws and sleights of hand result from countless hours of practice with a deck of playing cards. Most people with day jobs cannot imagine spending 8 hours a day trying to toss a card so that it comes back to you, shuffling cards without actually shuffling them, or holding his hand in just such a way that you can’t see the card between the slit in his fingers.

The tenacity required to be any good at magic is the same as becoming good at golf, music, dance, poker, or jiu-jitsu. Do anything with enough practice, and it will look magically easy. The difference is that sports, music, martial arts, or dance seem to suggest more function than magic, a business built around making you feel foolish for not understanding how the seemingly impossible works.

Magic is an industry founded on no-selling effort.

A little while ago, people watched David Blaine do incredibly painful things like stick long needles through his arm without flinching. They then debated whether the street magician was even doing magic, and the answer is that he was, since the “secret” to magic has long been the magician’s ability to endure more drudgery, pain, and prep work than most imagined possible.

But instead of planting an entire deck of playing cards around famed director Edgar Wright’s backyard an hour before the trick, Blaine was stabbing himself in the same spot so many times that his body gave up and just started healing around it. He had applied the technique of ear piercing to his arm.

There’s something unseemly about being a magician that used to permeate all entertainment jobs since all of them are hard work put into something once considered frivolous child’s play. While the glamor and prestige of awards and being on TV have pushed actors and stuntmen into the high-brow realm of artists and poets, that stigma still clings to magicians and fortune tellers.

In some ways, 2 and 1 are connected: the “magic” of Silicon Valley and Apple design is usually brute force and endless iterations with machines performing the calculations non-stop.

You don’t get it because you don’t want to get it. Leave it to the daemons to do the math.

What if I told you these two “secrets” of stage magic are the same for religious miracles?

For example, take Jesus’s first miracle in the Gospels of turning water into wine. A controversial theory amongst historians that is not without evidence suggests that early Christians regularly used mushrooms in their sermons and rituals, causing ego death and “rebirth” when they returned from their trips.

They would know that large doses could produce full-on encounters with God, aka the ineffable, but small doses could make colors more vibrant, lights pulsate, and a sense of euphoria to pass over whoever eats them.

They might also carry it in powdered form for easier concealment from authorities.

Now they arrive at a wedding party with no wine, they add enough of this “magic mushroom ingredient” into the water, color the liquid with a bit of pomegranate juice or food dye, and since the dose is small and dilute, you wouldn’t taste the bitterness of the shrooms or even cloud up the water much.

Say you had no language for what effects were produced and could compare it only to the intoxicating effects of the one drug you know, what would you call the beverage? Would you not say the holy man from the desert turned water into wine? Would this not be an example of 1) above?

As for the many healings and even his resurrecting Lazarus, we might apply explanation number 2: Christ was a kind of ancient amateur physician who could recognize the social/psychological phenomena that might cause a woman to go blind. He might have fixed enough broken legs that getting a lame man to walk was impossibly easy for him.

Whatever the explanations, wanting to know for certain misses the point.

While it may be fun to speculate, we mustn’t forget the main goal here. Penn Gilette was right: you’re not actually all that interested in how magic and miracles are performed. You’re interested in believing you could also do it if you had the time and passion. You can’t because you lack the passion, so you won’t invest the time.

The answer is almost always a combination of the magician figuring out something you haven’t yet and then investing countless hours of practice to pull it off.

Special knowledge and hard work.

Knowing that it’s these two culprits doesn’t bring you any closer to performing miracles and magic tricks yourself. This disappoints many people who want the shortcut to the seemingly impossible: they want the impressive result without the hard work. Sadly, outside of The Matrix, you can’t “know Kung Fu” without the rigorous training and hours to years of practice, conditioning, and study necessary to “learn Kung Fu.”

But without the labor, the fruit isn’t yours.

Something to think about on the first Monday of every September:

Imagine being so interested in something that you’d spend 40 days fasting in the desert to master it. Total media detox, including even the medium of food. That’s how much Jesus cared about what he wanted to do.

This should make you wonder: What kind of “miracles” might you pull off if you engaged with your passions and committed to your dreams at a fraction of the level Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and countless other “miracle workers” did?

Congratulations if you already feel this for the work you’re taking a break from. If not, putting down the alcohol and finding something you could fully devote yourself to might be the trick.