Thank you. Well you'll probably have noticed that in the title of tonight there is the word "magician". Well, I can assure you that there is not going to be any conjuring tricks done, I'm not going to do one so you're not going to be inundated with those, but I'd like to say at this juncture that I haven't come here to praise Randi, I've come here to bury him, or at least the myths about magicians that seem to be incarnated in Randolph Zwinge, as used to be. Right, well of course, this, "Forbidden Knowledge", £9.95, comes out March 22nd, that's a plug! There are two descriptions rather than definitions of a magician. There's the occult magician, the alpha-magician if you like, which includes shamans and the like who seek to affect events in what I suppose most of us can convieniently regard as the psysical world, and to gain information about the physical world by using non physical forces. Now my own level of physics tells me that non physical forces is in fact using terms which are incompatable but I think you know what I mean, so I hope you'll forgive me. The other type of magician, the beta-magician if you like, affects the world and gets information about it by apparently non physical means. Usually, but not always for the puposes of entertainment. Now I suspect that most people would accept that there's a difference between these two, that the first type of magician has real magic powers or psychic powers, while the second achieves much the same effect by the use of trickery. But I say that these are not differences between the two types of magician but they are extreme ends of a continuum if you like, that runs from say the holy men of the Easten cultures through Western hermeticism, the Golden Dawn movement to people like David Berglas, Paul Daniels, even James Randi, [04:49] and that outright money-grubbing commercialism of the Philipino psychic surgeon. Now, just to confuse the matter further, while a lot of writers today tend to use the term conjurer to mean a magician who achieves effects by the use of trickery, in fact a conjurer was originally somebody who "conjured-up" spirits, and in fact a real magician if you like. The fake magician, in days gone by, in medieval times was in fact known as juggler; and in fact if you look at Tarot cards now you'll find that The Magician is referred to as The Juggler, quite often. But from the beginnings of recorded history right up from the temple priests of Egypt to the Aboriginal miracle workers of today there's been a good dollop pf beta-magic, fakery, trickery, used in and by alpha-magicians, the real magicians. To give you, not a very ancient example but North American Indian shamans, miracle workers, used to make bullets out of clay, when the white man was invading their territories, they would make bullets out of clay, they would push these bullets into breach loading guns and have the guns fired at them to show that they were proof against white man's bullets. In fact, very much the same fundimental technique was used by entertaiment magicians back in the 1940's and 1950's. Now of course the difference between the two is the latter usually killed themselves while the former tended to contribute to the genocide of the time. I think it was Thurston or Blackstone when Harry Houdini told them that he wanted to do the bullet catching trick wrote to him and said, "Harry, don't do it." Because it's so dangerous and in fact Harry Houdini never did the bullet catch trick, it's one of the areas where, in fact, magicians are very superstitious. Although technically speaking the bullet catch isn't very difficult to do, it does mean that if something goes wrong it goes completely wrong, normally if you drop a packet of cards on your foot you just break a toe, if you get the bullet catch trick wrong, that's it, you're over with and in fact you could end up talking to Robert Houdin, who in fact was hired by the French govermentto carry out psychological warfare in Algeria, when the shamans, the miracle workers of the time were trying to get the local people to rise up against the colonialists; and the French sent in Robert Houdin to carry out psychological warfare as a magician against them. [07:44] Very successfully. But I'd suggest, and I appreciate that to certain people the term magician in it's occult meaning has a very specific term, but I'd like to be more general than that. I'd suggest that it is perfectly acceptable to exchange the term psi or psychic functioning for alpha-magic, and fraud for beta-magic. And I think you'll accept that fraud and psychic functioning have been closely accociated all through the history of parapsychology and through psychical research. And in fact even today one hears supporters of a particular psychic say, "Oh, we know he cheats, or she cheats sometimes, but eventually they come out with the real things". Unfortunately these same people tend to be the people who bury that knowledge, bury that opinion when they're asked to comment publicly on their favourite psychic, which I think is a bit of a pity.
Well I don't think I need to go any further to demonstrate that down the years there have been links between genuine psychics and performing magicians, because there's another strand I'd like to introduce. One that might come as a bit of a surprise, not a tremendous one, but as some of you may know here that Albert Magus was a scientist. He was an alpha-magician, he used occult methods; but he was also a trickster, he used to use a special double-bottomed tumblers to introduce drugs into his patients by sort of pretending to put in water and giving them this water which had subsequently had drugs added to it. I think Paracelsus was another one that fitted into the mold. And in fact if you look in the history of science you'll often find that the earliest demonstrations of scientific principles and scientific technology, were magicians. Look at hydraulics, optics, acoustics, robotics, cybernetics, even the electrical ignition of gas flame was first demonstrated by a magician, on stage. The first public demonstration. And in fact this continues very much down to the present day near enough. The first commercial use of the memory-metal, Nitinol, whic has featured in certain papers in parapsychology, was actually used by magicians before, up to three years before it appeared in most scientific papers actually. And of course generations of, and in fact some of you older ladies might feel sympathy with this, generations of ladies with bent pennies of course have good reason to curse magicians because of course it was John Neville Maskelyne of Maskelyne and Devant and the Egyptian Hall, whos actually invented the coin operated lock. Hence the phrase, "Spend a Penny".
So, not only is there a link between magicians and psychics there's also between magicians and science, or at least the practical appplications of science and scientific discoveries. So, while people like Harry Collins and various others have actually questioned the value of magicians in the context of the parapsychology laboratory, I'd argue that the long standing link between magicians and psychics and magicians and science, I'd suggest that this may mean that perhaps magicians have avalue to parapsychology that goes beyond the limited conception of the magician as a sort of policeman in the parapsychology laboratory. Well of course there are very ambiguous attitudes towards magicians. This seems to be reflected very much in the, amongst parapsychologists. In a way it's almost as if parapsychologists say, "Well, yes we'll let magicians in but they mustn't say anything and they mustn't do anything and they mustn't comment. And that doesn't just reflect an ambiguity in parapsychology I think it also reflects an ambiguity of society itself towards magicians, down the centuries. AFter all, what's a magician? In a way he or in these days she is vey much a symbol if you like, of a child growing up in an adult world with it's own tricks and wonders, if you like innocence in a strange world. In fact magicians if you speak to them get out and talk to them, not of course that many psychical researchers ever do, [12:29]
