Abracadabra started as medicine
The oldest known written use of ABRACADABRA is in a Roman medical poem from around the third century AD by a doctor called Serenus Sammonicus. He recommended writing the word on a piece of parchment as a triangle, dropping one letter on each line until only A was left, and wearing it round the neck to shrink a fever away. Nobody knows for certain where the word came from.
Stage magicians took it over much later, along with the WAND and the top HAT, as part of the costume of a performer. Pulling a RABBIT out of a hat is usually traced to the early nineteenth century, and it works because a rabbit will sit quietly in a small dark space until it is lifted out.
The whole art is where you are looking
Most tricks depend on misdirection: getting the AUDIENCE to look at one thing while something else happens. A big gesture with one hand, a joke, a question — the attention goes there, and a COIN or a card moves unseen in the other hand. Scientists who study attention have worked with magicians, because they are experts in exactly how easily people miss things happening in plain view.
SLEIGHT of hand, from an old Norse word for cunning, means moving objects secretly by skill alone. It takes hundreds of hours of practice in front of a MIRROR to get a single move smooth. Tricks with CARDS, a ROPE or a coin can be done close up, inches from the audience, which is harder than it looks on a stage.
Keeping the secret
The Magic Circle was founded in London in 1905, and new members promise not to REVEAL how tricks are done except to other magicians. Its Latin motto means roughly not apt to disclose secrets. Part of the reason is craft — a trick that has been explained loses its wonder — and part is that many performers earn their living from illusions they spent years inventing.
Some famous illusions are simpler than they seem. Pepper's ghost, first shown in London in 1862, made a ghostly figure appear to walk through a play; it was simply the reflection of a hidden, brightly lit actor in a huge angled sheet of glass. Versions of it are still used in theme parks today. Our Victorians page covers the age in which it caused a sensation.
Escapes, vanishes and a man who fought fakes
Harry Houdini became world-famous in the early 1900s for ESCAPE acts: getting out of handcuffs, straitjackets and locked, water-filled tanks, often while crowds watched. He challenged police forces to lock him up and walked free. Later in life he spent years exposing fake mediums who claimed to talk to the dead, using his knowledge of tricks to show how they did it.
Every big stage ILLUSION is a piece of engineering: making an assistant VANISH or DISAPPEAR from a BOX, making a person LEVITATE, producing a DOVE from nowhere. The best TRICK of all is the one where the MAGICIAN keeps the SECRET and the audience goes home puzzled, still clapping — the APPLAUSE is the real reward.