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The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History

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Perhaps you have seen a magician pull a rabbit out of a demonstrably empty hat. You may have seen the classic magical trick of sawing a woman in half. And perhaps you have seen the Indian rope trick: the conjurer, standing in an open field, throws one end of a rope into the air, where defying gravity, it stays, and a boy comes to climb up the rope, reaches the top, and disappears. No, you have not seen that one, perhaps, but it is as famous as the others and has caused a century of wonder, perhaps not from audiences but from those who have tried to see the illusion and tried to learn how it was done. In _The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History_ (Thunder's Mouth Press), Peter Lamont, a magician and an academic researcher on the performance of magic, has written a hugely entertaining book about the most legendary and exotic of magic tricks. "A legend is very much like an illusion," he writes, "more interesting and invariably more attractive than reality." We need legends, and this one is so colorful and mysterious, Lamont's careful probing and deflating make it even more attractive.

The amazing truth is that there never was any Indian rope trick, and it has almost nothing to do with India. It was the invention of a loyal American, a journalist who later went on to become the head of the US Secret Service. John Elbert Wilkie was a reporter for the _Chicago Tribune_, and in 1890 he published an anonymous article describing the rope trick as seen in India, and how it was done. He made it all up. There were those who spoke up, certain that people were seeing the rope trick before 1890, but there are no accounts of the trick before that time. A few weeks later, the _Tribune_ published a confession that the story was a hoax, but newspapers across America and Europe were spreading the story, while the retraction got nowhere. As Lamont writes, "A legend does not survive on accuracy." The community of magicians, and those fascinated by their effects, became split between those who were convinced that the rope trick was a real illusion and those who thought it an illusory illusion. The efforts of those who believed the trick to be real have been extensive. A photograph was finally produced of the trick in 1919, but it turned out to be the far more prosaic trick of a boy balancing on a pole. People had seen the trick in India, but they turned out to be people who were reported as seeing it by other people, the familiar "friend of a friend" basis of countless urban legends. There were those who claim to have seen the trick themselves. Many of them took decades to speak up and say that they had actually seen the trick performed, but a psychologist has found that the memories get elaborated, with fancier versions being recalled the more distant the memory is.

One particular elaboration has outdone Wilkie's conception, and has had its own life, supporters, and detractors. This is the version in which the boy climbs the rope and the magician climbs up after him, only to chop the boy up and throw his separated pieces down, whereupon they are magically reunited and the boy brought back to life. As in the original, there are those who claim to know just how this trick is done, but of course it is never done. Throughout this book is documented the human eagerness to believe; skeptics may assure the public with factual assertions about how the trick never existed, but as Lamont writes, the people who keep Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster going are the same types that will keep the Indian rope trick in existence, even though it never had an existence to begin with. With his book, full of arcane facts and documentation presented by a humorous and entertaining guide, Lamont knows that he is only going to strengthen the legend. In fact, in a jaunty epilogue, he tells us he has, indeed, seen the trick himself, and any reader will agree, he tells a good story.

You wouldn't have thought that a magic trick that never was is the best known magical trick of all time.

Peter Lamont uses this trick as the foundation of a search into magic tricks of all kinds, but especially tricks from India. His search has taken him back into history and finally a trip to India doing research.

Extensively researched and referenced this is a very interesting trip into the explanation of magic. When I first picked it up, because of the title, I expected to put it down again quickly. Instead I found the writing style and the content to be fascinating and didn't put it down.

Every so often I get some kind of story in an e-mail describing something that just makes so much sense that it had to have happened. It's nice to know that such urban legends didn't just start with the Internet, but a long time ago.

The Indian Rope Trick - a totally made up story - in Chicago - nothing to do with India at all. Then magicians had to come up with a way to do it. Strange world.

Guys

I have not read this book yet, but I can't resist myself from commenting on this topic.

I don't know what kind of research the author has done and arrived at the conclusion that the Indian rope trick was a complete HOAX.

The fact is that the Indian Rope Trick does really exist. It's just that very few magicians can do it. The classic Indian rope trick (boy vanishing in thin air and then the master cutting him in to pieces) may be a myth, but the Indian rope trick is very much performed even today.

[...].

There is an excellent demonstration of the trick in BBC's program supernatural science - Secrets of Levitation where Nishamuddin, a magician from India, who has revived this trick, performs the trick for BBC.

There is a professor and a magician in Kerla (southern India) who can also perform this trick.

So I don't know what's all this fuss about?

According to this magician who looked for what wasn't there, "history is not the past, only the historian's interpretation of a very small part of it." Those who write history do not know all the facts, do not deem some of them important or entertaining enough to sell papers, or books. Bare facts are of little use without historical interpretations. He dontinues, "Two historians reading the same text choose different facts and write different stories, nothing alike" Similar to these reviews, I would imagine.

Even in newspapers, "facts" depend on what editors have decided are important and the tales by the journalist (their personal opinions) are never identical. History will always be a matter of opinion, but one based on evidence, so-called historical facts.

In the 17th century, Indian and Persian magicians were called jugglers. Mostly the charmed snakes, but never anything to compare with America's David Copperfield. Magic was a world of enchantment, like Merlin's in Camelot, filled with illusion. The age of technology in late 17th and 18th centuries brought Enlightenment,

There is no documentation of the rope trick as originating from India; a shaman from Siberia claimed to have climbed to the sky "by the use of a rope." But it was a story about a trick with a rope in India which captured the popular imagination and became the world's most famous hoax,

Like 'The War of the Worlds' radio fraud, this is believed to have been a false newspaper article written in 1890 in America; the author admitted it was untrue and had even written that there was no factual verification. But the notion and notoriety prompted people to claim that they had seen it with their own eyes. It is ordinary folks who bring a legend to life.

Many photos throughout this book shows how the thing proliferated and could have happened. The best in my opinion is the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, contemplating a coiled rope with perhaps five feet up in the air. As we all know, Hollywood was the purveyor of props and rumors. It was a 'charade.'