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2008 – Magic Through the Ages
'Magic Through the Ages: A Magical Evening with Eddie Dawes' – by Tom McAlindon.
Tom McAlindon reports on 'A Magical Evening with Eddie Dawes', Honorary Vice-President of The Philip Larkin Society and Historian of the Magic Circle: The Back Room, Hallgate, Cottingham, 20 December 2008.
[From About Larkin 27, April 2009]
As every graduate in Eng. Lit. used to know, one of the greatest of English narrative poems opens with a Christmas feast at Camelot where the noble company, eager for seasonal fun and games, is entertained by a tall stranger who stuns them with an exhibition of magic, far beyond anything they have ever imagined possible: he invites one of the guests to chop his head off and then 'Halled out at the hal dor, his hed in his hande'. Cool as you like; his audience left gasping and incredulous.
I was reminded of this on the Saturday night before Christmas last when the noble Larkin Society, of which I am not a member, invited me to their Christmas feast in the Hall of Balloons on Hallgate in Cottingham. Like Arthur and his court on that momentous occasion, they were all in high spirits when I slipped in: glasses tinkling, tongues wagging, friends among friends, all 'talkkande before the high table of trifles ful hende'. But well before the tables were filled and the feasting began, high-spirited Arthur's counterpart on the night, one James Booth, eyes twinkling and arms somewhat akimbo – for 'He was so joly of his joyfness, and sumquat childgered' – leaped to the platform and announced for our delectation the arrival of a famous magician: Edwin Dawes (pictured right). Like the Green Knight, this magician was impressively tall and decidedly humorous. But not at all mocking or menacing or boastful: in fact his performance was marked by a certain sprezzatura, an elegant casualness, a graceful and smiling suggestion that he didn't take his dazzling art all that seriously.
But of course he does and he doesn't. It has not been acquired without a lifetime of studious and continuous practice, everything tried in secret again and again until the art becomes nature. Moreover, before putting his perfectly honed skills on display, he adapted with perfect decorum to the nature of his audience by giving us a compact mini-lecture on the history of magic from its beginnings with Zoroaster in Persia to Paul Daniels and the like on TV. Agreeably laced with anecdotes on the way in which he himself was gradually seduced by the metamorphic art, and relevantly noting en passant the profound association of Christmas with miracle and magic and wonder (the Magi from the East, the miracle in the manger), this survey of a several-thousand year subject was anything but dry and ponderous. No need now for anyone to get lost in Lynn Thorndike's three-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science.
Eddie Dawes doesn't go in for beheading or corporal bisection, but after this talk he made us forget such grosser pleasures by producing a cornucopia of illusions that held us spellbound. Again and again matter obeyed his delicate touch in defiance of all the laws of physics and chemistry: objects self-multiplied, changed colours, interpenetrated and separated, disappeared and reappeared, contracted and expanded, bent and straightened: he was Simon Magus, Friar Bacon, Doctor Faustus, Paracelsus and Uri Geller all in one. The Society's Membership Secretary, Andrew Eastwood, one of the volunteers on whom he exercised his spells, was overcome with wonder at the triumphant close of that session, and almost embraced him in awe before resuming his place among the rest of us. An adoring convert: Credo quia impossibile est.
What left one wondering most of all, however, is the fact that Eddie Dawes is both a science professor and a magician. The wonder is not just that he embraces these contraries (truth and verification as against deception and obfuscation) for, as he reminded us in his mini-lecture, chemistry was born of alchemy and the scientist's search for the secrets of nature began with natural magic and astrology. The wonder is that in this age of academic specialisation we have in our midst someone who can achieve mastery in divided and distinguished worlds.
A wonder-full party! Invite me again next year, please!
Photographs © James Booth 2008
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