Tradition

Five classical pieces. What follows is where each one begins, so far as the record runs. And where the record gives out, the stories take over.

Rings

Solid metal rings link, pass through one another, and join into a chain.

Everybody calls them the Chinese Rings, but the name is a clue more than a history. The oldest known written explanation of the method is Japanese: Max Maven's article "The Iron Rings" in Genii (May 2016) identifies it in Hokasen, a conjuring book published in 1764, and discusses why the Japanese called the trick Chinese. In English, Professor Hoffmann gave the rings a full treatment under the title "The Chinese Rings" in Modern Magic (1876). The routine in this show is Jim Steinmeyer's "Linking Five Rings," from The Conjuring Anthology (2006).

Egg

An egg appears at the fingertips, vanishes, and is found again in a small cloth bag shown empty.

The egg bag goes back to London in the 1720s, where Isaac Fawkes pulled eggs from a large cloth bag and finished by producing a live bird. A century later in the Netherlands, David Bamberg, of the Bamberg family of conjurers, worked his own version, producing eggs and then a hen. By the Victorian era it appeared in Professor Hoffmann's Modern Magic (1876). The small bag most performers use today carries Max Malini's name, and his handling, recorded in The Tarbell Course in Magic, is the one in this show. Charlie Miller and Johnny Thompson refined it further for later generations.

Silks

Two sets of three colored silks. A spectator handles one set as they please; the performer's set is found to agree with it.

Knots and cloth are as old as conjuring, but silk only became a conjuring material once it was cheap and bright enough to use by the dozen. That makes silk magic younger than anything else on the program. The silk specialists of the early 1900s built a whole branch of conjuring around it, and Harold Rice later gathered their work into his Encyclopedia of Silk Magic, still the book everyone turns to. The routine in this show is Stewart Judah's "As U Like It," from its third volume (1962).

Rope

A single length of rope is cut through the middle and made whole.

This is one of the oldest tricks anyone ever bothered to write down. It shows up in the first English book to give conjuring away, Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), listed as cutting a lace in two and making it whole again. It turns up again in the anonymous Hocus Pocus Junior: The Anatomie of Legerdemain (1634), and in Hoffmann's Modern Magic (1876). The version in this show is Charlie Miller's "The Great Debatable Rope Mystery," first published in Genii in 1968.

Cups and Balls

Balls pass through solid cups, vanish, reappear, and multiply, and finally the cups are lifted to reveal something no one expected.

This is about as old as recorded magic gets. Magicians long claimed a wall painting at Beni Hasan in Egypt, some 4,000 years old, as the first picture of the cups and balls. Egyptologists see a game, or ordinary work, and no balls at all. The first sure record comes in the first century AD, when Seneca the Younger wrote to his friend Lucilius about the conjurers' cups and pebbles (acetabula et calculi), confessing that the deception itself delighted him. The act turns up again in De goochelaar (L'Escamoteur, The Conjurer), a painting by or after Hieronymus Bosch from around 1500, in which an accomplice picks the pocket of the man most absorbed in the trick. It appears in Scot's Discoverie in 1584, and as the opening routine of Hocus Pocus Junior in 1634. The routine in this show is Dai Vernon's, published by Lewis Ganson in The Dai Vernon Book of Magic in 1957, and still the standard.