'The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick': The Grift of the Magic

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review: "WHEN John Elbert Wilkie died in 1934, he was remembered for his 14 years as a controversial director of the Secret Service, during which he acquired a reputation for forgery and skullduggery, and for masterly manipulation of the press. But not a single obituary cited his greatest contribution to the world: Wilkie was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. Not the actual feat, of course; it does not and never did exist. In 1890, Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, fabricated the legend that the world has embraced from that day to this as an ancient feat of Indian street magic.

How did a silly newspaper hoax become a lasting icon of mystery? The answer, Peter Lamont tells us in his wry and thoughtful ''Rise of the Indian Rope Trick,'' is that Wilkie's article appeared at the perfect moment to feed the needs and prejudices of modern Western culture. India was the jewel of the British Empire, and to justify colonial rule, the British had convinced themselves the conquered were superstitious savages who needed white men's guidance in the form of exploitation, conversion and death. The prime symbol of Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks -- as the British imagined -- frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool. Indian street magicians have a repertory of earthy, violent tricks designed for performance outdoors -- very different from polite Victorian parlor and stage magic. So when well-fed British conquerors saw a starving fakir do a trick they couldn't fathom, they reasoned thus: We know the natives are too primitive to fool us; therefore, what we are witnessing must be genuine magic.

In 1890 The Chicago Tribune was competing in a cutthroat newspaper market by publishing sensational fiction as fact. The Rope Trick -- as Lamont's detective work reveals -- was one of those fictions. The trick made its debut on Aug. 8, 1890, on the front page of The Tribune's second section. An anonymous, illustrated article told of two Yale graduates, an artist and a photographer, on a visit to India. They saw a street fakir, who took out a ball of gray twine, held the loose end in his teeth and tossed the ball upwards where it unrolled until the other end was out of sight. A small boy, ''about 6 years old,'' then climbed the twine and, when he was 30 or 40 feet in the air, vanished. The artist made a sketch of the event. The photographer took snapshots. When the photos were developed, they showed no twine, no boy, just the fakir sitting on the ground. ''Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn't hypnotize the camera,'' the writer concluded.

This idea of genuine magic in a far-off place filled a void in the West. Physics, biology, geology and archaeology were challenging traditional beliefs, especially religion. The story's genius is that it allows a reader to wallow in Oriental mystery while maintaining the pose of modernity. Hypnotism was to the Victorians what energy is to the New Age: a catchall explanation for crackpot beliefs. By describing a thrilling, romantic, gravity-defying miracle, then discrediting it as the result of hypnotism -- something equally cryptic, but with a Western, scientific ring -- The Tribune allowed its readers to have their mystery and debunk it, too.

Wilkie's story had remarkable staying power. In 1904, for the first time, a living person claimed to have seen the Rope Trick. A young British gentleman, Sebastian Burchett, reported to the Society for Psychical Research that he recalled having seen the trick a few years earlier. After lengthy cross-examination, the society dismissed his testimony as illustrating ''once more the unreliability of memory.''

In 1919, The Strand Magazine published a photograph of the miracle in progress with a boy high atop a rope. That was a big hit until the photographer confessed that his picture actually just showed a child balancing on a pole. In 1925, the aptly named Lady Waghorn suddenly remembered witnessing the trick in Madras in 1891, although for 34 years she had somehow thought ''nothing about it.''

Other magicians saw the Rope Trick as a dangerous myth that ''gave the appalling impression that Indian jugglers were superior to Western conjurors.'' Members of Britain's magicians' alliance, the Magic Circle, systematically hunted down and discredited eyewitnesses, and even offered a 500-guinea reward for anyone who would actually perform the trick.

Naturally, the nuts emerged. ''His Excellency Dr. Sir Alex-ander Cannon'' offered to bring over his favorite yogi to perform the trick at the Albert Hall, if the Magic Circle would pay him £50,000, provide a shipload of genuine Indian sand and heat the Albert Hall to tropical temperatures. Karachi -- the exotic stage persona of a ''lamentable'' Plymouth magician named Arthur Derby -- offered to do the rope part of the trick in the open air, provided he could prepare the grounds 48 hours in advance and keep the audience at least 15 yards away. Karachi declined to make the boy vanish (that being the impossible part).

By 1934, historians were thoroughly confused. Some claimed that Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, had scoured India for the trick in 1875 (he hadn't) and that same year Lord Northbrook had offered £10,000 for a performance (he hadn't). Antecedents of the trick, resembling it about as much as ''Jack and the Beanstalk,'' were found in Australia, Siberia, Germany and China. Researchers in India proudly quoted rope-climbing metaphors in eighth-century philosophical commentaries. But, Lamont argues cogently, though one or the other of these obscure references may have inspired Wilkie, the Indian Rope Trick as we know it did not exist for the world until the hoax of 1890.

Lamont relishes the bizarre theories suggested to explain the trick that's never been done. In the 1930's, Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler's secretly Jewish personal psychic, declared that the rope in the trick was actually a segmented pole made of sheep bones. In 1955 an American journalist, John Keel, went to India and came back with a ''simple explanation'' involving a boy and a fakir hanging on a rope suspended between two hills by means of a thread of human hair, and pretending to argue while the man throws to the ground pieces of dead monkey. In the 1960's, an Indian offered to teach a secret mantra of the trick to any penitent who would avoid eating meat and having sex for three weeks -- and who could prove that was true. In the 1970's, Uri Geller's biographer declared that the Rope Trick was a mass hallucination induced by telepathy. ''One could choose,'' Lamont remarks, ''between the views of a Jewish Nazi clairvoyant or those of an ambassador for psychic aliens, between chopping up a monkey or becoming a vegetarian celibate.'' "