Gibecière
Courtesy of the William Kalush collection
Woodcut portrait of Girolamo Cardano from the 1582 Basel edition of his De subtilitate
G ere ··· i b e c i` > Journal of The Conjuring Arts Research Center ?
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The Conjuring Arts Research Center Board of Directors William Kalush Dan Smith Philip Varricchio Steve Cuiffo David Blaine Director Emeritus and Advisor to the Board of Directors Dr. David Singmaster Editor Stephen Minch Publisher William Kalush Gibecière is a peer review journal that uses double-blind methodology. Our group of reviewers is broad and covers all aspects of conjuring and the related arts. Please submit contributions via e-mail at: gibeciere.submissions@conjuringarts.org. All submissions, unless requested to be returned, will be added to the library at Conjuring Arts Research Center. Gibecière is published semi-annually by The Conjuring Arts Research Center 11 West 30th St., 5th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Phone: 212-594-1033 www.conjuringarts.org © 2015 ISSN 1558-8149
Contents Pocket Notes—Stephen Minch 7 The Legend of Donba-jutsu—Mitsunobu Matsuyama 9 Conjurers around the Mediterranean Basin— Pierre Taillefer 53 Jehan Dalmau—Pierre Taillefer 101 Wilson on Wilson—Tyler Wilson 115 The 52 Wonders—C. H. Wilson 125 Furthermore... 157 Contributors 159 Q
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POCKET NOTES Decimal is an arbitrary system of accounting for things, particularly anniversaries. But because decades have been a standard measure for thousands of years, we can’t help feeling that entering our tenth year of publication deserves something special, so that is what you are getting. This issue of Gibecière begins with Mitsunobu Matsuyama’s study of Donba-jutsu. In the winter 2009 issue of this journal, Mr. Matsuyama gave a brief account of a bizarre feat, known only in Japan, in which the magician visibly swallows a live horse. Legend reports that this trick was performed by a conjurer named Chōjiro Shioya sometime from 1688 to 1704. We asked Mr. Matsuyama if he could elaborate on this unique effect. He responded with an article that provides the full history of the trick, the proposed method and his thoughtful and thorough refutation of that method, which includes a compelling argument proposing that the trick was very probably never performed as described, but was instead confabulated from Japanese folk tales. Along the way, he explains how a giant, fire-spewing toad was produced on Kabuki stages, adds a new piece to the early history of Western Black Art and much more. Have you ever wondered what we know of the Western conjurers of antiquity and what they performed? French scholar Pierre Taillefer has contributed a handsomely researched article that addresses just that question. The short answer is: not a lot. However, what little is known is fascinating. Taillefer organizes all the available information, along with an analysis of how conjurers were perceived and received during the early Middle Ages and prior. Mr. Taillefer follows this study with a short article that increases our knowledge of one of conjuring’s oldest known past masters: the accomplished sixteenth-century Spanish magician, Dalmau. Dalmau’s Q
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Gibecière reputation as an exceptionally accomplished card conjurer is clearly evident in the scant mentions of his performances given by Girolamo Cardano, Aretino and others of the period. Taillefer has turned up a new chapter in the career of this important figure of conjuring. The irrepressible Canadian professional and researcher of conjuring history, Tyler Wilson, has discovered a rare and virtually unknown booklet on card magic published in 1877. Its contents would seem to necessitate a reassessment of the legacy of S. W. Erdnase. I will not spoil the surprises Mr. Wilson reveals in his introduction to this booklet. Given the importance of this work, we have reproduced it in its entirety, working from scans kindly provided by Stanford University’s Cecil H. Green Library and the University of California’s Bancroft Library, which house the only known copies of the booklet. Mr. Wilson also aided us by making composites of the two scans for the title page and page 9 (pp. 126 and 133 in Gibecière), to overcome deficiencies in the Stanford copy, which is the basis of our facsimile reproduction. Not bad for a ten-year-old. We hope you will agree. Stephen Minch editor
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The Legend of Donba-jutsu
The horse-swallowing scene described in Ehon Hyaku Monogatari
The Legend of Donba-jutsu: Swallowing a Horse Mitsunobu Matsuyama
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t is widely believed among historians of the Japanese performing arts that the magician Chōjiro Shioya performed a very peculiar trick known as Donba-jutsu, the feat of swallowing a horse.1 Shioya was said to have done this effect in various small theaters during the Genroku Era (1688–1704) in the Edo Period. These performances are described in numerous early essays and annals. However, all the authors cited as their source either earlier literature or hearsay. None had actually witnessed Shioya perform the trick. Nor has any supporting documentation survived that depicts his performance of it. In other words, there is a lack of reliable firsthand evidence to verify an actual occurrence of this remarkable feat. Consequently, the reality of Donba-jutsu is in contention and constitutes one of the biggest mysteries in the history of Japanese magic, comparable to the questions of whether the legendary “East Indian Rope Trick” was ever really performed and who wrote Artifice Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table (aka The Expert at the Card Table)?
Chōjiro Shioya and His Donba-jutsu For an accurate understanding of what the effect of Donba-jutsu was, let’s look at the best-known and most extensive historical document Q
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Conjurers around the Mediterranean Basin
Courtesy of the William Kalush Collection
Title page of the 1621 Lyons edition of the commentary of Isaac Casaubon on Athenaeus
Conjurers around the Mediterranean Basin From Antiquity to the Beginning of the Middle Ages Pierre Taillefer
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he aim of this article is to study the most significant evidence about the conjurers of antiquity up to around the seventh century, solely from the viewpoint of entertainment spectacles. I will leave to one side the fascinating literature on the fakery of false prophets and pretended miracles in the religious domain, since Steffen Taut is preparing a survey article on that subject. When we appraise this vast period of antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, we must realize that the different ancient languages do not correspond to any fixed geographic division. We cannot, in particular, separate the Greek world from the Latin, for even at the strongest point of the political domination of Rome, Greek remained the international and scholarly language, while Latin played more the role of the everyday language. In other words, the two languages coexisted in the same places and during the same period. Consequently the texts, which are in Greek or Latin, echo one and the same culture, one and the same reality; they even speak of the same artists. We must draw now on one, now on another language to put together one and the same puzzle. In the Middle Ages, nevertheless, we lack a certain number of pieces of the puzzle, for the Greek and Latin texts are no longer sufficient to Q
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P i e r r e Ta i l l e f e r draw up a precise portrait of the conjurer. Quite naturally, we must look for these missing pieces in the last-born of the written languages of the Mediterranean basin: Arabic. In fact, starting in the seventh century with the spread of Arabic by Islam, this language began to dominate a great part of the regions where people previously spoke Greek or Latin. In passing from Greek to Latin, and from Latin to Arabic, we are pulling on the same thread. This is why we will dedicate a coming article in Gibecière to the conjurers in the medieval Islamic world.
Historiography The shows of the ancient conjurers have captured the attention of a number of historians, archaeologists and philologists since the end of the sixteenth century: the Protestant humanist Isaac Casaubon took for pretext the brief appearance of a conjurer in the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus to follow the presence of the subject from antiquity to the Middle Ages,1 followed some years later by the Jesuit Jules-César Boulenger.2 At the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Beckmann, in his series of works devoted to inventions, delivered a thorough analysis of the subject, while broadening it to all types of performers of miracles.3 In the 1830s, we owe to the German archaeologist Karl August Böttiger a precise study on the ancient conjurer, which took for its point of departure a text by Alciphron.4 In 1909, there appeared in the review The Reliquary and Illustrated Archæologist a survey article by a certain Arthur Watson on the history of the shows of illusionists from antiquity to the seventeenth century.5 In 1918 and 1927, Hugo Blümner6 and Alexander Gaheis7 each published a study on the minor spectacles in antiquity and devoted a few paragraphs to the repertoire of conjurers. Finally, among the most recent research, we should mention the work of Alexandre Farnoux, on the traces left by the mountebanks of antiquity,8 56 2 Gibecière ‹› Winter 2015 Q
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Jehan Dalmau
Courtesy of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Supposed portrait of the Jester Pejer贸n, by Antonio Moro
JEHAN DALMAU A Spanish Conjurer at the Court of Francis I Pierre Taillefer
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Mme d’Étampes: Do you want me to send for the Spaniard Juan d’Alman, with his cards and his foolishness? Francis I: No; but come close to me, quite close. Mme d’Étampes (bending over him): Poor Francis! Francis I: I am dying just as Henry VIII predicted in his last moments.1
he historical drama Reines de Rois (Queens of Kings), performed for the first time on November 17, 1909, on the stage of the Théâtre national de l’Odéon in Paris, brings the conjurer Juan d’Alman back to life in the query of the Duchess d’Étampes at the bedside of the dying Francis I. The reply of the king’s favorite is freely inspired by the acts of Francis I, published in 1905, which tell us that a certain “Jean D’Alman” was granted a pension for the amusement that he gave the king in 1538 and 1539 (that is, close to ten years before the death of the sovereign) through his adroit handling of the cards.2 In addition, we have long been acquainted with the Spanish praestigiator Damautus, who accompanied Charles V to Milan and who was mentioned by Girolamo Cardano in his De subtilitate. Recently some commentators have been able to relate this text to the references to a certain Dalmao found in the writings of other important authors of the sixteenth century, such as Aretino, Girolamo Ruscelli, Gabriele Salvago, Q
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P i e r r e Ta i l l e f e r Luis Zapata and Tommaso Garzoni. Giuseppe Crimi has offered an interesting overview of them in his work Illusionismo e Magia Naturale nel Cinquecento (2011), linking them to a pamphlet hawked in the sixteenth century that revealed some secrets attributed to Dalmao.3 This article offers the first faithful transcription of the documents of King Francis I concerning Jean d’Alman, and defends the hypothesis that he is none other than the Dalmao of Italian and Spanish literature. Historians of conjuring have too quickly forgotten that the catalog of royal documents published in 1905, mentioned above, does not offer a transcription of them but only brief summary listings of their content. Consultation of the registers in the Archives nationales permits us to correct the name of the artist and to transcribe in their entirety the lines of the account dedicated to him: Photo by Pierre Taillefer
Paris, Archives nationales J. 96214, documents of October 1538 [Octobre 1538] A Jehan Dalmau, espaignol, en don a cause du passetemps qu’il donne au roy au subtil manyment des cartes à prandre comme dessus 225 £. [October 1538] To Jehan Dalmau, Spaniard, as a gift, because of the delight that he gives to the king in his adroit handling of the cards, 225 livres to be taken as above.
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Wilson on Wilson
Wilson on Wilson Tyler Wilson
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s a mischievous child, I would ravage boxes of cereal in search of the surprise toys inside. I’d never wait until the trinket naturally fell out on its own. I was impatient. I’d reach my hand deep down into the box to fish through the sugar-frosted heaven until I found my glow-in-the-dark decoder ring. It was nice to have the toy, but I would inevitably leave the cereal tasting hand-y. As a mischievous adult, not much has changed. The only difference is that I’ve swapped cereal boxes for libraries. I now get my sugar buzz from searching for surprise conjuring texts hidden among the classics. These searches are rarely fruitful, as there is a finite number of books on magic, and most have already been thoroughly researched and studied. However, on a recent lecture tour down the West Coast of the United States, I found an old card-magic booklet in Stanford University’s Cecil H. Green Library. Published in 1877, it is housed in the rare-books special collections. The title of the booklet piqued my interest because I had never heard of it or its author. That didn’t promise much, as many books from the period were simply collections of rehashed material that had been cut and pasted from other books—often word for word. The booklet at Stanford was only thirty pages long, so I expected to give it a quick skim and be back on the road within minutes. Little did I know that the decoder ring I would find that day would be solid gold. On the very first page, I was greeted with Erdnasian techniques a full quarter-century before S. W. Erdnase penned his iconic opus. Q
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The 52 Wonders
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