Book Review: The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick
I have to thank David Southwell for sparking my interest in the Indian Rope Trick. In 2019, I was preparing a lecture on the relationship between Yoga and Magic for Treadwells Bookshop (see Yogis, Magic and Deception – I) and was reading an early draft to David. He pointed out, quite rightly, that of all the Yogic feats I had mentioned, I had omitted the most famous of them all – the Indian Rope Trick!
I read a couple of papers on the Rope Trick, but it was only after the lecture that I read Peter Lamont’s wonderful The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (Abacus, 2004).
Engagingly written with sparkling wit and thorough attention to detail, Peter Lamont uncovers the strange history of a “trick that never was” – the most famous of Indian Fakir magical feats that many have claimed to witness, but in actuality originated in a “fake news” story in an American newspaper. Along the way, Lamont introduces a cast of wonderful and colorful characters, ranging from European conjurors who took on Indian fakir stage identities – the first of these being no less than Charles Dickens – to Spiritualists and Madame Blavatsky. Lamont details the fascinating backlash against the growing fame of eastern magic by the members of the Magic Circle, initially led by none other than John Nevil Maskelyne, conjuror and inventor of the pay toilet (hence the phrase “spend a penny”). Lamont also shows how attitudes to Indian feats of magic were intertwined with the growth of interest in Spiritualism, and how early theories of hypnotism were invoked to both explain and debunk the apparent paranormal powers of both fakirs and spiritualists. There has been a great deal of focus on the rise of interest in “the mystic east” and the passage of Yoga and other Indian traditions into the West in recent years, and this book is a great addition to that evolving field.
If you’re at all interested in the intersection between stage magic, the occult, and the reception of Indian feats of magic in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick is a must-read. Illustrated with period photographs and flyers, it sheds much light on the popular and enduring fascination of Indian feats of magic and trickery and attempts to explain or debunk them.
