The Astral Cord

India has long held a place of mythic fascination for those in the West. India was where a British man without means, but maybe a few connections, could stake his claim. A place where the modern pop star can attain and taste exotic forms of spiritual enlightenment that come with a high sheen when compared to some dowdy old strain of Protestant Christianity. A place, where if the stories are to be believed, the most bad ass drugs are available for the asking…shit you would never, ever see back on the mean streets of Akron, Ohio. Orientalist fantasies of fakirs, opium smoke and snake charmers flood the brain…maybe, just maybe, you would be lucky enough to catch sight of the most astounding illusion that the world has ever known: The Great Indian Rope Trick.

Accounts date back 700 years and more, witnessed by medieval explorers Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta, the Indian rope trick is by all reports a breathtaking illusion. With nothing but a basket on the roadside and the turban on his head, performed in broad daylight in the wide open, the magician makes a long length of rope slither into the sky like a serpent rising to the tune of snake charmer’s flute. Miraculously, his boy assistant climbs to the top of the rope and disappears. The magician calls for him to come back, but the boy refuses to return. Angry, the magician picks up a sword and climbs after him. At the top, he also disappears. Suddenly, the boy’s severed limbs tumble to the ground in front of the audience, and the magician climbs down. Then he puts the body parts into the basket and produces the boy whole again. The Rope Trick has permeated the Western consciousness, every American kid has seen Bugs Bunny do it a hundred times. It has in the eyes of the West, become the examplar of Eastern miracles and the world’s most famous illusion.

Many modern magicians have invented methods for performing versions of the trick, yet these have relied on a stage or darkness. The classic Indian version is much more impressive because as noted, it was performed in daylight and in the open air. Will Goldston, founder of The Magician’s Club remarked in 1936:

"If it [the rope trick] does exist, it is worked by methods completely unknown to Western magic and science…I make this statement without qualification whatsoever, and back it with my lifetime’s of experience of magical invention and construction"

Despite the trick’s ancient pedigree, it did not really burst onto the pop culture stage until the final decade of the 19th century when the Chicago Tribune published an account in 1890. Oddly enough the paper retracted the story months later claiming that it was a hoax and a product of mass hypnosis, but this did not keep the press worldwide from running with the idea for years afterwards. By 1899 massive rewards were being offered for anyone who could accomplish the feat.

Despite the plethora of eyewitness and published accounts that sprang up in the tricks rise to fame, British magicians who could not accomplish the classic version of the illusion, treated it with a racist dismissiveness.

"…illusions said to be performed by [Indian] jugglers, such as casting it air the rope, the upper end of which remains there, whilst the performer climbs up it and vanishes from sight. These seem to be considerable exaggerated and hardly worth of credence"–Charles Bertram 1896

British magicians regularly stressed that Indian magic was simply trickery, and not particularly good trickery at that. They described Indian magic as "overrated" and felt that "judged by Occidental standards, [Indian tricks] cannot be dignified with the name of illusions" and no "English conjuror would dare show them to his youngest child". The idea that an Indian would be able to accomplish a feat that an Englishmen could not replicate was asinine.

Rewards for the performance of, and the secret to, The Great Indian Rope Trick continued to be offered through to the mid- twentieth century. There have been many comers, but never an answer to satisfy all. Recent thought on the subject seems to support the claims made by late Victorian and Edwardian era magicians, that the trick never existed at all (though without the imperialist condescension). Was this the case, or like the extract of Soma or Greek Fire was it merely a secret of the ancients lost now to the modern world?

• 01-Montrose // Make It Last
• 02-Comus // Drip Drip
• 03-The Body // Even Saints Knew Their Hour Of Failure And Loss
• 04-Jesu // Transfigure
• 05-Glenn Branca // First Movement
• 06-Coliseum // Man Was Never Meant To Fly