This is the first of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think

What is it you first think of when you think of magic?

Got an answer? OK now imagine that you’d read the question before you became a magician. What would you have thought of? Would it have had anything to do with cards, silks, coins, doves or whatever it is we tend to associate magic with now we’ve been initiated.

Its a question I used to ask some of my friends who weren’t magicians – they would usually bring up images of a supreme power able to command the elements bring fear across the lands. When I asked them what they thought of when they heard the word “magician” – the response was to do with some form of funny little man in a tuxedo and top hat with a gaggle of scantily dressed assistants – generally the images aren’t too positive.

Why have we created such a divide between these two images? Surely doesn’t the magic we can do have the potential to be just as frightening and have the same ability to shake people’s worlds the way the magic does in fantasy novels and role playing games? Robert-Houdin is often quoted as having said “A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.”, but do we do that? Honestly when we look at our acts can we say “Yes, If I met somebody who could really do magic that’s exactly what I think he would do!”. Honestly if you really had magical powers would you stand on a stage and produce fans of cards, make billiard balls multiply and pull a signed and freely selected rabbit out of your assistants sponge bra? I wouldn’t.

Because magic is something much more then that. Granted if we want to call ourselves illusionists then this is unimportant as all these things could be classed as “illusions” – but I for one never learned magic because I wanted to create illusions – I wanted to do magic. This is why I like walking down the street use floating a banknote over my hand. I believe that in the moment some people see that banknote float something extremely powerful happens – up until that moment the person currently staring at you knew that the world was simple, logical and could be explained – suddenly in a single moment all that certainty has been broken and destroyed – after a few seconds, their brain kicks back in and realizes there has to be some kind of logical explanation like magnets or something but still the fact remains that they have had that moment – that moment that grabs them out of themselves and screams at them “there is more to life then what you think is real” and throws them back – in that moment their are taken back to the primitive, a state of mind where the laws, restrictions and limits that society imposes on us cease to matter, because the society and world we knew ceases to exist – I don’t think the phrase “childlike wonder” encompasses enough -

its something pure yes, but at the same time it is something pure in that was a Japanese mythical daemon posses “yu-gen” in being so pure it is both sublimely beautiful and completely terrifying. That is what I mean by taking magic back to the primitive – returning both the art itself and its spectators to a pure state that is free from restrictions and limitations.

Where to the limits come in magic? Only from ourselves. Why do we only levitate? Why not fly? Why do we catch bullets with out teeth, why not stop them in midair before they come towards us? Why do we turn the twenty pound note back into a fiver again? If I could really turn a five pound note into a twenty – I’d give it away, after all I can just create another one can’t I?
Expensive perhaps. But perhaps it is the distinction that removes a magician from a man in a silly hat.