Watch Ep IV on Youtube

In the last post, we concluded that  magicians have a special appreciation for the art of magic. A sense of wonder which is, for various reasons, inaccessible to lay people.

The episode opens with JC turning water to ice. I just noticed that about two thousand years ago, a similarly initialed man turned water to wine. In this video, Harapan does some sweet card magic while Matthew bends spoons. With the right kind of story and in a slightly less skeptical audience, Matthew would might have been labelled some kind of psychic with supernatural powers. In 17th Century Massachusetts, he would have been tried as a Witch and hung.

It simply happens that since the show is presented as as conjuring, people expect some kind of trickery. We have been in a sense, immunised by anecdotes of previous charlatans. As such, our criteria for what constitutes a miracle is very much different from what it could have been many years ago.

Peter Popoff is a very classical case. In the 1980s he organised huge Faith Healing rallies, where he could apparently tell people's addresses and their ailments simply by looking at them. Sort of like Dr House. Upon investigation by skeptics (including the famous James Randi) a rather mundane explanation emerged. The faithful filled out prayer requests before the show, from which his wife was feeding him information via a wireless microphone.

I would at this point want to draw a parallel with science prodding nature to reveal its rather fascinating secrets, but that's a long topic for another day.

For now, I'm leaving you with a quote.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C Clarke

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