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Besides, animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism progressed. A logic parallel to that of racism… The convergence of processes of civilization is astounding. Animals, like the dead, and so many others, have followed this uninterrupted process of annexation through extermination, which consists of liquidation, then of making the extinct species speak, of making them present the confession of their disappearance. Making animals speak, as one has made the insane, children, sex (Foucault) speak. This is even deluded in regard to animals, whose principle of uncertainty, which they have caused to weigh on men since the rupture in their alliance with men, resides in the fact that they do not speak.

Jean Baudrillard²⁴⁴

A theme of this book is the way in which magic inhabits the epistemological boundaries of the age in which it finds itself. The conjuror is constantly engaged in boundary work: in the name of entertainment (or wonder), he brings us up against the limits of a culture’s beliefs and knowledge and of its habitual ways of understanding the world. Thus, in an age of superstition and supernatural belief, the conjuror trades on the supernatural in order to suggest explanations for his performances. As we have seen, Samuel Rid, writing in the Jacobean period, encourages his jugglers to capitalize on the imagery of the ‘real’ wizard and to play up against the edge of his culture’s belief about the power of man to harness occult powers. In ages less likely to take for granted the reality of the supernatural, conjurors find other boundaries against which to work. Implicitly or explicitly, they challenge the laws of nature: by passing one solid object through another, by performing levitations, by ‘changing’ one thing into another, by killing or dismembering and then reviving or making whole. The themes of the conjuror’s narrative play, time after time, with the possibility (or the fantasy) that apparent natural laws may not, after all be absolute. And in an age of materialism and rationality, this in itself becomes one of the attractions of his performance: that in a world which the scientist purports to explain with increasing thoroughness, he reminds the audience that there is after all the possibility of wonder.

The conjuror then is generally operating on or near the boundaries of a culture’s knowledge. In this chapter, however, I shall be talking about boundary work in a more precise and particular sense – the way in which the performances of conjurors and their colleagues have variously subverted and/or reinforced the boundaries of what it means to be human.

In our construction of ‘the human’, one of the ways in which we have traditionally proceeded is by drawing boundaries in order to delineate what the human is not. The historian Keith Thomas traces this back to Descartes, who stressed the lordship of humanity over a natural world which is characterized as inert and lacking in any spiritual dimension. According to Thomas, ‘Man stood to animal as did heaven to earth, soul to body, culture to nature.’²⁴⁵In fact this absolute distinction between man and nature pre-dates Descartes by millennia.

It is articulated in the Book of Genesis, the founding myth of western culture.

But it is true that Cartesian philosophy, and the greater Enlightenment project in which it played such an important role, made that distinction culturally more urgent. And if the distinction between man and animal is so important, the key questions of what it is that distinguishes us from animals become important too.

Again the common-sense response is an important one: man is a rational animal and a language animal. These are the key borderlines – and therefore the site of both scientific experiment and imaginative exploration. Hence the prevalence of talking animals in folk tales and mythology; hence the prevalence of myths relating to deities or sorcerers who, like Circe, turn men and women into animals – teasing us with the horrifying possibility that the boundary may be broken down. Hence, too, the widespread fascination with twentieth-century scientific explorations into the language of animals, and, with those attempts, to teach chimpanzees and dolphins a human language which have met with such limited success.

Another important distinction is that between the animate and the inanimate, or to put it another way, between mechanical and inanimate and the organic. Again, this is not always as simple, nor as innocent, as it seems – as the Elizabethan scholar John Dee discovered at an early age, when the mechanical flying scarab which he designed for a Cambridge college production of Aristophanes’ Peace was taken for a living monster, leading to the first of the many accusations of sorcery which pursued him for the rest of his life.²⁴⁶ In later years the pervasive imagery of both the universe and the human body as some kind of machine (with or without a ghost in it) attests a growing uncertainty about the simple distinction between the human and the inanimate:

when Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein uses electricity to animate the apparently lifeless assemblage of parts on his laboratory table, he articulates this uncertainty about how absolute this separation actually is. So, too, in a different mode, does James Whale’s 1931 film version of Frankenstein, where the bolt through Boris Karloff ’s neck wittily sums up this complex of ideas in a single visual image. Science fiction films and novels have relentlessly explored the ambiguities of this theme through numerous robots and androids – most successfully, perhaps, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). On another level, the image of the human mind as a kind of computer has become common in recent years. This, though, is hardly comforting, since the computer on our

desk can perform most reason-based tasks more efficiently than the one which (we are told) we carry around in our heads. Perhaps man is not, after all, such a rational animal: certainly, since the advent of the computer, popular culture has tended to take its cue from Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, seeking definitions of the human which do not depend on rationality.

If the construction of the human involves definitions such as ‘not animal’,

‘not inorganic’ another involves the category ‘not disembodied spirit’. Biblical traditions which distinguish us from beings of pure spirit: in the traditional hierarchy of creation humanity is ‘lower than the angels’, and the spheres which relate to these different orders of creation remain separate: they are the realms of heaven (or hell) and earth. Here, too, boundaries seem less than absolute: in folk traditions across the world there are endless tales of ghosts returning, of witches and sorcerers who, like the Witch of Endor, were able to conjure them up, or of oracles who maintained a privileged communication with the spirit world. The shamanic tradition which is referred to in Chapter One is dependent on the concept of being able to negotiate between one world and the other. Later European philosophical developments led thinkers to approach this boundary in a slightly different way. Cartesian dualism sees reality as a dichotomy of matter (extended or spatial substance) and spirit (thinking substance, including God).

Descartes argued for the independent existence of a non-corporeal realm and a physical realm and saw the mind as separate from body, the two representing separate and distinct principles of being or classes of substance in the universe.

And while an increasing secularization of western thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has called into question the nature of the ‘spirit’ side of Descartes’ dichotomy, there are still millions of people for whom its existence is not in question, and for whom scientific advances tend to confirm rather than refute their beliefs.

The performance of magic touches on this question in a variety of ways. In this chapter, I shall be looking at two areas of magic in particular – both of them in some ways peripheral to the mainstream of conjuring as we now conceive it, but nonetheless an essential part of the history of magic: talking animals and automata.

‘Appearances of Reason in the Brute’: human/animal

William Banks and his horse, Morocco, whom we encountered in an earlier chapter, are good examples of the kind of subliminal trickery which may be employed in order to make an animal seem to have human intelligence. We saw that part of the mythology of this famous double act involved hints and suggestions of sorcery – suggestions which Banks himself may well have encouraged as a publicity strategy. But in some ways Banks and Morocco were before their time; the great age of the ‘intelligent animal act’ was the long eighteenth century – that period between the Restoration and the Regency which

broadly coincides with the philosophical period we call the Enlightenment.

And to this later age, this kind of entertainment presented a different kind of philosophical question. The great intellectual project of the European Enlightenment movement was to synthesize ideas of God, man and nature into a coherent world vision in which human reason, through which man understands the universe and his place in it, becomes the prime mover. John Collier summed up what had become the common view when, at the end of the eighteenth century, he concluded in his inquiry into the ‘Vital Principle and the Soul of Man’ that the superiority of Reason is what marks man off from the rest of Creation, the fact that God has endowed him with

Faculties, distinct perceptions, and in vast abundance; genius, reflection, reason, and foresight, together with a knowledge of his God, and the means of tracing him out, whereby his elevated thoughts improve these his admirable talents, and turn them to excellent advantage.

No one animal in the creation partakes with Man in this sublime exercise of his faculties, and in the consolations which accompany it. It is the particular excellency of his reasonable creatures only…

Reason (for instance) avails itself of the sacred treasury of the past, compares it with the present and judges its influence on the future. Reason surveys and connexts the scattered variety of intellectual knowledge diversified among the Brute creation, as it were into one whole, the animating soul presiding over all, concentring in itself ‘the sum of all their powers’.

Reason in Man is active and fruitful, unrestrained by place or time, capable of varying and enlarging its attainments… Compare this now with the actions and appearances of reason in the Brute.²⁴⁷

Enlightenment rationalism went hand in hand with advances in scientific thought, and scientists took an almost missionary zeal, throughout the eighteenth century, in spreading the word amongst the public. Demonstrations and explanations of scientific principles and inventions spread from London’s coffee houses, to salons, theatres, halls, mechanics’ institutes and scientific and literary societies both in the capital and in the provinces. By the end of the eighteenth century nearly every English town of any significance was part of a regular circuit of lectures and exhibitions: science was offered to the public in the form of performance, and successful careers might be made out of it since ‘“knowledge”, as Benjamin Martin reflected, “is now become a fashionable thing.”’²⁴⁸

It is important not to oversimplify. For every action, as one of the Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers explained, there is an equal and opposite reaction,²⁴⁹and the Age of Reason also showed intense interest in the irrational and the supernatural. As recent scholars have argued, ‘the eighteenth century

was too deeply involved with the occult to have us associate it exclusively with rationalism, humanism, scientific determinism and classicism’.²⁵⁰Nonetheless, there was a dominant strain within Enlightenment thought which celebrated the rationality of man. To the exhibitors of the intelligent animals, this must have been a godsend, offering them the chance to subvert just that boundary between man and the animal world which scientific and theological thought looked to emphasize. Thus the Age of Reason was also the heyday of phenomena such as William Pinchbeck’s ‘Pig of Knowledge’, James Hazard’s ‘Learned Pig’, Sieur Rea’s ‘Little Scientific Pony’, Signor Castelli’s Dog ‘Munito’, the

‘Wonderful Intelligent Goose’ and many other Learned, Sapient, Scientific, and Philosophical farmyard and domestic animals. Frequently publicized in terms which imitated, quoted and parodied the more ‘respectable’ scientific lectures and demonstrations with which they competed for customers, these intelligent animals were exhibited not only in fairs but also in lecture rooms, arcades, halls and institutes throughout Europe and America. Some, like Munito the dog, could also be consulted…

AT HOME

At No. 1, Leicester Square,

Where he exhibits, Daily, every Hour from TWELVE till FIVE, His wonderful and surprising Knowledge, which last Year so greatly entertained all those who honoured his Performance with their presence.

MUNITO, besides his former accomplishments, will astonish the Public with his vast Knowledge in the Sciences of

GEOGRAPHY, BOTANY, and NATURAL HISTORY²⁵¹

Intelligent animals appeared, too, in another form in one of the greatest of the satires against the rationalist assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy. In the fourth and last book of Jonathan Swift’s surreal and misanthropic fantasy Gulliver’s Travels, the eponymous narrator collapses into an existential despair at the irrationality and the inhumanity of his fellow men, comparing them unfavourably to the wise and benevolent race of the Houyhnhnms, the talking horses he had encountered on his final voyage.

Swift’s talking animals are far removed from those on display in eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century London eighteenth-and Boston, but they share an ideological function: to problematize the assumptions about the primacy of man’s role as

‘rational animal’. For some Enlightenment spectators this raised some serious questions. A contemporary publication, Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous histories, designed for the instruction of children, respecting their treatment of animals articulates some of these issues. It is written in the form of a series of conversations between a mother (‘Mrs. Benson’) and her daughter, and some friends. In one

of these conversations, they discuss the recent phenomenon of the Learned Pig, which Mrs. Benson had seen on a visit to London. This Pig was able to ‘spell’

words by pointing at, or picking up, cards arranged on the floor – leading the conversation towards the question of whether the Pig can really have human-like intelligence. At first Mrs. Benson brushes the question away:

For my part, replied Mrs. Benson, I find the subject so much above my comprehension, that whenever my mind is disposed to expatiate on it, I check the inclination, from an opinion that it is of no consequence to me, whether animals have intellects or not, and that it is amongst those things which the Almighty has intentionally concealed from our penetration. That they are in the power of man, and subservient to his use and pleasure, gives them a sufficient claim to our compassion and kindness…²⁵²

Later, however, when her daughter presses her more insistently on the question, she replies firmly in the negative.

Nor are animals capable of attaining human sciences because, for these, human faculties are requisite; and no art of man can change the nature of any thing, though he may be able to improve that nature to a certain degree;

…And I would advise you, Harriet, never to give countenance to those people who shew what they call learned animals; as you may assure yourself they exercise great barbarities upon them…²⁵³

If the impulse of Enlightenment rationalism is to insist on the clear and unalterable distinction between man and the animal world, then the showman’s response is to subvert that distinction. Trimmer’s Mrs. Benson sees a danger in the Learned Pig, in that it threatens to blur an important boundary.

The showman could respond, however, that such exhibitions were actually in the spirit of the Enlightenment itself. This, certainly, is the line taken by William Pinchbeck, the owner and exhibitor of the ‘Pig of Knowledge’ which caused a great stir in late nineteenth-century America, when he eventually wrote an explanation of how the act was done in The Expositor, the first conjuring book published in America. He explains the way in which a pig can gradually be brought to respond to subtle cues and trained to pick up cards by rewarding it with food. The Expositor takes the form of a rather witty series of fictional letters between Pinchbeck and a correspondent who is eager to learn Pinchbeck’s secrets, starting with the training method for the Pig. Pinchbeck was writing in part, it seems, in order to defend himself against the accusation that training the pig involved, as Sarah Trimmer put it, ‘great barbarities’. However he was also writing as a true man of the Enlightenment:

THE intention of this work was not only to amuse and instruct, but also

to convince superstition of her many ridiculous errors, – to shew the disadvantages arising to society from a vague as well as irrational belief of man⬘s intimacy with familiar spirits, – to oppose the idea of supernatural agency in any production of man, – and lastly, how dangerous such a belief is to society, how destructive to the improvement of the human capacity, and how totally ruinous to the common interests of mankind.²⁵⁴

The correspondent, too, writes in a spirit of enlightened rational curiosity. He wishes to understand how the routine works in order to refute the more mystical accounts of it which he has heard.

Wherever I stop on my tour I am sure to hear of the fame of your celebrated Pig, and the many different opinions prevailing relative to the mode of his tuition, makes him a subject of general speculation. Some contend it is witchcraft; and others, like the ancient Pythagoreans, believing in the transmigration of souls, conclude that the spirit of the grunting philosopher might once have animated a man.

An evening or two since, stopping at an inn, your Pig being the topic of conversation, I could not but listen to a grave old gentleman, who, putting on a very affected, sage like look, declared his performances were the effects of the Black Art; that the Pig ought to be burnt, and the Man banished, as he had no doubt but you familiarly corresponded with the devil. O monstrous!

will time and experience never remove such credulity from the earth?

Must ingenuity, the parent of manufactories, the progressive pillar to wisdom and the arts, whose summit supports a mirror where superstition may see her own gorgon image, be thus broken and overturned by the rude hands of ignorance and pride? We rejoice that we live in an enlightened part of the world, where liberty extend her choicest blessings, and where the Presiding Magistrate is a philosopher, and under his patronage men of talents dare to be

Must ingenuity, the parent of manufactories, the progressive pillar to wisdom and the arts, whose summit supports a mirror where superstition may see her own gorgon image, be thus broken and overturned by the rude hands of ignorance and pride? We rejoice that we live in an enlightened part of the world, where liberty extend her choicest blessings, and where the Presiding Magistrate is a philosopher, and under his patronage men of talents dare to be