Made to love magic

Anjali Joseph 

The Magician in the tarot interests me. The Rider-Waite deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith and first published in 1909, shows him in a red and  white robe, an infinity sign above his head, and on a table in front of him a  cup, a sword, a staff, and a pentacle – representing the suits of the tarot.  He holds a wand. I associate this depiction with Mandrake the Magician,  hero of the comic strip first published in the 1930s and reprinted in one of  the daily newspapers in Bombay when I was a child. Mandrake is a suave, top-hat-and-tails stage magician; but he possesses all sorts of other powers, whether lightning-fast hypnosis that allows him to befuddle  villains, or the ability to transform his physical body at will, or to levitate or  instantly teleport himself.  

In the much older Tarot de Marseille, the Magician is Le Bateleur (or, in the  Italian tarocchi, Il Bagotto), a picaresque character dressed as a jester,  standing in front of a table bearing cups, balls, and other paraphernalia of  the streetside entertainer. He looks like an escamoteur, one of the sleight of-hand artists who operate outside Paris metro stations, asking passers by to bet on which of three cups covers a ball or a coin. In this deck, both  the Magician and the Fool function, when tarot is played as a card game, as trumps. 

To me, however, in the Rider-Waite deck, the Magician (whose caption  might be ‘I do!’) is an obverse for the Hanged Man, a beguiling figure  suspended from a gibbet of sorts, upside down, by one ankle. He has a  halo and an air of renunciation. Sometimes I think of him as holding a yoga  inversion: giving up on the usual ways of the world in favour of hanging like  a bat, observing. His caption might be ‘Nothing doing’. 

I like the tension between the two ideas of the Magician, or magic in  general – doing magic (acting on the phenomenal world, making things  happen, creating incontrovertible proof), and pretending, or creating an  illusion.  

In the present historical moment, among the educated and adult, it can  seem as though almost anything is acceptable as an attitude, except  credulity. I don’t think that those under the age of thirty see the world that  way, but the generations born in the 1960s till, perhaps, the 1990s are  steeped in a slightly self-denying adherence to science over religion, or as  a religion, that may stretch all the way back to the Enlightenment. Coupled  with that, I feel, is grief at the sense of wonder that was lost or that we  were forced to leave behind in childhood. One of the gifts of the enormous  success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been that for the  generations of children who grew up reading or having those books read to  them, and watching the films, magic continued to exist as perfectly  respectable; they were never expected to put it away and become  sceptical, as befits a grown up. 

Growing up, and growing older, I lived in my imagination, but also had a yearning towards the spiritual, religious, or magical. Unusually for an Indian  family, there was no religious ritual when I was a child, neither among the  Hindu relatives on my mother’s side in Bombay, nor from my father, who had been brought up Syrian Christian but flatly refused to take me, an  experimental four-year-old, to church even when I wanted to see what it was like.  

My forays into the unseen were self-directed, and idiosyncratic. Among  them: aged about four, I tried doing my own religious rituals with some sea  shells and a small bottle of rather strong eau de cologne that my mother  had given me (Babe, by Fabergé, since you ask); at eight or so, by now  living in Warwickshire, and having heard something on the radio about the Donovan song ‘Mellow Yellow’, I had a go at drying out a banana skin in my room, then lighting the end of it and inhaling the smoke. No transcendence resulted. Around the same time, I borrowed one of my mother’s yoga  books, by Swami Sivananda, and read about postures, concentration  practice and meditation, and tried to set my clock radio alarm for 4am to  leave myself time to practice all the things necessary to arrive at  enlightenment. I was attracted by the siddhis, or powers, that reportedly  occur along the way, and which the spiritual aspirant is warned not to be  distracted by – among them, if I recollect, the ability to read others’ thoughts, to teleport, to become infinitely small or big, to levitate, and so on.  

The alarm went off at four a few days in a row, but I didn’t manage to do much more than hit snooze before dragging myself up later and slugging to  school. However, I did glean from the book that it was important to be able  to sit in the lotus pose – and so spent hours practicing that while reading  (probably books about children who erred into magical worlds, like Alan  Garner’s The Owl Service). Some of the other elements of that time  reappeared years later: I did yoga teacher training through an institution  named after Swami Sivananda and founded by one of his students; more  unexpectedly, I was teaching a creative writing course in Devon a few years ago at which Donovan was among the cohort. Did I ask him if he’d ever successfully smoked dried banana skin? Strangely, I don’t remember. 

When I was younger, I always felt embarrassed by the two strongest pulls in my life: one, towards magic (or the spiritual), and the other, towards art.  They seemed inimical to each other: spiritual people, surely, didn’t mess  about making up stuff; real artists presumably didn’t want to transcend so  much as practice their vocations. I would have to get rid of one of them. 

For the first decade or so of my adult life, both these vocations – to magic,  and to art – were something I concealed. And yet, the righteous world of  jobs and rent, getting ahead, being practical, et cetera, felt thin and  unsatisfying. When I moved back to Bombay, in my mid-twenties, and  began working as a journalist on a daily newspaper, I continued to read the ‘books you buy on the pavement’, a phrase a friend of my parents used for  her collection of pirated copies of popular esoteric literature like Creative  Visualisation by Shakti Gawain, or The Silva Mind Control Method by José  Silva. Most of them expounded a variant of the thesis: imagine it and it’ll  come true. It never quite did, or not in the way the books suggested, but  what was interesting was the way that patterns of events repeated themselves, something to which I began to be attentive. In the first book I  wrote, Saraswati Park, the son of a failed writer begins to write, himself, in  his fifties, after coming upon a volume of Mark Twain essays including  ‘How to Tell a Story’ at a pavement bookstall in Bombay. In my second  novel, Another Country, I felt that beneath the story of the inward loves and  life of the main character, Leela, was an underlying dialogue: between Leela  and her witnessing soul, if you like, and that much of the affect of the book  wasn’t from the external ups and downs of events she experienced and  caused, but instead from a sense of grief for a lost childhood experience of  connection. 

Connection to what? To the world – to wonder. When I was moving from Norwich to Assam in 2014, there were a few days in between my packing  up some possessions, giving away the rest, and clearing my rented flat of  everything that I’d brought into it in the previous three years. I’d packed my  coffee pot, and so went early each morning to a nearby coffee shop. The final day, the day I would leave for the airport, there was a small family  sharing my table. The parents were talking to the barista, and the child, a  boy of about six or seven, amused himself playing with ice cubes from his  glass of water, sliding them around, watching how they moved. To him,  matter was interesting, animated, even playful. He may have felt a  recognition of that in my gaze, because he looked up and we shared a smile.  Then we both returned to pretending to be sentient humans in an inert  world. He put the ice cubes back in the glass and left with his parents, and  I went back to my flat, got my suitcase, and went to the airport. 

During my time in Assam I became fascinated with whatever I could learn  about tantra (sometimes from conversations, but mostly from books). It is  a philosophy that has had huge impact in the eastern parts of India, where  goddess worship has been important throughout history. I also happened  to study yoga in the Himalayas, but what we learned there was Vedanta,  the philosophy expounded at the end of the Vedas in the Upanishads – from  which, among others, T S Eliot borrowed in the Four Quartets. Vedanta  doesn’t have much patience for the phenomenal world of experience; the  ideal is to grasp that the phenomenal is unreal, then focus on ‘source’.  Tantra has a different emphasis: it seems to suggest that the correct  relation to the phenomenal world, or to being embodied, is one of play.  Look at how the ice cubes move!

Many of the principles I extrapolated from what I read of tantra found their  way into Keeping in Touch, my fourth novel, in which an Assamese woman  and a British Asian man begin a long-distance relationship of sorts, with, in  the background, an exceptionally long-life lightbulb that may, or may not,  have magical properties. For example, the idea that, as Keteki, one of the  protagonists, thinks while in a friend’s car, ‘Everything is alive’ – even a  class of being (like objects) usually thought of as inert. Or, the sense that  how time works may be very different to what the usual chronologies imply  – perhaps many different worlds and even incarnations are all happening  simultaneously rather than succeeding each other, coupled with an  awareness of how attention focused on something or someone can alter  its size (make it infinitely big, or infinitely tiny) or even change its duration.  

In the end, the figure of the Magician is also tied into the sad image of an  inanimate world through which conscious humans move, acting or being  acted upon. This, too, is misleading. The more modest figure of the  Bateleur – the illusionist who knows that in attention and perception lie  gateways to reality – offers more lightness (levitation, of a sort), and a first  step into a different world. This is not a world where cause and effect are  rigidly correlated, but a mode of being and becoming that offers more potential for surprise, the more unpredictable rhythm of things that grow. It’s the world of nature, the world of fiction, and also the world of magic.

Anjali Joseph

Anjali Joseph is a novelist and teacher of literature and creative writing