For the Halloween season, we present a pair of skeleton illustrations that were recovered in a 19th-century tome. These illustrations are a part of an illusion guide book called, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography. This collection consists of various illusions acts that mostly revolve around the concepts of death and morphing the body. This kind of “magic” depends on warping an audience’s perspective and misdirection. Some ways that this can be achieved is by shoving multiple people in a single box, using a set of invisible strings, or through the use of manipulating lights, mirrors, and glass panes. It is fascinating how easily our eyes can be tricked by having a basic understanding of how much the eye can see and how light passes into our eyes. When someone is educating on these concepts, they can make anyone believe that they are doing true magic during the Victorian era.
Nowadays, these tricks are almost common knowledge, so many people aren’t phased by seeing someone floating or getting chopped in half or people appearing transparent on stage. It is even common knowledge that some world-famous attractions, like the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, use tricks to manipulate the viewer’s eyes through the use of lights and mirrors. These kinds of tricks are where we get the phrase, “must be the trick of the light”, for whenever something we see cannot be immediately explained. It can be so easy to brush the Victorian people off and assume that the Victorian people could be easily convinced that magic was a real thing but I don’t think that it is such a bad thing to believe in this magic. The people who put together these performances must have put a lot of time and effort in order to cause a crowd of people to question whether or not their eyes were fooling them. We have become disillusioned from these illusions but let yourself imagine being in a time where these aren’t common knowledge and to be able to experience these illusions without the lens of skepticism that we have grown accustomed to. You might have obtained a great sense of wonder and fascination for what these magicians could accomplish for your viewing pleasure. The fascination is probably why magic shows became so popular in the first place, causing these early illusions to become more and more mainstream, which enabled modern magicians to invent new ways to try and convince their audience that they were really magical. Making them push the limits of how to trick the audience’s perception even more.
Though, Halloween is not about logic or determining if monsters are real it is about having fun and letting yourself believe that anything is possible for a single night. It is also about being able to become someone or something that you cannot be otherwise. In a way, it’s like putting on an illusion performance as we try to convince and manipulate people’s perspective through what we wear and how we do our makeup. With Halloween, we don’t need to question or be skeptical because it is the one night a year where we can allow ourselves to believe in magic and the paranormal. And to throw away our understanding of modern science and say that we have true skeletons in our closets.
By Jessica Brandenburg
Currently, Jessica Brandenburg is an English major and the treasurer of the English Undergraduate Student Organization at New Mexico State University. She also occasionally posts her own artwork on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ember__page/.
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