Always looking for a script idea, anecdote, or quote to enrich my routines and my world, my readings sometimes lead me to surprising and unexpected horizons!
If you too want to find inspiration for your shows and routines, discover the Kleroterion, a book associated with a special card game, which puts chance at the center of your acts!
What I love most of all is the idea, why not, of learning and transmitting knowledge, but above all of giving an extra dimension to the tricks I present, a deeper meaning, capable of touching the audience more, by echoing a part of poetry, wonder, why not childhood, more or less buried in each person.
This is exactly the case with the subject we are going to discuss here!
The crystal ball, with its perfect aesthetics, the magic carried by its simple evocation, and its multiplicity of meanings, can embellish many card, coin, or mentalism acts, for example. Indeed, evoking another dimension, another space-time, the ability to travel through time, space or within oneself can justify many effects if you think about it!
Who doesn't know this occult, fascinating, enigmatic object, essential in any self-respecting cabinet of curiosities: the crystal ball? And yet, do you know that it is very poorly named?
First, because it is rarely made of crystal, but even more so, because it is not always a ball!
Its mystery begins first and foremost with the search for its origins. It seems that its appearance dates back to ancient Greece. However, we have no sources mentioning it during this period. Its trace also disappears in the medieval era, under the moral and legal condemnation of the Church, like all forms of magic, science or occult object, blacklisted, forbidden, annihilated.
It is therefore in the Renaissance (15th century) that it reappears, as an ancient heritage. We know that the Renaissance was fond of Antiquity, no doubt out of contempt for the Middle Ages (associated with obscurantism and ignorance).
It is therefore not surprising that everything was done to give it this ancient origin. Could we then affirm that the crystal ball was born in a certain form of ancient Greece, reinvented, idealized by the Renaissance? It is very possible.
In any case, since its origin, the crystal ball has always been considered a "third eye", also spherical, capable of seeing what cannot be observed with the naked eye.
Emperor Nero (37-68 AD) could be cited as observing "through a faceted emerald, what he could not see from afar", also seeking to protect himself from another "evil eye", in the manner of a magical talisman. We see here, the term "crystal" was to be understood in a broad sense ("passage from a chemical composition to a solid state"). Crystal was also often associated with the properties of water (origins of life, "memory" of water, as if crystal were a "fossil form of water").
Thus, Joseph Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro (1743-1795), read the future, not in a crystal ball, but in... a carafe of water!
"Emerald blade used as an optical instrument by Nero", Engraving, Private Collection
Moreover, crystal balls are not systematically round: they can also be flat. Why not present it in the form of a mirror? Mirrors have often been associated with the world of Magic: Lewis Carroll thus made his Alice go "through the looking-glass". As we know, mirrors "reflect", they have an answer to everything, and the Wicked Queen from Snow White will not tell us otherwise!
Besides, don't some mirrors have the property of being round and convex, when they are called "witch's eye" (an object immortalized by Van Eyck's masterpiece "The Arnolfini Portrait")
"The Arnolfini Portrait" by Jan Van Eyck (1434), National Gallery, London
If we go further, wouldn't the crystal ball be a miniature version of the world, which the Renaissance discovered to be spherical, or a mirror of the celestial vault of extraordinary dimensions, thus giving it a more "cosmic" dimension? Yet, does the sky give us the keys to read the future, as astrology claims, when it is populated by stars that have been extinguished for millions of years?
What we see there: it is the past of what we see. In other words, we are the future of what we see, condemning us to only be able to predict the past (a sentence that deserves to be re-read, and why not used in one of your next texts!)
Dai Vernon said that "one always stops thinking too soon", so let's go further: why wouldn't the crystal ball be a black hole (a circle of black fabric) from which an object or a thought would appear or disappear?
And why should it be materialized, have a tangible appearance? Could it not be considered as a concept, a mantra, a method, a reminder of a capacity for wonder that we have within ourselves? Finally, it is not the future that the anamorphosed reflections of a crystal ball reveal to us, but rather a projection of what is hidden within us.
Isn't that the power of a magic trick? As I often say: "What Magic reveals is the spectator."
As Jean Cocteau wrote, "Mirrors should reflect a little more before returning images!"
Note: For more details, explanations, and anecdotes, if the subject interests you, I can only recommend reading David Wahl's book Traité de la boule de cristal, published by Editions Riveneuve. Fascinating!
