The Mitchell capital. (Mitchell, Dakota [S.D.]) 1879-1918, 1906-01-26

Arc the Cheapest Sort of Fakirs-S'
pened in kellar's Career. 80
From the Chicago Record-Herald.
On the word of a mar whose business
for forty years it las been to fool the
public. there is no such thing as a
physical manifestation OF spiritual
ISM mind reading is q myth; So
fummery or science cleverly applied,
and all alleged evidence of superhuman
Interference In the affairs of men Is eX-
plainable under purely physical laws.
The greatest Of mystifiers. there is
probably no man living more brutally
iconoclastic In SCATTERING the mys-
teries Of the seemingly supernatural
than Harry Kellar. In public life the
master of trickery n Of all that Is
mysterious and uncanny, Kellar, over
his bowl of milk and bread after one
of his ~confounding performances at
ghosts, robbed spirits Of their spookl-
ness, made buffoons of hes east Indians
Of mystic romance, and otherwise
turned mystery into light. It's al! very
simple as he tells it-very simple in
deed-until the conjurer is led up to his
own tricks.
'Ah," said the magician, grasping the
hand of the Interviewer, your palm
Indicates inquisitiveness-greal inquis-
itiveness. Yes, the cabinet trick can
be done in the open. No stage is neces-
sary. Mirrors in the deviation act?
Oh. we used them in the old deviation
that is different"
So the talk turned to the tricks of
others, especially of the Hindus and
the demonstrations of spirit mediums
and to these subjects the conjurer
warmed rs he ordered his second bowl
OF milk and bread.
THE world looks to India as the
fountain of all c%onjurers' wisdom" he
said. India is synonymous with mys-
terry. probably because Of the great age
Of the art in h a II Weird tales
OF the tricks of the Hindu fakirs are
brought to us by travellers; and the
student of the occult and the supposed
ly supernatural makes his Indian pill
grimage as surely as the homing pigeon
finds his loft. Naturally, it was to In
dia I went when l felt I had learned
all the c%onjuring that Americans had
to teach, and no man ever visited that
country In a more receptive frame of
mind or more anxious to learn. 1t was
to be my postgraduate course and l
was fired with the stories of magic i
had read.
What did 1 learn? Just this: That
America excels India in the Develop
ment of the goethe art. If / did not
have a horror of the venomous cobra l
could duplicate every trick known to
h Hindus. But 1 draw the line on
snakes. The cobra is an important
part of many of the Indian tricks, and.
while I know how the tricks are done,
I decline to add a lot of cobras to my
properties.
There are two distinct classes OF
magicians in India, the street fakirs
and the priests. The former are clever
sleight-of-hand NERVES, I'll tell you
hn" their fr{oGC awe ln,,o r,rnc1,,tlv
while the priests are %conjurers of much
skill. When the prince of Wales visits
India or the quadri-centennial Moha1n-
medan feast is held, the religious con-
1urers gather from all parts of tho
country and all the best of their tricks
are to be seen. AT the last of these ]
saw the levitation trick. 1t took a good
deal of study, but 1 got the secret at
last and improved on it. for the Hindus
raise the body of the subject With their
hands and cave it suspended in mid
air, while / raise the subject without
the application OF hands at all. That is
the best trick they do. Accounts of
deviation carried to the point where
priests walk from mountain peak to
mountain peak on air had reached me
and / tried to run them back to au-
thentic sources. / never succeeded. I
never found a person who had seen this
phenomenon. / did, however. find per-
sons who said they had seen other per-
sons who had seen it.
did you ever see a ghost? No? Well.
you've probably seen people that had,
but If I went to them they would refer
me to someone else. It's the way with
the cloud-walkers. If anyone will tell
me where I can witness such a phe-
nomenon I'll start tonight. 1t must be
remembered that in India all scientific
knowledge is in possession of the
priests, some of whom are very learned.
But imagine. If you can, the effect l
could produce on an audience that
knew nothing of electricity, physics or
any other science. That's the sort of
audience a Hindu priest performs be-
fore, and he uses his knowledge to mys-
tify and control the ignorant masses.
The street fakirs accept money for
their services, but the religious fakirs
do not; and this very absence of appar-
ent motive gives them a stronger hold
on the imaginations Of the masses.
1.-The most startling tricks of the
street fakirs are the basket, pineapple,
mango tree. snake charming and luck
tricks. In the first a boy is placed in a
basket, run through with a sword,
made to vanish n then to reappear
uninjured. The fakir that does this
his waist. After placing the boy, who
Is very light and agile, in the basket,
the fakir passes a big napkin over the
basket and the boy whisks himself
from the basket, follows the napkin and
hides himself unseen between the legs
of the fakir. Then the sword is run
into the basket, o red fluid like blood
being squeezed down the blade OF the
sword. The walls of pain supposedly
from the basket come from the, boys
hiding place, and as the fakirs always
form half a circle around the basket
and the audience the other half. 1t is
dtficutt to tell where the cries come
from. Besides. with every eye fixed In
tently on the basket. the spectators nat
MrallY imagine the cries to come from
that source. The boy is whisked back
to the basket under W of the big
napkin. It Is clever sleight-of-hand
work, nothing more.
eft took me longer to figure out the
growing pineapple trick. In this the
fakir spreads a cloth over a stone. and
suddenly the center of the cloth begins
to rise. A few passes are made. and
when the cloth is taken off there is a
Sraa,fl nineannla nlant. which is made TO