MAGIC WORDS "Voilà!" My fellow spectator called the word out in a loud whisper, like an efficient script girl prompting a delinquent stage actor's lines from be hind the curtain. "Voilà!" she repeated, perhaps with a hint more insistence, when the magician failed to take her cue. One can certainly sympathize with the professional entertainer who has trained himself to ignore distractions, criticism, insults, flirtation, and motherly advice from the audience, lest his rhythm falter or his control waver. What magician could be at once so humble (a trait not generally associated with magicians) and so self-confident as to let a "Voilà!" pass his lips, after an audience member has attempted to spoon-feed it to him? No, it should not surprise us that the performer ignored our heroine and simply continued with his routine. But the spectator was expressing a genuine desperation, rooted in a legitimate expectation. She awaited, she desired, she needed something that the magician was not providing: a magic word to trigger the effect's finale. Her point was crystal clear -- a wondrous effect demands to be marked and activated by a magic word, a word that bespeaks the history of the craft, the requisite secret knowledge, the focused intent of the performer . . . and, above all, humanity's deep-rooted reverence for the creative power of language. Voilà: behold! As the lady's unheeded request lingered awkwardly in the room, the sheer vibrancy and urgency of magic words was dramatically revealed.1 And it was revealed with a power and resonance that eclipsed even that of the onstage illusion. Our current fascination with magic words stems from a general re vival of interest in the arts of close-up magic and grand illusions. This began in the late twentieth-century and has continued into the twenty-first, fueled by the work of such performers as Criss Angel, Lance Burton, David Copperfield, Siegfried & Roy, David Blaine, and Jeff McBride. But magic words are, as one might guess, as old as conjuring itself. Their presence, as echoes of the rhythm and vibration of creative power, has always gone hand-in hand with sleight-of-hand. Professional magician Jeff McBride considers the very first magicians to have been storytellers: "They told a story with words. Words are powerful tools." Indeed, "One of the most powerful ways of specifying your magical or mystical intent is through the use of words."4 Any magi cian, like any storyteller, uses many of the same words as the population at large. But then there are those special words, those that are the hallmark of his art: the "magic" ones. The heft of these words cannot be denied. They convey import and influence, whether one regards them as embodying a 1 As Stephen L. Carter succinctly puts it, "Words are magic. We conjure with them" (Civility [1998]). The reason for this is equally simple: "Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing" (Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [1917]). 2 One of Japan's earliest chronicles of history and mythology, Holy Nihongi (720 CE), traces the first use of magic incantations to the year 660 BCE. "Spiritual Strength and Introspection," The Secret Art (2001) 4 Jason Augustus Newcomb, New Hermetics (2004)