MAGIC WORDS a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen. Words and magic are particularly crucial in time of crisis when old forms of life are in dissolution and man must grapple with the unknown. Normal motives and incentives lose then their efficacy. Man does not plunge into the unknown in search of the prosaic and matter-of-fact. His soul has to be stretched by reaching out for the fabulous and unprecedented. He needs the nurse of magic and breath-taking fairy tales to lure him on and sustain him in his faltering first steps. Even modern science and technology were not in the beginning a sober pursuit of facts and knowledge. Here, too, the magicians -- alchemists, astrologers, visionaries -- were the pioneers.7 From ideology to science, from spiritualism to cultural revolutions, words open passages into the unknown. And anyone, whether leader or follower, for whom discourse serves as a first step to unexplored territory, is an Ali Baba, a personal pioneer. Modern magicians continue to pioneer, constantly redefining "the fabulous and unprecedented." Uttering a magic word, they wave a collec tive wand over the scientific spirit of our times, to reveal "soul-stirring myths and illusions."8 Their effect on us recalls a rapturous passage in the work of novelist Angela Thirkell, which one may read as a kind of tribute to the open sesame effect: "Oh, word of magic, of freedom, of bliss, of old life forgotten, new life begun."9 Jim Butcher, author of mystery novels set in a magic-enabled world, posits that words aren't so much magical in themselves as they are containers that hold the magic. "They give [magic] a shape and a form, they make it useful, describe the images within." One might imagine a magician's enchanted silk as such a container, giving shape and form to the invisible magic force that animates it. Or one might picture the age-old cup-and-ball tum bler, or the magician's signature top hat, as delineating a space within which marvels occur. Butcher adds that a few particular words are so magical "they re sound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real."10 Even professional magicians, intimately familiar as they are with the mechanics of illusion, long to enjoy that heart-, mind-, and soul-wrenching amazement along with their spectators. We must remember, after all, that a craving for wonder is universal. Moreover, it stands to reason 7 Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (1976) 8 Ibid. 9 August Folly (19 6) 10 Grave Peril (2001). Similarly, D.A. Carson notes: "There is nothing magical in the words themselves. But when you actually mean the words you say, they are life changing" (Sunsets: Reflections For Life's Final Journey [2005]).