MAGIC WORDS mances of its practitioners leave their squirming audiences spooked and unsettled, daring anyone not to crack up. Their strange magic words, whether meant to sound uncanny or to produce an uneasy burst of laughter from "thin" air thick with tension, are like insurance policies -- incomprehensibility is guaranteed. Four Archetypes of the Magician; Four Magical Dialects My words as magic wands. My words, not as a metaphor for power, but as the thing itself. My words as a synonym for creation. -- asha bandele, The Prisoner's Wife (1999) Professional magician Jeff McBride discusses four primary aspects (or roles) of a magician: Trickster, Sorcerer, Oracle, and Sage. These are four possible personae that an actor-magician may choose to adopt,21 and of course the facets may overlap or evolve through time. As McBride points out, a magician might even play out all four aspects during the course of a single performance. Each persona naturally comes with its own vocabulary of magic words -- its own dialect, if you will. The Trickster The Trickster is probably the most common persona of a magician. This persona is epitomized by the close-up sleight-of-hand artist who works with cards, silks, cups and balls -- the sort who might effortlessly pull a silver dollar from your ear even as he mischievously loosens your wristwatch. "The trickster's medium is words. A parodist, joker, liar, con-artist, and storyteller, the trickster fabricates believable illusions with words." Before we discuss the Trickster's dog-eared lexicon, a bit of background on the archetype is in order. Tricksters are mythology's wise fools. Like the mischievous sprites of fairy-lore, they are divine boundary-dwellers who exist outside the laws of the world. Magicians famously defy the law of gravity with levitations and shatter the law of cause-and-effect at every turn. In violating the laws of physical nature, tricksters are simultaneously creators and destroyers, hence a magician's propensity to make things appear -- Voilà! -- and disappear -- Poof! -- at will. It should come as no surprise that the rabbit, the animal classically associated with professional magicians, is a common Trickster figure in folklore. In general, Tricksters are comedians, mocking convention and disrupting order.24 Tricksters are typically proud and boastful, and 21 Jeff McBride, Mystery School (200 ) 22 Jeanne Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (1997) 2 Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction, (2001). Other common Tricksters are the coyote, raven, and spider. 24 Allan Combs, Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster (1996) Ibid.