turning water into wine
So yeah, after a conversation with a very clever Jehovah's Witness the other day (I'm on their regular round), I got to thinking again about how to stage a trick to duplicate the classic alleged Jesus miracle. I'm quite pleased with it.
As I may have mentioned, I studied a little stage magic as a kid, and I've toyed with this concept on and off for years, but now I've an idea that is concrete and which could actually be plausibly performed. As with all stage magic tricks, 99% of it is massaging perception.
So the first part of the setup is that we have a line of barrels, or possibly urns, definitely not amphorae, of "water". Lets say it's six of them. One of them, on the end of the line, is open, and everyone drinks water out of it. The others are sealed, and seeing as the people present are guests, and probably not that keen on water anyway, they won't open those others themselves. You can take other measures if necessary, like have a servant on hand with a ladle to serve people so they don't have to concern themselves. Obviously, the other 5 barrels are actually all full of wine - as again with stage magic, 99% of the time the "trick" is over and done with long before it is presented.
Now the middle barrel is a bit special. In the middle barrel, floating in the wine, is a bowl of water. It's not quite full, to give it bouyancy, but it's full enough that it sits low and out of sight.
So now, of course, we run out of wine. I motion the servants to dispose of the mostly empty barrel of water, seemingly innocently, although really because it's the one barrel I can't do anything with, and position myself behind the line, in the middle, lined up with the special barrel. Of course it just looks like I'm in the centre merely so my magic can go both ways equally. I open this barrel, pick up the ladle, and scoop out a some water from the floating dish to show that the barrel is full of water. I pour this back in, wave my arms about a bit and say "abracadabra"; then I take my ladle and reach in deeply, pushing the floating dish and its water content beneath the surface. It just looks like I'm making an emphatic gesture, showing that I really am reaching deep into a full barrel. The dish sinks, and the water diffuses, which no-one will ever notice. I bring out a ladle-full, and pour it out to show that the barrel is now full of wine. The I have the servants open up all the other barrels to reveal that they too have been "transformed".
Et voila! I have apparently magically turned water into wine, and the only evidence that might possibly give me away is if someone notices that there is a curious dish at the bottom of one of the barrels. But you'd have to be pretty suspicious to go from that to figuring out the whole deliberate setup, and my ladling servant can probably take care of it anyway. Of course nobody actually saw that the barrels were full of water, but given the vagaries of human memory and how unreliable our perception is, at least half the audience will think they did, and the legend will only grow in the telling.
I think that would work.
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