Magic and religion

I was recently reminded of that excellent film, based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King. Sean Connery and Michael Caine knocking about the Hindu Kush suddenly find themselves hailed as gods by the local people and manoeuvre themselves into living the life of Riley. They aren't magicians - the misapprehension occurs by accident - but there is a lot of scope for unscrupulous conjurors to give the impression of having supernatural powers.

This was exploited by the French colonials in Algeria, who persuaded the legendary Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin to pass off his phenomenal conjuring as real magic. Conversely, during the Second World War, Jasper Maskelyne was responsible for exposing an Egyptian spiritual leader with so-called special powers as a plain old conjuror, not quite as good as he was himself (or so I read in a book called The War Magician).

In our culture these days, it's generally only mentalists who get the opportunity to pretend to be genuinely magic - and fortunately these charlatans seem to be getting rarer.