The Magic Circle is a club for magicians located in London, near Euston Train Station. For decades the club was considered, in the UK at least, to have a special place in the world of magic. If you were a magician the first question anyone would ask is whether you were in The Magic Circle. To a degree it also had international prestige, which they use to declare themselves an international club, even though the majority of their members are located within 50 miles of the London headquarters.
A massive change occurred in the club in the 90s, when due to a huge public campaign run by and on behalf of female magicians, the club accepted women for the first time. Yeah, in the progressive wonderland of 1991 they allowed female members. Conversely the International Brotherhood of Magicians has always been open to female members, since it was founded in 1922.
The actual shift in the club though was an after effect of the campaign to open The Magic Circle to women rather than the impact of the rule change itself.
There’s an old quote which my partner Rebecca once recounted to me, back when I first applied to join the magic circle. She attributed it to Terry Pratchett but I can’t find a reference to which book it is in. To paraphrase, the subject is that of The Men’s Hut, a concept in primitive tribes¹ where there was an implied status in the division between boys and men. Becoming a man was a big deal, usually involving trials for the young adults to overcome and a ceremony upon their completion.
The point of it all however was that only when you were a man could you enter The Men’s Hut, a mysterious place. The women didn’t know was was inside there, the boys didn’t know what was inside there, and the only people who had seen inside there were the men, who weren’t about to give away the secret because it’s men’s stuff, not for the likes of the uninitiated.
Then after completing the trials a boy is excited to be invited into The Men’s Hut for his ceremony and finally gets to see inside.
And it’s just full of men.
The apocryphal tale is of course about the nature of arbitrary barriers people set up to mark themselves as somehow special, and this was the crucial flaw of The Magic Circle’s adherence to refusing female members.
The Magic Circle had occupied a mysterious prestige, set aside from the world, there were people who honestly believed actual wizards and blood sacrifice magic were happening in there because the secrecy of the club was so tightly bound around the idea that if you weren’t a member of The Magic Circle, you weren’t a real magician. You didn’t know the real magic, that stuff was members only. The majority of people of course knew it wasn’t ancient scrolls and devil worship, but most still thought The Magic Circle was a kind of guild, which controlled who was and wasn’t allowed to be a magician; like a monopolistic union, with the added threat that if you hired a non-union magician there was a greater-than-zero probability that they would send the boys round to cut you in half.
So the opening argument whenever advocates for female members were interviewed by the national media was always the same²: “If they’re such a big deal, not allowing women to perform magic is clearly discriminatory.”
And the spokes people for The Magic Circle had only one response, “We’re not a governing body, we aren’t stopping anyone from being a magician, The Magic Circle is nothing more than a private club, and as a private club we can choose who is and isn’t eligible for membership.”
The aftermath of this argument was two fold. Firstly it redefined in the minds of the public what The Magic Circle actually was. The second thing is that in the discourse the existence of other magic clubs was revealed to the public at large when the argument devolved to the level of “Look just join some other club³, why do you have to go changing ours?”
The Magic Circle, though not a true monopoly in the magic world, had achieved a defacto publicity monopoly in the UK due to the most prestigious British magician being a member of The Magic Circle, who would go on to promote other members. I am of course speaking about David Nixon, one time President of The Magic Circle, who then later passed the torch on to Paul Daniels, who worked with Ali Bongo, also later a President of the Magic Circle. Paul Daniels invited many other members of The Magic Circle onto his televised magic shows.
But by the time Paul Daniels was making his second series, called Secrets, the public knew that The Magic Circle, far from being a monolithic arbiter of the magic world, was just one club in one city. Secrets attempted to maintain the gentlemen’s club image of magic projected by the circle, with it’s formal dress code and smooth presentation, but it landed on TV a year after Stuff the White Rabbit had already totally shattered that illusion, introducing us to figures like Jerry Sadowitz and Amazing Jonathan, fronted by John Lenahan, who had been very publicly kicked out of The Magic Circle in 1994 for exposing the inner mechanics of a con game on a TV show. The Magic Circle might have thought that stripping him of his membership would destroy his public image, when in fact the opposite was true. It singled him out as an outlaw, allowing him to mock the institution of magic from an insiders perspective, unbidden by it’s rules.
When shown side by side, the obvious trappings of status and exclusivity in Paul Daniels Secrets compared to the anarchic comedy club feel of Stuff the White Rabbit, the public’s perception of one being aligned to The Magic Circle and one being outside of it is obvious even before you start counting the number of insignia badges worn in each.
And along with the rise of Penn and Teller, who vocally position themselves as directly in opposition to The Magic Circle, the message the public was getting was that not only was The Magic Circle not the only club, it wasn’t even a very good club, churning out outdated acts and stuffy pretentious performers.
I am a member of The Magic Circle. I guess watching The Paul Daniels Magic Show had influenced me as a child and I knew my parents still considered the Magic Circle to be a big deal, so what better way to prove my worth to them as a human being than to join the magic circle myself?
Within The Magic Circle however I think it’s super important to understand the things the club as a whole gets wrong, or it will never get better. The Magic Circle is still seen by many as an ancient organisation full of ancient people with ancient ideas and to a certain degree… it kinda is.
Anyway, this long introduction is a preliminary introduction to the circle’s public perception⁴ which is important to the next topic, the meaty one. The modern interpretation of The Magic Circle’s number one rule:
Do not reveal secrets to the public
¹ Okay so the concept of “Primitive Tribes” is kind of problematic but this is the context of the quote.
² These statements in this next section are all paraphrased to sum up the gist of the arguments in a shorter form.
³ Fun factoid, The International Brotherhood of Magicians installed its first female president in 1987, 4 years before The Magic Circle even allowed female members.
⁴ There are other spokes to the wheel upon which The Magic Circle’s fate is bound. For example, the mainstream press, opposed to any secrets existing whatsoever, take every opportunity to run puff pieces about magicians’ failings, and it was only a matter of time until a child molester or sex offender turned out to be a member of The Magic Circle – a secretive society which was opposed to widening the membership beyond men of status. Far from being a badge of honour, there was a brief time in which it was actually advantageous for children’s performers to deny any involvement with The Magic Circle, as if it was some kind of underground paedophile ring⁵.
⁵ I can’t stress enough that it isn’t.