A Magician Amongst the Spirits

Posted on August 3rd, 2007.

What do Sherlock Holmes and Eric Weiss have in common?

Perhaps that’s a bit of an unfair question really.

Sherlock Holmes was creation of the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Erich Weiss is the creator of the character we now know as Houdini.

The extent to which each creator lived within the skins of their creation is perhaps open to debate.

Conon-Doyle wrote fictions about the adventures of a man possessed of great intellectual dexterity and so we could argue that his personal creativity was a part of the fictional character he created.

Eric Weiss aspired to be something more than a Rabbi’s son from Budapest and so created his alter-ego Harry Houdini. Initially a dime show entertainer billed as “The King of Cards” and later the world famous escapologist, self-liberator that ‘no prison or bonds could hold’

Perhaps it could be said that Eric-Houdini went one step further than Doyle-Holmes in that in early adulthood it was Houdini who spent a considerable amount of time and effort re-writing the biography of Erich.

All that may be interesting but what is of concern at the moment is the thing which brought these two well known people together and eventually drove them apart.

Houdini very much admired the mind of the man who created a character that epitomised human intellect in terms which today we would know as creative, critical and lateral thinking or deductive reasoning.

Conon-Doyle admired the physicality of the man no gaol could hold and, one can assume, the way Houdini used words and actions to maintain one of the largest and most successful self-promotional campaigns.

Letters and meetings between these two celebrities were initially joyous, self celebratory and no doubt ego-stroking affairs.

There was one thing that was to come between them however.

Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was a spiritualist, indeed his wife was a well respected Spiritual Medium.

Initially Houdini showed an interest in the ideas of early spiritualism, perhaps a playful scepticism, but one could suggest a relatively open mind.

When Houdini’s mother died the man who seemed to have no fear in the face of death was devastated. Letters to his brother and comments made to his wife, later reported in her memoirs, tell us of a man on the edge of an emotional abyss – perhaps on the verge of falling deep into a chasm from which he would never escape.

Conan-Doyle offered some comfort and his wife offered a ‘sitting’ for Houdini – in common parlance a séance. The detail of what happened during that séance is a subject of much conjecture but it is safe to assume that Houdini was singularly unimpressed. Some argue that it was this one incident which set Houdini on his sometimes aggressive, often theatrical and always very public opposition to Spiritualism, Psychic Phenomenon and all things Paranormal.

It was Houdini’s outbursts and taunts at the spiritualist community which drove a wedge deep into the very heart of the friendship which existed between Doyle and Harry.

In the years which followed both men implored each other to shift their philosophical position. Pride, intellectual stubbornness and emotional commitment to either ‘spiritual’ or ‘scientific’ paradigms fuelled their adversarial approaches to each others world view. Both were locked into a debate which neither could win.

When Houdini exposed the tricks mediums used, the Spiritualist community would respond with the assertion that the ‘tricks’ duplicated (some) spiritual phenomena but did not necessarily explain all.

“Not all psychics are frauds Mr Houdini but all Magicians are…” could well have been the thoughts of those who were defending more than an idea; more than a quaint notion of a ‘world of spirit’ but a profound personal belief – dare I say a religion?

Houdini and Doyle