Behind Mango Magic

It needed a book by Ormond Magill to show me how the famous Indian Mango Tree Trick is performed. I had always wondered how it is done especially having had the occasion to watch it performed by a street magician several times.

Like every one else I too am curious about magic tricks and magicians though I always have had a suspicion that there were some hidden techniques behind every magic trick. As long as we are not aware of them we would wonder at the magician and his trick. I remember once watching a street magician throwing up a few metal rings in the air in my childhood. The rings disappeared in to the canopy of the tree above, they never came back. I stood there till the end of the show to see if the rings would come back, they never did and I was the last one to leave the place. This made me confused for long time till I learned how it is done. Let me tell you this is no mean trick. It requires a definite amount will power and imagination on the part of the magician to project the rings like that in broad day light and make people believe in what he wanted them to believe. It requires hard training and belief in oneself. It was no mean feat.

A level of hypnosis is used to do such things. This is what is known as the “eye deception” techniques or binding of eyes. A person with a strong imagination can make it happen. Even will power is not highly required once you master the trick. It consists of a strong suggestion aimed at the minds of the viewers to see what the performer wishes them to see. To do this one need to visualize the entire process of the rings going up in the sky and disappearing. By strenuous practice one can do it.

But ordinary magic tricks are not done in the same manner. Take card tricks for example. They are merely tricks by manipulation of the cards in hand. In Mondo magic, a recent hit show on AXN, both the performers show a pack of cards to the TV viewers and bending them back and flipping the cards backwards they ask us to pick one card from the pack in your sight. They would later correctly tell us the card we selected. It would appear strange how they manage to come up with the card every single time. As you would have probably guessed, they manipulate the pack before showing it to you so that one card would remain a few second longer in your memory than the others. You will have to pick on it whether you like it or not, since the other cards are flipped back faster than you can pick on.

I started to describe to you the secret of the Mango Tree trick of India. It really is a fascinating trick, mostly performed by street magicians. The performance is like this. The magician takes out a mango seed from his pocket and circulates it among the viewers. It is a genuine seed; hard and fresh there is no trick in it. Then the magician goes on to collect a bit of mud from the surrounding area and prepares to plant the mango seed in it, sometimes he would also allow one of the spectators to plant it, further enhancing the mystery of the performance. Then he waters it and covers it with a cloth. Nothing suspicious up to now. He will then proceed to insert his hands inside the cloth after showing that both hands are empty and begins some magical rites to make the mango tree grow. After a little while he removes the cloth and shows the spectators how much it has grown. The spectators are dumbfounded as they witness that the mango has budded and a few leaves are coming out of the ground. The magician covers it again and begins his magical rites again. Every time he removes the cloth the tree has grown more and finally the tree becomes at least one foot tall and it has a few mangoes as well!

When you see it first you are dumbfounded. There is a street magician in our land who does it. He does not know how to read or write. (He says he has never entered a school in his life other than to take shelter from rain!) But his street performance is masterly. Perhaps he is the only practicing magician doing the trick now. You would find it hard to believe if you had witnessed the performance without knowing how it is done. I was as mystified as the rest how it is done till I chanced across a book by Ormond Magill which describes several such tricks in detail, including the great Indian rope trick, which of course is not a trick at all and is done with magical force of suggestion.

The mango trick consists of taking a mango seed and carving the inner parts out and inserting a mango sapling in it. The seeds of some mango trees are big and the mango leaves and saplings do not show any signs of wear and tear when inserted into small spaces and then unfolded. This is the reason why mango trees and seeds alone are always used in this trick. The sapling with the leaves are carefully folded into the seed and extracted by the magician as he works the magical rites under the cloth covering it. The seed would look split when you see it next with the sapling coming out of it. Of course this is not the seed shown and examined by the spectators. The seed inserted by the spectator would be still inside the mud if examined. The magician cunningly inserts the prepared seed into the lump of mud and slowly extracts the sapling talking and performing histrionics all the while. To a good performer introducing several variations to the technique is not impossible.

I have seen it performed before and after I learned about the technique and I must say that I was impressed both times, Earlier with the wonder of it and then later with the finesse of the performance.