NONFICTION - Jan. 24, 1993

CONJURING By James Randi, Esq. (St. Martin’s: $29.95; 314 pp.) . James (The Amazing) Randi is not going to tell you how it’s done. You didn’t want to know anyway, did you? Even Roman philosopher Seneca preferred ignorance: “It is the trickery itself that pleases me; show how it’s done and I have lost interest.”

Instead, Randi has twirled his cape and--Presto!--revealed the world of magic through the men (and a few women) who make it work. “Conjuring” spans 3,000 years, from one Dedi (who pleased Cheops himself by wringing the neck of a goose, then restoring it in plain sight) to Penn & Teller, “the best in a generation.” In between is a cohort of characters to rival anything performed onstage.

Consider Eunus, a Syrian slave, circa 132 AD, who mastered the Human Volcano so well they made him king of Sicily; Comus, who performed in the 1760s with a “self-acting machine” called the Thaumaturgical Horlogium, fitted, as usual, with Pyxidees and Teretopaest; the great Maskelyne, who invented not only the Levitation Trick but the pay toilet as well.

Consider the Catching Bullets trick (usually “caught” between the teeth), dangerous enough to have killed a dozen performers, including a Frenchman who successfully bit the bullet but died when a disgruntled servant coshed him with the butt of his own gun. Ponder S. C. Sorcar, who donned jeweled turban, silk robe and turned-up slippers to ride a bicycle up Times Square--blindfolded. How about Cagliostro, who in the 18th Century got very rich selling an “age-repression” potion between acts, and told willing dupes that he himself had witnessed the Crucifixion.

The greats are here too: bow-legged Houdini and his Chinese Water Torture Cell; the ineffable Blackstone; Dunninger (above), the mentalist who mystified Jack Dempsey, Harry Truman, even Thomas Edison.

“Curious, peculiar, whimsical, eccentric,” Randi calls them, “many of them misfits, but artists all.”