Conjuring, Burning Legends, and a Long Afterlife

To make his case Scot had to show that seemingly impossible things have ordinary causes, so he explained how the tricks were done. The book contains working descriptions of sleight of hand, substitutions and staged illusions, including the trick in which a head appears to be severed and restored. It was not written for entertainers, but entertainers found it, and it survives as one of the earliest printed accounts of conjuring technique in English. Magicians have reprinted it for four centuries for reasons Scot would have found beside the point.

Two later stories cling to the book and neither should be repeated as fact. The first is that James VI and I ordered every copy burned when he came to the English throne in 1603. There is no contemporary evidence for it, and modern scholarship treats the story as a later tradition rather than a recorded royal act; what is documented is that James wrote against Scot by name in Daemonologie in 1597. The second is subtler. Seventeenth century reprintings added material Scot did not write, including a discourse on devils and spirits, so an edition bought today may contain arguments its author would have rejected.

The book's real afterlife is stranger than either legend. Because it described the conjurations it meant to debunk, it became a route by which some of that material stayed in circulation, and a work written to end belief in magic was mined by people who wanted to practise it.