In Vanuatu, a string of islands in the South Pacific, the natives all live a secret life. 

At Le Meridien resort, a fit young Melanesian man in a grass skirt and headdress opens the door of your taxi with a warm smile, but he is not what he seems.  Neither is the husky Melanesian bartender at Breakas, where you swim up to the bar and order a Margarita while gazing at a stunning beach.  Nor the slender Melanesian driver who takes you three hours over dirt roads to the active volcano of Mount Yasur; here, nobody is what they seem.

The people of Vanuatu, men and women with dark faces who settled this island chain beginning in 1400 B.C., are called ni-Vanuatus, meaning literally, “people of Vanuatu.”  Beginning in 1603, Westerners arrived and brought the typical onslaught of civilization, including technology, written language, and most importantly, a logical and pragmatic philosophy of life.  But throughout the centuries, the ni-Vans have resisted.

Today, nearly all ni-Vans believe in a world in which magic, real magic, is a literal fact of life.  In fact, that’s what originally drew me to this magical land: I make my living as a magician, performing magic in nightclubs, at corporate events, and even on the street.  As author of the book, Be a Street Magician! (Aha! Press, 1998, $30), I have lectured in 70 cities over the past six years to working magicians who are eager to learn how best to apply the rules of misdirection, sleight, and verisimilitude in the real world.

But Vanuatu’s claims of genuine magic fascinated me.  On Ambrym Island, ni-Vans will tell you, there are magic men who can fly, transfigure into animals, and walk around invisibly.   Dead spirits reside in banyan trees, which can be seen beside every highway, and which are illegal to cut down without the clearance of a magic man.  And if you don’t watch out, practitioners of black magic will cast a curse on you, and the results can be serious, even fatal.

During my trip to Vanuatu, I was toting around the third Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and midsentence realized, to my sudden delight, that ni-Vans believe with all literalness in the world outlined by J.K. Rowling, a book that delights Westerners, but only as an imaginative childhood fantasy.

But if I performed magic for the ni-Vans, how would they react?

I had heard of the American soldier who was stationed on Vanuatu during WWII, when the islands were strategic outposts.  The sergeant had stayed a couple years, managed the natives, and then left.  I had heard how the John Frum cult had evolved soon thereafter—a name derived from the sergeant’s name: “John from America”—and how some ni-Vans now worship John Frum every Friday night, praying for his return as an evangelical Christian might pray for the return of Christ in the clouds.

And I had heard of the Christian missionaries who had been eaten by the ni-Vans in the 1800s, and of documented cannibalism on the islands as recent as 1987.

I wondered if, after seeing me pull a coin from a ni-Van child’s ear, the villagers would throw me in a pot or start a David Frum religion.

Strangely, I was not afraid.

In Search of Real Magic

When you fly into Vanuatu, it is Port Vila on the island of Efate that you see first.  It is a bustling town of 36,000, but nothing like a real city.  There is a one-lane main street along the shoreline and a few quaint restaurants and shops.  The streets are populated with black-skinned ni-Vans, Australian tourists, and the expatriate merchant class.

We stayed in the Le Lagon resort, which is like the lovely resorts in Fiji or Hawaii—lots of beautiful rolling lawn, great restaurants with a view of the lagoon, and fabulously fresh fish dinners for a price. 

But I wasn’t much interested in resort activities.  I had heard of people called man blong magik, or magic men, and was determined to find eyewitnesses to their feats.  I asked around everywhere to find traces of them and their work.

At the Botanical Gardens, I asked Paco Mete.  He is the host of an outdoor museum that gives historical and cultural information about Vanuatu.  Paco is an eloquent young Melanesian man with a sharp mind, and when asked, told of two examples of real magic that he has witnessed firsthand. 

“Once,” said Paco, “right here at the gardens, I see man blong magik cut a coconut in two, and then, suddenly, clap the two halves back together, healing it.”

I smiled and nodded, but still, this wasn’t terribly impressive to me, since my American friend Michael Ammar regularly performs the same trick with a lemon. 

The second, however, was more intriguing: During that same ceremony, Paco saw a conch shell grab onto a leaf as if it were a hand. 

The incident sounded vaguely hallucinogenic, like the willow tree whose branches try to kill Harry Potter in Azkaban, and so my mind immediately went to kava, a local drink.  However, I had to be careful with such suspicions, because virtually every feat of magic can be discounted by labeling it a kava dream, and that would render all magic false before even examining it.

Paco recounted more chilling feats, as well.  Sometimes, Paco said, magicians have been known to sneak into people’s homes in the middle of the night and perform secret surgery.  The victims wake up the next morning and walk around as if nothing is wrong.  A couple days later, however, they drop dead.  If an autopsy is performed, the doctor finds that his guts are filled with nothing but leaves.

Before leaving the Botanical Gardens, I read a display that told the secret of how some magicians walk around invisibly.  First, they boil a black cat live.  Then they place one of the cat’s bones in their mouth.  Finally, the display declares with confidence, they can walk around invisibly.

Everywhere I went, people encouraged me to drink kava (piper methysticum).  People see strange things when drinking kava, although it’s not a hallucinogen; in fact, it’s legal to purchase even in the virulently anti-drug atmosphere of the United States.  When I checked with my acupuncturist back home, I discovered that technically, kava is a euphoric and a soporific, which means that it “makes people feel mildly euphoric and then sleepy,” according to Laraine Crampton, L.Ac., one of the authors of Chinese Medical Herbology and Pharmacology (AOM Press 2003, $90).

Kava begins as a local leaf that young virgins prepare by chewing it into a mush.  They spit it out, water is added, and it is filtered through coconut fibers into a final product.  Kava bars abound on the islands.  After drinking kava from a half-coconut shell, you can see and even talk with the dead spirits, according to local lore.  First, your mouth becomes numb.  If you turn away from other people and stare into the distance, the spirits appear to you.  Within minutes, all of the questions that bother you will be answered, they say.

In my search around Port Vila, I stumbled on Don MacQuoid, who runs The Waterfront Bar & Grill.  After a few minutes of conversation, I discovered that he’s quite a knowledgeable magician, owns an awesome sleight-of-hand library, and that we know many American magicians in common. 

MacQuoid landed here six years ago, buying the Waterfront after fifteen years of sailing around the world with his lovely wife Donna.  Running a business here, Macquoid knows firsthand how strong the ni-Vans’ magical beliefs are.

From time to time, Macquoid invites prominent magicians to perform at the  Waterfront.  After one particularly strong performance, MacQuoid says, the ni-Van employees were convinced of the magician’s genuine powers.  That night, a young boy fell sick in their village, and the next day, the employees refused to go to work, blaming the magician’s black magic.

“I had to bring in a village klever,” MacQuoid says.  “I paid her $60, and her job was to walk around the restaurant and discover the source of the curse on the young boy.  Finally, she found three black stones in a planter that she said were to blame.  She replaced them with three white stones, and suddenly, everything was right with the world again.”

From books, I discovered other magical stories.  The Lonely Planet Vanuatu guidebook says that magic is especially strong around volcanoes, for example, and that there are nine active volcanoes in Vanuatu.  Magic is believed to be strongest on Ambrym and Epi, remote islands that the travel agents warn me not to visit.  There are barely even accommodations on that island, they say, only guest houses.

One intriguing eyewitness account comes from Isles of Illusion, a book by an anonymous author who’s identified only as Asterisk.  He was a colonial Englishman who was stationed on the islands in the late 19^th century, and wrote back to his brother in England about his experiences in letters that were never meant to be published, but which one of his descendants deemed fascinating enough to put into print in 1913.

Asterisk didn’t believe in the ni-Vans’ magic, so when a native told him that he was being pursued by a demon, Asterisk was skeptical.  But then he describes how one night, he saw the native being dragged through the jungle by no one, by an invisible person.  It may be historical, but it is an eyewitness account, nonetheless.

On Lini Highway, Port Vila’s main drag, I found Ma Barker’s, a 1920s-style restaurant and bar where they serve fabulous sashimi during the daytime and break out the hard liquor and cut loose big-time when Australian cruise passengers are in town.  When I asked about magic, owner Lydia Drew brought out a pack of symbol cards, much like tarot cards.  For 3,500 vatu—about $35 U.S.—she read my future.

Lydia was born in the bush in an isolated part of New Caledonia, never attending school, and believing, as all the village elders told her, that the world was flat.  But one day, she climbed a tree and closed her eyes, and saw that, instead, the world was round.

“That was my first vision,” Lydia told me.  “Later, I find I can see the future when I lay out the cards.”

Lydia’s husband Owen is an Australian expatriate, and is actually a believer in South Pacific island magic.

“My wife and I never talk about that side of her life,” Owen said in his Australian accent.  “When I was in the Solomon Islands, I had some pretty scary experiences with island magic—situations where people actually died from it—and now, I just try to stay away.”

I asked Owen for specifics, but he just shook his head and looked away. 

“It was pretty dark,” was all he would say, and my mind reeled with the possibilities.

Performing for the Natives

Collecting stories about Vanuatu’s magic was one thing; performing my own magic was something I had to creep up on.

Early on, Don Macquoid arranged a performance date for me at The Waterfront Restaurant for Tuesday evening.  He said he’d contact the newspaper.  It sounded like a big deal.

The next day, while standing at the hotel registration counter, I performed a coin trick for a pretty ni-Van girl.  A crowd gathered, including all the counter staff, several bellboys, and a couple security guards. I first showed them a few coin tricks with their own vatu coins, then graduated to borrowing some silverware from the restaurant and bending a few of those with my mind.

I waited for them to throw me in a pot.  Instead, they just gathered around, eyes wide open, astonished as no Westerner over the age of 11 can be astonished.

“I’ll be playing at the Waterfront on Tuesday,” I said.

“We’ll be there,” one of them said.

“Are you a magic man?” one of the girls asked. 

I avoided the question, not knowing what being a magic man meant to her.  But she persisted.

“Can you tell me if my baby will be a boy?” she asked.

I placed my hand on her belly for a minute, pondered, and then answered: “Yes, a boy.”

Hey, I had a 50-50 chance, and if I got it wrong, I wouldn’t be around to take the heat.  Suddenly, this twentysomething ni-Van girl seemed terribly happy.

Later, I walked past the open market, where hundreds of poor rural ni-Vans bring their wares to sell from Monday through Friday, sleeping beneath the tables at night.  While standing in front of a table filled with shell necklaces and decorative boar tusks, I began performing coin tricks.  Within five minutes, there was a crowd of 100 poor, uneducated ni-Vans gathered around.

These, I noticed, were the superstitious ones of whom I was a bit afraid.  Still, they watched in awe, making the telltale sounds of an astounded audience, especially when I changed the time on a man’s watch the number of minutes he named, all without touching it, while he was holding it in his fist. 

They did not throw me in a pot, either.

Over the next few days, I performed to strangers all over Port Vila—in restaurants, in retail shops, even on public sidewalks.

By Tuesday evening, word had gotten around and there was a huge crowd gathered at The Waterfront, a mixture of expatriates, ni-Vans, and tourists who just happened to be in the restaurant.  With a microphone hanging around my neck, I went through my whole comic stage show.

I began by giving a volunteer a lemon to hold.  Then I borrowed another volunteer’s bill—in this case, an expatriate’s 1000-vatu note (about $10 U.S.).  He signed it, and then I tore off a corner and gave it back to him as a receipt.  I then vanished the remainder of the note.  After much humorous byplay and a few other tricks, the volunteer cut into the lemon, and when he cracked it open, inside the lemon, there was a rolled-up 1000-vatu note sticking out.  Throughout the show, I had never touched the lemon.  The rolled-up bill turned out to be a perfect match with the receipt.

If you think about it, really ponder it, there is no possible way for me to do the feat that I described.  In response, most Westerners enjoy the show, but ultimately conclude that it must have been just an elaborate trick that is simply impenetrable to them.  It seriously bothers some people, especially engineers, egotists, and bona fide geniuses, all of whom stake their entire identities on being able to figure things out.  These types come up to me days after my performance, their eyes red and fatigued.

“I’ve been staying up nights thinking about your tricks, dammit,” they tell me.

But Westerners rarely go to the place where they believe—actually truly believe—that I can magically penetrate an uncut lemon with their own bill: It is just a sublime puzzle.

But ni-Vans are different.  After this show, as sweat was rolling down my neck and I was walking among the audience and shaking hands, I saw a different expression on the faces of the ni-Vans in the audience.  One ni-Van stopped me and asked me to teach him a trick.

“It’s that trick where you….” and then he started laughing as he thought about it, his middle-aged eyes crinkling, “…that trick where you…” and once again, he devolved into laughter, “…where you pick the vatus out of the air.”

It was a throwaway trick that I perform for children at home, where I pick coins out of the air, one after another after another.  This man saw an immediate application to the trick: He, too, wanted to pick coins out of the air.  To him, it was real.  I was a rich white man, and that’s how I became rich. 

Of course, a magician never tells.

In the context of the ni-Vans’ upbringing, the ones at The Waterfront clearly believed that they had seen a man blong magik (which means, literally, “man who belongs to magic”), someone who can calm the oceans and see into the future, someone who can probably fly and, if he doesn’t like you, cast a fatal curse on you.

Interestingly, after the show, all the ni-Vans treated me very, very nicely.

Port Vila, however, was the capital town.  I was eager to see what lay in store for me on one of the more remote islands.  Tanna, I had heard, was brimming with magic and mystery.  You can hike up Mount Yasur, the active volcano, and commune with the spirits.  There are 28,000 people on Tanna, most of whom are villagers who live in thatched huts in the jungle, without benefit of electricity or indoor plumbing, without a Western education, without television, radio, or mass media of any sort.  It is also the home of the wacky John Frum cult.  Many Tannans believe with all their hearts, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that magic happens every day, all the time.

So when the opportunity arose to visit Tanna, I leapt at the chance.

Into the Wild

A flight to Tanna is a flight away from all modern security concerns.  We boarded a 10-seater plane, without any kind of X-ray screening, and one of us sat next to the pilot.  If he’d had a box cutter, we would’ve all been dead. 

It was a noisy flight, the sound of the engine roaring in our ears for over an hour, and once we landed, the Tanna International Airport was no larger than a steakhouse.  There were no customs agents of any kind.  And once we hopped into the shuttle bus, we discovered that the road from the airport to the accommodations was unpaved.

Whitegrass Bungalows is a charming property with TK bungalows perched directly on the oceanfront, each with an incredible panoramic view of reefs, ocean, and endless sky.  Each hour, it seems, reveals a different visual masterpiece.

Still, you are constantly reminded of how different Tanna is.  Whitegrass does not issue room keys, for example, because thievery is a trait of civilization that the Tannans have not yet acquired.  The rooms themselves are immaculate, although the showers have concrete floors, there are no televisions, radios, or clocks, and all electrical power shuts off at 10 pm.  You sleep under white mosquito netting, and when the lights go out, you can hear the geckos make their gentle clicking noises in the rafters.

The next afternoon, a group of us hop into a Toyota Land Cruiser and make for the volcano.  I sit in front with the slender ni-Van driver named Belden, who says he is 26, although ni-Vans rarely keep track of their birthdays, and often simply guess at their age.

First, we rumble across bumpy dirt roads through the Whitegrass Plains, past wild horses, boars, and goats.  Later, we reach Middle Bush, still on dirt roads, passing village after village of thatched-roof buildings, natives carrying bows and arrows, black children in old donated clothes running up to the Land Cruiser and waving happily at the Caucasians, kids stopping their soccer game to wave and yell at the Caucasians, all these black faces and white smiles and bugs and dust and no electricity and no signs, virtually no signs anywhere.  When it rains, this place must turn into one muddy mess.

As we pass through village after village, Belden tells me his life story.  Belden, it turns out, studied at a university in Tonga and received his A.A. in South Pacific History before the scholarship money ran out.  He was set up in an arranged marriage, which is the custom in Vanuatu, but refused it, insisting on marrying a girl whom he truly loved in a neighboring village.

After much dispute and negotiation, the marriage was allowed, but there was a price to pay for taking a woman from the neighboring village: The couple must eventually return a woman to that village.  When their 4-year-old daughter Marsala becomes old enough—perhaps 10—they must give her up.

“Won’t that be difficult?” I asked.

“Yes, it will,” Belden said with some emotion from behind his steering wheel.  “But it is for the good of the village.”

I think about asking Belden about magic, but it is a sensitive subject, since the people in his village are churchgoing Christians.  Indeed, the island is teeming with missionaries from various denominations, all seeking to convert the pagans to their own faith.  The island boasts Seventh-Day Adventists, Foursquares, Mormons, Baptists, you name it.

Conversion, however, seems an inappropriate term for what happens in Vanuatu; it is more like a fair trade.  The missionaries will build a church for a village, deluge them with secondhand clothing and various other donated items—cargo, in island terminology.  And in return, the villagers will attend church on Sunday and project a facsimile of religious faith, something that the churches can trumpet at their annual conventions.

After 2 ½ hours on dirt roads, it was getting on toward dusk.  Suddenly, from nowhere, we mounted a grey, ash-covered plain that stretched out like a Tranquility Base moonscape.  Belden sped across the plain for a few minutes, and then suddenly, the volcano rose up in front of us. 

Mount Yasur is a study in blacks, whites, and greys, a huge smoking mountain.  It was forbidding, to be sure, but it was where the spirits live.  We crossed a stream, and then sped up the back road through the thick, overgrown rainforest, heading for the top.

It was 5:30 when we finally reached the crater, and darkness had just fallen like a hammer, no lights anywhere, just the black, black night.  Belden parked the car and handed each of us “a torch,” as they like to call flashlights in the South Pacific.  We wended our way up the last 150 yards of switchbacks in the dark.

A dull red glow in the sky.  That’s what Commander James Cook saw from his ship in August, 1774, and what originally caused him to veer toward Tanna.  When Captain Cook started to scale the volcano, however, the natives stopped him: The spirits inhabit the volcano, he was told, and climbing it was tabu.

But times have changed somewhat.  As we climbed the switchbacks, we began to smell the sulphur, and when we reached the top, we began walking through a thin veil of sulphurous smoke.  You feel and hear the volcano before you see it—the frightening hiss of flowing lava, the gentle ground tremors, the heat that you can feel if you squat down and lay your palm on the ashy ground.  If you believe in such things, you can feel the presence of the spirits.

When you finally peer over the crater’s edge, the colors are unexpected, modulating in fiery hues.  Occasionally, lava splashes high in the air like a Roman candle.  The scene is hypnotic, and it beckons you to stare and stare.

“Do you come here often?” I asked Belden.

“Yes,” he said.

“How many times?”

“Maybe one hundred?” he said.

Finally, it seemed appropriate to ask about the magic.  Belden was not taken aback by the question, and answered forthrightly.

“Once, I see man blong magik plant mango seed,” Belden said, “and all in ten minutes, it sprouts, it grows—how you say?—grows buds, it bores fruit, and the fruit falls from the tree.”

I wonder how I or my friend Michael might pull off such a feat, and I end up with no ideas.  Belden told me of other befuddling magic, too, and when he had finished his stories, I asked him whether the church approved of his beliefs.

The tiniest smile crept onto Belden’s lips.

“I do not tell them,” he said from the red light of the volcano.  “But I know it happen, because I seen it.”

The strangest thing was that, in the red light of the volcano, I could see conviction in his eyes.

Chief Tom’s Magic

The following evening, a group of us sat down with Chief Tom Numake of the Evergreen Village.  We were sitting in the velvety semidark on the terrace at Whitegrass, the waves of the broad, black coastline lapping somewhere in front of us.

Chief Tom is an important man on Tanna, a member of the Council of Chiefs, which has significant power in running the country of Vanuatu.  He carries himself with great authority, and takes himself quite seriously.  For three hours, while we sipped Australian wine in the candlelight, Chief Tom went into great detail about kastom, which is pidgin English for “custom,” meaning the old, indigenous, pre-white-man ways.

Eventually, I asked him about magic.  He was firm and unyielding about what the powerful man blong magik men in Vanuatu can do.

“A magic man can turn into a dog, squirrel, flying fox,” Chief Tom says.  “If he doesn’t like another man, he can wait till the man go fishing, then turn into a shark and eat the man.  A magic man can turn into a cat and climb in a window, and if you touch this cat, you will die.”

I had just read chapters in Azkaban in which wizards turn into, alternately, a rat and a wolf, shapeshifting creatures that J.K. Rowling refers to as animagi. 

“And devils are real.  When you come across a devil, your ears become long like a cow’s ears, your hair becomes colder, and you start shaking.

“I know these magic men on Ambrym, and they can fly from island to island—bam—in two seconds.  And you can going flying with him.  You hold on his pants and close your eyes.  You hear singing and then you start flying.  You fly straight—straight through buildings and mountains and whatever stands in your way. 

“But if you open your eyes, you get stuck inside the mountain or the building or  whatever.  I know this is true.”

“That would be great,” I said with a grin, but then I caught myself, hoping Chief Tom wouldn’t take my grin as sarcasm.

“If I had known before that you wanted to fly, I would have arranged for you to fly,” Chief Tom said with not a trace of humor.

Chief Tom went into great detail about magic men, devils, flying, and curses.  Then he described what magic men use to communicate instead of telephones.

“They use marigolds,” Chief Tom said.  “They talk into a flower on Tanna and somebody in Ambrym can hear them.  In fact, we can use these marigolds to talk to people in the United States.  Have you ever seen someone in the United States with a flower behind their ear?  Well, that’s the talking flower. 

And then he ended with the phrase he used time and again in talking about magic, the solemn pronouncement he used whenever he saw skepticism in my eyes:

“I’m telling you the truth.”

His eyes holding mine, not wavering.

A Moment to Be Afraid

The next day, we toured Iwner, a kastom village.  There, for an admission price, they show tourists the old ways.  It is a fascinating tour.  A ni-Van guide with a bare chest showed us around and described what life is like in this primitive village in the jungle.

Over 85% of the vegetation around us can be used for food, medicine, shelter, or in other ways, he told us.  A woman in a grass skirt gave us each shredded coconut wrapped in some kind of leaf, and although we hesitated, we finally ate it so as not to offend.

After the 40-minute tour, in a large clearing in front of a huge banyan tree, where the dead spirits reside, over 300 villagers in grass skirts and painted faces began performing a tribal dance.  When asked, I joined in, trying to mimic what they did, although I was always a second or two behind.  Over 300 people were stomping the dirt with their feet—one, two, three!—and you could feel the tremors in the ground.  They were asking the gods to bless their yam harvest, and the dust rose up in response.

Finally, when the dance was over, Belden asked the chief whether I could perform a show for the villagers, and he consented.  The entire tribe gathered around me, everyone from elders to fit young men to teenage girls to little children.  If there was a moment to be afraid, this might have been it.  Surrounded by black faces in war paint, people who believe in the old ways, people who dance to please the gods.

This was the moment to be afraid.  I was surrounded by black faces in war paint, people who believe in the old ways, people who dance to please the gods.  And I didn’t have J.K. Rowling writing the script to ensure a happy ending.

Taking a deep breath, I performed the sponge balls, little red balls that disappear, reappear, jump from my hand to their hands, and in the end, thirty little red balls pouring out of a black man’s hand like bats out of a cave.  When I perform this trick at home for kids, it is the trick that always seems most like real magic.

After each magical moment, there was an audible “Ohhhh!” as 300 people expressed their astonishment at the same time.  A few superstitious elderly Iwners laid back with a conflicted, suspicious look on their faces, like maybe I’m the real thing, like maybe I’m going to put a curse on them, like maybe I’m a devil who’s come to make their ears long like cow’s ears and slaughter them all.

But in the end, to my relief, I didn’t get thrown into a pot.  I performed a fabulous rope trick, the disappearing scarves, and the classic Ashes on the Palm, and they loved it all.  When it was all over, I walked toward the Land Cruiser, and every ni-Van’s eyes were on me, and I felt what David Copperfield must feel when walking down Park Avenue.  As we were driving away from Iwner, once again over bumpy dirt roads, heading back to our bungalows, Belden finally spoke.

“These people have not seen such a thing before,” said Belden.  His eyes betrayed some deep emotion, perhaps awe or, perhaps, gratefulness.  “You have shown them a very great thing.”

At Tanna International Airport, waiting in a crowd of ni-Vans for the plane that will take me back to Port Vila, I saw a Mormon missionary, dressed in the familiar white shirt and tie, and short blond hair.  I struck up a conversation, and discovered he was from Utah.

“What do you think about the magic here in Vanuatu?” I asked.  “Is it real?”

“Most of it is just superstition and tricks,” he said.

“Most of it?” I asked.  “What do you mean, ‘most of it’?”

But he waltzed around my question, talking about kava, about sleight of hand, about naïve audiences.

“But do you believe that some of it is, for example, the work of Satan?”

He paused, as if to make sure that he was clearly understood.

“I believe that Satan’s power is real,” he said, looking me straight in the eye, “and that if you look for Satan, you will find him.”

Afterward, as if to show him what I thought of his missionary work, I started pulling vatus out of ni-Vans’ ears, and pulled a crowd or 20 or 30 delighted natives, laughing and enjoying the handiwork of Satan, or whoever the hell inspired me to do these tricks.

The White Man’s Proof

Back in Port Vila, I took a cruise with Peter Whitelaw, owner of Sailaway Cruises, to Havannah Harbor, the other side of the island.  I had had enough work for the moment, and was engaging in something touristy and pleasant.

Peter is an Australian who sailed into Port Vila in 1980.  A cyclone suddenly hit and his boat was destroyed.  He’s remained in Vanuatu ever since, becoming one of those craggy but happy-go-lucky expatriates that you read about in Hemingway novels.  When I told him of my interest in magic, Peter gave me a warning.

“This is a very secretive society,” Peter said.  “Like an onion, you must peel it back in layers.”

And then Peter told me about black magic.  Whenever anyone dies at a young age or gets sick unexpectedly, Peter says, the ni-Vans assume that someone cast a curse on that person.  In fact, he said, there is currently someone on trial on Espiritu Santo for killing three people by black magic.

When I researched the court case in the local newspaper, The Post, I discovered a strange fact: The man has confessed.  And it puzzled me: Why would a man confess to killing three people if he hadn’t?  Equally stunning is that the Vanuatu legal system is taking such claims of black magic seriously.

In other Post articles, I discovered other surprising cases.  One murder case, for example, rests on a man’s claim that he saw one of the murderers transfigure into the form of his sister “from the waist up,” and that the transfigured person successfully took his sister’s place for two days.  The legal system, astoundingly, is allowing such claims to be presented as fact in court.

This is truly a magical land, in which the realm of what is possible is far greater than what Dan Rather or Judge Antonin Scalia might believe.  However, the Western mind does tend to reduce everything to sad explanations.  In my final days in Vanuatu, I was increasingly aware that most of my eyewitness accounts of magic came from ni-Vans, people who are predisposed to magical rather than skeptical explanations.  Is a Western eyewitness more reliable than a ni-Van eyewitness?  Can indigenous perceptions ever be trusted?

That’s when I heard Peter Whitelaw’s story.  Peter is clearly a Western mind, an Aussie with a B.S. in electrical engineering, and a man who thinks deeply about all things, whether cultural, political, or scientific.  A couple years ago, one of his ni-Van boatmates told him that he was being dogged by a curse that had been placed on him.  Peter was skeptical, of course. 

But then one day, the mate was eating in the galley when his plate split into pieces in front of them all for no reason.  The shards and food all fell to the floor.

“This happens all the time,” said the ni-Van man with a besieged look on his face.

When I perform magic in the Western world, standing onstage with my magic wand, most people consider what I do “just tricks.”  But there is a whole world out there, hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples, perhaps billions, who believe that the world is more than just numbers and facts and the concrete.

They believe that ghosts and spirits are all around us.  They believe that magicians can perform feats beyond all imagining.  They believe that the world is, like the waterfall at the base of Mount Yasur, evanescent and malleable and wondrously surprising, that it is, in a word, magic.

And who am I to disagree?