The
Modern Occultist
Interview #19
Dr. Eric Colleary
Cline Curator of Theatre & Performing Arts, Harry Ransom Center;
Houdini's
Library (forthcoming book and current exhibition)
The University of Texas at Austin, 2026
MODERN OCCULTIST
Houdini's public legacy is famously split down the middle: the greatest escape artist of his age, and simultaneously one of the most aggressive debunkers of fraudulent Spiritualist mediums in American history, a crusade widely understood to be tangled up with his own grief and his desperate, private hope that his mother might somehow still be reachable.
Now that you've spent years inside his actual library and
papers for your accompanying book, does that documented record support the
popular narrative of a heartbroken skeptic secretly hoping to be proven wrong?
Or has the archive complicated that story in ways general audiences might not
expect?
DR. ERIC COLLEARY
The library and papers show Houdini had a relationship with spiritualism that ran far deeper than a single wound. Houdini once bought more than twenty thousand books and pamphlets on spiritualism from a single Boston publisher. He acquired séance manuals, exposure pamphlets, histories, memoirs, the personal papers of famous mediums, trumpets, slates, and more. He annotated what he read and kept notes on which authors he found credible. This was sustained intellectual work carried out over decades.
His mother was almost certainly sympathetic to spiritualist ideas. He remembered being a boy after his father died, when she took him to a local medium hoping to locate missing insurance papers. Some of his early exposure to stage magic came from performers who blended spiritualism and conjuring, and an early playbill in his collection shows that he and his young wife offered "spiritualistic entertainments" as part of their act in the 1890s. On both sides of the Atlantic at that time, the line between the séance room and the stage was thin.
Houdini's mother, Cecilia Weiss, died in 1913. Nine years later, in June 1922, Lady Doyle held a séance for him in Atlantic City and produced pages of automatic writing she said came from his mother. It rang false to him immediately. Lady Doyle was sincere, which convinced Houdini that even honest people could deceive the grieving, and it sharpened his attention to those doing it deliberately for money. He began performing demonstrations of fraudulent séance methods, published A Magician Among the Spirits in 1924, and testified before Congress in 1926 in support of regulation.
The archive complicates the idea of a man secretly
waiting to be proven wrong. In a magazine article called “How I Unmask the
Spirit Fakers,” he notes that he is not a skeptic, and that his mind remains
open, and that he is willing to be convinced if a medium can demonstrate
genuine psychic power. In A Magician Among the Spirits (1924) he writes
that he is "willing to believe, want to believe, will believe" if the
spiritualists can produce substantiated proof, and that until they do, the
evidence offered to him has not survived investigation.
MO
Your essay “Behind the Bookcase: Houdini as Collector” gets at something most treatments of Houdini skip entirely: not what he performed, but what he chose to keep, and why … What does the actual shape of his collection, the specific books, ephemera, and objects he prioritized acquiring over decades, tell you about him as a private person that the stage persona never let audiences see? Was there a category of material in his collection that genuinely surprised you when you first encountered it?
EC
What surprised me most was how much his library became an obsession. He spoke about it in most interviews. He brought it up in letters about completely unrelated topics. He spent a fortune assembling it and often told reporters how he was looking forward to retiring from the stage and spending his remaining years with his wife and his library. Some collectors hoard the material so they can say they own it, but Houdini pored over his collection and mined it for his books and articles. He spoke intelligently about it time and time again. He knew what he had and why it was important and often stayed awake through the night reading.
It’s also clear how central his books were to his
performances as a magician and escape artist. Magic tricks often have a
genealogy that’s passed down to each performer. Knowing where the trick came
from and the different ways different people performed them allowed Houdini to
come up with more complex approaches to old tricks. His library made him a
better performer.
MO
You curated “The Golden Age of Magic Posters” back in 2019, and that particular art form leaned constantly on genuine occult iconography, pentagrams, demons, Egyptian imagery, alchemical symbolism, in service of what was, ultimately, a theatrical trick rather than a claimed spiritual practice.
From your vantage point inside these archives, how deliberately were stage magicians of that era borrowing the actual visual language of ceremonial and occult tradition to sell tickets? And did that borrowing ever run in the other direction, with real occult practitioners of the period adopting theatrical stagecraft to make their own claims more persuasive?
EC
The “Golden Age of Magic” (roughly the 1880s through the 1930s) coincided with enormous advances in color lithographic printing and with a Western appetite for Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese imagery. European and American magicians billed themselves as Indian fakirs, Chinese jugglers, and Egyptian mystics. The Egyptian Hall in London had been built in 1812 with an Egyptian revival facade, riding the enthusiasm that followed Napoleon's campaign, and by the time Maskelyne and Cooke took up residence there in 1873 they inherited a building that already promised something exotic.
The imagery was entirely deliberate, and we can see it in their surviving advertisements. A playbill in Houdini's collection for the conjurer Herman Boaz, printed in Berwick in 1811, advertises “Pyroteknomancy, Dactiliomancy, Ornithomancy, and Kapnomancy.” Those are invented pseudo-classical terms dressing up ordinary tricks in the vocabulary of ancient divination. The same playbill then flatters the audience by observing that in an age and country less enlightened, such wonders would inevitably have appeared supernatural. The performer is selling the occult and winking at it in the same paragraph. Decades later, Strobridge printed a poster for Herrmann the Great advertising "An Evening in Spiritland," which is a magician selling a séance as a night out. Ernest Thorn's "Dreamland" poster from around 1905 crowds a three-sheet with devils, ghosts, a sphinx, and an owl surrounding what was a conventional illusion act. Harry Kellar popularized the use of impish red devils in his posters that often still appear in magic advertisements today.
It ran the other way constantly. The Fox Sisters, who set the whole spiritualist movement in motion in 1848, were touring their séances to packed theatres within a few years. The Davenport Brothers built the spirit cabinet into a full stage act and toured it before Napoleon III, Czar Alexander II, and Queen Victoria, and they never claimed or denied supernatural powers, which left audiences to decide for themselves and sold tickets either way. Maskelyne and Cooke launched their careers by exposing the Davenport cabinet in 1865 and then spent decades performing at the Egyptian Hall. A poster from 1872 bills Georgiana Eagle jointly as a Wizard Queen and a Mesmerist, and it was reported that Queen Victoria consulted her hoping to reach Prince Albert. The categories were not separate enough to run in one direction.
Bartolomeo Bosco, whose papers Houdini collected, put it
on his own portrait: "Je vous trompe, mais je vous trompe
honnêtement." I deceive you, but I deceive you honestly. That is what
separates the poster from the séance bill. The imagery could promise anything,
because buying the ticket was the disclosure. Houdini understood the harder
version of that bargain. Telling an audience in advance that you intend to
deceive them, and then deceiving them while they watch for it, is considerably
more difficult than asking them to believe.
MO
Our own publisher has been especially grateful for your generosity and guidance regarding the Ransom Center's Aleister Crowley holdings, which sit in the same institution, and sometimes, we'd imagine, in strikingly similar boxes, as your stage magic archives.
As a curator who has to handle both traditions with equal historical seriousness, do you find yourself drawing a hard line between “magic” as theatrical illusion and “magick” as claimed spiritual technology? Or does enough overlap and cross-pollination show up in the archival record that the distinction starts to blur the deeper you dig?
EC
I should say first that I am the performing arts curator, so my focus has been on our stage magic collections. The Crowley and Doyle collections, and other occult holdings, are often stewarded by our reference department, though there is obviously overlap.
The question I ask of any object is historiographic. What circumstances led to this thing being made? Who engaged with it, and what does their engagement tell us about the moment they were living in? A typescript on astral travel and an 1811 Playbill advertising Ornithomancy are both interesting sources that might help us understand something about how science and faith were trying to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness in their respective moments.
Approached that way, both traditions are unusually good instruments for reading a society. Stage magic absorbs whatever a culture finds plausible, exciting, or frightening at a given moment, and so does occultism. These collections get used by interdisciplinary historians of religion, science, and politics, and that range is one of the pleasures of working at a research library.
MO
Without giving away more than you're able to at this stage, is there a single item destined for Houdini's Library, whether in the book or the exhibition, that you're most looking forward to finally putting in front of the public?
And for our readers who may be planning a visit to the Ransom Center themselves, what would you tell a first-time researcher walking into the performing arts holdings for the first time about how to actually get the most out of an archive this vast?
EC
I keep coming back to a letter written by Cagliostro. He was one of the most famous mystics in eighteenth-century Europe, an Italian adventurer born Giuseppe Balsamo who reinvented himself as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro and traveled the continent offering healing, alchemy, and divination to aristocratic clients. He was celebrated and distrusted in roughly equal measure, and he was ruined by the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, the 1785 fraud that swindled a cardinal, forged the signature of Marie Antoinette, and did lasting damage to the French monarchy on the eve of the Revolution. Cagliostro was acquitted and expelled from France. Four years later his wife denounced him to the Inquisition in Rome as a heretic, magician, and Freemason, and he was arrested and imprisoned. He died in a papal fortress.
Houdini's letter dates from that Roman imprisonment. Cagliostro addressed it to the French nation and all of Europe, proclaiming his innocence and denouncing the men who had jailed him, and signed it with the name he was born with: Io Giuseppe Balsamo. It was reportedly found among his papers in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Houdini regarded it as one of the great treasures of his collection. To get it, he also bought the papers of the Countess de la Motte, including her handwritten notes from the confrontation hearings in the necklace case, and ended up with what he called practically the complete court record. He wanted to form his own judgment of a man who stands somewhere between conjuring and the beginnings of spiritualism. What surprises people is how generous that judgment turned out to be. When a New York Times reporter in 1926 asked whether he condemned Cagliostro the way he condemned fraudulent mediums, Houdini refused. There was not any honest way at that time, he said, for an honest wonder-worker to make a living.
To answer the second part of your question: For a first-time researcher, the material is vast, so the useful skill is narrowing it before you arrive. Search the finding aids and the library catalog for specific terms rather than broad ones. If tarot is your interest, search tarot and divination, but also search names like Austin Spare or Frieda Harris. Names surface material that subject headings miss. Then write to the reference team. Tell them your project, tell them what you have already found, and ask whether they know of anything else that might support it. That holds for any library, not just ours.
At most libraries, you do not need academic credentials.
Registration is free, and staff will show you how to handle the material. Come
with a research question and stay open to the potentially better ones that
surface while you work. And stay organized. I use a free program called Tropy
to manage the reference images I take in archives.
MO
In your personal opinion—and to the benefit of new students and initiates—how would you describe “Occult Philosophy”?
EC
I am a theatre historian and a curator, not a
practitioner or a scholar of esoteric philosophy, and I would be speaking well
outside what I actually know to try to offer an explanation. What I can say is
that the phrase has changed dramatically over the centuries, and that archives
are a good way to trace those changes. What Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa meant by
De occulta philosophia in the 1530s is not what Crowley meant by occult
philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, and the documents let you
watch that shift happen.
MO
What was your personal start on your own journey on this path (or chosen profession)?
EC
Before he passed away when I was five, my grandfather was the first person to show me how a quarter could appear from behind my ear. I’ve never forgotten the sense of wonder and awe from that first trick.
Professionally, I trained as a theatre director focused
on performance as a tool for social change. My graduate studies in theatre
historiography led me to a doctoral minor in museum studies and to my first
archival work at the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of
Minnesota. Much of what I do still comes back to the same question: how
performance helps communities come together and imagine better ways of being in
the world.
When I arrived at the Ransom Center in 2015, the magic
collections were a wonderful but underdescribed resource. With the help of an
extraordinarily generous international magic community, we have been able to
make them far more accessible with finding aids, exhibits, digitization
efforts, and more.
MO
To this magazine, the concept of “modern occultism” can (and should) be equally viewed from both the academic and practical sides. What would you recommend to a person only now coming along to these subjects, and is uncertain if an objective academic career, or a true “practical path” may be right for them?
EC
Again, this is largely outside my wheelhouse, but I often encourage people to think beyond binaries like scholar or practitioner. They complement one another and overlap. A great deal of the material I work with was made by people who were doing both at once, and often the documents will not tell you which one they were. That ambiguity is frequently the most interesting thing about it.
For the scholarly side specifically, reading rooms are
almost always free and open to the general public. You do not need credentials
to register at most research libraries, and you can be handling primary
material within an hour of arriving. If you are uncertain which way you lean,
that is a cheap and fast way to find out whether working with documents holds
your attention the way you hoped it would.
MO
What is one book, film, lecture, or teacher that helped shape your journey and personal philosophies that you would recommend to a new student or occult practitioner (or historian / academic)?
EC
My doctoral advisor at Minnesota was Michal Kobialka, and his first book was This is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages. For nearly a century, theatre scholars treated the Easter liturgy as the birth of medieval drama. Instead of simply reading the passage about Christ's absence from the tomb, clergy began to reenact it, with more than one participant and a stone before the altar that could be rolled away. That was taken as the origin point, the moment drama emerged from ritual. Kobialka argued that hunting for an origin point was the least interesting thing to do with that material. What the practice actually registers is centuries of anxiety about transubstantiation and about where the body of Christ could be located. The reenactment is evidence of a theological and social crisis, not the first act of a new art form.
That book changed how I understand the writing of
history. It taught me to stop asking what an object or an event is the
beginning of, and to start asking what pressures produced it and what its use
reveals about the moment that made it. I still work that way.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
Modern Occultist
2026. Modern Occultist Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.