Lost skills....

[I Ratant]

Last night while enjoying a bout of gastro-intestinal awareness, I turned on the electric tv box and found Pastor Melissa Scott running around the stage with the requisite handful of black, red, blue and green Magic Markers.. the trademark of the kook, describing part of Exodus to the sheep in the audience.
The part where Pharoah's magicians cast their staves on the ground, and these become serpents.
Aaron casts his stave on the ground, and it devours those other serpents.
I was struck by the long-repressed thought that this feat hasn't been done since then.
And, Melissa (a babe in her own right) could mouth this twaddle year after year, without a thought as to whether it had any physical reality to it at all, to the herds of gentle viewers and audience members, who also fail to consider just WTF this scene is really about.
Just what exactly has the field of magic lost, when this transformation can't be done anymore?

[Delvo]

Nothing, if it wasn't ever actually done in the first place.

The only "trick" for this that comes to mind is that they were snakes all along, somehow paralyzed or in seizures or trances that made them stiff and straight for a while, and then the impact when they hit the ground snapped them out of it so they started acting like normal snakes again. But I figure there probably was no such trick because I know of no way to induce such a state in snakes and nobody who's claimed to be able to do it, and because even stiffened and straight they might still look too much like snakes to fool people. Most likely, somebody just saw a staff that was carved with the shape of a snake's head on one end and thought "Hey wouldn't it be cool if..."

[Akhenaten]

Pharaoh's serpent often becomes a staff. At other times it becomes a toothpick.


No magical skills involved, I'm afraid :)

[quixotecoyote]

My crazy athiest/panthiest (depending on his mood that day) grandfather insisted that they were all carrying frozen snakes which were hibernating until they hit the ground and then shook themselves off and warmed up.

Craziest atheist I ever met.

[Kittyclaws]

Refrigeration in biblical times?

[Kevin_Lowe]

I read something once that speculated that you could keep a biggish snake quiet by holding it perfectly vertical because it would be hard for it to get blood up to its brain or something like that, and that this was how the magic trick in Exodus was done. They reckoned you could get such a paralytic snake, coat it in clay, and chuck it on to the ground when you needed an effect.

I guess they'd never seen a tree snake climb a tree.

Still, it's not inconceivable that if you had a species of snake with low blood pressure and you kept it cold and you kept it vertical that it might sit still long enough for such a party trick. I'm sure the stage magicians of the past were as crafty as those alive today, just working with more limited materials and a more limited knowledge base.

[bokonon]

I imagine you could muster a reasonable performance with a telescoping staff that had a snake inside, but since there doesn't seem to be any extra-biblical evidence that the Jews were ever subjugated by Pharoah in the first place, I'm inclined to think the whole tale is fabricated.

Come to think of it, there's another way you could do it -- slide the snake out of your sleeve at the same time you stuff the staff under your robe. I might have read about it in that ancient manual of magical manipulation, the Kama Sutra.

[I Ratant]

it's the kind of thing that would (and does) appeal to kids.
But even as a kid, I wondered about that never-seen again feat.
One of the many YGBSM scenes in the god-book that fail rationalization.

[Bikewer]

Sounds like simple allegory to me, a literary technique quite lost on subsequent generations of fundamentalists.

"My God is badder than your God."

[Phase Inverter]

It seems that, in the Exodus story, Yahweh's first two "miracles" flopped. You'd think he would have seen that coming.

[alfaniner]

Was he also using the green Magic Markers to also make his CDs sound better?

[GreNME]

Pharaoh's serpent often becomes a staff. At other times it becomes a toothpick.


No magical skills involved, I'm afraid :)

Oh, that's bad.


Unrelated: I actually spent 20 minutes translating your avatar, and then realized it's not any kind of joke or silly translation. For those curious: left cartouche - Nfrkhpr re htp n ('the beautiful manifestations of Re', Akhenaten's pharaoh title); right cartouche - Itn bAk n ('servant for/of Aten'). Thanks for that distraction! :)

[Autolite]

Actually the explanation is quite simple. A theist once told me that god did lots of "magic" 2000 years ago but he just doesn't do it anymore. Hey, that's good enough for me...

[Giraffe107]

Snakes can be a paralyzed- if you hold a 'ground snake' (such as a cobra) vertically, it passes out after a while, because unlike tree snakes their heart is unable to pump blood properly. They wake up when they put horizontal again. Dr Karl (on the ABC here in Oz) was talking about it a couple of weeks ago, I can't find the podcast unfortunately (it was early June, the archive only seems to back 2 weeks).

[PitPat]

Melissa Scott's show runs late night on my cable market and I've found myself transfixed by her faux scholarship and luxurious long brown hair. Get yourself a big whiteboard with old-timey language in different colors and it's legit, I tell ya. Very sciency. And she's a good talker too.

At first I thought it was all horsepucky, but she sings all good and stuff too!
Oh Gene, you lucky, lucky dead man.