How to be a fakir
Podcast: Download
By M Parrott
Article ID: 1329
In a previous article, I covered “How to be a psychic“, telling how to recreate common psychic supernatural abilities. But there are more important problems in the world. Not a politician’s expense claims, but fakirs. Fakirs convert people to religions by performing supposed miracles that people assume would otherwise be dangerous or impossible.
Before I begin: everything I describe here is dangerous and should not be attempted. If you hurt yourself or someone else with the techniques described here, it’s not my fault, it’s yours. I will describe how these things are done, and the science behind them, as much as I can. If you are so desperate to try these techniques, I can’t stop you. But I did warn you.
How to lay on a bed of nails
As many of you know, this trick is where someone just lies on a bed, and the bed is made from hundreds or thousands of upturned, pointy, sharp and dangerous-looking nails. The performer takes a snooze, gets up, and is unpunctured.
So the trick… actually, there is no trick. All that is needed is a real bed of nails. The nails must all be the same length. You need someone to lower you down so that your weight is evenly distributed over all the nails. You want your body to be pressing against as many nails as possible. Your weight being distributed means there is not enough pressure on any one nail to puncture the skin. When getting up from the bed of nails, make sure no extreme pressure is applied to any nail-covered area. There’s a similar (and much safer) way to perform this trick with eggs instead of nails. You can lay out a bed of eggs so that the top of the eggs – the pointy part - are all facing upwards. Then lay down carefully in the same manner as you would on a bed of nails. If you mess up, at least it’s not painful. Just moist.
How to perform snake flossing
This is a trick where the fakir gets a snake, sucks it in through his nose and pulls it out of his mouth.
How’s it done? Well, you get a snake, suck it in through your nose and pull it out of your mouth. Any perceived “trick” is just due to human biology: right above your nostrils is the entrance to your nasal cavity. The nasal cavity connects to your throat near the same place your mouth connects to it. So the idea is you snort the snake in through your nose with sharp intakes of breath (I’d suggest tail first), grab it from deep inside your mouth and pull it through. Now obviously if you were stupid enough to not follow my earlier warning and are going to try this (which I thoroughly suggest you do not), don’t start with a snake. A thread of 100% cotton (I emphasise cotton) is best.
How to walk on broken glass
In this trick, a bed of broken glass is laid out. The fakir walks across the bed of glass from one side to the other. At the end of the journey, the fakir shows his feet, and they’re uncut by the shards of glass.
This relies on a similar principle to the bed of nails – weight distribution. Your pressure is spread out over enough pieces of glass that you won’t cut your feet. But there is another element to making sure this trick works. A lot of the glass shards will lay smooth side up – sharp edges will press against the ground, not against your foot – but this isn’t always the case. So, when you put your foot down, you must move it slowly back and forth, helping the glass settle into the right distribution so that you can put your entire weight on that foot without getting hurt. Do not transfer pressure to that foot until you are absolutely certain you won’t cut yourself. Then repeat the process. The idea is to take it slowly, for two reasons. One, you don’t want to cut yourself. Two, the slower it is done the more pain the performer appears to be going through. In reality, any pain is caused by walking on the broken glass too fast.
How to walk on hot coals – How to firewalk
A bed of burning hot coals. A fakir in bare feet, who then shows his resistance to pain by walking across the bed. No burns, no injuries, no skin grafts.
This technique is also worryingly used by new agers nowadays to show how you too can become a new person, overcome challenges, ignore adversity, and generic feel-good crap like that. Walking on hot coals works because your feet aren’t very good at heat conduction. If you stop in any one place, you’ll soon be walking on two well-done steaks, but if you keep moving, keep walking, you won’t be burned because there’s not enough time for heat to transfer from any coal to your feet.
How to cut off your tongue, swallow it, and restore it
A fakir takes a knife and grabs his tongue. He cuts off the end of his tongue, puts it back in his mouth and amazingly it’s restored.
What’s that smell? Yes, it’s baloney.
This is a proper magic trick because there’s some real obfuscation going on. Out of all the tricks here, this is the only one I would suggest you could follow along with. Unless you can’t trust yourself with a knife, then don’t do it.
First, you need something that resembles a tongue. Just make sure it’s edible and wet. In the book “Swami and Mantra” by Sam Dalal, Dalal suggests using a goat’s tongue, which is often the traditional tongue-replica used. Cut it into a shape that looks like the end of your tongue. And to be honest, it just needs to be approximate. If you perform the trick properly it won’t matter.
Hold the fake tongue (tip down) in your left hand held between your first finger and thumb. Cover the fake tongue by keeping your fingers closed around it. This may look dodgy, but will look fine with practise. The emphasis should be on the knife in your right hand. Just show it, and as you bring the knife to your mouth, bring the fake tongue up as well. Make sure you don’t uncover the fake tongue until your fingers are next to your mouth. Spread your fingers so that only your finger and thumb are holding it next to your mouth. Now just pretend to cut and place the fake tongue in your mouth. Chew. Swallow. And reveal. You could also use a blood bulb or a blood pellet for even more disgusting realism.
How to be a human blockhead
This is also a classic used by “geeks” as well as fakirs. (A “geek” is a term for someone who does things that look like a trick, but they’re not hiding anything – the trick is as real as it appears to be.)
For the “human blockhead”, a fakir takes a nail and slowly hammers it into his nose. This is tough – I’ve personally never been able to do this anywhere near as well as the geeks or fakirs. Some can do this with a 5-inch nail! For some reason I’ve never been able to do anything more than a 3-inch nail. But, I can still easily describe what to do.
With snake flossing, I described the gap that’s above your nostril, leading into your nasal cavity. This is where the nail goes. Hold the nail horizontally to your nose and find that gap with the end of the nail. Then slowly push the nail in while breathing heavily through your mouth (it helps, trust me). With practice, you can insert it deeper and deeper. You’ll also learn other techniques, like those preventing you from sneezing. As I’ve said, do not try this yourself, but if for some dim-witted reason you’re going to anyway, please don’t use a nail. Start with cotton buds or Q-tips.
Conclusion
There are plenty of tricks out there performed by fakirs, designed to convince you of their supernatural or religious strength. Electric powers, chi, pushing nails or needles in and through various places. If you’ve got a specific question or example not mentioned here, comment on this article. Or just drop me an email and I will help as much as I can. In some cases, we’re dealing with performed effects which I won’t reveal for the sake of others. But I’ve never seen the “tongue-swallowing trick” performed by a magician, for example, so I think I’m fairly safe in revealing how that one is done.
While these tricks are entertaining and fun to watch, there’s something more to be learned here. When someone makes a particular claim, there’s no inherent reason why that claim must be believed. Not when – as we learned here – deception, cons and tricks can be so much fun. And profitable. And easy.
Podcast
Support
Email alerts
RSS
Facebook