28 MAGIC WORDS something beyond. They are the coveted guarded secrets 0 that grant admittance into inner chambers 1 and secret circles. Open sesame: these "two simple words change the landscape," invite us to "discover hidden treasures," and affirm "an entire range of extraordinary things . . . indescribable only because they have not been described." 4 With open sesame, "the impossible and the unobtainable miraculously materialize before your very eyes." There is no more classic, no more straightforward magical key than open sesame. It exemplifies how precisely the right words are required for working magic. "When Ali Baba wanted to enter the cave of the forty thieves, he had to have the right password. He could yell out, 'Open, brown rice' or 'Open, shredded wheat' forever, but nothing was going to happen until he said, 'Open, sesame.'" Open sesame is a badge of knowledge, of wisdom, of initiation, and of authority. 7 Essayist Susan Cooper suggests that magic words like open sesame guide us to finding our way into the unconscious mind, the place where imagination resides, and we use them "because we know that's the only way to get into a place where magic is made. 'Open sesame!' I am shouting, silently, desperately to the door of my imagination." 8 Even before they begin working their magic, the words open sesame are, by definition, always called for at a magical time and place. In other words, before one speaks "open sesame," one is already standing between two worlds, at a magical threshold (or liminal zone -- see Abraxas), ready to call upon a veil to be parted and for a spectacle to unfold. 9 There's already electricity in the air, sizzling with the promise of a miraculous, legendary payoff. (Best of all, the acquisition will be effortless.) Novelist Henry James described such a magical instant: "that pitch of the wondrous was in everything, particularly in such an instant 'Open Sesame,' and . . . the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the 0 David Britland, Phantoms of the Card Table (2004) 1 Reginald Hill, Death's Jest-Book (2004) 2 Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper (2004) Scott Cunningham, Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (1985) 4 Marina Tsvetayeva, Letters: Summer 1926 (1985) 5 Katie Hickman, Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon (1987) 6 Eknath Easwaran, Meditation (1978). Similarly: "Change the structure of the sentence; substitute one synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find him- self as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying 'Open Wheat,' 'Open Barley,' to the door which obeyed no sound but 'Open Sesame'" (Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays [1865], quoted in Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics by Frances W. Pritchett [1994]). 7 Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins (2001) 8 Dreams and Wishes (1996) 9 For, as poet Jules LaForgue has said, "the Infinite is at our doors! at our windows! Open, and see those Far-Off Nights and all Time with them!" (Selected Poems [1890], translated by Graham Dunstan Martin [1998]).