In his commentary on Gaudapada's explanation of the Mandukya Upanishad, the 9th-century Hindu teacher Adi Shankara, illustrating a philosophical point, wrote of a juggler who throws a thread up into the sky; he climbs up it carrying weapons and goes out of sight; he engages in a battle in which he is cut into pieces, which fall down; finally he arises again. However, his demonstration was a failure as the boy who climbed the rope was observed by the audience to have swung to the end of another rope behind a curtain. According to that miniseries, the tour travelled the world investigating historical tricks, and while in India they travelled to Agra, where they recreated the trick.

Pu Songling records a version in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1740) which he claims to have witnessed personally. Revealing the Psychology of Playing Card Magic, in the Scientific American, July 31, 2012, http://scientificamerican.After being granted four days to prepare the site, the presentation was filmed by Gaumont British Films. Robert Elliot of the London Magic Circle, when offering a substantial reward in the 1930s for an outdoor performance, found it necessary to define the trick.

When a magician acts out the visible catch of an imaginary deck of cards thrown by a spectator, or throws a ball in the air where it vanishes, the appearance or disappearance really occurs at the location of the magician's hand, but to most spectators (two out of three in actual testing [55]) the magic appears to occur in mid-air. As they uncoiled it and held it up it became stiff; it was evidently jointed bamboo with the joints made to lock. He translated an article by the German magician Erik Jan Hanussen who claimed to have observed the secret to the trick in a village near Babylon. The real challenge was to perform the full trick including the disappearance of the boy in broad daylight, outside in the open air.Huddleston writing in Nature, claimed to have spent more than thirty years in India and knew many of the best conjurors in the country but not one of them could demonstrate the trick. A "smoke producing preparation", combined with the blinding sun, gave the illusion of disappearance for the boy. The lifter continues to look upwards and holds a conversation with the "climber" using ventriloquism to create the illusion that a person is still high in the air and is just passing out of sight. Nobody ever claimed this reward and he considered the full trick to be a myth, never successfully demonstrated. Perhaps more importantly, he found the more spectacular accounts were only given when the incident lay decades in the past.

The boy then conceals himself inside the magician's voluminous outer garment, and clings to him as the magician climbs down seemingly alone.The magician's son climbs the rope, vanishes from sight, and then (supposedly) tosses down a peach, before being "caught by the Garden's guards" and "killed", with his dismembered body falling from above in the traditional manner. A diminutive boy, not much larger than an Indian monkey, climbed up to the top of the pole and was out of sight of the audience unless they bent forward and looked beneath the awning, when the sun shone in their eyes and blinded them. In 1950, John Booth offered a reward of 25,000 rupees to any conjuror in India who could successfully demonstrate the trick. Online you’ll find countless tutorials and YouTube clips, which explain – step-by-step – how to do the rope tricks above, as well as many more. No magician has yet sent a small boy up a rigid rope and caused him to vanish at the top, or to fall to the ground dismembered.