The Magic Story (Condensed Classics): The Mysterious Classic of Self-Transformation

By Frederick van Rensselaer Dey and Mitch Horowitz

Discover the Mysterious “You” Who Cannot Fail

The Magic Story—one of the most intriguing and powerful works of inspiration ever written—reveals the unknown but entirely real you: a stronger, resilient, and more capable being who shadows your daily existence and requires only that you invite it in.

In this imaginary but starkly real tale, author Frederick van Rensselaer Dey (1861–1922) reveals this “plus-entity” and how to encounter it. Originally published in 1900, Dey’s beguiling and instructive story is a “magic key” for all who wish to become the person they are truly intended to be.

This volume includes the complete text, an original publisher’s preface, and a new introduction by spiritual thinker Mitch Horowitz making it the signature edition of Dey’s mysterious classic.

“Since earliest childhood,” Mitch writes in the introduction, “you have probably felt, as I have, that you are two selves. Be guided by the principle of The Magic Story: select the self that builds you. It represents a more powerful choice than may at first appear.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: G&D Media
• Release date: May 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781722526290

Frederick van Rensselaer Dey

Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey (February 10, 1861 – April 25, 1922) was an American dime novelist and pulp fiction writer. Born in Watkins Glen, New York, to David Peter Dey and Emma Brewster Sayre, he attended the Havana Academy and later graduated from the Columbia University Law School. He practiced law and was a junior partner of William J. Gaynor, who went on to become the mayor of New York. Dey took up writing while recovering from a serious illness and his first full-length story was written for Beadle and Adams in 1881. “The Magic Word” and “The Magic Story,” written in 1899, were extremely popular and passed through some twenty editions. He was married twice and had two children.

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  Introduction

DISCOVERING YOUR STORY WITHIN THE MAGIC STORY

By Mitch Horowitz

If you’re like me, you often walk around feeling like there are two of you—dual selves fighting for dominance.

And you are right: There are, in a sense, two personas struggling within us all, like Jacob and Esau.

We experience this when we feel ourselves divided between ordinary life and peak possibility. People often harbor the feeling that they could become a writer, or could get straight A’s, or could excel at work, or could find a positive relationship … if only they were able to freely throw themselves upon the energies of their higher, better, more formidable doppelgänger, waiting to be released. This possibility is real, but it is rarely, or only fleetingly, exercised.

Many modern fiction writers and psychologists, not to mention their ancient and folkloric forebears, have posited the existence of this other self. Psychologist Carl Jung famously called it the shadow, which he identified as a fount of unacknowledged desires and proclivities; if acknowledged and integrated into your day-to-day consciousness, these shadow traits could lead to the growth of untapped powers, confidence, and abilities. For fantasy writer Robert Louis Stevenson, the other self was the malevolent Mr. Hyde, a feral counterpart to the refined and approachable persona of Dr. Jekyll. For Edgar Allan Poe, the other side was represented by William Wilson, the title of Poe’s 1839 short story in which his protagonist, the debauched Wilson, grows up alongside an uncanny double who shares his name, appearance, and birthdate, and who eventually turns out to be the maleficent hero’s alienated conscience.

Many fiction writers, like Stephen King in his 1989 novel, The Dark Half, see the other self as a figure of repressed violence and evil. But that reflects only one sliver of the split-self riddle of human nature. More important for our purposes, your counter-self can be a figure of relative fearlessness, effectiveness, and ability. Author Napoleon Hill highlighted these possibilities in his 1937 self-help classic, Think and Grow Rich. (A book that you do yourself a disservice by not reading if you permit yourself to be put off by its seemingly gauche title.) Hill wrote:

O. Henry discovered the genius which slept within his brain, after he had met with great misfortune, and was confined to a prison cell in Columbus, Ohio. Being FORCED, through misfortune, to become acquainted with his other self, and to use his IMAGINATION, he discovered himself to be a great author instead of a miserable criminal and outcast. Strange and varied are the ways of life, and stranger still are the ways of Infinite Intelligence, through which men are sometimes forced to undergo all sorts of punishments before discovering their own brains, and their own capacity to create useful ideas through imagination.

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