Harry August Jansen, Dante the Magician, Copenhagen 1883, took the phrase from a Danish children's song he learned at his mother's knee, Hojt pa en gren en krage, and began using it on stage around 1927 instead of hocus pocus, touring it worldwide through the Sim Sala Bim Magical Review. The song's own source reaches further back: the medieval folk play Robyn Hode: A Mummers Play, where a Turkish alchemist revives the hero with a golden elixir and the words sim salabim. The chain continues: Jonny Quest's Hadji in 1964, Johnny Carson's Carnac the same era, each borrowing the remembered magic of the last.
Dante's own gloss was pure showmanship: sim sala bim means a thousand thanks, and the more applause, the bigger the bow, the more thanks the words would mean, a meaning retrofitted nightly by audience volume. Whit Haydn revived the phrase as tribute and confessed its appeal was phonetic, the Aladdin-ish sound. The Swedish treat it as their native abracadabra. Nobody, in any country, has ever produced a lexical meaning. The words work because they sound like they should.
The claim: sim sala bim exposes what all magic words are, feedback loops where the audience's belief in the words is the actual effect, and Dante's thank-you scaling is the honest confession most magicians withhold: the incantation's power is calibrated by the crowd, not the syllables; the spell is the room. Verdict: the documented history supports it, the phrase migrated on charisma, not grammar. The archive's whole spellwords wing converges here: the words are spells because someone with a stage said so first. Dante was just the rare one who said so openly.
If the spell's meaning is a thank-you scaled to the clapping, was the magic ever in the words, or always in the audience?