Perspectives on Magic: Scientific Views on Theatrical Magic

Perspectives on Magic

Scientific Views on Theatrical Magic

Peter Prevos

Third Hemisphere Publishing

c Peter Prevos (2013) Third Hemisphere Publishing, Kangaroo Flat, Australia thirdhemisphere.net This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License. You are free to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work under the following conditions:

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Contents

Preface W HY THIS BOOK ?

v

Acknowledgements W HO HELPED ME WRITE THIS BOOK ?

x

1 Introduction W HAT IS MAGIC ?

1

2 The Science of Magic H OW DOES MAGIC RELATE TO SCIENCE ?

12

3 The Art of Magic I S MAGIC A PERFORMANCE ART ?

23

4 Magic Networks W HAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A MAGICIAN ?

37

iii

iv 5 The History of Magic W HAT ROLE DID MAGICIANS PLAY IN THE PAST ?

54

6 The Power of Magic W HAT IS THE PRACTICAL USE OF CONJURING ?

70

7 The Magic of Teaching W HAT CAN WE LEARN FROM MAGIC TRICKS ?

81

8 The Deception of Magic H OW CAN WE BE SO EASILY BE DECEIVED ?

97

9 The Future of Magic W ILL MAGIC BECOME OBSOLETE ?

112

10 Epilogue W HAT IS THE SCIENCE OF MAGIC ?

124

Bibliography

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www.magicperspectives.net

Preface W HY THIS BOOK ? For as long as I can remember, performing magic has been a part of my life. To be more precise, I am an occasional conjurer and use sleight-of-hand and other forms of deception to feign being a real magician. I started adding magic to my life as a schoolboy in the Netherlands. I devoured books from the local library, collected magic sets from the toy shop, and constantly attempted to amaze friends and family. My passion for magic was unrelenting in those early years, and I showed magic tricks to anyone who was interested and, in my enthusiasm, also to those who were not. I performed in many local talent contests and at family birthday parties and even some paid performances. Magic was, however, not the career I chose to follow. After completing an engineering degree I took on a job that allowed me to travel to exotic places where communication was often complicated by language barriers. In those situations, magic tricks and balloon animals were the perfect tool to overcome these barriers and make instant friends. Soon after I started my career I achieved my personal goals in engineering and began a degree v

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Why this book?

in philosophy to study the mysteries of existence. Because of all the serious thought involved with this study, I became disillusioned with the triviality of magic. I was no longer able to see the meaning of conjuring beyond the mundane trickery and clichés employed by magicians. Much of magic has a “look at me” aspect, and it can be an egocentric performance art. In retrospect, I was disillusioned because at that time I did not have sufficient insight to move beyond the stereotypes. As such, I replaced my passion for magic with a passion for philosophy and completed a degree in this subject. It was only years later that I realised that my interest in philosophy was actually strongly related to my interest in magic, and that magic is an inherently philosophical performance art. I read some books on the history of magic which described the connection between magic tricks and divination and other esoteric practices. I began to realise that the ancient shaman, the tribal philosopher, was also a conjurer, a master of sleight-of-hand. A magic performance is in essence a theatrical experience that challenges reality as we know it, which is an inherent philosophical quality. Magic challenges the mind in a way that no other performance art can. My passion was rekindled when I discovered the works of Jay Sankey, Tommy Wonder, Eugene Burger and Jeff McBride, some of the magicians that inspired me the most. Their work displays a passion and a philosophical understanding of theatrical magic that takes it beyond mere trickery. Reading their books and watching their videos renewed my enthusiasm for this quaint performance art. I still occasionally perform magic shows, but now my main interest in magic stems from what it can teach us about ourselves and about the world around us. My passion for academic research has www.magicperspectives.net

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Why this book?

never waned, and at the time of completing this book I am a PhD candidate at La Trobe University in Melbourne, researching organisational culture and customer service. Being a graduate student provides me access to the ivory tower of academia and its immense knowledge networks. During my research I discovered an article by professors Terence Krell and Joseph Dobson from Western Illinois University, advocating the use of magic tricks to teach theories of organisational behaviour. This started me on a quest to establish an annotated bibliography of scientific and professional literature related to conjuring. To my pleasant surprise I uncovered a vast number of journal articles and scholarly books that discussed magic from many different perspectives. Studying magic scientifically started at the end of the nineteenth century with psychology experiments. The last few decades there has been a renaissance of scholarly research into magic, with publications in many different fields of science. The idea to write this book came to me when I discovered that anyone not formally associated with academia can be charged more than thirty dollars to purchase a short article from an academic journal. This places access to much academic knowledge outside the reach of most people. It is unfortunate that the collective knowledge of the world is locked up behind ironclad copyright contracts and is not available freely to the taxpayers who funded much of this research. Another motivation to write this book is that science is sometimes just as esoteric as magic. Scientific knowledge is often shrouded in an obscure language that is only comprehensible to those initiated in its traditions, and each field of science is a subculture with its own language and methods. The main purpose of this book is to unlock the literature on theatrical magic to non-scientists who are interested in this ancient performance art. My objective in writing this book is to show that theatrical magic has much to offer www.magicperspectives.net

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Why this book?

beyond frivolous entertainment. This book is an attempt to unlock the professional and scientific literature on conjuring for those with an interest in deceptive theatre. In order to provide a broad understanding of the art of conjuring, this book contains the collective musings of a wide range of professionals and academics, including teachers, psychologists, occupational therapists, mathematicians, and sociologists. Magic tricks are used by health care professionals to aid them in rehabilitation programs, by teachers to illustrate principles of science, and by psychologists to better understand how the mind works. Magic research also provides a unique perspective on cultural history, and in recent years there has been a steady stream of scholarly works interpreting the role of magicians in society. Studying this extensive collection of literature about magic has uncovered many interesting insights into magic, its past, present and possible future as a performance art. Given the variety of scientific subjects covered in these pages, this book is also an enquiry into the nature of science itself. The research described in this book shows that there is no such thing as the science of magic but that artful deception can be investigated from many diverse angles of human enquiry, ranging from the humanities and psychology to software engineering and nursing. My journey through the wide variety of literature available on this subject taught me that only a multidisciplinary study can provide a meaningful understanding of a social phenomenon such as magic. Each field of intellectual endeavour provides a unique perspective on magic as an art form, as a psychological curiosity or as a means to achieve practical goals beyond entertainment. In contrast to most other books about magic, this book does not contain any descriptions of how to perform magic tricks. There are no explanations of new ‘moves’ to make a card change from black www.magicperspectives.net

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Why this book?

to red, no ‘sleights’ to make a coin disappear, like is usually the case in books about magic. One chapter is dedicated to why magic tricks work, but not discuss any details on how they work. This book has been written for both experienced magicians and people with only a passive interest in magic. My aim is to provide magicians with a deeper understanding of their craft and to inspire them to keep evolving the performance of magic. For people with only a passive interest in magic, this books aims to provide insights into a quaint performance art that is generally surrounded in secrecy and muffled by clichés, without breaking the magician’s code. Magic and science have in common that they both are driven by questions. The inherent nature of scientific research means that with every answer many new questions arise. It is my hope that this anthology of the existing literature on the science of conjuring will raise new questions and spawn further research into this fascinating performance art.

Peter Prevos, Kangaroo Flat, May 2013.


Acknowledgements W HO HELPED ME WRITE THIS BOOK ? This project has taken me almost four years to complete and would have been impossible to publish this book without the help of others. I owe a gratitude to the many scholars in different fields that have taken the effort to publish papers and books on a niche subject such as theatrical magic. I also need to acknowledge the many anonymous subjects of experiments conducted by psychologists and occupational therapists. They are the unsung heroes of some of the research described in this book. My magician friends from Melbourne and overseas have been very supportive during this long project, and although many may have wondered whether this book would ever be published, their continued interest is what sustained my motivation to keep working on this book. Thanks to Tom Stevens for his permission to use one of his Facebook updates. Also, a special mention for Alex de la Rambelje, who gave me invaluable feedback on my thoughts about magic and let me use his university thesis on the theatrical aspects of magic performance. The invaluable feedback provided by magicians Nicholas, The Honest Con Man, Johnson, Gary Cox

Who helped me write this book?

xi

hen and Brendan Croft, all from Melbourne, and Tony Barnhart, a cognitive scientist and magician from Phoenix, and Fritz (with a Z) from Amsterdam, kept me motivated to continue working on this project. Also a word of thanks to my wife Sue, who was so kind to proofread the text and had to endure conversations with me from behind a laptop screen. This book was edited by Marissa van Uden, my secret weapon in completing this project. It is only through her insightful feedback and critical reading of my drafts that I was able to transition an otherwise tedious annotated bibliography into a readable book. Lastly, my thanks to Susan Hobbs of Pair of Aces Design for her patience with me in designing the cover for this book and the artwork for the associated website.


Chapter 1 Introduction W HAT IS MAGIC ? The magician introduces three cups and three balls. Using a magic wand, he commands the balls to dematerialise from his bare hands and rematerialise under the cups. The balls seem possessed by supernatural powers as they appear, disappear and penetrate solid matter at the mere whim of the magician. This supernatural choreography ends with pieces of fruit appearing under the cups where the balls once were. The spectators applaud after witnessing this ancient miracle. Although they are impressed and entertained, a nagging thought lingers in their minds: How did he do it? Among the spectators is a group of university colleagues who reflect on what they just experienced. They enjoyed the show as much as everyone else, but they have very different questions than the rest of the audience. The psychologist wonders how it is possible that his mind was so easily deceived by the performer. How can it be that we are tricked to be seeing something that contradicts our com1

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What is magic?

mon sense view of the world? The psychologist’s friend, a professor in humanities also enjoyed the show. She wonders how the fruit appeared under the cups, but also ponders the cultural significance of magic and the reasons it has remained popular for millennia and across different cultures. Her husband, who works as an occupational therapist at the local hospital, is also an amateur magician. He contemplates the incredible hand-eye coordination and muscle control required to perform the trick he just saw, and he wonders if magic tricks could be used in occupational therapy. Meanwhile, another magician sitting in the back of the room has a very different perspective. Although she is fully aware of how the performer directed the attention of the spectators and used sleight-of-hand to create the illusion of magic, she was nevertheless impressed and entertained by the performance, in particular by the flawless execution of the Vernon Wand Spin and other technical manoeuvres. She is even more impressed by how the performer was able to hold the spectator’s attention with his beautifully executed choreography and enthralling presentation. I I I I This anecdote illustrates how the performance of magic tricks can have very different meanings to different spectators, depending on their personal perspective. It also shows that the question of how a magic trick is done and what specific techniques have been used to create illusions is only one of many questions that may be raised in the minds of the audience during a magic performance. In the following chapters, we will explore the many facets of conjuring and discuss the many questions raised by scientists and professionals from diverse areas of expertise. But before we can delve into their research, we need to define what it is that magicians actually do and review the different interpretations of what constitutes magic. www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

The relationship between magic and science is a complex one. On the one hand they are considered each other’s opposites, while on the other hand they can be seen as stages in a continuum of human knowledge. The word ‘magic’ is usually reserved for anything that contradicts what we consider to be the laws of nature. Some adopt a less confrontational view and think that the difference between magic and science is related to a lack of knowledge. This confusion is as least partly created because the word ‘magic’ can be used in different ways. The meanings of words, especially those ingrained in the cultural fabric of society, evolve as the values that underpin the culture change. Magic is, in the words of philosopher Walter Gallie, an essentially contested concept: terms that describe a complex aspect of humanity (such as ‘culture’ and ‘religion’), that are laden with value and whose meanings can be debated at length without a final definition ever being agreed upon. There are three ways of looking at essentially contested concepts such as magic. The dogmatic view places magic in diametrical opposition to science. A belief in magic is usually seen as a rejection of science and vice versa, thinking scientifically as a rejection of magic. This is the view of many scientists who use the term ‘magical thinking’ to refer to theories that are contrary to the principles of scientific thinking, such as astrology and homoeopathy. In the sceptical point of view, no claim to truth is made, and magic and science are seen as equally subjective personal perspectives. It should be noted that the philosophical use of the word ‘scepticism’ in this context is different to that used by the many sceptic societies. In philosophical scepticism, all claims to truth are considered equally invalid, both magical and scientific. The popular sceptic societies, such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry or the Skeptics Society, are not philosophically sceptical as they only question paranormal theories www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

and assume the primacy of science. However, neither the dogmatic view nor the sceptical view is insightful regarding the relationship between magic and science. Both lead to either diametrically opposed views, where one side aims to annihilate the other, or to nihilistic views devoid of all meaning. Gallie’s third option, an eclectic view of magic, gives credence to both magic and science as valid aspects of the human experience and as ways to make sense of the world. In this interpretation, magic and science don’t compete with each other but are complementary world views. The eclectic view is more productive because using value judgements for either science or magic prevents a full understanding of magic as a phenomenon of human culture. Magic has always been an integral part of human culture; it still plays an important role and will, despite advances in science, continue to do so in the future. What is perceived to be either magical or scientific will, however, change continuously along with cultural perspectives. The discourse on science versus magic is complicated by the fact that the word ‘magic’ itself is deceptive. This simple word can be used to describe different aspects of the human experience. The word ‘magic’ can refer to either the theatrical illusion of magic or supernatural magic. The often paraphrased definition of a theatrical magician by the nineteenth-century French conjuring legend Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin illustrates this duplicity: “A magician is an actor playing the role of a magician”. This quote has been cited by numerous magicians to remind themselves that showmanship is tantamount in a good magic act. However, if it wasn’t for the double meaning of the word ‘magic’, this sentence would be a tautology: a statement that explains nothing. It would be like saying that a scientist is an actor playing a scientist. The magician seems to be both a pretender and a real magician, both the deceiving conjurer and www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

the powerful wizard. A more precise version of Robert-Houdin’s definition can be found in an 1877 translation of the phrase by English magician Professor Hoffman: “A conjurer is not a juggler; he is an actor playing the part of a magician”. Before the eighteenth century, before science became the dominant source of knowledge in Western culture, the word ‘magic’ was reserved for the ‘dark arts’ or witchcraft. The terms ‘juggling’ or ‘legerdemain’ were used to describe the performing of innocent conjuring tricks by entertainers pretending to be magicians. As the belief in the metaphysical foundations of magic began to wane, so did the distinction between supernatural and theatrical magic, until eventually the words ‘juggling’ and ‘legerdemain’ faded from the English language, with respect to references to magic. The more specific terms, such as ‘conjuring’, ‘legerdemain’ and ‘sleight-of-hand’ are still used in theatrical magic circles, but rarely used in common language. The distinction between the entertainer and the true magician has, however, been maintained in other European languages. For example, the Dutch word ‘goochelaar’, which has the same origin as the word juggler, is used specifically for a person pretending to be a magician to entertain people. The English language is unfortunately burdened with using the same term for wholly different concepts. The contemporary uses of the word ‘magic’—referring to either theatrical conjuring or supernatural magic—are quite distinct from each other, and the proponents of each type of magic form their own subcultures. Theatrical conjurers tend to meet in magic clubs and share their secrets through conventions, books and more recently through video and on-demand Internet videos. The believers in supernatural magic also enjoy meeting regularly to share information. Modern day witches organise themselves in covens and their community has spawned a cottage industry of instant spells, www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

instruction books and courses on how to control your life through these forces. Although both subcultures are based on the idea of magic, they are quite distinct from each other. One major difference is that conjurers tend to be sceptical of supernatural explanations. Research conducted by Peter Nardi, emeritus professor of sociology and regular author on conjuring-related matters (not to be confused with a magician of the same name) showed that magic performers are more sceptical about the existence of magical phenomena than the general public, and by extension even more sceptical than those who follow New Age beliefs. If a conjurer is an actor playing the part of a magician, then what is it that magicians claim to actually do? Attempts to define magic in strict terms have not been very successful, and there exists a myriad of theories explaining what magic is. According to the anthropological view a belief in magic is the belief that supernatural forces can be invoked by a qualified person (such as a shaman or magician) through the power of spoken words or the appropriate actions, usually performed as part of a ritual. Magic in this sense contrasts with scientific theories. Science is deeply rooted in the philosophy of cause and effect and focuses on material causes that eventuate without interference of the scientist. Science is an impersonal and passive philosophy, while magic is based on active human interaction with metaphysical powers. It is in this aspect that magic and science seem diametrically opposed. An alternative view was proposed by English science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who considers magic and science as parts along the same continuum of human experience. He expressed this succinctly in his Third Law of Prediction, which states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. In Clarke’s interpretation, the demarcation between magic and science www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

is not a fixed point; rather, it moves depending on the level of scientific knowledge of the person experiencing the magic. The Third Law carries in it a presumption that magic will be increasingly eclipsed by science as the level of knowledge about the universe increases. All magic is, in this sense, reduced to science that has not yet been made intelligible. For example, appliances that are commonplace in a contemporary house, such as a vacuum cleaner or microwave, would most certainly seem magical to a housewife of the nineteenth century. The Third Law portrays an optimistic view of science in the sense that it will progress towards a complete explanation of the world around us. However, Clarke is wrong to place magic and science along the same continuum. Magic is not in opposition with science or an extension of science, because they both seek answers to different questions. Supernatural magic is a belief system that aims to provide answers to questions related to the meaning of things, while science is a system of knowledge that seeks to explain things, their origins, functions and so on. Magic provides an answer to the question ‘why?’, while science provides explanations and answers to the question ‘how?’ Science and magic are, as such, not incompatible with each other but complementary aspects of the human experience. The position one might take in the discourse of magic versus science does not actually matter. Magic, as a supernatural occurrence, might or might not exist factually, it most certainly exists in a cultural sense. For those with a belief in magic it is a vehicle to provide meaning to their lives. The key to understanding magic as a human phenomenon is neither to explain magic as an alternative to science nor to discount it as irrational nonsense, but to understand it as an integral phenomenon of human existence. By viewing magic as a normal part of human culture instead of a physical phenomenon www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

that needs to be explained, we can form a much richer understanding of social reality. Magic provides the hope that the unrelenting and unpredictable forces of the natural world can be overcome. In this sense magic shares a purpose with science and technology, in that their purpose is also to make the world more understandable and controllable. I I I I Besides the duplicitous meaning of the word ‘magic’ as either a supernatural occurrence or a form of entertainment, the word is also used for something that causes astonishment, even when obviously caused by explainable physical processes. Magician Paul Harris sees astonishment as our natural state of mind; he associates it with a child’s mind-set in which there is little knowledge of the world and everything is magical. This mind-set is the reason that performing magic tricks for children below four years of age is difficult: they do not perceive the presented reality as special because, to them, the whole world is already magical. The word ‘magic’ is often used in advertising to communicate that a product has properties beyond what can normally be expected. Numerous gadgets, such as self-inflating balloons, cloths with astonishing absorption rates and numerous others, are called ‘magic’ by marketers because they possess properties that appear miraculous. A search in the American trademark register reveals thousands of entries that use the word ‘magic’. For example, a company producing herbal nutritional supplements uses the name Jungle Magic™ to communicate the idea that their herbs have properties beyond the regular garden herbs, and a series of cooking appliances sell under the name of Cook Magic™. Using the word ‘magic’ in the branding of products and services taps directly into the human desire for a magical world where mundane activities can be undertaken almost www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

effortlessly. Just as primal cultures believe magic can help to ensure a bountiful hunt, modern day marketers use magic in their hunt for new consumers. Another range of products in this category are ‘magic’ toys designed around natural processes that seem magical to the casual observer. For example, levitating rings that use magnetic repulsion to defy gravity, or a set of concave mirrors that creates the illusion of a coin that is so realistic people try to pick it up. English physics teacher David Featonby laments this use of the word ‘magic’ in these cases. He writes that it hides the fact that these so-called magical toys are based on known principles of physics: “Take the mystery out of physics, but leave the wonder”, is his advice. Featonby distinguishes between two types of magic: the first is sleight-of-hand and trickery, or conjuring; the second is hidden science, which relies on the audience having no full grasp of the science involved. Given that most people are not aware of the science behind the illusions— or do not experience similar effects in their daily lives—the toys are considered magical because they cause astonishment. For practising magicians, however, there is no difference between these two types of magic: both sleight-of-hand and hidden science are considered valid methods of creating the illusion of magic. The final way the word ‘magic’ can be used is to describe the quality of an experience. Watching films or plays or walking in a forest can be ‘a magical experience’, meaning that these experiences have an ephemeral quality, a feeling that only poets can reconstruct in words. Magicians may try to invoke this feeling in their audience through their theatrical performance. For example, Australian magician Raymond Crowe creates a mesmerising display of shadows on a projection screen using nothing but his hands and a spotlight. Although no deception is used to hide the method by www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

which the shadows are created, the audience often describe seeing his performance as a “magical experience”. He also uses mime to enhance the magical illusions that he crafts on stage. Crowe masterfully manipulates a ball to create the illusion that it is floating while never really letting go of the ball with his hand. Through his performance, Crowe emphasises the narrative of a floating ball that tries to escape from him, not the impossibility of the method. Crowe, who calls himself an ’unusualist’ instead of a magician, expressed the magical nature of his art in a lecture to a group of magicians in Las Vegas: “The older I get, the more I like magic that is not a trick”. I I I I Magicians use the word magic in all four of the previously described interpretations: to describe their performance art as well as to indicate the supernatural world they are simulating. Magicians not only create the illusion of magic in the supernatural sense of the word but also create a sense of astonishment through their theatrical performance and provide audiences with experiences that have a magical quality. In this book the words ‘magic’ and ‘conjuring’ are used interchangeably in the context of theatrical magic, which is the craft of creating illusions. Theatrical magic is the performance art which blurs the boundaries between magic and science. Although spectators are most often placed in the frame of the scientist and ask themselves how the magic is performed, as a performance art magic has the ability to shift those questions to why it is possible that they have occurred. The following chapters of this book cover the work done by the many scholars who have written about theatrical magic in an attempt to better understand magic as a performance art itself and how the performance of magic tricks helps us understand human behaviour. The essence of science is asking questions, and in this book some of www.magicperspectives.net

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What is magic?

the answers to the questions that can be asked about theatrical magic are described. Is magic a performance art or simply a playful form of deception? What is it like to be a magician? What role did magicians play in society of the past? What is the practical purpose of magic and what can we learn from magic tricks? And, the question most often asked by scientists, how it is possible that we can be so easily deceived? The answers to these questions not only provide a range of perspectives on magic, they also provide an insight into the diversity of the sciences. This books shows that there is no such thing as the science of magic. There is no single science of magic but rather various scientific perspectives on magic, and these perspectives leave many questions still left unanswered. The final question asked in this book is about the future of magic itself. Will magic slowly disappear as technology renders all miracles common, as predicted by Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction, or will there always be a role for people who are able to entertain through artful deception?


Chapter 2 The Science of Magic H OW DOES MAGIC RELATE TO SCIENCE ? The foundation of all science is to ask questions of the reality around us and of ourselves. Because of the inherent complexity of the natural environment and of the human mind, a wide range of different sciences exist, each asking their own questions and each using their own specific methods to find answers. The fields of endeavour most often portrayed as being representative of science itself are the physical sciences—most importantly physics, chemistry and earth sciences. Physics and chemistry are, on one hand, in stark contrast with what magicians aim to achieve, while on the other hand magicians thankfully exploit the gaps between the audience’s knowledge and scientific knowledge to create the illusion of magic. The relationship between magic and the different fields of science is bidirectional. Magicians use the principles of the natural sciences, linguistics, psychology and formal sciences as methods to create the illusion of supernatural magic and schol12

How does magic relate to science?

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ars in these fields study theatrical magic as a phenomenon. Many self-working magic tricks are based on principles of chemistry or physics, and, in mentalism, information theory can be used to create the illusion of miracles such as clairvoyance or telepathy. In sleightof-hand magic, illusions are created by exploiting the psychological peculiarities of how we perceive the world. Because the words a magician uses can subtly alter the perception of the spectator, linguistics is also important, especially in mentalism, which is essentially magic with information. Magicians also use the engineering principles of the applied sciences to construct self-working mechanical tricks and grand illusions performed on the large stage. Magicians also regularly rely on the formal sciences, such as mathematics and information science, to perform magic tricks. The formal sciences have no subject in themselves and bind all other sciences together as almost all sciences rely on mathematics. The subject of mathematics is not about physical things in reality, but abstract concepts such as numbers, geometric shapes and computer algorithms. It is in this way that mathematics can be considered magical and mysterious. In the early days of mathematics, geometrical knowledge was guarded as an esoteric secret and was known only to the initiated. Even today, mathematics and conjuring are still closely intertwined as many magic tricks rely on the principles of mathematics. What scientific research and magic shows have in common is that the spectator of a magic show is akin to a scientist observing a natural phenomenon. Both scientists and spectators are observing something that they don’t understand. However, a spectator does not have access to a laboratory with the necessary tools to uncover the truth, like a scientist would. The magician presents an alternative version of reality in which the known laws of physics can apparently www.magicperspectives.net


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be broken at his will, but spectators must observe passively, without being able to investigate everything in detail. Spectators consciously know they are being fooled and will instinctively seek out the true cause of what they experience. Their subconscious mind will create causes for what the spectator sees, even if those causes appear magical. The magician, as the prime-mover of his own temporary universe, has a home-ground advantage over the spectators and can direct the spectators’ observation, preventing them from extracting the truth from their perceptions. The relationship between a scientist and the phenomena she studies is very different to that between a spectator and a magic trick. Nature cannot deceive scientists in the way a magician deceives audiences. Scientists force the truth from reality by interrogating it with complicated equipment and sophisticated techniques, a privilege the spectators of a magic show do not have. Magic and science are, from a methodological perspective, each other’s opposites. While magic relies on secrets and deception, science relies on transparency and open communication. Scientists are keen to explain their latest findings to the public to obtain recognition, whereas magicians thrive on secrecy and mystery and hide their knowledge from public view. Hiding the real physical causes creates the illusion that supernatural magic is at play because, even though the audience does not rationally believe in the supernatural, the magician has removed all other logical options. For example, there are logically only three ways in which the illusion of levitating somebody can be achieved: either the person is resting on something, is hanging on something, or is propelled by an upward force. It is the task of the magician to make all three possible explanations seem implausible to the audience. This is usually achieved by using a hoop or similar prop to emphasise that the suspension www.magicperspectives.net


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is fully independent of any supports or wires. Given the current state of science, using an upward force is not plausible as a method because technology to cause objects that are heavier than air to fly are extremely noisy. The audiences’ minds are convinced by the theatrical rhetoric of the magician that none of the three possible methods are used, even though these are logically the only solutions available. A fine example of this is the flying illusion as performed by David Copperfield. His illusion is theatrically beautiful because it is as close as possible to our own experiences of flying in our dreams. Copperfield subtly reminds us in different ways that the use of supports or wires cannot be the method used to fly across the stage, leaving the audience in a state of pure astonishment. Magic and science also have a lot in common: magicians and scientists share both a curiosity about the world around us and a desire to untangle its many secrets. Albert Einstein, the archetypical scientist, is quoted as saying, “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—it is the source of all true art and science”. It is in the reverence of the mysteries of nature that magic and science find each other. Scientists force an answer from nature by using the scientific method and freely share the outcomes of their work with others. Magicians also have an understanding of the physical world and the mind, but rather than using this knowledge to explain how reality works, magicians use it to distort reality and do not share their knowledge with the audience. I I I I Before the mid-eighteenth century, the performance of magic was heavily steeped in the occult. Magicians presented themselves as heirs of the ancient traditions of sorcery, alchemy, and divination. They performed in mystical outfits, mumbled magical invocations and related their performances to a belief in supernatural magic. www.magicperspectives.net


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After the scientific ideals of the Age of Reason began to take hold and industrialisation spread across Europe, Robert-Houdin reinvented the magic show and changed it from a fringe activity that was viewed with suspicion to a middle-class form of entertainment. He based his magic shows on science instead of the occult and ever since Robert-Houdin, the large majority of magicians have distanced themselves from their occult roots. Magicians began to embed their performances in a scientific aura instead of referring to mystical occurrences, which evolved into the abstracted type of magic we know today. Robert-Houdin was one of the first to abandon the mysterious sorcerer outfit of the past and replaced it with a fashionable gentleman’s suit. He portrayed the image of an entrepreneur of the industrial age, and was a magician for a new scientific age. He wrote that in order to be a good magician, it is necessary to have studied the physical sciences, such as chemistry, mechanics and electricity. Many of his tricks were based on his knowledge of science and technology and he presented these feats as scientific demonstrations. However, unlike a scientist, Robert-Houdin did not share his knowledge with the audience. In 1856, after he had retired as a performer, Robert-Houdin was asked by the French colonial government to perform for some of the leaders of the Arab tribes in Algeria. Magic was one of the problems colonising nations had to face when trying to pacify the exotic cultures. The Marabouts, religious and spiritual leaders of Algeria, were perceived by the locals to possess magic powers. The French, who perceived this as a threat to their authority, invited Robert-Houdin to help them neutralise the Marabouts’ influence by staging a magic competition. For this performance, RobertHoudin did not portray himself as a man of science as he would do in Paris; instead, he compared himself with the local traditional www.magicperspectives.net


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magicians. In one of his tricks, he humiliated a strong Arab by inviting him to pick up a box that was held down by an electromagnetic charge, and later humiliated the volunteer further by giving him an electric shock. His performance was enough to convince Marabout magicians that the French occupiers were more powerful than them, thereby thwarting colonial unrest. The event did actually take place, but the details are lost in time. The political nature of the performance set-aside, the story is deeply symbolic for the self-image of European magicians at that time. In his writings, Robert-Houdin portrays the Marabouts as primitive tricksters who were not able to compete with the science-based magic he and his contemporaries performed in Paris. His story has the structure of a traditional mythological story in which an archetypal conflict between scientific civilisation and magical beliefs is fought out. This performance can also be interpreted as a symbol of RobertHoudin reckoning with the past, demonstrating that magic has moved away from the esoteric and into the enlightened age of science. With the popularity of the shows by Robert-Houdin, embedding a magic show in the principles of science became increasingly popular. Robert-Houdin himself presented a trick in which his son seemed to defy the laws of gravity as a demonstration of the powers of ether as he claimed that inhaling these vapours would make somebody as light as a balloon. Magicians in the nineteenth century often adorned themselves with the title of ‘professor’, not only to provide themselves with an aura of respectability but also to indicate that their performances were a demonstration of the miracles of the natural world instead of the supernatural. They showcased an ambiguous distinction between magic and science, claiming to use scientific principles while simultaneously performing magic tricks that seemingly contradicted the known laws of nature. Magic and www.magicperspectives.net


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science were closely intertwined in their performances. Magicians of that age talked of wonderful chemistry, of recreational mathematics, and amusing physics in one instance, and of thought transference, communication with spirits, and levitation in the next. In contemporary magic shows, magic and science are still often intertwined. German magician Thomas Fraps performs a show in which regular magic tricks are used to demonstrate the principles of science. For example, Fraps uses a the classical cut-and-restored rope trick to demonstrate the principles of molecular biology: he uses ‘genetic scissors’ to snip out mutated genes and then magically restore the rope. On the reverse, science can also be used to demonstrate magic. Many physics teachers perform scientific experiments that at first instance seem like magic to their students. Main difference between using magic tricks to demonstrate science on the stage and presenting science as magic in the classroom is that in an educational setting the secret of the magic trick has to be revealed. I I I I One controversial branch of science that has a close relationship with magic is parapsychology, which is the scientific study of supernatural phenomena. Parapsychology is where the battle lines between science and magic are most sharply drawn. In this specialised branch of psychology, researchers investigate the existence of supernatural occurrences such as mind reading, remote viewing and extrasensory perception. The term parapsychology was coined by Max Dessoir, one of the first psychologists with an interest in magic tricks. Magicians and mentalists have long been actively involved in exposing fraud psychics who claim to possess supernatural powers. Magicians play a key role in the many sceptic societies around the world and regularly assist scientists who are investigating supernatuwww.magicperspectives.net


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ral claims to ensure the scientists are not deceived by the subject. To have magicians in attendance during parapsychology experiments is only a recent phenomenon; in the past, scientists were often deceived into believing that a subject possessed supernatural abilities. Mentalists can be so convincing that they fool even scientists who are trained in critical thinking to believe that they have real supernatural powers. Feigning psychic abilities is frowned upon by conjurers, and there is a long tradition of magicians (most famously, Harry Houdini in the early twentieth century) exposing fraud mediums. Magicians enjoy playing this role because, as previously mentioned, they tend to have a lower level of belief in supernatural phenomena than the general population does. In contemporary times, American magician James Randi is the driving force behind this movement. In the early 1980s, he orchestrated an elaborate hoax named Project Alpha to show that it is possible to deceive scientists into believing that supernatural powers exist. The project was mimicked a deception perpetrated by Uri Geller some years earlier where he managed to convince a group of distinguished scientists that he possessed real supernatural powers. Geller was so convincing that the deceived scientists even published their results in the 1974 edition of the prestigious scientific journal Nature. In his re-enactment of this earlier episode, James Randi managed to covertly place two young amateur magicians—Steve Shaw (who now has a career as mentalist Banachek) and Michael Edwards—into a parapsychology laboratory. The two successfully performed many spoon bending experiments and were able to convince the attending parapsychologists that they had psychokinetic powers. The magicians found that it was very easy to deceive the scientists because they did not follow strict protocols. Shaw and Edwards employed basic misdirection www.magicperspectives.net


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techniques used by magicians. They would drop one spoons in their lap and bend it below the table with one hand, while simulating to psychokinetically bend a spoon in their other hand. The two became well known for their believed abilities in parapsychology circles, until Randi decided to reveal the true identity of the purported psychics. The revelation of their perpetration sent shock waves through the parapsychology community because the researchers believed by them to be genuine psychics. There was so much publicity about the deception by the magicians that the McDonnell Lab was eventually closed. Since Project Alpha it is considered good practice for researchers of paranormal phenomena to enlist the help of an experienced magician to be able to rule out the use of deception to fake psychic powers. I I I I The art of conjuring is practised by an estimated half a million people around the world. Most magicians that actively perform are amateurs or semi-professionals that are otherwise also engaged as lawyers, occupational therapists, psychologists, computer scientists, teachers and so on. Most of the works referenced in this book were written by such scientists and professionals from many otherwise unrelated fields of science, who share an interest in theatrical magic. The word ‘science’ is usually reserved for the natural sciences, but the scientific work on conjuring presented in this book shows that science is a much broader concept that deals with the full spectrum of human experience and the natural world. To fully understand a complex phenomenon such as magic, a range of perspectives beyond the natural sciences need to be included in the review. The art of conjuring has been studied by scientists and professionals from three different domains: social sciences, the applied sciences and psychology, each providing their own perspective. www.magicperspectives.net


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The largest field of study with links to theatrical magic are the social sciences. The social sciences, sometimes also called the humanities or behavioural sciences, studies everything people do or believe. While the objective of the natural and social sciences is to explain the world around us, the objective of the social sciences is to understand the social world. This understanding is an inherent subjective state of mind and seeks to find the meaning of actions from the actor’s point of view. Scholars in the social sciences are not necessarily seeking for a final answer to their questions, but are engaged in an ongoing narrative to improve our understanding. From the perspective of the social sciences, a wide variety of questions can be asked of conjuring: Why are there more male than female magicians? What was the cultural significance of the popularity of magic at the end of the nineteenth century? Is magic entertainment or a performance art? The social sciences cover a wide-ranging field of studies that can help answer these questions. Most important to conjuring are performance studies and cultural history, which researches the act of performing magic shows in the present and in the past. Researchers in film theory, linguistics and gender studies have also published their ideas of theatrical magic. The social sciences place the performance of magic in its historical or contemporary context. The answers provided by scholars in humanities can thus help us understand both society itself and the role magicians play within it. In the applied sciences, such as health care and teaching, the fruits of labour of the natural scientists, formal scientists and social scientists are used to improve people’s lives. Engineers use the theories of physics to build bridges or manufacture computers, and health care professionals implement the latest findings in biology to improve our health, and so on. It is in these fields of human www.magicperspectives.net


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endeavour that magic fulfils a practical role. The health sciences are a fertile field for magicians to participate in, especially in occupational therapy where magic tricks are used to assist with improving people’s abilities and self-esteem. Magic tricks are also used in psychotherapy and as a means to reduce anxiety in children who must undergo medical treatment. Another applied science where magic can help professionals perform their tasks is teaching. Many magic tricks are based on the principles of physics, chemistry or mathematics, which makes magic a perfect tool for playfully illustrating the abstract concepts of these sciences. Research into the psychology of magic is as old as the science of psychology itself. Pioneers in this field, such as Alfred Binet, recognised already in the nineteenth century that studying the tricks performed by magicians could teach us about how the mind works. Magicians have extensive experience with using the weaknesses of our perception mechanisms to create illusions. Research on the psychology of magic is currently a very active field and a plethora of journal articles has been published in recent years. In psychology, the main question being asked is how our brains can be so easily deceived into perceiving something that is not true. Studying both magicians and more importantly the reactions of their audiences provides an insight into how the human brain processes information and help us better understand how we experience the world in general.


Chapter 3 The Art of Magic I S MAGIC A PERFORMANCE ART ? Theatrical magic is the art of pretending to perform supernatural magic and, thus, is a form of theatre. The performer is not showing a simple demonstration of supernatural powers, but a theatrical interpretation of what a real magician could be like. Interesting aspect of a magic performance is that the audience knows they are being deceived. No ethical boundaries are, however, crossed because of an unwritten and often unspoken social contract between the spectators and performers. The audience is prepared to momentarily believe in the portrayal in front of them and willingly suspends disbelief for the duration of the performance. Suspension of disbelief is a central concept in theatre and film and occurs when the audience is enticed to postpone judgement concerning the implausibility of what is presented. We suspend our disbelief when watching a film or stage play so that we can avoid thinking about what is actually happening and immerse ourselves in 23

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the story. This suspension of our credulity is only temporary and as soon as the curtain closes or the silver screen goes dark, we are snapped back to normality. In science fiction literature, the term ‘cognitive estrangement’ is sometimes used to describe the psychological process of accepting a story as reality. As in magic, science fiction presents a world in which the impossible seems possible: people drive flying cars or travel through time, objects levitate, and people can predict the future. Cognitive estrangement involves using the audience’s lack of knowledge to promote their suspension of disbelief. In science fiction, this lack of knowledge is often created by the fact that the scientific advances or technological wonders presented do not yet exist. Magic, as a form of storytelling art, is very much aligned with science fiction. In magic, the asymmetry in knowledge between the spectator and the magician is also central to the art, and secrecy is its main currency. The magicians knows the secrets and is the only person that knows what will happen next. The spectators are left in a continuous state of not-knowing, which moves the balance of power securely with the magician and as such provides a platform for deception. One form of magic where a genuine suspension of disbelief is still possible is mentalism. This is a form of magic in which the performer appears to demonstrate extraordinary mental or intuitive abilities, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and so on. Mentalism is essentially performing magic by enacting impossibilities such as mind reading, metal bending or clairvoyance. The science of the brain is not as advanced as the science of the physical world, and, as expressed by Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction, there is ample opportunity for spectators to believe that mentalism could be real supernatural magic. Many people are prepared to believe that Uri Geller can actually bend metal with his mind or that John Edwww.magicperspectives.net


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ward can actually communicate with deceased people. Some believe so strongly in the existence of the paranormal that they proclaim that English mentalist Derren Brown actually possesses supernatural powers, even though he openly admits to being a magician and using deception. Cinema is a form of art that has a lot in common with magic. Cinema is an inherently deceptive art. Both in magic and cinema, the viewer is deceived into temporarily believing something is occurring that, in reality, is not. The deception created by magicians is explicit as the inherent purpose of conjuring is the transcendence of what we know about physical reality. In cinema, the deception is implicit and occurs in three layers. Firstly, our brain is tricked into interpreting the continuous stream of still pictures as a moving image. Secondly, relying on the principles of ventriloquism, the mind is tricked into thinking the sounds emanating from the speakers are actually coming out of the actor’s mouths. And lastly, audiences suspend their disbelief and embrace the idea that they are watching real people in a real world. The magician and the film director have similar problems to solve: both seek to create an alternate reality that the spectator can temporarily believe to be real, both seek to create a high level of believability, and both aim for the spectator to suspend disbelief and accept the narrative presented as real. Given the social contract between spectators and magicians, which acknowledges that deception will be used, nobody truly believes that the performer has genuine magical powers. The audience knows that subterfuge and deceit will be used to create the illusion of magic. This is also the case with cinema: viewers are consciously aware that they are sitting in a theatre watching a two-dimensional screen, but they are conditioned to suspend disbelief in order to immerse themselves in the story. www.magicperspectives.net


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No matter how similar magic and cinema are in their deceptive aim—which is to create a temporary reality that seems plausible— these two forms of performance art are separated by distinct differences. The major difference is that audiences watching a magic show continuously ask themselves the question “How is it done?”, while visitors of a cinema are more likely to wonder “What happens next?”. However, this difference did not exist in the early days of cinema, as will be discussed in chapter five. Magic is a form of theatre by virtue of it pretending to be a manifestation of supernatural magic, without claiming it to be real. Deception is not the defining feature of a magic show; other performance arts also use deception. The defining feature of a magic show is its ability to provide spectators with a sense of astonishment. With magic being a form of theatre, magicians prefer to call themselves artists in the sense that actors and musicians are considered artists. The fact that magic is a form of theatre does, however, not imply that it is also a performance art. Not every form of theatre can automatically be called an art. Magic can, however, not be simply compared with other forms of performance arts because it has some special features not shared by other forms of theatre. In the following pages, we will review the literature on the performance aspects on magic and explore whether, and under which conditions, magic can be considered a fully fledged form of art. I I I I Now that we have characterised magic as a form of theatre, are we then also justified in saying that magic is a performance art? Magic has a fairly low status compared to other forms of theatre. Jerry Seinfeld expressed it in his usual observant manner in his book Seinlanguage: “What is the point of the magician? He comes on, he fools you, you feel stupid, show’s over. You never know what’s www.magicperspectives.net


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actually happened. It’s like, Here’s a quarter. Now it’s gone. You’re a jerk.” The place of magic in performance art is highly debated among contemporary magicians. Online magic shops such as Theory11 and Ellusionist call their magicians ‘artists’, and the influential magicians of the McBride’s Magic & Mystery School aim to elevate magic to a serious performance art. The aspirations of magicians to become recognised as artists are not widely supported by the general community. Bengali magician Aladin lamented the perception of magic as a “tributary of popular entertainment”. In the Performance Research journal he writes about how he is caught up within the stereotypes society holds about magic. Aladin struggles with his identity as a magician and he sees the magic community’s own unwillingness to “eschew critical, theoretical or dialectical enquiry” as a major cause for its low status as a performance art. Dramaturgical analysis of magic performances are almost exclusively written by magician’s themselves, with Showmanship by Magicians by Dariel Fitzkee and Magic and Showmanship by Henning Nelms as often-cited examples. The academic literature on theatre studies largely ignores magic as a performance art. Standard reference work The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, for example, has only one short entry on ‘magic shows’ and brief lemmas on Harry Houdini and Harry Kellar. Academic journals in the field of performance studies are also mostly silent on the performance of magic tricks and other types of variety performances. Academic quarterly The Drama Review, a journal that focuses on performances in their social, economic and political context, has published only a handful of articles on magic in the past four decades. The low status of magic as a performance art has been illustrated in a short polemic in the journal Stage Directions. Magician Jeff www.magicperspectives.net


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Busby wrote a letter to the journal in response to an earlier statement by theatre writer and educator John Bliss, who criticised a theatre university graduate for working as a magician. In Busby’s opinion, this gave the impression that “being a magician is beneath being an actor”. Even though Busby disagrees with Bliss, he acknowledges that many magicians are “embarrassing exemplifications of amateurish copies of what is considered a minor variety act”, and encourages a change in attitudes towards magic by both magicians and theatre professionals. Busby closes by stating that being a magician is not necessarily merely a temporary job for an otherwise unemployed theatre professional. Magic can be a full form of theatre. The belief in the character of a magician epitomises, in Busby’s view, what a genuine actor in that part should be. Theatre director and Shakespeare scholar Bernard Beckerman takes an egalitarian view of all types of performance art and does not distinguish between low and high art. Beckerman does not view magic as a lowly form of entertainment and included it in his review of all forms of theatre. In his theoretical reflections on theatre, he includes magic as one of the three types of shows: shows of glorification, such as parades, festivals and the like; shows of skill, such as the circus, jugglers and acrobats; and shows of illusion, such as drama and magic. Beckerman does not equate magic with circus and jugglers, as is usually the case, but places it in the same category as drama. Beckerman distinguishes between magic and drama by the way illusions are used in performances. For example, a ballet dancer actually extends the human limits, while the magician, just like the actor in a drama, only pretends to extend them. He paraphrases Tennessee Williams by saying that a stage magician creates an illusion that has the appearance of truth, while the actor portrays “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion”. www.magicperspectives.net


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Professor of philosophy Warren Steinkraus provided a detailed analysis of magic as a form of theatre in a 1979 article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education. In his article, Steinkraus places magic firmly within the classification of minor performing arts and concludes that a magic performance is “rarely enriching, but nevertheless amuses and evokes awe”. What makes conjuring a minor form of art, according to Steinkraus, is that it offers minimal emotional consequences. Magic tricks do not move us; the only pervasive feelings they arouse are surprise and wonder. In his opinion, magic is thin from an aesthetic point of view because once one has discovered the mystery of how a trick was created, the attraction vanishes. This is not a recent point of view. Roman senator Seneca once wrote to his friend Lucillius, “It is the very trickery that pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I have lost my interest therein.” I I I I In 1974, drama teacher and stage director Julian Olf described the similarities and differences between magicians and other types of performance artists. According to Olf, hiding the true method of a performance is not unique to conjuring; it is central to all performing arts where, unlike visual arts such as painting, the work is performed right in front of the eyes of the spectators. We only ever see the end result of a painting, a statue or a play and not the many failed attempts that were part of the creation process. In performance art, this issue is complicated because the audience is present while the art is being created in front of them. Olf points out that there is a ‘double concealment’ in performances: actors need to conceal both their own personalities and the effort required to achieve this deception. The craft of the magician is the ability to perform a simple action that conceals a complex one. In effect, a magician has to play two roles simultaneously: the part of the performance that can be www.magicperspectives.net


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seen by the audience, and the part that is hidden from the audience. All performance artists use control of attention and concealment to create the required effect on the audience. Actors pretend to be somebody they are not, dancers hide the enormous physical strain they are under, painters create three-dimensional worlds on a twodimensional canvas, and magicians hide the real cause of the effects they create. In the words of novelist Alex Miller, “art bewitches us with its tricks, its illusions, its lies, its forgeries, its sleight-of-hand”. The main difference between a regular theatre and magic is that the overarching objective of the conjuring performance is to create a sense of astonishment with the spectators. In other forms of theatre the objective is to tell a story. Although deception is also used in drama to achieve this objective, it is only a means to tell a story and not necessarily used to create a sense of astonishment. There exists an inherent tension in the performance of magic. The magician seeks to create an experience of astonishment and aims to direct attention away from the deception. The audience is, however, naturally attracted to the deceptive aspects of the performance and seeks out the method used to create the illusions. Contemporary magicians, such as Eugene Burger and Robert Neale, stress that the purpose of magic performances is story telling, but the social contract between the magician and the spectator places prime focus of the performance on deception. This social contract is based on the fact that spectators know they are being deceived. Olf, discusses the inherent tension between the visible and the hidden performances of magicians, and writes that the audience is “bent on believing [the magician] in spite of themselves, and disbelieving him because of themselves”. The magician is confronted by an audience fighting for the integrity of their perception and intellect. Scientific research using brain scanners has confirmed Olf’s deliberwww.magicperspectives.net


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ations about a tension in the spectator’s mind. This research shows that people watching magic tricks are placed into a position where they focus on method because their brain is seeking to regain the cognitive control that the magician removed. Olf concludes that this tension, the cat-and-mouse game between magician and audience, is essential to magic performances. Without it, the magician would be unconditionally believed, and his performance would no longer be considered theatre but a demonstration of supernatural powers. Without this tension, a magic performance would lose one of its most important theatrical tools. The tension of getting caught is therefore essential to the identity of a magician as an entertainer. It is, however, also this tension that keeps magic from being experienced as a genuine form of performance art. When magic is performed as a challenge, the audience is too distracted by their quest to seek out the method to be enthralled by the performance itself. Theorists of the performance of magic such as Tommy Wonder, Eugene Burger and Henning Nelms encourage magicians to reduce the urge of spectators to seek out the method by focusing on storytelling. This way, the spectator’s mind is drawn more to the question on what happens next rather than to how solving the riddle of how something was done. However, because the purpose of a magic performance is to create a magical effect, and because the brain is naturally inclined to try to resolve the riddle, magic can never be a fully-fledged storytelling art. No matter how artful the performance, the niggling question in the spectator’s mind is how did he do it? One of the aspects in which magic differs from regular theatre is active audience participation. In a paper published in The Drama Review, Susan Condos describes the act of street magician Jeff Sheridan, who used to perform at the Walter Street statue in Central Park. www.magicperspectives.net


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Condos describes how Sheridan interacts with the audience instead of making them passive receivers of his performance. He breaks the imaginary barrier between himself and the audience, which is known in theatre studies as breaking the fourth wall. Generally, the distance created by the imagined fourth wall is essential to help the audience accept the fictional work as reality. In some instances, however, an actor may wish to speak directly to the audience, reminding them that they are passive observers. This technique was already used by Shakespeare, but in drama the actors are generally pretending to be oblivious to the fact that they are observed by a multitude of silent spectators. In magic, the fourth wall is often broken when spectators are asked to assist the magician by picking a card or by lending objects to be used as props. The spectator then becomes part of the performance, which changes the dynamic of the performance. In Jeff Sheridan’s silent act, he directly communicates with the audience through mime to enhance their experience of the magic. He starts his act immersed in his own actions, which attracts the attention from the audience. Sheridan then moves his attention to one audience member, usually a woman, and the byplay draws the remaining spectators further into the performance. The chosen spectator assists with the performance by cutting some ropes, which are then artfully restored. In this way the spectator forms an integral part of the show. This is not a specific feature of Sheridan’s performance, but is a basic technique used in almost all magic shows. In contrast to traditional theatre, in magic breaking the fourth wall strengthens the belief of the audience. Audience participation brings them closer to the proceedings, which reduces suspicion of trickery, but partaking in the performance actually reduces the ability of spectators to find solutions to the deception because of the carefully controlled www.magicperspectives.net


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circumstances. Audience participation gives the spectators a false sense of certainty. The closer the audience is to the actions of the magician, the easier it is for them to accept the magic as unexplainable. On the other hand, this closeness also has a negative effect as it reduces the ability of magician to tell a compelling story. I I I I One of the most detailed scholarly accounts of magic as a performance art was written by Alex de la Rambelje, who completed a Bachelor of Performing Arts before becoming a professional magician. In his dissertation, de la Rambelje’s analyses various approaches to the performance of conjuring and distinguishes between three different types: skill-based presentation, dramatic presentation and theatrical-technical construction. In the skill-based presentation, the magician emphasises the skill required to create illusions. This performance style is comparable to a juggling act as they both focus on virtuosity as a predominant performance element. In this approach, magic is limited to being a puzzle, a riddle to be solved. In the dramatic presentation, theatricality is increased because the magic effects are presented so that it engages the audience in some way, usually by attaching a meaningful narrative to the magic. This approach moves away from the limitations of the skills-based approach, but De La Rambelje believes that the dramatic presentation is burdened by the fact that the magic effect and the storyline can nullify each-other, leaving the spectator confused about what to focus on. This approach is often used in so-called Gospel magic, where the tricks are used to illustrate stories from the Bible. The performance is no longer about the magic, but about the story which it tells. The theatrical-technical construction approach differs from the skill-based and the dramatic presentation in that the magician entertains not while doing magic www.magicperspectives.net


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but with magic. This approach embraces the challenge aspect of magic but tempers it by constantly interweaving the theatrical aspect into the challenges. For example, the magician may react to the tricks along with the audience. By acting just as surprised as the audience at each magical occurrence, the magician is performing a dramatic double act: the figure on stage is at once the agent and the victim of the tricks, drawing even more interest from the audience. The technical-theatrical construction type of magic is a format that encompasses a dual awareness. The magician acknowledges that technical skill is involved but tempts the audience into believing in the idea of magic. The audience is constantly torn between knowing that the magic isn’t real and being seduced into the dramatic world of the act. Within this dual awareness lies tension, a foundational tool of theatre as a performance art. This dual awareness also creates an intellectual tension in the mind of the audience where they get the sense that the performer is two beings at once: a character in a play and the technician of the tricks. In contrast, when watching a film in which a character is dangling off a high cliff, the audience cannot be sure how much of the fear belongs to the character and how much belongs to the actor. Not knowing the true state of things is what hooks the curious audience into paying attention to any performance of magic. I I I I Magic as a performance art often struggles to provide the aesthetic or emotionally moving experiences that other performance arts can achieve. An important aspect of magic as a performance art, in the words of sociologist Robert Stebbins, is its “unabashedly commercial nature”. Unlike other forms of performance arts, such as dance and music, there are no formalised aesthetic ideals emanating from the idea of magic as a pure art form. In the fine arts, such as painting, www.magicperspectives.net


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sculpture and so on, the distinction between art and commercialisation is quite sharply drawn, but in magic there is no such distinction. Variety artists may have trouble making a living and may suffer like many visual artists do, but this is not due to a continuous battle between their art and making money, as is often the case in fine arts. Professional magicians generally have no problems changing their performances to suit the needs of their corporate clients or integrating logos and products into their acts to promote business. This has, according to Stebbins, consequences for any discussion related to magic as an art form. Magic as a performance art provides few aesthetic or emotionally moving experiences. This is at least partially caused by the fact that magic is embedded in easily recognisable symbols, such as rabbits and top hats. Magicians are more often than not identifiable by the clothes and props they use, with little individuality distinguishing them. They are therefore given the generic stamp of being a magician rather than being identified as an individual creative artist. Most people that watch a performance will remember that they saw a magician, but are much less likely to remember her name. There are many developments in contemporary magic opposing its own stereotypes and new types of presentations are being developed beyond the top-hats and rabbits. An absolute answer to the question of whether magic performances are a genuine form of art cannot be given, as art is dependent upon its context. As shown by the perspectives presented in this chapter, the majority of magic performances are not considered art in the same way other types of performances are. In addition, just because somebody is an artist does not imply that they produce ‘art’ in the aesthetic sense of the word. The English language suffers in this respect as there is no specific word to denote an artist that prowww.magicperspectives.net


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duces art for the sake of art or an artist performing to entertain. The question posed in this chapter on whether magic is a performance art should be answered positively. But as a performance art it is limited by the stereotypes of magic, preventing it from reaching its full potential. The question of whether magic is a performance art is as much related to the performances themselves as to the magicians that create the performances, who are the topic of the following chapter.


Chapter 4 Magic Networks W HAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A MAGICIAN ? The phenomenon of performing magic for entertainment raises many questions, as illustrated in the opening chapter of this book. How do magicians learn their tricks? What is the magician subculture like? Why are most magicians men? These are the types of questions that scholars in the social sciences provide the answers to. The social sciences are not, as the word implies, one single field of study but rather a collection of sciences. Scholars in diverse fields such as social history, cultural sciences, anthropology, gender studies, linguistics and—most germane to conjuring—theatre studies, as described in the previous chapter, have published on the meaning of magic and magic performances. The aim of the social sciences with regards to theatrical magic is not to explain how audiences can be deceived or how magic tricks can be used practically but rather to provide a narrative that helps us understand what it is like to be a magician and what role magicians play in society. 37

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Until some years ago, not many academics were interested in the world of magic tricks from an scholarly perspective. Academic interest in conjuring started in earnest in 1997 when philosophy lecturer Lawrence Hass at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, started a semester-long academic symposium on magic. Hass intended to convince fellow researchers that magic is a serious performing art, the study of which has implications for many different disciplines in the humanities. The program attracted attention from the media and became popular on the academic calendar at the college. Some publications exist from before that time, but since the symposiums, a steady flow of journal papers and books discussing magic from a theoretical perspective have been published. These works demonstrate that the study of magic is a valuable addition to the field of cultural studies because it illustrates important aspects of what it means to be human. Scholarly monographs such as Modern Enchantments by Simon During and Performing Dark Arts by Michael Mangan seek to untangle some of the complexities of conjuring and its place in human culture. The earlier mentioned Lawrence Hass edited Performing Magic on the Western Stage, which provides a series of social perspectives on magic. Most work on theatrical magic is published in academic journals, such as the journal Early Popular Visual Culture, which in 2007 dedicated a complete issue to theatrical magic. These books are, however, mainly focused on the magicians from the past instead of contemporary magicians. Literature on contemporary theatrical magic in the field of social sciences describes how magicians are organised, how they learn new tricks and what role secrecy plays within their subculture. These books and papers written by anthropologists who use the same methods they would use to study a distant tribe to study the subculture of magicians. Another www.magicperspectives.net


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topic often discussed in the sociological literature on magic is the issue of gender imbalance obviously present in theatrical magic. In this chapter, we will explore these two topics a bit further to gain insights into magic subcultures and provide a perspective on what it is like to be a magician. I I I I Driven by their need to maintain secrecy over their methods, magicians have formed their own subculture: a social environment in which they can talk freely amongst themselves without the risk of exposing their methods to the public. Many magicians are members of magic clubs, such as the International Brotherhood of Magicians or the Magic Circle in London. The oldest societies still in operation were founded around the beginning of the twentieth century, the oldest being the Society of American Magicians, founded in 1902. These societies play an important part in the social world of magicians. The subculture of magicians is best illustrated by the fact that their literature makes a sharp distinction between magicians and their non-magician spectators. Just like religious organisations distinguish between the initiated clergy and the uninitiated laity, in magic fraternities there is a distinction between initiated magicians and their uninitiated audiences. Magicians refer to audiences that have not been formally or informally initiated in the craft of magic as lay people. There is, however, no agreement on when somebody can call themselves a magician. Many members of magic clubs never perform other than to their magician peers, friends and family. Some members of magic clubs only have a passive interest in magic or are collectors of magic books and paraphernalia. Being a magician is in this context not necessarily related to the amount of performances one does, or the fact that others are willing to pay to see a www.magicperspectives.net


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show. Being a magician is part of a person’s identity, it is the idea that you belong to the global social network of magicians, which is demarcated from the rest of the world by the secret knowledge passed on from magician to magician, or from DVD to magician in the contemporary context. The existence of the subculture of magicians makes it an interesting subject of study for scholars in the humanities. Sociologist Robert Stebbins published a comprehensive anthropological overview of professional and amateur magicians by interviewing fifty-six Canadian performers. His study is part of a series on the sociology of leisure in which he also studies amateur archaeologists, classical musicians and athletes. The majority of members of magic clubs are enthusiasts and occasional performers that join a club for social reasons. Neophytes of magic clubs often have to audition and formally swear an oath of secrecy to become full members, although this practice is waning and only the more traditional clubs maintain formal initiation ceremonies. The estimated half a million people worldwide with an active interest in magic purchase books, videos and props to learn the skills they need to perform, enhance their personal collections, or simply to satisfy their curiosity. Since the dawn of the Internet and the increased ease by which ideas can be published, many more magicians have entered the marketplace. In the past decade, an avalanche of magic tricks, books and DVDs has been unleashed on interested amateur magicians. The openness of the Internet and the ease with which information can be disseminated has decreased the role of magic clubs as a place for the distribution of new ideas. Stebbins found that many professional magicians rely financially on the patronage of amateur magicians, who buy the fruits of the professional’s creative works. Professional magicians use the club cirwww.magicperspectives.net


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cuit to promote their magic products by selling books and tricks. An important marketing tool for new products in magic are the lectures where professional magicians explain their techniques and philosophies of magic to other magicians, either in clubs or at magic conventions. These lectures are more reminiscent of Tupperware parties than formal lectures in an academic sense. The prime purpose of knowledge-sharing during a magic lecture is to sell books, DVDs and tricks. Stebbins also described the entrepreneurial aspects of life as a professional magician. The world of professional magicians is dominated by solo artists. The market for magic shows is not very large, and having additional helpers (on-stage or offstage) increases costs, which must be covered by the ticket price for a show. The singular nature of the magic act, Stebbins claims, makes the professional life of the magician simpler than it is for, say, a Broadway actress or band musician, because there is less need to coordinate rehearsals or performances. The gap between magicians and those who work in other forms of theatre is illustrated by the fact that few professional magicians are members of organisations such as the American Guild of Variety Artists. Magicians mainly bond with other magicians, which is driven by their need for secrecy in discussing the details of their art with others. Stebbins also describes some key points by which magic differs from other forms of performance art: firstly, there is little opportunity for formal training to become a magician. Theatre schools and circus schools rarely provide the performance of magic as a subject. Several magic schools do exist, such as College of Magic in Cape Town or the Mystery School in Las Vegas, but they do not provide formally recognised performing arts diplomas or degrees as is the case with students in performance arts at regular universities and colleges. The only exception is the Dong Pusan College in South www.magicperspectives.net


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Korea, which has a department of Magic Entertainment. This school has been very successful as several magicians trained at this institute are now highly respected in the magic fraternity. As a consequence of this lack of formal training, almost all magicians are autodidacts: they train themselves through books, DVDs, online media, and most importantly by learning from fellow magicians, whom they meet at magic clubs and conventions. With the advent of the Internet, obtaining the knowledge and materials required to become a magician is easy. Anyone can walk into a magic shop or go online and purchase a grand illusion and start sawing their girlfriend in half. With the popularity of online shopping, procuring professional magic tricks has never been easier. Many older magicians are lamenting this development as they miss the semi-private fraternity of people sharing secrets between themselves. Magic has, like many other aspects of life, become democratised through the ease by which information is now shared between people. I I I I Some years ago, then anthropology student Graham Jones filmed a brief session at a local magic shop as part of an assignment for his graduate studies in anthropology. This short encounter sparked his interest in magic, and Jones began to wonder where the expertise to perform magic came from, how it was codified and perpetuated, and how secrecy was maintained within the magic community. This lead to an in-depth study of the world of Parisian magicians, which resulted in a PhD dissertation on the topic. Jones recently published a fascinating book based on his eighteen months of ethnographic research about the world of Parisian magicians. The book provides a European perspective and enhances the Anglo-American perspectives of Stebbins and Prus and Sharper. One of the main differences between French and American magicians, according to Jones, is the www.magicperspectives.net


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reverence for Robert-Houdin on the French side and Harry Houdini on the American side. Robert-Houdin was the progenitor of theatrical magic as we come to know it today. He was one of the first to move away from occult presentations and to distance himself from the informal ways of the street performers, transforming the magician into a middle-class gentleman. The French artist is responsible for the stereotype of the magician as we know it today, and he was a major inspiration for the world’s first superstar, Erich Weiss, also known as Harry Houdini. As Houdini’s belief in himself grew to ever larger proportions, his admiration of the French master diminished. In 1908 Houdini deeply insulted French magicians by publishing a vitriolic book about his former idol, accusing Robert-Houdin of copying material from others and of not being original. This book made Houdini a persona non grata in French magic society and, according to Jones, galvanised the admiration French magicians have for Robert-Houdin. While Houdini is admired and considered an inspiration for magicians in the USA and many other countries, in France magicians admire their own home-grown hero. This reverence for either Robert-Houdin or Houdini illustrates a schism in the magic world between the continental European and Anglophone magicians. Not many magicians cross the linguistic divide between the continent and the USA. David Stone (for whom Graham Jones acted as a script coach on his acclaimed DVDs) is one of the few French magicians popular in the English-speaking magic world. Jones acknowledges Stebbins’ views on the difficulties of magic in becoming a high art form. The performance of magic is not an autonomous activity, as is the case with painting and other types of art. Magic, and indeed many other performance arts, are shaped by the demands of the audience, which leaves little room for creative risk www.magicperspectives.net


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and innovation. A magician is bound by the wants of the audience in order to secure ongoing bookings and is thereby locked in to the societal stereotype of what magic should be. The status of magic as a performance art is taken very seriously in France. The government maintains a program called intermittence, which rewards performing artists for the unpaid time they spend on artistic creation between performances. This program includes magicians, placing them in the same category as symphonic musicians, ballet dancers and opera singers. Magicians in France hope that this program will free performers from the confines of the private market, leaving them room for crafting serious works of art. Intermittence has led to the establishment of a research centre for new magic, inspired by the developments in circus performance, as epitomised by Cirque du Soleil. However, not all magicians are content with these developments; the two models of magic—the traditional playful performance of magic and serious artful magic—are becoming distinctly different streams of cultural production, with the art-focused magicians no longer participating in the traditional social networks. I I I I One of the defining aspects of theatrical magic is the veil of secrecy that surrounds performances. Secrets are the currency of theatrical magic, and in his research Graham Jones explores the life cycle of secrets: their creation, distribution and eventual destruction. Secrets are the core of the magician’s skills—they differentiate the magician from any other performance artist. The secrecy necessary to perform magic is paradoxical because there is value in both concealing and revealing the methods of magic. To expose the method to the audience during or just after a performance will reduce it from theatre to a demonstration of skill, but magic cannot survive as an art form without its secrets being shared between practitioners. www.magicperspectives.net


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Any performance art thrives on originality, and the audience expects the performer to present something they have not experienced before. The mark of a quality performance is therefore uniqueness. Given the nature of magic as a deceptive performance, the creation of new magic focuses around developing new methods. Secrets are both the intellectual capital of magicians and also an extension of the inventor’s reputation. The greater the reputation for owning original secrets, the higher the likelihood of invitations to magic conventions and to events on the lecture circuit. Because of the commercial importance of secrets to professional magicians, intellectual property is commonly a hotly debated topic. Legal protection of magic secrets is, however, limited, and in essence only possible for mechanical inventions; sleight-of-hand cannot be patented because it is a procedure. Because of this lack of protection of intellectual property there is a big problem in magic with copycat performances. The topic of originality often features in magician periodicals and online bulletin boards, with occasional vitriolic outbursts, chastising magicians accused of stealing ideas. The most common way for magicians to protect their intellectual property is, paradoxically, through controlled distribution of the secret. Jones describes what French magicians refer to as déposer, the deliberate exposure of magic secrets to insiders in order to establish ownership within the magic community. This can be achieved by either showing the trick to a well-known and trustworthy magician or by publishing it in a book or video that is distributed through magic shops and clubs. The distribution of magic secrets must be done carefully because among magicians the exposure of secrets to outsiders is considered a defilement of magic. Jones wrote about a protest by two hundred magicians against the airing of a television show exposing the mechanics of magic tricks. The magicians www.magicperspectives.net


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championed what they called “the public’s right to dream”. Contemporary magicians often lament the ease at which secrets can be distributed via modern technology and the way this impacts magic as a performance art. There are, however, no real indications that the availability of magic secrets has reduced the willingness of audiences to enjoy magic performances. Performing magic skilfully requires a large amount of technical knowledge, and although the techniques of magicians are considered secret, many magic books are published every year. In obtaining this otherwise secret knowledge, magicians tend to become avid collectors of books, tricks and other magic paraphernalia. Some collections are only available to magicians, and many magic clubs maintain their own libraries. Superstar magician David Copperfield owns one of the largest collections of magic memorabilia and books ever assembled, which he houses in a Las Vegas warehouse. The collection is not open to the public and interested scholars and magicians can access this collection by submitting an application to the archivist. Many magic clubs also maintain their own libraries. The library at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, the library of the Society of American Magicians and of other magic clubs are open only to magicians and closely shielded from people not initiated in the magical arts. Several magicians have bequeathed their impressive collections to academic libraries. These collections are made available to scholars of magic and in some cases the general public. The University of Texas in Austin houses the Harry Houdini and McManus-Young collections, while Brown University’s library on Rhode Island is home to the H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana. The National Library of Victoria in Melbourne houses the impressive personal collection of Australian magician Will Alma, who www.magicperspectives.net


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performed in the first half of the twentieth century. The collection has been kept alive through regular new acquisitions and has been the source of several exhibitions. Another important collection in Australia is the Robbins Stage Magic Collection at the State Library of New South Wales. These libraries play an important role in the academic study of the history of theatrical magic because the materials are kept under archival conditions and have been catalogued to academic standards. To be able to communicate their secrets to each other in confidence, conjurers require their own esoteric language. Only seasoned magicians can decipher a phrase such as, “I occasionally use the Ultra Move to produce the AD, and lose the signed selection via the Bluff Pass replacement or tilt”. In their special idiom, a magician does not use a ‘handkerchief’ but rather a ‘silk’. Magicians don’t speak during their magic tricks, they ‘patter’. And when a magician is getting loaded, it does not mean that she is getting drunk but rather that she is secretly hiding objects on her person to make them reappear during the show. Children’s author Sid Fleishman, who started his working life as a magician, wrote a paper on the language used by magicians in the 1949 edition of American Speech, the official journal of the American Dialect Society. At the time he wrote this paper, the language of magicians was laced with words borrowed from the French language, reflecting the influence Robert-Houdin had on modern conjuring. Words such as ‘pochette’ (a hidden pocket) or ‘houlette’ (a cover for playing cards) were once commonly used by English-speaking magicians. A secret move to make a coin disappear used to be called a ‘tourniquet’ by magicians but is nowadays referred to as a French drop. Only a handful of French words have survived into the twenty-first century, of which ‘servante’, a hiding place behind a table, is the most often www.magicperspectives.net


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used in contemporary English magic literature. Although magic is surrounded by secrecy, some conjurer’s vernacular have made it into official English dictionaries. Magic inspired words and phrases such as ‘sleight-of-hand’, ‘box of tricks’, ‘smoke and mirrors’, and ‘misdirection’ are now used regularly in common language. The word ‘gimmick’, a device that assists in creating the illusion of magic, was first used by magicians around 1930. Prior to the first appearance of this word, magicians struggled to express this idea. Magicians had to use circumlocutions such as ‘the additional element in the apparatus’ or vague diminutives such as ‘little appliance’, ‘little mechanical aid’, or ‘little accessory’. In the early days, some magicians used to spell it ‘gimac’ as an anagram of magic. Now ‘gimmick’ is a common word in everyday language, mainly to indicate a novelty feature designed to make something stand out. I I I I Another aspect of the social lives of magicians often discussed in scholarly literature is the gender difference in this performance art. Even though gender equality has progressed in many professions, magic is still a male dominated form of theatre. Research by the US Bureau of the Census conducted in the 1980s showed that magic and stand-up comedy have the lowest percentage of female performers of all performance arts. Also around that time, only five percent the International Brotherhood of Magicians members were female—a figure that has not changed much almost thirty years later. More recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that of all performing arts professionals, approximately thirty-five percent are female. Of all singers, just over half are female, and of all dancers, over seventy percent are female. Unfortunately, no official data exists for magicians specifically, but according to the allaboutmagic.com website only about one hundred of the thousands of www.magicperspectives.net


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professional magicians in the world are female. This data shows that magic, with its very low female participation rate, is a special case in the performing arts. The gender imbalance is also illustrated by looking at the cover photos of the influential magic magazine Genii. In its seventy-five-year history of publishing bimonthly magazines, only fourteen covers have featured women by themselves and on more than thirty covers women were shown in the company of a male magician; the remaining four hundred covers featured men. Notwithstanding the large gender imbalance in magic, recent developments show a greater acceptance of female performers. Adelaide Hermann, one of the few famous female magicians, wondered why this was the case, especially as so much in magic requires feminine qualities of graceful movement, which could be the reason that many magicians still perform with the help of one or more female assistants. These women are usually the passive receivers of the magic performed by the magician. The role of female assistants in the magic fraternity has been explored in the documentary film Women in Boxes, directed by Phil Noyes and Harry Pallenberg. This rare view behind the scenes of the world of magicians focuses on the women assistants who are stuffed in boxes, cut in half, penetrated by swords and miraculously restored. The ‘box jumpers’, as some call themselves, add a feminine quality to the masculine performance of physical violence, often displayed in stage illusions. Female magicians have always been a part of the magical performance landscape, but they have largely remained in the shadows of history. Only a handful of female magicians are mentioned in the many books on the history of magic. The scholarly literature on the history of magic does not give much attention to female performers either. Amy Dawes provides a comprehensive overview of www.magicperspectives.net


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the ‘magiciennes’ of the Victorian and Edwardian eras of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dawes makes the point that “whatever men were doing, so were the women”, including performing magical arts on stage. She recounts the exploits of several female magicians, escapologists and mind readers. Although there are many individual examples of professional female magic performers, as discussed by Dawes, the fact remains that they form only a minority in the world of magicians. Emeritus professor of sociology Peter Nardi published two journal articles in which he explores possible reasons for this imbalance. Reflecting upon his 2006 visit to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, Nardi describes it as an environment of classical gender roles, a world of “phallic magic wands and swords slicing and dicing female assistants”. In a previous publication published in 1988, Nardi provided four possible reasons for the stereotypical image of the magician as a white man in nineteenth-century evening dress, complete with top hat and beautiful female assistant: The first reason is that before the middle of the nineteenth century, women were mainly associated with witchcraft. This was driven by sexist religious assumptions of women as the source of carnality. Women performing magic tricks would immediately have been suspected of witchcraft. The historic record tells of one girl in Cologne in the fifteenth century who was tried for witchcraft after performing a torn-and-restored handkerchief trick. Only when magic moved from the street to the parlour in the nineteenth century was it considered acceptable for women to be magicians. While the men portrayed themselves as professors of scientific experiments, female magicians mainly performed feats of mentalism. The second reason opted by Nardi is the social organisation of magic as a profession and hobby. In the early twentieth century, www.magicperspectives.net


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magic clubs began to be formed around the world. These organisations were essentially gentlemen’s clubs that prevented women from joining them. For some societies, it took till the end of the last century before these rules were relaxed. The gatekeepers and role models for magic as a profession and hobby were almost exclusively male, providing a social barrier for women who wished to explore magic as an activity. The socialisation of gender roles in society is a third contributing factor to the low participation rate of women. Boys are socialised from an early age towards positions of control and power. This is illustrated by the marketing of toy chemistry sets in the early twentieth century. These sets, advertised as magic kits, were targeted exclusively at boys. Girls are socialised not to seek out such pastimes or to be the centre of attention. Rather, they are encouraged to take supportive and less competitive roles. The final reason proposed by Nardi is the nature of magic itself. Performing magic tricks has an inherent aggressiveness; there is always a power imbalance of knowledge between the performer and the spectator. Research with brain scanning equipment conducted by Ben Parris and his colleagues confirms that viewing a magic trick triggers areas of the brain related to conflict. The spectator is always placed in a position of not knowing, and magicians often have to fend off inquisitive spectators. The inherent aggressiveness is visible in literature on the performance of magic, which often refers to a successful performance as ‘killing’ or ‘frying’ the audience. Due to the inherent aggression and the interactive nature of magic performances, some of the literature on performing magic is devoted to managing the behaviour of the audience, particularly to methods for controlling the negative responses audience members may have to being deceived. www.magicperspectives.net


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The main social issue with a woman performing magic tricks is that she breaks the gender-appropriate power distribution assumed in everyday life. A female magician enters the sphere of the middleclass white male. Peter Nardi speculates that for magic to remain entertainment it should not become an event with religious undertones, like a séance or tarot card reading. Perhaps performers invoking power and displaying control over the experience of the spectator’s reality must be perceived as having a high status, which could explain the male dominance in theatrical magic. I I I I In this chapter, we have seen that magicians occupy a special place within the world of theatre, they join their own clubs, read their own literature and speak a secret language—they form a subculture separate from performers in other theatre genres and contrast themselves with their spectators. The evolution of this subculture is largely driven by the inherent need for secrecy, the distinguishing feature of theatrical magic. Magicians feel a need to be with like-minded people because of their fear that otherwise the secrets of magic could become commonplace. The original question posed in this chapter was what it is like to be a magician. Just like philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that we can never know what is is like to be a bat, we can never fully know what it is like being a magician by merely analysing what magicians do. A complete answer to that question can never be provided, which emphasises the defining difference between the social sciences and the physical sciences. The subjective character of experience cannot be captured by any of the analytical methods used in science. The purpose of the social sciences is to develop an ongoing narrative about the subject of study rather than to define final answers to specific questions. www.magicperspectives.net


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The only way to truly know what it is like to be a magician is to become a magician, which is something that the objectiveness of science can not encompass. This subjectivity is inherent to the way human culture develops. The role of magic in society is not a historical constant and needs to be constantly reinterpreted. The place of magicians in society has changed over the millennia and will most likely not stay the same in the future. In the following chapter, some aspects of the history of magic are discussed to show how magic evolved over time and to discuss some interesting topics in the long and rich history of conjuring.


Chapter 5 The History of Magic W HAT ROLE DID MAGICIANS PLAY IN THE PAST ? Magicians care deeply about the history of their craft and are avid collectors of books and historical paraphernalia related to conjuring. This strong interest in the history of their craft is illustrated by the fact that magic magazines regularly publish articles on magic performances of the past, and that the prestigious Magic Circle in London has appointed Edwin Dawes as their official historian. In this respect, magic has a unique position within the performing arts. In other forms of theatre, the historians are generally not artists themselves but specialised academics who view the subject from an external perspective. In comparison with other histories on the performance arts, histories of magic are more motivated by the author’s enthusiasm and love of the art than by academic ideals. Histories of magic are generally demonstrations of encyclopaedic knowledge that weave the history of magic together with fascinating biographies of the performers of the past, such as the impressive tome 54

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The Illustrated History of Magic by Milbourne Christopher and his wife Maureen, which celebrates the heroic exploits of significant magicians. Most histories of magic written by magicians bypass the idea that magic is created not only in the hands of the performer but also in the minds of the spectators. A complete history of magic should also include the perspectives of audiences. The audience is an integral part of the performance, as people attend a magic show with a set of assumptions about the world, how it functions, how people relate to each other and about what is possible and impossible. We can not understand magic shows without taking the relationship between the magician and the audience into consideration. Cultures are not static and change over time. Studying the history of magic by looking at both sides of the proscenium arch in the past enables us to make sense of magic in the present and think meaningfully about its future. An academic historian of magic is not only interested in the biographies of magicians but also in the role that audiences of magic shows played in the past. A critical history of magic addresses questions about what happens on stage, behind the stage and in the auditorium and places magicians and their performances in the relevant contemporary context. A critical historical reading of a magic trick requires, by definition, untangling its meaning within the historical context in which it was performed. For example, the famous illusion where a woman is cut in half and gloriously restored can be told as a series of events throughout the history of magic, listing the performers who invented different versions of the trick and when they performed them. The annals of magic history list the first performance of this illusion as 1921, by the British magician Percy Thomas Tibbles, known on stage as Selbit. However, there is some controversy about this story, as American magician Horace www.magicperspectives.net


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Goldin also claims to have been the first to perform this illusion, and he even patented his method to prove this point. Although this controversy is in itself an interesting historic fact, it does not unpack the meaning of this trick. The question of historical importance that needs to be asked is why Selbit and Goldin developed this trick and why it has become a staple item in so many magic shows. There are many questions that can be asked about tricks beyond their originality, the different versions or when they were first performed. The most pressing question about this trick is contained within its name: why is it almost always a woman who is sawn in half? The literature describes two different perspectives on this question. The sawing illusion can be viewed as a vengeful misogynist act against women who obtained the right to vote a short time before Selbit introduced the trick in England. In this sense, the sawing illusion is more than just a piece of entertainment as it points to something outside the performance itself; it can be linked to the world beyond the confines of the theatre. From this perspective, sawing a woman in half becomes a violent male response to the new freedoms enjoyed by women. The trick can also be viewed in a more positive light by seeing it as a celebration of life: the cutting in half and miraculous restoration as a demonstration of resurrection after death. The sawing illusion, and for that matter many similar magic tricks, informs us about the idea that death can be conquered—it is a celebration of the ultimate mystery of life. These readings of the sawing illusion not only illustrate that a simple magic trick can have meaning outside the theatre itself, they also show that history is more than just a collection collecting facts; it is about providing meaningful interpretations of the events of the past. This makes writing history an interpretive task where we can never find absolute truth, only perspectives on the available www.magicperspectives.net


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evidence. Writing a history about something as ephemeral as magic shows is difficult. We can never directly experience the shows of the magicians of the past. The past is, by definition, gone and can never be experienced directly. We have to rely on recordings, play bills, eyewitness reports and the writings of magicians themselves. History is as such not an empirical science, but one of interpretation and story-telling. Fact-finding in the history of magic is complicated because the profession is based on secrecy and deception. The task of the magician and the task of the historian are diametrically opposed. The magician’s objective is to obscure reality and present a world of illusion, while the historian aims to uncover truth from the past. However, magicians are accustomed to bending reality and have often manufactured biographies to extend their stage personality to their personal lives. Their biographies can be considered performative pieces of writing, in which the story of their lives is intertwined with their stage persona. Magicians construct their biography to portray themselves as mysterious persons imbued with special powers. The magician who most famously blurred the boundaries between real life and the stage is Harry Houdini, who is considered the first superstar of the modern age. Houdini was supported by an efficient propaganda machine that ensured his status as a superstar. His carefully manufactured persona and continuous blurring of the lines between theatrical illusion and reality would eventually be the cause of his tragic death. Houdini was considered to be virtually indestructible and for his admirers there was no difference between the theatre persona Houdini or Erich Weiss, as he was known offstage. One day, Houdini was unsuspectingly hit in the stomach by a spectator on the street who thought that Houdini was actually indestructible, just as he portrayed in his performances. The www.magicperspectives.net


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blow to his stomach ruptured internal organs, but Houdini did not realise how badly hurt he actually was. For more than a week he continued his physically demanding performances and pretended to be unharmed. However, a blow to the abdomen that leaves no visible trace can cause severe internal injury, including acute appendicitis. His famed indestructibility would become Houdini’s final deception as he eventually succumbed to internal wounds. The idea that somebody is a magician at any time of the day, whether engaged in a performance or not, is often promoted in the magic community, where it is expected that a magician can perform a trick any time somebody requests to see one. Magician Jeff Mcbride promotes the Magician 24/7 concept, which is the ability to perform a magic show any time, anywhere. It is considered a sign of weakness if a magician cannot perform impromptu, which is doing magic without special props. This illustrates that being a magician is not only about being an actor. More than anything else, being a magician is also an identity-formation project that infiltrates all aspects of life and culminates in formal performances. I I I I Even though magic performances have existed for millennia, until recently they remained largely unexamined by theatre historians. Driven by the interest of academic historians, the science of writing about the history of magic (the historiography of magic) is currently going through a transformation. Until recently, the writing of magic history was, in the words of Dutch historian Jan Romein, in the ‘epic phase’ of writing. This means that the history of magic was told as a collection of grandiose biographies with the performers as the heroes. This phase in writing magic history is now evolving into a more reflective type of writing which analyses magic performances in their cultural context. Since the first decade of this cenwww.magicperspectives.net


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tury a steady flow of books and journal articles critically analysing magic’s place in society through the ages has been published. Some academics have completed PhD dissertations on specialised aspects within the history of magic, such as the work on magic, masculinity and literature in Victorian and Edwardian England by Kainoa Harbottle, a Hawaiian-born magician and Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He examined how gender identity and conjuring related to each other during the late nineteenth-century and how anxieties surrounding masculinity inspired a good deal of the magic performances of the time. Harbottle sees a change in the way magic is performed after the first decade of the twentieth century. Though still associated with masculinity, the narrative of magic shows became less about unfathomable powers and more about public amusement. Magic shows changed their focus from a demonstration of male power to amusement. Another PhD thesis has been written by entertainer and university lecturer Fred Siegel. He provided an in-depth analysis of the evolution of conjuring during a period of rapid change in American culture, the vaudeville era from the 1880s through the 1930s. Magicians, who could not afford to develop evening filling shows found a fertile market in vaudeville, where they could perform short acts. Siegel provides a systematic analysis of the performances of vaudeville magicians and identified six major categories of conjuring acts. Firstly the the generalist flash act, in which an series of impressive tricks were performed in quick succession. Secondly he identified the theme act. These were organised around one trick or one type of trick. Third category were the comedy and burlesque acts, which mixed ancient conjuring traditions with vaudeville comedy. The ethnic act, fourth type of magic show, was mostly based on using Asian stereotypes and incorporating the mystery of the Orient www.magicperspectives.net


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in a magic act. The penultimate type of magic, the mutilation act, is a show in which women were magically divided into pieces. Lastly Siegel identified the para-conjuring act, which are the types of performances most closely related to magic, which included escape artists, mind readers, spiritualists or hypnotists. The popularity of film and the economic crisis in the 1930s saw a quick demise of vaudeville. Siegel provides an elegant framework to analyse magic performances and traces how the individual types of magic acts developed after the demise of vaudeville and became the types of magic shows as we know them today. These are only minute sketches of some of the historical writings about magic. It would be impossible to provide a complete overview of the rich history of magic in only a few pages, and in the remainder of this chapter we will discuss two topics in the history of magic: the involvement of magicians in the developments of cinema and the role of non-Western magicians in the history of magic. I I I I The appearance of moving pictures in 1895 coincided with a time of great interest in theatrical magic, and magicians quickly recognised the potential of cinema as a medium for miracles. Major magical theatres of the time, such as the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris and London’s Egyptian Hall, were some of the first places motion pictures were publicly screened. Because of the similarities between cinema and magic and the easy access magicians had to vaudeville theatres, magicians were some of the first exhibitors, performers and producers of motion pictures. One of the pioneers in the development of cinema was the French magician Georges Méliès, who was only in his twenties when he bought the famous Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. He became a prolific designer of stage illusions and performed a wide range of www.magicperspectives.net


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magic styles, from simple side-show conjuring tricks to elaborate stage illusions. In 1896, Méliès developed an interest in moving pictures, which over the years became an integral part of his magic shows. According to Méliès, he accidentally discovered stop-trick photography when his camera jammed while filming a street scene. When he watched the film, he found that the mishap caused a cab to turn into a hearse, pedestrians to change direction, and men to turn into women. Being a magician, he quickly recognised the deceptive qualities of this technique, and between 1989 and 1914 he produced more the five hundred short trick films. The trick films produced by Georges Méliès were the progeny of special effects. He developed techniques such as splices, matte shots, superimpositions, multiple exposures and dissolves. Méliès is one of the pioneers of special effects but has only been recognised as instrumental to their development in recent years. In his films, Méliès makes people appear, disappear or decapitates them, using, as Canadian film professor André Gaudreault puts it, the film scissors as his magic wand. Magicians have a plethora of techniques available to them to create the illusion of magic, including advanced technology. Although magicians such as Méliès pioneered special effects, magicians have a love-hate relationship with using camera tricks to create illusions. At the start of almost every magic show on television, the producers emphasise that the magic you are about to see is created without the use of camera tricks, emphasising that it is the skill of the magician and not the skill of the editor that has brought about the magic. As a theatrical art, magic partially relies on the assumption that it requires above average skill to perform magic tricks, and so any implication that technology is involved reduces the perceived skill of the magician. Using camera tricks is seen as an easy way out www.magicperspectives.net


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as it reduces the amount of dexterity and deceptive skills required to perform magic and is therefore not highly regarded by magicians. This taboo is surprising, as throughout the centuries magicians have eagerly used the latest available technology to create magic. The father of modern magic, Robert-Houdin, regularly used electricity and electromagnetism to create illusions and magicians during the early years of film featured cinematographic effects in their magic shows. This played very well for contemporary audiences, but twenty-first century viewers would not consider these effects as magical. Early spectators were not aware of the techniques of film editing and viewed trick films much in the same way as they would view a magic trick. Magicians of the early twentieth century guarded the techniques of trick photography as closely as they guarded their other secrets. When the first publications exposed special effects techniques to the general public, such as an in-depth article in the 1915 edition of Nature, early film-makers protested vehemently. Méliès abhorred the exposure of his secrets in the scientific journals of the day. To audiences, the producers of trick films created inexplicable magic, and exposing their methods of film-editing would destroy these illusions. Méliès lost his battle against the exposure of cinematographic secrets. Nowadays, most DVDs contain features that explain how the film’s special effects were created. Contemporary audiences are astutely aware of the methods used by filmmakers and would not regard Les Cartes Vivantes, where a playing card comes to life, in the same way as Méliès’ original viewers did. However, the fact that people remain mystified by cinema, even though everybody knows or can learn its methods illustrates that the exposure of magic methods is inconsequential to the popularity of magic. Only when magic is performed as a challenge or a puzzle will www.magicperspectives.net


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the audience think more about the method than the effect. Magic, just like cinema, is a storytelling art where sleight-of-hand and other techniques are used to show the spectator a world where magic is possible. Only two books dedicated to the involvement of magicians in film history have been published, each advocating a different perspective on the interplay between conjuring and the dawn of cinema. As a teenager, media historian Erik Barnouw helped magician John Mulholland to catalogue his immense collection of magic books, many of which Barnouw also read. When, later in life, he became interested in the history of film, he recognised many of the names of film pioneers because they had also appeared in Mulholland’s book collection. He was surprised that the literature on film theory had largely ignored this connection and subsequently published the first journal article and book on magicians and the cinema. Barnouw saw cinema as the natural progression for magicians who had been using optical illusions for decades. He wrote that “cinema was the robot that ousted its former master as the entertainment market shifted to cinema”. He interpreted the involvement of magicians in film from an evolutionary perspective and theorised that cinema had become a replacement for stage magic. In his view, magic and cinema are almost mutually exclusive, and the move of magicians from the stage to the silver screen proved ultimately catastrophic for many magicians. Matthew Solomon, associate professor of cinema studies of City University in New York, positions himself against Barnouw’s rendering of magicians and cinema. Solomon distinguishes two types of magic cinema. Films of tricks show conjurers performing sleightof-hand and, just like the television shows of recent decades, did not use camera tricks but relied of the manual dexterity of the perwww.magicperspectives.net


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former. Trick films on the other hand employed cinematic techniques to create magical effects. Solomon argues that the rise of cinema was not simply the next evolutionary stage for theatrical magic and magicians. Trick films have morphed into the Hollywood special effect blockbuster we now know, but films of tricks are still popular as exemplified by the many magic televisions shows. Magicians are now working in a more competitive market for entertainment then in the golden years of vaudeville, but the emergence of film, television and other entertainment technologies has not fully replaced magic performances. The history of magic and film should not, according to Solomon, be interpreted as a tragedy in which special effects rendered stage illusions obsolete, because many magicians embraced the new technology and successfully combined cinema and stage magic in their theatre performances. The introduction of film and later of television has certainly eroded the marketplace for magic performances, but in no way has it rendered magic obsolete. Magicians have always been able to adapt to new technology and find new ways to entertain their audiences through deception. I I I I The existing histories provide an exciting account of the evolution of magic through the ages. These writings are, however, very much dominated by the stories of white male magicians, implying that women and non-Western magicians played only minor roles in the development of theatrical magic. The role of non-Western magicians in magic is currently undergoing a new appreciation and there is still much to discover. Milbourne Christopher dedicates one chapter in The Illustrated History of Magic to conjuring by American Indians, who used deceptive techniques in their ceremonies. The use of deceptive techniques by American Indian shamans has also been described in acawww.magicperspectives.net


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demic anthropological literature. The stories told about Native American magicians in the canons of the history of magic are mainly sourced from the early explorers of the New World and from anthropologists that were able to witness these magical rituals and ceremonies. Native American shamans were believed to be able to perform many impressive feats of supernatural magic, but used deceptive techniques to create the illusion of miracles. One often mentioned miracle is the so-called shaking tent ceremony. The shaman would be bound with ropes and locked in a tent. After the shaman summoned the spirits, the tent would start to shake violently, even though the shaman was still securely bound with ropes. In some variants of this ceremony, the shaman managed to escape from his bonds and disappeared from the tent. American magicians recognised the illusions of magic and escapology acts incorporated in this ceremony. Most reminiscent of the original shaking tent ceremony is the so-called spirit cabinet, made famous by the Davenport Brothers in the late nineteenth century. The brothers were securely tied to a chair inside a large wooden box, which contained musical instruments. A member of the audience was asked to ensure that their hands and feet were securely tied so that they could not move. The box was closed and even though they were not able to move, the instruments could be heard from inside the closed box. When the box was opened, the brothers were found to be still securely tied in their original positions and were supposedly unable to have been the cause of the sounds that emanated from inside the box. Their act was not presented as a magic show but as a demonstration of genuine spirit power and the people who witnessed the illusion often actually believed that the instruments were played by supernatural forces. In reading the anthropological writings about Native American magic or the works by magicians such as Milbourne Christopher www.magicperspectives.net


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it becomes clear that Native American magic is not placed on the same level as magic performed by Western performers. Christopher describes the magic of Native American shamans and exposes their methods, and yet when describing the magic performed by Western performers he protects their secrets. Native conjurers of the past are implicitly and sometimes explicitly compared with charlatans, such as the Davenport Brothers, and accused of deceiving their audiences for personal gain. However, this comparison is not justified, because the magic of shamans and charlatans is performed under different presumptions. The shamans performed magical ceremonies that formed part of a religious experience. Their demonstrations of what appeared to be supernatural magic are expressions of religious truth, beyond the mechanics of the actions. Participants to these ceremonies derive a sense of purpose from these experiences. This is no so much the case with charlatans who claim to perform miracles, their activities are not ceremonies with a religious purpose but a performance; they are curious mixtures of show business and religious experience. Theatrical magicians often proclaim that magic is a culturally neutral type of performance, understood by everybody because of its simple visual appeal. Psychologists studying magic assume that our ability to be deceived is culturally independent. This is only partially the case because magic also relies on cultural frameworks to be interpreted. The earlier mentioned performance by Robert-Houdin to convince the Marabouts of his magical powers shows how magic is interpreted differently, depending on the cultural background of the audience. In this respect, the original shaking-tent ceremonies cannot be interpreted in the same way as we view magic shows or charlatans. In religious ceremonies, there is no distinction between the performer and the audience; there are only participants. The shaman www.magicperspectives.net


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is not just a performer, but also the director of the proceedings and helps the other participants through their experience. The deceptive techniques used by shamans in these ceremonies have a purpose, as they are concrete representations of religious truths. This metaphysical representation is the defining aspect of religious magic, an aspect that has been lost from contemporary Western magic, which is a theatrical abstraction of ceremonial magic. The motivation of authors, such as Christopher, to expose the secrets of ceremonial magicians is, rightly or wrongly, based on a value judgement about the purpose of these performances. Ceremonial magic makes claims about reality which, according to the value system in Western culture, should be investigated. Exposing the secrets of those magicians that make claims about the nature of reality is a natural consequence of the inquisitive nature of Western culture. Magic performed as entertainment make no claims about the essence of reality and has as such no impact on our lives other then providing a momentary moment of delight. Exposing the secrets of theatrical magicians is therefore of a much lesser consequence. A well known nineteenth-century African-American magician was Henry ‘Box’ Brown. He was born a slave but managed to escape by mailing himself in a wooden crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia, a harrowing twenty-seven-hour journey. He became a well-known anti-slavery activist and gave presentations in America and England about his life as a slave. His presentations morphed into entertaining performances which included a demonstration of his box-escape, which he presented as an escapology trick. Later in his career, he included more magic tricks in his presentation and began performing under the moniker of Prof. H. Box Brown and toured with a show called ‘The African Prince’s Drawing Room Entertainment’. The name he chose for his magic tapped in to the fascination the public in www.magicperspectives.net


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the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had for anything exotic. A recent book by Jim Haskins describes the fascinating history of magicians from African origins. Throughout American history these magicians have achieved great skill, but slavery and later racial segregation and discrimination prevented them from claiming their place in the illustrious history of magic. During the so-called Golden Age of Magic in the first half of the twentieth century, the original abstraction of magic performances from the esoteric to a gentlemen’s pursuit, as introduced by RobertHoudin, slowly waned in popularity. Magicians reverted back to the grandiose performances of earlier times, evoking images of mystical lands in the European colonies. The iconography of performances included fanciful images of the mystical East. Ever since the stories of Marco Polo’s travels to the orient, European culture has had a fascination with the cultures of the Far east. This fascination reached its apex during the height of the British colonial empire. Peter Lamont, research fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh is a prolific writer on conjuring-related matters and an expert on the history of the famous Indian Rope Trick. He has also published on the psychology of magic and is one of the few scholars that crosses the disciplinary boundaries in the study of magic. In the mythical Indian Rope Trick, the magician throws a rope into mid-air, where it stands without apparent support. He then orders a boy to climb up the rope, who subsequently disappears into thin air. A dramatic crescendo with body parts falling from the sky implies that the boy has been dismembered by metaphysical forces. The audience’s anxiety is eased when they find out that the boy is unharmed after he reappears in a basket. This trick has been debated by the public, scientists and magicians for decades, ever since the first accounts became known in England and the United States. Many people prowww.magicperspectives.net


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claimed to be eyewitnesses to this miracle, fuelling the controversy surrounding it. However, none of the eyewitness accounts were ever satisfactory, and despite several researchers offering lavish rewards for performers who were able to successfully produce the Indian Rope Trick miracle to a critical audience, no performer was ever able to. Although many stage magicians benefited from this fascination and included a version of this trick in their act, the myth died a slow death. Meticulous research by Peter Lamont shows that the stories told about this trick were based on a hoax article published in an American newspaper in 1890. Lamont reasons that the West’s romanticised view of India as a land of real miracles is what drove the strong belief in the claims made about this trick. It is interesting to note that when the myth was at its strongest, famous magicians of the time dismissed the purported skill of Indian magicians and believed that their magic was not as sophisticated as that of British magicians. I I I I The history of magic is long and complex and the current academic publications on this topic are certainly not the final word. This short review of some of the current work on the history of magic shows that the traditional encyclopedic approaches to writing magic history, which are imbued with masculine Caucasian values, are being enhanced with more analytical perspectives. These new approaches critically analyse instead of describe the history of magic and provide interesting new perspectives on magic history, so that we might learn what the future of magic as a performance art might hold.


Chapter 6 The Power of Magic W HAT IS THE PRACTICAL USE OF CONJURING ? Many people believe in the power of magic—they believe that supernatural forces can be controlled to help them shape their lives. Since time immemorial, shamans have been employed by communities to control or appease otherworldly forces in order to reduce chaos and unpredictability. In this way, magic has always been a means to an end. The objectives of traditional magic are as diverse as the objectives of science and technology are today, and the shaman, the forebear of the modern conjurer, has performed a multitude of roles. Magic has been used to influence the weather, heal the sick, predict the future, ensure a bountiful hunt or bestow misfortune upon rival tribes. The use of deception to create the illusion that supernatural forces are at work is an important aspect of the shaman’s functioning in his or her tribe. The performance of miracles points towards a world beyond the unpredictability of everyday life and is a vehicle for bringing meaning to the lives of the people that believe in magic. 70

What is the practical use of conjuring?

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In modern cultures, roles once performed by shamans, medicine men, alchemists and other miracle workers have been usurped by scientists, doctors and entertainers. Modern day professionals don’t resort to the illusion of magic to achieve their objectives, but they use the fruits of science. The techniques of deception used by shamans in their rituals and ceremonies are no longer used by scientists and professionals, but have been handed down from generation to generation to the theatrical magicians of today. Due to the primacy of science, deceptive techniques have disappeared from from professions previously undertaken by shamans. Likewise, the practical aspects of magic, such as healing and predicting the future, have all but vanished from contemporary Western culture. Magic is now considered to be a purposeless form of entertainment. Not all magic tricks are, however, without purpose. After an absence of centuries, the performance of magic has returned to health care to help patients in their healing process. The contemporary approach for using magic tricks to heal people differs greatly from the traditional approach. Magic effects are used to assist the healing process but are ostensibly presented as tricks instead of as supernatural magic. The magician or medical professional does not feign to possess supernatural healing powers like a shaman would. In this chapter, the different practical uses of magic tricks, performed by both the medical professional and the patients themselves, are explored. Magic tricks are used by occupational therapists as an active part of their therapy by teaching their patients to perform tricks. This helps them to recover from injuries or manage disabilities by improving their dexterity. Magic tricks are also performed by medical professionals in psychotherapy to help diagnose what is wrong with children and to reduce the anxiety of children in need of invasive medical treatment. Lastly, some scientific research into www.magicperspectives.net


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the endurance feats performed by escape artists has helped inform medical experts, who use this information to save lives. I I I I The use of magic in occupational therapy started in 1982 when David Copperfield had his first experience with using magic as a means for rehabilitation. He met a shy eight-year-old girl who had suffered a stroke and lost all awareness of the right side of her body. Copperfield taught her a magic trick with a rubber band. Fifteen minutes later, she approached Copperfield and performed the rubber-band trick using her right hand. This seemingly small action was a major step in her recovery process and inspired Copperfield to establish Project Magic, a program developed to “give the gift of magic to people with various physical, psycho-physical and developmental disabilities”. In the wake of Copperfield’s Project Magic, several other collaborations between magicians and occupational therapists have been developed, such as Rehabacadabra, Open Heart Magic and The Healing of Magic. The primary objective of occupational therapy is to enable people with disabilities, whether developmental or due to injuries, to participate in the activities of everyday life. Occupational therapists use activities, exercises and tools to enhance their patients’ lives. The American Occupational Therapists Association (AOTA) has recognised the value of teaching magic tricks as an authentic method of achieving therapeutic goals. The basic premise of the program is that patients can benefit both physically and psychologically from performing simple sleight-of-hand magic. The AOTA defines magic therapy as “instruction in magic skills for the purpose of increasing dexterity, fine- and gross-motor skills, problem-solving, attention span, communication, strength and socialisation”. The tricks used in these programs are specially selected to help patients www.magicperspectives.net


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reach their therapeutic goals. Rubber-band tricks can be used to strengthen hands, while more complex tricks introduce cognitive challenges to help improve cognitive skills. Magic therapy also helps patients to develop functional skills related to proprioception (the sense of the relative position of one’s body parts), to master activities that improve their daily lives, and to build self-esteem by learning how to do magic tricks, something that most other people, regardless of their other abilities, don’t know how to do. Anecdotal information from both patients and health professionals provides support for magic therapy programs. There is, however, a not much research measuring magic therapy’s true effects, and the available data is not conclusive. Phoebe Sui and Ming Sui from the Baptist Oi Kwan Social Service presented a paper on the effectiveness of magic therapy showing that magic therapy caused a statistically significant increase in dexterity and personal well-being. Evan Kwong and Nora Cullen evaluated a program that involved teaching magic tricks to acquired-brain-injury patients undergoing rehabilitation in Toronto. They tested the hypotheses that “learning magic tricks as an adjunct to a patient’s regular rehabilitation program will improve the patient’s quality of life”. The differences before and after the experiment were, however, not found to be statistically significant, which means that the improvements could have been caused by something other than the magic. I I I I In occupational therapy, patients improve through their active rehearsing and performing of magic tricks. The patient flexes and extends muscles, which has a direct therapeutic benefit; and their ability to perform the magic and entertain other people helps them to improve their self-image. In other words, the activities required to perform magic heal the physical problems, while the feeling of www.magicperspectives.net


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accomplishment helps to heal the illness. The other way conjuring is used in health care is when the magic is performed for the patient, who benefits from experiencing the magic as a passive spectator rather than as an active performer. Performing arts, such as clowning, storytelling and drama programs, are being offered in many health care settings to help patients cope with the emotional impact of illness and hospitalisation. Laura Vagnoli and her colleagues conducted experiments in an Italian hospital to examine the effect of clowning on children’s anxiety levels prior to minor surgery. Magic tricks and other methods for entertaining, such as gags, music, games, puppets and soap bubbles, were also used. Compared to the control group, the children who were entertained showed a significant reduction in anxiety. However, according to Vagnoli, the beneficial effects should not be attributed exclusively to the magic tricks but also to the humorous interactions between the artists and the patients. The use of so called Clown Doctors has also been criticised by Vagnoli. Some of the physicians and nurses interviewed considered the clowns to be a disturbance to hospital routine and claimed that they interfered with the normal relationship between medical staff and the child. Linda Miller-van-Blerkom, a social anthropologist of Drew University, compares Clown Doctors with the traditional shaman. Both clown and shaman violate natural and cultural rules in their performances and help patients and the patients’ families to deal with illness. Both the clown and the shaman use deception to improve patients’ lives. Miller-van-Blerkom writes that children are more receptive to clowns than adult patients are because they are less enculturated into the orthodox medical belief system that values pharmaceutical and surgical intervention over magic. Clown Doctors have been used in paediatric wards in several countries since 1986 to help children cope with the harsh realities of www.magicperspectives.net


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hospital life. In the minds of the children, the clowns seem to come from a magical and imaginary world where anything can happen and anything is possible. The clowns use magic tricks in their comedic repertoire to introduce metaphors and help the children cope with and understand their experience. For example, in the hands of a clown, a ball may symbolise a tumour that magically vanishes. Magic tricks can also be used to reduce pre-treatment dentistry anxiety. Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem studied the effectiveness of using magic tricks compared with using conventional methods to persuade strong-willed children to sit in the dental chair. Two groups of three- to six-year-old children participated in the experiment. All children were asked to sit in the dentist chair, but one group was shown a magic trick first and the control group was not. The research showed a significant reduction in the time required to get children to sit in the dental chair after they had been shown a magic trick. In a similar experiment, the researchers found children who were shown a magic trick were more agreeable to being x-rayed than those who were not shown a trick. The researchers concluded that showing children magic tricks not only decreases the time required to persuade children to undergo dental care, it also increases the quality of the care because the dentist can focus more on the mechanical actions instead of patient management. Some dentists in the United States have used a packaged magic show called The Magic of a Healthy Smile as a marketing or motivational tool for dental treatments, while others have taken this concept to the next level and integrated the performance of magic tricks into their practice. A now defunct company called Dentallusions used to sell not only specialised magic tricks for dentists but also the Happy Tooth Magic Show, a fully scripted show for dentists in which a magic wand is replaced by a magic toothbrush, and standard magic www.magicperspectives.net


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shop items are used to promote good dental-health practices. I I I I Besides helping people to deal with physical ailments, magic tricks have also been used in mental healthcare. The idea of using magic in psychotherapy with children was first developed in the early 1970s. Since then, conjuring has been used in the treatment of children in an attempt to engage them in the therapeutic process. Balloon animals can be used for mutual storytelling in which the child plays an active role and potentially reveals valuable information regarding his or her inner conflicts, frustrations, and defences. The child is encouraged to enact a story with the balloons, after which the therapist repeats the story back to them with the same characters and setting but with more adaptive coping mechanisms and a more appropriate resolution of the conflict. Magic tricks can be used to advance a variety of therapeutic goals such as developing rapport, building motivation for treatment, encouraging empowerment and reinforcing behaviour change. When performed by the patients themselves, magic can also be successfully employed as a means of introducing positive effects, developing social skills, enhancing fine motor skills, and increasing attention span. To discover whether teaching magic could help with counselling, school counsellor David Levin researched the effects of teaching magic to severely emotionally disturbed youths in a psychiatric hospital. The research was conducted over six sessions with a small number of participants. During these sessions, students were taught magic tricks to rehearse and then demonstrate in the final session. The overall outcome of the study suggested an increase in self-esteem; however, as there were other aspects that could have influenced the results—such as other treatments during the same period—the results were ultimately inconclusive. www.magicperspectives.net


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In 2003, Dan Ezell, a magician and professor in special education, collaborated with his wife Colleen Klein-Ezell to research the impact that learning to perform magic tricks has on self-esteem and self-confidence in children with disabilities. Participants were taught a range of magic tricks and were given several weeks of practise time to perfect their presentation prior to performing for others. The results indicated a statistically significant increase in self-esteem and self-confidence for the entire group. Ezell and Klein-Ezell recognised, just like other researchers, that it was not just the magic itself that provided positive results but that all positive experiences raise children’s self-esteem. Magic has one aspect that is, however, not present in any other type of activity: its inherent secrecy. The childmagicians are taught secrets that are only known to them, allowing them to complete tasks that others cannot immediately replicate and become magicians in the eyes of adults and their peers. Magic tricks in psychotherapy with children can also be used to obtain diagnostic information. One valuable source of information is the child’s reaction to the trick. For example, the child may be amazed, critical or passive, or may respond in an omnipotent manner, stating that they can do the trick better than the therapist. Their reactions can reveal something about their state of mind. The use of conjuring as a form of therapy is not always effective. James Bow, who was a psychologist in a mental hospital, recommended that children with paranoia, psychosis or severe intellectual disabilities do not participate. These children lack the cognitive resources to understand magic. In psychotic children, magic tricks may blur the boundary between reality and fantasy even further, which is contrary to the reality orientation that needs to be reinforced with them. In a similar way, paranoid children may incorporate magic as a component of their delusional system, and this could worsen their sympwww.magicperspectives.net


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toms. I I I I When conjuring appears in scientific and professional literature on health care, it is mainly from a therapeutic perspective. There are, however, some references in medical-research literature that discuss the scientific aspects of magic performances. Escapology is a performance art whereby magicians free themselves from seemingly impossible predicaments. Given the extreme physical and psychological situations they find themselves in, they occasionally become of interest as a topic of scientific research. By placing themselves in extreme physical situations, they become fascinating subjects for medical scientists studying the body’s survival mechanisms and reactions to stress. Contemporary escape artist and magician David Blaine combines magic and escapology with feats of extreme endurance. His resume includes much self-induced torture: he was buried alive for seven days, spent sixty-three hours in a block of ice, stood for thirty-five hours on a 33-metre (100-feet) high pillar, and broke the world record for holding his breath (seventeen minutes). One stunt that was studied by medical researchers was Above the Below, an endurance feat conducted in 2003 in London in which Blaine was sealed inside a transparent case suspended nine metres from the ground and did not eat for forty-four days. During the fasting period, Blaine survived on just over four litres (one gallon) of water per day and lost a quarter of his body weight. Endocrinologist Márta Korbonits and her colleagues studied his physiology during the refeeding period after his extreme fast. When he was released from his self-imposed torture, David suffered from refeeding syndrome, which occurs when the body is no longer accustomed to digestion. The sudden introduction of nutrients can overwhelm the body and put strain on the heart and lungs, possibly resulting in www.magicperspectives.net


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respiratory or heart failure. After Blaine emerged from the box, he was gradually fed a liquid meal and given oral vitamin and mineral supplements while being observed by scientists. Studying the feats by performance artists such as Blaine can help medical professionals to better understand how our body responds to extreme situations and make a small contribution to our knowledge of our physical selves. I I I I Although solid evidence is sparse, the general opinion among professionals is that using magic tricks as a form of treatment or to lighten the burden of hospitalisation is beneficial. Also, the active practice of rehearsing and performing magic tricks by patients has direct benefits in an occupational therapy setting because of the fine motor skills required to perform tricks. The active performance of tricks also has psychological benefits in that it improves the selfesteem of people who may consider themselves less capable then their healthy peers. In regard to the passive enjoyment of magic tricks by patients, the otherworldly nature of magic can help them forget their surroundings and their situation. Magic can heal the psychological aspects of illness, which impacts positively on people’s ability to deal with their problems. Likewise, the inherently humorous aspect of magic can also have a very positive effect on the healing of patients. Such benefits can, of course, also be achieved through other forms of entertainment such as juggling, acting or any other purposeful activity. However, the special nature of simple magic tricks is that they create an asymmetry of knowledge between the performer and the spectator. Patients who consider themselves less able then their healthy peers are now able to accomplish something the others are not able to do. In the previous pages we have seen how, after an absence of www.magicperspectives.net


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many centuries, the use of magic has returned to health care. The main difference between the old and the new methods is that modern healers don’t claim that supernatural powers are aiding in the healing process. Instead, it is the aspects inherent to the performance of magic that help patients in their recovery process. Learning to perform magic has positive benefits such as enhancing self-esteem and improving fine motor skills, and passively enjoying magic also has beneficial effects, such as reducing anxiety and lightening the mood during difficult times. We can confidently say that magic can indeed have a purpose beyond being a frivolous form of entertainment. The benefits of magic have also been recognised by teachers and many use magic tricks as a tool to help them educate students in abstract subjects, which is the topic of the next chapter.


Chapter 7 The Magic of Teaching W HAT CAN WE LEARN FROM MAGIC TRICKS ? Besides helping patients to recover from their illness or helping make their time in hospital less stressful, magic tricks can also be used in schools. In the previous chapter we discussed how school counsellors use the performance or teaching of magic to help students cope with personal issues. Magic tricks can be used in the classroom to help teachers educate their students. This idea is not new: more than two centuries ago, the famous German poet Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that the performance of magic by children helps them to develop better speech. Magic tricks are also used by teachers as an educational tool to illustrate abstract concepts of science, mathematics, psychology, computer sciences, psychology, economics and business training. The secrets of magic tricks are mostly based on psychological, mathematical, chemical and physical principles and do not require much technical skill to perform other than being able to stage an entertaining presentation. Magic tricks that rely on ab81

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stract principles of science makes them perfect vehicles for enhancing the learning process of students. Teachers are motivated to use magic in the classroom because it helps them achieve their pedagogical goals by providing the students with entertaining illustrations of certain scientific principles. Magic can accentuate the normal curriculum with an extraordinary moment that ensures the undivided attention of the students. Even otherwise uninterested students may become focussed observers, if only because they want to find out how the magic trick works. It is this ability of magic to arouse curiosity which makes it an effective teaching tool. A magic trick in a classroom can act as a memory hook, something students will remember and associate with the lesson that was taught. Learning is much easier when the curiosity of students is aroused, which can be achieved through surprise—a speciality of magicians. Performing a magic trick is basically about violating expectations derived from existing beliefs, surprising the observer and making them curious about how the trick is accomplished. Teachers can use this element of surprise to the increase attention that students pay to them. Another way to use magic in the classroom is to use it as a metaphor for difficult aspects of life, such as self-confidence, friendship, body image and so on. Performing a magic trick as a metaphor can be an effective segue into classroom discussion on a variety of life skills. Brian Gilroy, student counsellor from New Jersey, wrote a comprehensive manual about how to use simple magic tricks in a teaching context. He describes a trick where a Mexican coin is transformed into an American coin. Performing such tricks provides an opportunity to teach, for example, about the power of change. In this chapter, some of the work undertaken by teachers that use magic tricks to teach subjects such as mathematics, computer www.magicperspectives.net


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science, physics, psychology and management are briefly reviewed. In this chapter, we will show how magic can be used by teachers as a vehicle to motivate students to find out about the abstract theories that are the foundation of many subjects in the school curriculum. I I I I The idea that mathematics and magic have a lot in common is as old as the invention of geometry itself. Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, famous for discovering the theorem that is still used by builders to form straight angles, established a secretive society in which mathematics and geometry were considered a magical and sacred form of art. Although in contemporary culture mathematics has lost its occult veil and has become a practical tool, many students still consider mathematics as esoteric as magic. The strange symbols used in mathematics texts look a lot like mystical symbols one would find in occult writings. Some aspects of this most abstract of all sciences can be used to create the illusion of magic. Magicians call such tricks ‘self-working’, as the illusion of magic is created by following a mathematical process, without the need for sleight-of-hand. The Twenty-one Card Trick, whereby three packets of seven cards are mixed in a specific order to find the spectator’s selected card, is a well-known example of a self-working card trick taught to beginners. Magic tricks based on the principles of mathematics are popular among magicians. Recently, deceased ‘mathemagician’ Martin Gardner published a plethora of tricks based on arithmetical and geometrical principles that seem to defy common sense. Even the most famous and skilful magicians occasionally use magic tricks based on mathematical principles. David Copperfield performed a self-working card trick in his 1991 television special, Mystery on the Orient Express. Copperfield showed a series of cards on the www.magicperspectives.net


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television screen and invited spectators to touch a random card on the screen. After a series of instructions that seemed to give spectators free choices, Copperfield was able to predict the chosen card. Mathematics teacher Sidney Kolpas used this particular routine to illustrate a mathematical proof used to teach number theory. Kolpas sees mathematical magic tricks as excellent motivational devices that offer exciting ways to introduce students to the nature of mathematical proofs and to introduce students to new theoretical concepts. Performing magic tricks helps teachers to illustrate some of its concepts that are difficult to understand. Mathematics lecturers Lawrence Lesser and Mark Glickman describe a method to use magic tricks to teach the abstract concepts of probability and statistical methods. Magic tricks are designed to appear as low-probability events in the eyes of a spectator. The probability of a magician successfully selecting the same card as the spectator is one in fifty-two. The theatrical presentation of the magician ensures that the spectator does not interpret the success as a mere coincidence, but as a miracle. For such tricks to seem like magic, the magician needs to enhance its improbability, rather then presenting it as coincidence. A statistics teacher can demonstrate magic tricks, such as a pick-a-card trick, to enhance the students’ understanding of probability by quantifying the probability of the unlikely event. Magic becomes an illustration of the concepts of statistics. Lesser and Glickman identify magic as one of the ‘twenty modalities of fun’ and show that magic has the potential to motivate students in statistics courses, which are otherwise perceived as very abstract and boring. However, they warn against using deception in the classroom, as it can have negative consequences. Magic’s inherent requirement to hide the cause of the apparent miracle can expose a student’s lack of knowledge and undermine their confidence in their ability to grasp the material. A www.magicperspectives.net


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magic trick that seems to reveal a new impossibility can make the lesson seem more difficult than it really is. Magic tricks, Lesser and Glickman advise, must be thoughtfully chosen in terms of quality and intensity of surprise so that students feel engaged and will want to discuss and understand rather than feel unduly tricked or deceived. Magic tricks are not only suitable for helping students understand mathematics but also for managing real-world problems in the multi billion-dollar gambling industry and for improving Internet security. Most card tricks are based on the idea that the individual cards are in a random order, this is important as picking and finding a card needs to be as improbable as possible for the magic trick to be impressive. Magicians have thus developed a slight obsession with methods of shuffling playing cards, which have been studied by mathematicians. Persi Diaconis, professor of statistics and mathematics at Stanford University, is an expert in the science of card shuffling. His expertise is related to his real-life experience with playing cards. When Diaconis was a teenager, he ran away from home to perform card tricks. He is now the author of several papers on the mathematics of card shuffling. The perfect method for shuffling playing cards is known among magicians as the Faro Shuffle. Performing this shuffle is considered a specialist skill by magicians, it is the magic world’s equivalent of catching a fly with chopsticks. In this method, the deck is split into equal halves of twenty-six cards, which are then pushed together to perfectly interweave. This particular shuffle is not only useful in magic tricks but also illustrates certain principles in the field of combinatorics, the study of mathematical combinations. This is an important part of information theory which has been put to practical use in transmitting data securely over the Internet. The science of card shuffling is used to ensure that a deck of cards is shuffled in a truly random www.magicperspectives.net


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order. The more random the order of the cards are, the more difficult it is to predict the next card in a sequence. The importance of studying the randomness and the mathematics of shuffling cards was recently highlighted in a Las Vegas casino when the casino sued a playing card manufacturer because the decks were not sufficiently pre-shuffled. This provided players with a slight but significant advantage over the dealer. Several players discovered this flaw and were able to win over half a million dollars due to the predictability of the card sequence. I I I I Computer science, essentially a form of applied mathematics, is a perfect vehicle for illustrating the seemingly magical properties of numbers and shapes. A mathematical magic trick is basically like a computer algorithm, which is a series of instructions that if followed guarantees some predictable effect. The algorithm tells you what to do and what order to do it in. A computer program is an algorithm written in a language that a computer can execute. Mathematical magic tricks are algorithms designed to produce counter-intuitive outcomes, creating the illusion of magic instead of a predictable outcome. In the earlier mentioned Twenty-one Card Trick the audience is not aware that a pre-determined sequence is being followed that ensures their selected card always appears in the same location. The presentation is designed in such a way that the spectators perceive the shuffling process as random and not affected by their choice of card. The magician’s casual presentation ensures that the spectators believe in the randomness of the proceedings, while in fact it is totally predictable. These types of algorithmic magic tricks can be used by teachers of computer science to teach their students about computer science in an entertaining way. Gerald Kruse, Professor www.magicperspectives.net


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of information technology at Juniata College, published an article about using a magic trick as a method for teaching students the principles of binary numbers. He finds that using a mathematical magic trick helps in his teaching because it increases his interaction with the students and increases the energy levels in the classroom. The demonstration also translates to a fruitful follow-up discussion, which helps students better understand binary numbers and be motivated to delve into the subject matter. Computer scientists Paul Curzon and Peter McOwan published several ways by which students can be engaged with computer science through magic shows. Together with their colleague Jonathan Black of Queen Mary University in London, Curzon and McOwan created the Computer Science for Fun (cs4fn) website, which provides many entertaining topics for students of computer science, including a section on magic tricks. In their strategy, the teacher shows the children a mathematical magic trick related to a computer science topic, after which the students are challenged to work out the method. Presenting computer science theories as magic puzzles and challenging students to find out the method, provides them the motivation to think more deeply about the subject matter than they might otherwise do. I I I I The relationship between physics and magic has a long tradition. Many magicians in the nineteenth century adorned themselves with lofty titles such as ‘professor of amusing physics’. Many magic tricks rely on the laws of physics to create the illusion that a miracle occurred, they use the principles of magnetism, hydrostatics, mirrors and other basic physical properties, which makes them a suitable vehicle for teaching the principles of the natural world. Teaching physics through magic tricks in a formal classroom setting is beneficial to students as it is often the students themselves performing the www.magicperspectives.net


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magic trick, giving them opportunity to explore the inner workings of the apparent miracle. The students are given sequential instructions on how to perform the trick before the class themselves. In learning these steps they gain a better understanding of the principles of physics that are use to perform the magic and gain confidence in public speaking. Magic tricks are also used at the university level education. Michael Ruiz, professor of physics at the University of North Carolina, describes the scientific principle known as Lenz’s Law, which is often demonstrated in lecture rooms, but is also used in a commercially available magic trick called Newton’s Nightmare. In this magic trick, the principles of electromagnetism are used to seemingly break the laws of gravity. The lecturer generates curiosity in the problem by demonstrating the magic trick and then explains its secrets to the curious students. The literature contains many examples of different magic tricks that can be used to demonstrate the principles of physics, but little attention has been given to developing principles on how to best use magic tricks in the classroom. The university of Villanova University in Pennsylvania established the Science & Theatre Magic Program. This is a multidisciplinary magic-themed program of science exploration in which teachers mentor high-school students in preparing and delivering magic-themed lessons, which the students in turn teach to primary school students. The experiences of this university provided insight into what determines the success of using magic in an educational setting. They found that success hinges on the ability of the teacher to employ the magic trick so that it elicits curiosity and articulates the connection with the topic being taught. When this is not the case, the magic trick becomes a mere form of entertainment instead of a learning opportunity. They also identified some possible difficulties, especially when teaching young children www.magicperspectives.net


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whose belief in supernatural magic or inability to distinguish between reality and illusion can sometimes interfere with creating an interest in the scientific explanation. Because young children believe that supernatural magic is a real possibility, the miracle is a sufficient explanation for the strange occurrence they just witnessed and there is no need for further exploration. This issue has been experienced by many people working in science centres around the world. Educators from these centres demonstrate the principles of physics in the form of magic shows. The demonstrations are not presented as formal classroom lessons, but in an entertaining manner. There is, however, some disagreement among science educators on whether these types of shows should be presented as magic tricks, as some educators feel that this confuses children. Even though the tricks are presented as science, some children still believe them to be magic. The children are so impressed by the effect that they are not interested in the solution to what they just witnessed. This phenomenon was also recognised by chemistry teachers Elaine Haub and Michael Barnes, who observed that some students perceived certain chemistry demonstrations as magic instead of science. To the initiated student or science teacher, the effects are caused by simple laws of nature, but to those who do not possess the required knowledge of science, the effects can seem like supernatural magic. This is a perfect illustration of Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction in action. When the observer does not understand the physics behind the event, their lack of knowledge will make the effects can seem like magic. I I I I Besides the mathematical and physical principles, most magic also relies on psychological deceptions. Because our senses and our mind work together to perceive the world along defined patterns, www.magicperspectives.net


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magicians can use this to make us believe something impossible has just happened. This makes magic tricks also perfect vehicle for explaining the principles of the psychology of perception, which is the topic of chapter eight of this book. Paul Solomon is a psychologist and amateur magician who uses magic tricks to explain aspects of human perception. He developed and taught a special course consisting of a series of lectures and magic trick workshops. Solomon describes how he teaches about perceptual organisation, a theory of how our mind interprets the images that are presented by the visual system, and other principles of psychology. He describes several magic tricks and how they can be used to demonstrate theoretical aspects of psychology. When, for example, a magician pretends to hold a single rope while in fact holding two pieces of rope with the joint hidden in his hand, the mind, in absence of other information, interprets this as being one piece of rope. Business management is essentially a form of applied sociology and psychology and has as such a lot in common with magic. Both managers and magicians aim to create an ideal world, a new reality very different from the one we know—the magician by using stage craft and the manager by using workplace psychology. Knowing about magic can, for example, help managers to better understand how processes of decision making operate and improve the decisions they make. Perceptual tendencies, the usual way in which we observe the world, can distort a manager’s view of reality and reduce their ability to make good decisions. Magicians know a lot about how to distort people’s perception and as such, magic tricks can be a good vehicle to illustrate theories of management. Terrence Krell and Joseph Dobson from the Western Illinois University outlined a method for using magic tricks to explain concepts of organisational behaviour in management education. They write www.magicperspectives.net


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that while situations in organisations sometimes appear to be unexplainable within the context of standard organisational behaviour theories, the basic principles of theatrical magic offer an opportunity to teach some of these oddities to students of management. The parallel between magic and organisational behaviour is that actions, behaviours and events often occur without an easily understandable, rational explanation. Many events that happen in an organisation appear magical in that they are not fully understood and are sometimes even shocking or generate other emotional reactions. Krell and Dobson describe a card trick in which the spectator seemingly has free choice but the magician knows in advance what card will be selected. This card trick demonstrates that, although there is often the appearance of free choice in organisational decision making, the presented set of choices may contain one particular option that has an unusually high probability of being chosen. Another way to use magic to explain the principles of management was described by K. Fatehi-Sedeh, also of Western Illinois University. He described how a card trick can be used to demonstrate that deficiencies in the perceptions of managers can lead to bad decision making. Through a simple magic trick, Fatehi-Sedeh demonstrated to management students that perception depends on the momentary activation of concepts such as one’s needs, goals and attitudes. Just like other educators he advocates the use of magic tricks to ensure the undivided attention of his students. Magic tricks are also used to informal corporate training to provide an entertaining way to make employees think about their dayto-day jobs. Senior managers of a major retailer in England were invited to the Magic Circle in London to attend the performance of a magician. Magic tricks were presented as allegories for common managerial issues; for example, a Russian-roulette trick was used www.magicperspectives.net


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to explain concepts of risk management and to emphasise that in business there is sometimes only one chance to get it right. The concept of magicians following a rigorous process to perform their tricks was used as a reminder for all to follow the established corporate procedures. From the practical experiences of lecturers and corporate trainers in management we can see that magic is a useful allegory to teach and enlighten professionals about business practices. The magician’s ability to distort reality is a reminder to those in management that their perception is fragile and that they should always find out the facts, rather than relying on perception. I I I I One interesting footnote in the history of magic is that the techniques of magicians were used to teach agents in the shady world of professional espionage. During the height of the Cold War, the CIA initiated a top-secret program, code-named MKULTRA, to counter Soviet mind-control and interrogation techniques. The project consisted in a range of investigations into the manipulation of human behaviour. Many of the techniques used by the CIA were ethically questionable, but their program also involved learning about the more benign techniques used by magicians to deceive people. Just as a magician must hide his techniques from an attentive audience, so must an intelligence officer elude detection by the enemy. Knowing about deceptive techniques is also important for analysts seeking to uncover foreign spies or for themselves to remain undetected. The CIA hired American magician John Mulholland to write manuals on sleight-of-hand for use by spies in undercover operations. All documents relating to the MKULTRA project were destroyed in 1973, but authors Keith Melton and Robert Wallace rediscovered two manuals written by Mulholland. In these manuals, Mulholland taught intelligence officers about manipulating the obwww.magicperspectives.net


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server’s line of sight in order to hide things from view, about using psychological misdirection techniques to avoid detection and many other techniques commonly used by magicians. Spies were trained in using sleight-of-hand techniques to hide miniature cameras and other tools of the trade. Techniques employed in stage illusions to hide people from sight were found very useful for secretly moving people across borders. There is in essence no difference in method between a large stage illusion where a girl disappears from inside a box and transporting somebody secretly across borders without being detected. The Mulholland manuals contain many techniques from the magician’s tool-kit and explain how they could be applied in clandestine operations. There is, however, one major difference between the secret agent and the magician: the spy would never use colourful boxes or props, as the trickery of the spy is designed to avoid all detection, even the fact that deception has occurred, while the magician prides himself that he was able to deceive the audience. I I I I Lastly, another field in which conjuring has served a useful purpose beyond entertainment is in computer programming. Software designers have looked at magicians to learn about human perception to be able to design better computer interfaces. Bruce ‘Tog’ Tognazzini, a respected expert in human-computer interaction, writes that “Both software designers and magicians create virtual realities. We bring ours alive on computer displays; magicians bring their alive on the stage.” The computer screen shows us a world of buttons, pages, folders and so on that do not really exist. Just like mathematical procedures can create the illusion of magic so can computer software interfaces produce illusionary experiences. Tognazzini draws many parallels between magic and computer programming, and recommends that software-interface designers learn from magicians to www.magicperspectives.net


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design software. In a similar vein to Tognazzini’s work on human-computer interfaces, husband and wife research team Noel and Amanda Sharkey of the University of Sheffield, published a paper exploring the correlations between stage magic and robots. The authors highlighted the long relationship magicians have with using automatons—early forms of robots driven by clockwork-like mechanics—in their performances. De Von Kempelen’s automaton chess player is one of the first technological mysteries presented to audiences in Europe. This machine was able to play chess and beat many players. The machine was not presented as a technological achievement, but as a magical secret to be uncovered, a riddle to be solved. As the development of mechanical engineering progressed, magicians began to use mechanical robots in their performances more commonly. Robert-Houdin started his career as a watchmaker and after becoming a magician, he was an expert at creating illusions based on clockwork-like mechanisms. Robotics and artificial intelligence are in essence forms of deception because they create the illusion of interacting with real people. The success of a robotics project is often measured by the extent to which the device is believed to be life-like, with the ultimate aim of creating a robot indistinguishable from a biological human being. This deception is anchored in the innate human predisposition to anthropomorphism, the tendency to interpret objects as part of the social world. The quest to create mechanical beings is closely tied to the art of illusion, and robotics engineers can use techniques of psychological deception borrowed from magicians to create the illusion of artificial intelligence. Another type of collaboration between magicians and computer scientists is in the relatively new field of augmented reality, which involves technology that shows a view of reality overlaid with prowww.magicperspectives.net


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jections of images and information generated by a computer. This is the current fore-front of technology, with early adopters of this idea already developing technology such as computer screens in glasses. Swiss magician Marco Tempest is well known for incorporating augmented reality in his magic performances. In some of his work he beautifully interweaves digital projections with reality, leaving the viewer with no clue as to what is real and what is not. By combining technology, which has no secrets, with traditional deceptive techniques, he is able to create an artful display of magic. Tempest honours the tradition of magicians incorporating science in their shows by using cutting-edge technology to create a theatre of illusion. Anna Carreras and Carles Sora, computer researchers from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, published two papers concerning the combination of conjuring and augmented reality. They experimented with a performance called Magic for a Pixeloscope, a performance in which traditional magic was mixed with projections. In their show, projections became physical realities, which was achieved by combining technology and old-fashioned sleightof-hand. Presenting technology as magic to contemporary audiences is a challenge because people are used to the miracles that can be achieved with modern electronics. Technology and magic are in this way considered mutually exclusive, as the causes of technological effects are known to the audience. When a magician would make a coin appear on a screen by simply touching the screen, this would not be considered magical as every smart phone has this capability. However, Carreras and Sora demonstrated that it is possible to entertain audiences with a mix of technology-based digital illusions and traditional techniques. They found that a good way to create illusions by mixing technology with classical magic is by breakwww.magicperspectives.net


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ing the boundaries between physical and digital worlds through the usage of transformations—turning a digital image into something physical. The inclusion of high-technology with magic is a technique that audiences will likely see more of in the coming years, just as audiences of the early twentieth century saw magicians adopt cinema for use in their performances. After physics, chemistry and psychology, information technology is becoming a popular method in the tool kit of the conjurer. I I I I In this chapter we have seen that magic can teach us a lot about the world around us and about ourselves. As a performance art, magic has a natural ability to arouse curiosity, which is the best way to increase the motivation for students to learn. The close relationship between magic and the different sciences makes it a good vehicle to teach the abstract concepts of physics, mathematics, computer science, psychology and related subjects. The main difference between an educational performance and a theatrical performance of magic is that the teacher will in most cases explain the workings of the magic trick, which is an absolute taboo in magic shows performed to entertain people. Magic in education seeks to answer questions, while in regular magic shows the goal is to leave questions unanswered. In the next chapter we will discuss the techniques and the sociological and psychological aspects that make it possible that audiences are deceived by magicians.


Chapter 8 The Deception of Magic H OW CAN WE BE SO EASILY BE DECEIVED ? When people watch a magician, the question first and foremost on their mind is: How did he do that? The burning curiosity of spectators is understandable and is in fact a natural reaction. However, the question that should be most pressing on everybody’s mind is not how the magician creates the illusion of magic, but how it is possible that our minds can so easily be deceived. How is it possible that we believe we are seeing something that we rationally know cannot be happening? The biggest secrets of magic are not the specific techniques used to create illusions but the way the trick is presented to the audience to trick us into believing that we experienced a miracle. Magicians use physical, sociological and psychological techniques to make spectators believe they are seeing real magic. It is not really interesting to know what type of sleight-of-hand technique a magician used to create the illusion of magic; much more fascinating is to find out how it is possible that it was achieved without the 97

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audience noticing. Scientists have been exploring this question for over a century and are still seeking final answers and this chapter presents a snapshot of this research. The fact that theatrical magic is possible at all underlines some profound questions about the nature of being a human being. Since the dawn of systematic thinking, philosophers have been investigating our mind’s relationship with the physical world. This was originally the exclusive domain of philosophy, but for the past century psychologists, cognitive scientists, and, in more recent times, neurobiologists have also been attempting to improve our understanding of how the mind perceives reality. Some of these scientists have focussed on magicians and their spectators with the hope that discovering how the mind can be deceived will help illuminate how the mind perceives the world in general. We look at the world through the lens of normality, and our perceptions are based on our previous experiences with the world around us. The patterns stored in our brain are, however, not always correct. Something that seems real to the unsuspecting observer can be no more than an illusion—their perception and reality may not always match. Deception researchers distinguish between three causes for deception: optical illusions, visual illusions and cognitive illusions. Optical illusions occur when our eyes are deceived due to the physical manipulation of light. Optical illusions are used in entertaining ways such as in the Hall of Mirrors attractions found in many amusement parks and carnivals. When you see yourself in concave or convex mirrors, you appear either fatter, skinnier, taller, shorter or totally deformed. Optical illusions are also regularly used in magic tricks, specially in large stage illusions where mirrors can make it seem that a box is empty, while in fact a tiger may be hiding inside. The use of mirrors by magicians has inspired contemporary www.magicperspectives.net


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language and the expression ‘smoke and mirrors’ is often used to refer to deceptions used by marketers and politicians. This phrase originates from carnie slang for magic acts and freak show displays that depend on optical illusions. Visual illusions occur when the information received by the eyes is wrongly interpreted and our subjective reality does not match objective reality outside our mind. When, for example, we look at a railway line stretching away from us into the distance, it seems as if the tracks meet somewhere near the horizon when in actual fact they remain perfectly parallel. Visual artists, such as M.C. Escher, use visual illusions by exploiting the mind’s processing of two-dimensional drawings to create seemingly impossible worlds in three dimensions. Cognitive illusions are the most complex type and are used in most instances of sleight-ofhand magic. A cognitive illusion occurs when the mind attributes a wrong cause to what is being observed. For example, the magician places a ball in his hand and after a wave with a magic wand the ball seems to have vanished. The wand was in fact used to distract the audience and hide the sleight of hand used to create the illusion. The eyes were not deceived, but the brain incorrectly interpreted the information that was provided by the optical nerve, leading to a cognitive illusion. It is interesting to note that in all three types of illusion, the eyes themselves are never deceived because they convey a perfect representation of the light received to the retina. Deception always occurs in the mind, which underwrites the statement made by many magicians that magic does not happen in the hands of the magician, but in the mind of the spectator. I I I I Magicians possess an extensive set of tools and techniques for creating illusions for their spectators, based on mechanical, sociological and psychological principles. English psychologists and former prowww.magicperspectives.net


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fessional magicians Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont developed a systematic overview of the methods used by magicians in which they classified all possible magic tricks into nine to be experienced by spectators. The first effect is to cause an object to appear where there once was nothing. Pulling a rabbit from an apparently empty hat or a coin from a child’s ear are the almost mythical examples of this effect. The second effect is the opposite of the first, vanishing something. This has been somewhat of an obsession among magicians. Houdini once vanished an elephant, and in later years magicians progressed to ever bigger and stranger animals and objects, culminating with David Copperfield vanishing the Statue of Liberty. The third possible effect is the transposition of an object. This is the disappearance of an object, animal or person followed by its reappearance in another place without it having been transported physically. A transposition occurs when a playing card, selected and sometimes even signed by a spectator, ends up in the pocket of the magician. The fourth magical occurrence is the transformation of something into something different, or change its properties, such as when a deck of cards changes form blue-backed to red-backed. Lastly, objects, animals or people can also be penetrated by another object or can be destroyed and subsequently restored. These two types of effects are the basic staple for large illusions shows, where the magician’s assistants are on the receiving end of these apparent mutilations. But penetrations and miraculous restorations are not only used on the stage and can also be performed in the hands of a skilful magician. Lamont and Wiseman proposed a categorisation of possible methods used to create magic using sleight-of-hand. They identified six types of techniques magicians can use to perform magic. An www.magicperspectives.net


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object can be concealed (for example, when a coin is hidden in the palm of the hand) or smuggled (moved with the spectator noticing). Magicians can also use simulation of actions, just like a mime artist pretends to do things without anything actually happening. Other techniques are to secretly use duplicate objects, to substitute one object for another, or to disguise an object as something else. Magicians use countless variations of these techniques and continue to develop different ways to achieve the same effect using these basic tools. The last two foundational effects are mostly related to mentalism, which includes telekinesis (moving objects with the mind) and extra-sensory perception (which includes mind reading, predicting the future and similar impossible feats). Mentalism effects are created using a large range of techniques, including so-called psychological subtleties. These techniques have a lot in common with the subtle deceptions used in advertising, such as plays on words or subliminal perception to place a thought in the spectator’s mind. These techniques are called subtleties because their success is not certain and relies mostly on the subtle ways in which the magician communicates with the audience. When, for example, asking somebody a number between one and ten, the most common answer is seven. Psychologist Jay Olson investigated people’s preferences for certain playing cards and confirmed what magician already knew through years of performing card tricks. The Ace of Spades was by far the most popular, followed by the Queen of Hearts, and then other high-ranking cards. These types of predictable preferences have been researched extensively by marketing scholars as it helps them ensure consumers choose the advertised products. Mentalist Banachek is not only famous for his participation in the previously mentioned Project Alpha, but also for his series of books on using www.magicperspectives.net


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psychological subtleties in magic. Many mentalists do in fact explain to the audience that they are using these types of subtleties instead of referring to real psychic powers. This way they are continuing the tradition of nineteenth-century magicians that explained their magic as demonstrations of physical sciences. In the current century the science of the mind is the new frontier of human enquiry, which, just like the physical sciences were two hundred years ago, makes psychological subtleties a perfect presentational tool and also a technique to deceive audiences. The toolbox of the magician is extensive and is continuously being expanded upon. Thousands of books have been published that discuss the mechanics of conjuring in great detail. These techniques are, however, useless when used in isolation, as the methods could be easily detected by spectators. The key to a successful performance is to ensure that spectators are not able to discover which techniques are being used to deceive them. To achieve this, magicians use sociological and psychological ruses to move the attention of the spectator away from the secret actions. I I I I Although being deceived is an inherently psychological process and all magic happens in the mind of the spectator, conjuring is first and foremost a social activity involving a magician and at least one other person to experience the magic. The answer to the question of how we can be deceived by magic tricks can, as such, be answered from two angles: the sociological and the psychological, each providing their own piece of the puzzle. The sociological answer to how our minds can be deceived by a conjurer is simply because we let him do so. We cannot help the biological make-up of our brain, and most people, even magicians themselves, will find it hard not to be deceived by a skilled sleightwww.magicperspectives.net


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of-hand artist. Most magic relies on the fact that the magician has a knowledge-advantage over the spectator and that the true causes of the events are hidden. This is especially the case with self-working tricks based on physical or mathematical principles. Only if the spectator is unaware of the laws of nature or mathematics at play will the effect be perceived as magical. As mentioned earlier, the Third Law of Prediction states that the boundaries of what is accepted as magic are continuously shifting. Whereas Robert-Houdin was able to deceive his audiences using the then new technology of electromagnetism, this would most likely not impress contemporary spectators. Nevertheless, magicians are still able to baffle even the most intellectually sophisticated audiences, and are able to perform miracles for which no explanation seems possible. Even though the spectator is implicitly invited to figure out how the magic is done, they have limited abilities to research the magic performance in detail, the magician carefully directs what the spectator can and cannot perceive. Social convention prevents spectators from grabbing the magician’s props to investigate them in detail or stop the performance to retrace what just happened. Good magic tricks are structured to make it harder for spectators to reconstruct exactly what happened. One way to achieve this is by not performing the same effect again by means of the same method. Repeating the same method allows spectators to better examine the proceedings and increases the likelihood of the deceptive techniques being exposed. This asymmetry in knowledge makes the performance, in the words of Jim Steinmeyer, essentially a “delicate battle of wits” between magician and spectators. Contemporary audiences know they are being deceived because of cultural conventions whereby the magician at least implicitly declares he is deceiving them. Although deceiving people is generally considered unethical or illegal, the www.magicperspectives.net


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deception in this context occurs between consenting adults, and a social contract between the magician and the audience, an unwritten and mostly unspoken agreement that deception will occur, negates the issue. The spectator must, however, be willing to be deceived. A sociological way to hide the true cause of illusions and to turn natural occurrences into magic is through the skilful use of language. The previously mentioned anthropologist Graham Jones and his colleague Lauren Shweder of New York University investigated the language a magician uses to teach a magic trick and then provided a detailed linguistic analysis. Jones and Shweder observed that when a magician teaches a trick to a novice, he not only teaches the mechanical actions on how to perform the trick, he also teaches a script that will be employed in a performance to shape the sensory experience of the audience. When a magician chooses to use certain words to accompany his actions, the words provide a magical context to what is happening. In this way, a handkerchief that rises from the table is believed to be haunted by a ghost or to have come to life, depending on the chosen presentation. The spoken word plays an essential role in mediating between the magician’s mechanical actions and the audience’s visual experience. For example, when a magician reveals a playing card that the spectator believes they selected randomly and in secret, words are essential in turning the feat from a mere coincidence to a magic occurrence. The magician has to stipulate the kind of magic that is occurring—he needs to stipulate what will happen: “I am going to read your mind” or “I have predicted the future”—and indicate when the moment of magic is about happen to ensure it is distinguished from mere coincidence. Illusions emerge not only as a result of manipulating physical objects, influencing the perceptions of spectators, but also from manipulating their overall experience with words. www.magicperspectives.net


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One type of magic where words are extremely important is mentalism. Without the proper direction of the magician, it is often impossible to distinguish whether he is reading a mind, predicting the future or controlling somebody’s actions. It is the theatrical task of a magician to frame the events with language, whether spoken or with gestures, to guide the spectators through their visual experience. Using the right words to prevent a spectator from discovering the real cause of the magic events is ‘verbal misdirection’, which Jones and Shweder define as the “constellation of linguistic strategies for producing and sustaining the sensory experience of illusion in magic”. When performing a magic trick there is actually a double narrative at work. The public narrative is what the audience hears and sees, while the secret narrative entails the actual causes of the magic. This creates what Jones and Shweder refer to as an epistemological gap—a gap in the knowledge of the spectator. The linguistic work of the magician creates a frame within which the audience can interpret the intentionally limited visual experience. In effect, the magician fills in the blanks with information that directs the spectator’s attention away from what has been hidden and provides an interpretive framework for what is revealed. The research by Jones and Shweder is compelling but limited to language use. The sociological view of deception is broader in that it focuses on the full social interaction between the magician and the spectators as a source of the illusion. Sociology is, however, not able to peer into the minds of the spectators; this is the task of psychology. I I I I A common belief about the cause of magical illusions is that “the hand is quicker than the eye”. This belief is so strong that it has become a common phrase in the English language. People tend to believe that magicians use swift movements to deceive. This belief www.magicperspectives.net


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is reinforced by magicians who use it as a ruse to distract audiences from detecting the methods they actually use. In sleight-of-hand magic, the spectator’s experience is not created by the magician’s undetectable rapid movements but by directing their attention away from the moment the magic is actually performed, which magicians call misdirection. The ability of magicians to actively shape how their spectators perceive the world has interested psychologists for many decades and has created a synergy between scientists and magicians. Just like practical experience with steam engines helped scientists in the nineteenth century to formulate theories of thermodynamics, some psychologists have found that the practical experience of magicians with deceiving people has helped them to formulate theories of human perception and cognition. In sociology and psychology, the magician is not the subject of study, it is the magician’s audience that is being investigated. In psychology, magicians become part of the scientific team and actively participate in researching their craft in a laboratory setting. Studying spectators while watching magic tricks provides insights into how the mind works because of the psychological processes at work when watching magic. Magicians themselves are also interested in the psychology of their craft, as this information can help them to improve their performances. The motivations of magicians are also related to their identity project of being a magician. Since the early days of modern conjuring, magicians have identified themselves with scientists. According to Sofie Lachapelle, magicians participating in a scientific laboratory as a team-member communicates to the general public that their craft warrants serious consideration and that magic goes beyond a mere frivolous entertainment. The scientific interest in magic is an important promotional tool for magic as a form of entertainment. www.magicperspectives.net


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The first psychologists to investigate deception of the human mind in a laboratory setting were Americans Joseph Jastrow and Norman Triplett, French psychologist Alfred Binet, and the German Max Dessoir, who all independently investigated magicians at the end of the nineteenth century. Jastrow explained that our mind draws conclusions about the world around us based on the limited information we receive from our senses, and that illusions manifest within this framework of limited information. He wrote that our minds evolved to be able to deal with average events, and that we are conditioned to interpret sensory information in a certain way based on our ordinary experiences. When we are confronted with an unusual experience, such as a magic show, our minds draw incorrect conclusions. The fact that we can be deceived is due to the wiring of our brains and is therefore an aspect of human psychology, not a weakness that can be avoided. Max Dessoir confirms Jastrow’s thoughts and wrote that even if somebody knows a lot about the techniques of magic, it is still possible to deceive them because of the inherent mechanics of the mind. The power of the mind is so strong that magicians occasionally even deceive themselves when practising their sleight of hand and observing themselves in a mirror. The four founders of the psychology of deception largely agreed on the nature of illusionary experiences. After their publications, psychologists largely lost interest in this research area. Research in the psychology of magic waned for almost a century, but it has been revived recently with a steady stream of publications, starting with the earlier mentioned work by Wiseman and Lamont. The major difference between then and now is that contemporary researchers have access to advanced technology that can tell them much more about how spectators perceive a magic trick. For example, eyetracking devices are used to record exactly where the spectator’s www.magicperspectives.net


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attention is at any given moment, and brain scanners can be used to identify which parts of the brain are activated at different moments. English psychologist Gustav Kuhn is an expert in the psychology of perception and is also an amateur magician. Kuhn has collaborated with other psychologists and published a range of articles on this topic, thus reinvigorating academic interest in the psychology of magic. In one of his laboratory exploits, Kuhn and his collaborator Michael Land repeated an experiment conducted more than a century earlier by Norman Triplett. They performed a trick in which a ball apparently vanishes into thin air. This illusion is created by throwing a ball up in the air three times, but on the third time the magicians only pretends to throw the ball when in fact it remains hidden in his hand. If this is done convincingly, the observer still perceives the ball rising into the air on the third throw, even though it never left the magician’s hand. To the spectator, it then seems as if the ball disappears in mid-air. To perform this illusion convincingly, magicians use so-called social cuing, which means that the magician uses his body language to direct attention away from the secret actions. Kuhn and Land performed two versions of the trick. The first version was performed the way it is described in magic books: the experimenter looked towards the ceiling as the imaginary ball flew up in the air. In the second version, the experimenter did not look at the imaginary ball, but instead looked at the hand that concealed it. They measured the eye movements of participants watching a film recording of both versions of the trick. Immediately after having seen the trick, participants were asked whether they saw the ball moving towards the top of the screen on the final throw. An interesting finding was that while most participants claimed that they saw the ball, the data from the eye tracker showed that they in fact were not looking at www.magicperspectives.net


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the ball. The version where the magician followed the imaginary flight path of the ball with his gaze was the most deceptive. Data from the eye-tracking device indicated that participants looked at the magician’s face before looking at where the ball should logically be. This indicates that the mind’s visual system uses information about where the magician is looking to predict the location of the ball. Most compelling conclusion was that the eyes were actually not fooled by the illusion. Participants only looked at the top of the screen when the ball was actually there. Kuhn and Land found a significant difference between what participants claimed to have seen and the way in which their eyes actually behaved. The participant’s perception, or what they consciously believed they had seen, was based more on their expectations of what was about to happen than on what their eyes actually perceived. Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘inattentional blindness’. It occurs when people fail to perceive a fully visible event because they are engaged in another task that is demanding their full attention. Studying magic tricks not only provides scientific theories to explain the practical knowledge of magicians, it also has real life applications that can save lives. When we drive a car, our visual system is very active in processing all the information coming in to us. This enables us to travel at high speed and stay safe on the road. The experiment by Kuhn and Land showed that although we might be looking at something, we might not actually perceive it: a potentially life-threatening situation when driving a car. Using magicians in the laboratory to help develop a scientific explanation of inattentional blindness can assist civil engineers improve the way roads are designed and possibly reduce the number of accidents. The final scientific word about misdirection used by magicians has not yet been written. Recent research in the United States by Jie Cui www.magicperspectives.net


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and others, assisted by Las Vegas magician Mac King, has revealed that spectators did not look at the magician’s face when the crucial moment occurred, as was shown in experiment by Kuhn and Land. Scientists are not only interested in eye movements to investigate how our visual system responds to magic tricks, they are also measuring what processes occur inside our brain when we are being deceived. Benjamin Parris, Gustav Kuhn and several other scientists at the universities of Exeter and Durham subjected a group of people to an fMRI brain scan while playing them a video of a magic trick. The results of this experiment show that watching a magic trick triggers the parts of the brain associated with detection of conflict and cognitive control. A magic trick represents a violation of our expectations of cause and effect, it is the presentation of an effect with no apparent natural cause. When we are presented with such a situation the brain detects a conflict in our perceptions, it sees an effect without an apparent natural cause. Second part of the brain that is activated when seeing a magic trick is specialised in regaining cognitive control in order to make sense of the world. This is the part of the brain that will seek for a logical solution of what was perceived. The brain-scanning experiment confirmed what magicians already knew. Watching a magic trick creates a cognitive dissonance: a tension in the mind between our expectations and what we believe we are perceiving. Our brain is programmed to resolve that tension and find a solution to what we experienced, which is usually expressed by spectators saying, “How did you do that?” The motivation to regain cognitive control is very strong and magicians often experience people inventing elaborate solutions for magic tricks that were achieved with very simple misdirection ploys. The loss of cognitive control needs to be carefully managed by magicians because if it becomes to large, the spectator might loose interwww.magicperspectives.net


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est in the show. Magicians refer to this as the “too-perfect theory”. This is not so much a scientific theory, but a philosophical notion that a trick can be too perfect, in the sense that there is absolutely no way for the mind to regain cognitive control. This often leads to spectators assuming technological solutions to the illusions, which do not give the magician credit for his skill. The neurological approach to researching magic tricks is gaining traction. On the other side of the Atlantic, Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience in Phoenix, Arizona, are promoting the neurobiology of magic. They have collaborated with several other scientists and well-known magicians such as Teller, James Randi, Apollo Robbins and Johnny Thompson and have published widely on the topic. In 2007, they chaired a special scientific symposium on the magic of consciousness, which featured presentations by scientists and by the above-mentioned magicians. They have also increased the profile of psychological research into magic, with articles published in popular science magazines, appearances on television shows and their excellent book Sleights of Mind. I I I I Neurological and psychological research into magic tricks has revealed many more fascinating discoveries in recent years and scientists are developing even more tantalising experiments to probe the mind to find an answer to the question how can can be so easily deceived. Some psychologists are extremely positive about their prospects to explain how the mind can be deceived and even speak of a science of magic as a speciality in itself. In the epilogue to this book we will review the possibility of an overarching theory of magic.


Chapter 9 The Future of Magic W ILL MAGIC BECOME OBSOLETE ? Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction holds within itself an expectation that magic will eventually become obsolete. It predicts that the more progress science makes, the less room there will be for magic. The questions needs to be asked whether this is this will actually be the case. Will magic eventually become obsolete and disappear from the cultural landscape? As people become more educated and have direct access to the collective knowledge of the world through technology, will the asymmetry of knowledge required to astound people fade away until it no longer exists? In this penultimate chapter, we provide a perspective on what the future of magic could be like. The good news is that as long as our minds are capable of being deceived in an entertaining way, there will be a place in society for magicians; and since our ability to be deceived is part of our innate psychology, there will as such always be a place for creative deception. The way magic is performed will 112

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undoubtedly change over time, but, as we have seen before, magic has a great ability to adapt itself to new cultural surroundings. Recent developments in science and technology can seem like miracles, even to our contemporary understanding of possibility. These developments are at the forefront of what is believed to be possible but have not yet morphed into practical applications. A lot of research effort is currently being devoted to developing display screens that consists of nothing more than a sheet of plastic. In a not all too distant future, we might be using technologically enhanced decks of cards that can change their face design without the magician having to resort to sleight of hand or any detectable technology being used. Other interesting developments have been made by scanning brain patterns to visualise the images in the mind’s eye. If this technology develops further and becomes openly available, mind reading could be a practical reality, perhaps even something we can do with our smart phones. This would move mind reading from the realm of magic into the realm of science. Magicians often use technology in their performances, and some magic shops already sell technological devices to help mentalists pretend to be able to read minds. These are interesting developments that have parallels with the pioneering days of cinema. In those days, magicians were in conflict with cinema because it was considered a threat to their livelihood, while other magicians embraced this new technology as a new technique to deceive their audiences. As people became more educated in the techniques of cinema, film lost its value as a means to create magic and morphed from a miracle to a story-telling form of art. Like in the early days of cinema, magicians are now facing strong competition from new forms of entertainment and technology, but some are embracing these new developments to create new kinds of magic. www.magicperspectives.net


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Some people believe that if science can replicate everything a magician pretends to do, magic as a performance art would become trivial because the asymmetry in knowledge between the magician and the spectator would have disappeared. The magician as the cause of the magic would be taken out of the equation, rendering the performance of magic a trivial activity. The counter-argument to this view is that the more science that is available, the more we know about nature, which means there are more ‘laws of nature’ to be broken and thus more room for magic. History shows that magic will always find a way to survive in a changing world, but how that future will look exactly we cannot describe, as the technology that would enable us to predict the future has yet to be invented. I I I I Opinions about the sustainability of magic as a performance art vary greatly. In a Forbes Magazine article about the jobs of the future, performing artists were considered among the people whose jobs would never disappear or be replaced by technology. Others listed in this category were politicians, prostitutes and undertakers. There is, however, no real reason why any of these jobs could not be replaced by advanced robots. A more recent article in the same magazine, expressed a less positive perspective on the future of the magician as a profession. The author believed that a career based on using deception as entertainment was headed for the trash pile, and linked this predicted demise to the growth of technology, claiming along the lines of Clarke’s Third Law that eventually anything we can imagine will be possible, leaving no space for magic. Statistics show that the number of stage performers, including magicians, jugglers, clowns and dancers, has suffered a steep fiveyear decline. This has been linked to an increased interest in homeentertainment technologies such as home cinema and video games. www.magicperspectives.net


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Declines in the number of performing magicians are not new and should not be viewed as an irreversible doom scenario but as natural variations in the market for live entertainment. Mankind is an inherently social animal, and there will always be opportunity for entertainment through face-to-face interaction. Magicians are as much impacted by disruptive technologies as any other industry. Music publishing is a great example to show how technology can change an industry. It is doubtful that even when computers are able to write beautiful music without human intervention, live performance of music will disappear. Music and magic as forms of art will never disappear; only the economic landscape changes, forcing magicians and other entertainers to adapt. I I I I Magic as a performance art is always evolving and is currently slowly pulling itself away from the stereotypes that surround it, but traditional views are still very strong. Someone who enters the word ‘magician’ into an image search engine will be engulfed in pictures of top hats, bow ties, playing cards, rabbits and other stereotypical paraphernalia. However, very few magicians use top hats or rabbits in their acts, and many of them have moved away from the traditional iconography, but they find it hard to escape. The different connotations of the words ‘magic’ and ‘magician’ forces theatrical conjurers to use recognisable images that communicate what their performance is about. The cover of this book intentionally uses a stereotypical image of a magician to ensure that it communicates the fact that this book is about theatrical magic and not supernatural magic. The top hat and rabbit are a cultural signifier of a magic performance as it developed over the last century, but times are changing, and many magicians are redefining what their performances are about. The current evolution in magic has been www.magicperspectives.net


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humorously expressed in the recent film Burt Wonderstone, where a traditional magician duo is usurped by a more edgy and popular street magician. The cinema version is very close to reality in that traditional Las Vegas style acts such as Siegfried & Roy have almost vanished and have been replaced by contemporary magicians such as David Blaine, Chris Angel and Dynamo. An interesting insight into the development of magic can be provided by looking at parallels in painting over the past century. One of the most exciting developments in the history painting was the movement towards abstract images. Although this style is often controversial and ridiculed by those who do not understand how to appreciate abstract work, its development is a deliberate movement away from the confines of the naturalist paintings of the past. Abstract painting is a quest to portray the essence of reality and expresses ideas and dreams rather than people and things. The evolution of painting towards abstraction is no better illustrated than by the work of Dutch artist Piet Mondriaan. He started his career by painting naturalistic and impressionistic works such as The Red Tree from 1908, a painting in which we can clearly recognise a tree. Three years later, Mondriaan became inspired by the cubist movement and painted The Gray Tree. This is a more abstract version of a tree, but still recognisable. Mondriaan experimented further with abstracting ideas and eventually produced Flowering Apple Tree, which no longer looks like a tree as we know them from everyday life. The painting is mainly grey, with a few black stripes on a light brown background reminiscent of a trunk. The leaves are indicated with all but curvy black lines. Mondriaan’s journey towards the abstract continued, and he became mainly known for his minimalistic geometrical compositions using primary colours and straight lines. The same type of evolution towards abstraction can be www.magicperspectives.net


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seen in conjuring. The naturalistic painting style can be compared with the time when conjurers pretended to be real magicians. Magic performed in this style was presented as a realistic copy of what a supernatural magician could have looked like. Magicians wore exotic clothes, summoned spirits and uttered occult words to impress their audiences. Robert-Houdin brought an end to this style of performing when he created the iconic figure of the gentlemen magician in evening dress, pretending to be a real magician. Magicians since Robert-Houdin presented magic as an abstraction of its original esoteric form. Gone were the mystic mumblings and costumes, to be replaced with references to science. This style of magic lasted for more than a century and became the iconic image of the stage magician as we know it. More recently, the stereotypical idea of the magician has been deconstructed further by post-modern conjurers such as Penn & Teller and David Blaine. The magician is no longer pretending to be somebody else, but has become an independent archetype. The magician presents abstracted miracles that don’t need a background story. The magic tricks speak for themselves. This development has, however, not been without resistance. Some magicians created a counter-reformation against this abstraction and formed the Bizarre Magic movement. In this style of magic, performers reconstruct the style of magic from before the revolution introduced by Robert-Houdin. Bizarre Magic relies heavily on ghost stories and frequent references to otherworldly forces. The current abstraction in conjuring, however, continues to evolve. Theatrical magic is in the process of making its next breakthrough toward a complete abstraction of the magician, just like Mondriaan’s later paintings are complete abstractions of what painting once was. This new magic is unpretentious and stripped down to its bare essentials. One performer moving down this path is the prolific creator of magic www.magicperspectives.net


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tricks, Jay Sankey. He develops a lot of magic with ordinary objects: bolts and nails, straws, key rings and similar objects familiar to audiences. All but gone are the sponge balls, colourful handkerchiefs and other strange props that are still the hallmark of many other magic acts. Magicians form part of the culture in which they operate, they form part of the same social universe as their spectators and embed their performances in the cultural assumptions they share with them. Magic is more often than not a story told with the use of props, which are aligned with the cultural assumptions of the society the performance forms part of. This is especially the case with the informal performance of close-up magic, where magicians often borrow objects from spectators. Just like culture continuously changes over time, the props that are used in magic also change. Some decades ago magicians would regularly use handkerchiefs to perform magic, but the introduction of disposable tissues has made this repertoire all but obsolete. Magicians have, however, adapted and responded to this evolution and developed tricks with paper tissues. As material culture develops, magicians respond by changing their repertoire. A recent development in material culture is the smart phone and how it replaces many objects we would normally carry. Phones can be used to replace money, keys and even playing cards. This limits the ability of magicians to borrow objects from spectators and forces them to adapt and develop new repertoire that incorporates the material culture in which they operate. When eventually all forms of cash will disappear from society, the immense repertoire of coin tricks will have lost a great deal of its appeal as audiences have no experience with these objects. The iconic action of pulling a coin from behind a child’s ear will be replaced with something new. As a sign of this development, magic tricks using mobile phones www.magicperspectives.net


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and other contemporary objects have become increasingly popular in magic shops. Just as a piece of abstract art can be confused with a child’s painting, abstract magic is deceivingly simple, but also this simplified style of magic is laced with psychological subtleties to create extraordinary experiences for the audience. As audiences become more educated about the tools used by magicians use to deceive them, the nexus of the performance needs to move away from the traditional mode of performance. Magic will rely less on the battle of wits and more on providing memorable moments. Contemporary magicians are recognising that their role is not to present miracles but to provide a valuable experience for their audiences through artful deception. Presenting magic as something that can add value to people’s lives will help magicians to better position themselves in the entertainment market and enable them to move away from the stereotypes of the past. In this way, magic will survive as a professional form of entertainment. I I I I One of the aspects of magic that is both enabling and a hindrance to the its enjoyment is the secrecy that surrounds the performances of magicians. Both spectators and magicians are obsessed with secrets. Magicians spend more time perfecting methods to create variations on the same types of effects than they do developing new presentations, and many spectators are also obsessed with methods because they have been presented with a mystery that the magician is unwilling to explain. Theatrical illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer writes in Hiding the Elephant that one can only truly understand the art of magic when one understands the magician’s secrets: “to appreciate magic as an art, you have to understand not only the baldest deceptions but also the subtlest techniques. You’ll have to learn to think www.magicperspectives.net


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like a magician”. Steinmeyer’s thoughts have recently been confirmed through the earlier mentioned brain-scanning experiments. Their results imply that people watching magic tricks are biologically forced into a position where they focus on method because their brain seeks to regain the cognitive control that was removed by the magician. Most books on the presentation of magic tricks advise to performers to reduce the psychological tension through an artful and entertaining presentation, but the basic psychological processes of watching an unresolved miracle can never be fully negated. Magicians passionately defend their secrets from public exposure. In the controversial television series Magic’s Biggest Secrets Revealed, the magician exposing the workings of magic tricks used to hide behind a mask to avoid recognition by his peers. Magicians vehemently protested as their cherished secrets were squandered for the sake of ratings. It is interesting to note that a broadcast of this series in Australia coincided with the start of the annual Melbourne Magic Festival. Even though the television show had good ratings, the popularity of the festival was not diminished and a record number of tickets were sold. Although this correlation between the broadcast and the popularity of the festival cannot prove that there is a causal connection, there is certainly no evidence that exposure necessarily reduces people’s willingness to watch magic shows. Sociologist Georg Simmel saw secrecy as something that places a barrier between human relationships. This is certainly the case in a society where information is freely available. The current tension between the magicians’ drive to maintain their secrets and the societal quest for open knowledge is a conflict between modernity and pre-enlightenment thinking. The idea of magic is steeped in the esoteric tradition, which comes from a time where knowledge was a privilege, not a right. Society has transformed in the past two www.magicperspectives.net


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centuries, and we currently live in a disenchanted world where mysteries are replaced by knowledge. Many ideas in magic are based on reversing this disenchantment, and this is the driving force in the Bizarre Magic movement. The developments of the contemporary world, were real magic is considered impossible and knowledge has become a right instead of a privilege, are irreversible; magicians must adjust to this new paradigm and embrace a future where secrecy is almost impossible to maintain. Exposure in magic is a double-edged sword. It would be selfdefeating to explain tricks while performing magic as it would turn a magic show into a documentary. It is the curiosity of the audience to find out the secrets what keeps magic alive. If the audience doesn’t want to know how the tricks are done, then the magician has no power. For the performance of a magic trick to become theatre instead of a lesson, there has to be a tension between exposing and hiding the secret. In the early days of cinema, exposure of the techniques used to create special effects was as controversial as exposure of magic tricks. However, knowledge on the workings of special effects in film is now freely available and people still visit the cinema. Another example of an entertainment form where audiences are knowingly deceived is professional wrestling. In the early days of this sport, deception was denied and audiences were led to believe that they were witnessing real fights. When the industry no longer insisted that the fights were real and the badly kept secrets of wrestling were exposed, the popularity of wrestling did not wane. Education of audiences into the secrets of magic can be beneficial for the profession. Most people that consider magic a true form of art are the magicians themselves, as expressed by Steinmeyer’s thoughts mentioned earlier. This appreciation stems from their knowledge of www.magicperspectives.net


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what it takes to study and perform good magic. Magicians enjoy the performances of other magicians for what is contained within the performance and have no need to focus on discovering the secret. I can watch Tommy Wonder’s and Pen and Teller’s version of the cups and balls over and over again and still enjoy it, even though I know exactly how it is done and am capable of performing a much more mundane version of this ancient miracle myself. Watching magic with the knowledge of a magician means there is no mental tension that needs to be resolved. Knowledgeable audiences who know the methods used find it easier to relinquish cognitive control, giving them the freedom to enjoy the magic at a higher level. Relinquishing the mind’s control over the experience provides spectators with a pathway to experiencing real wonders. I I I I As we saw in the first chapter, magic is more than an impossible occurrence that breaks what we consider to be the laws of nature. The word ‘magic’ can also be used to indicate a feeling of astonishment or the emotional quality of an experience. A magic performance is about creating these moments of astonishment and about crafting the magical quality of the overall experience. This is where the value of magic is located. Watching a magic trick creates a moment of astonishment, a moment in which the rational mind is not able to make sense of the world, a moment in which our deeply rooted expectations of what the world is like are contradicted. American close-up magician Eugene Burger describes the magical experience as a moment that moves us to “contemplate the reality of a nonrational realm of consciousness and experience”. It is the inherent philosophical theatricality of magic that enables this experience. A world of impossibility is presented to the spectator, who nevertheless knows that no real magic was employed. The ability of magic to ask www.magicperspectives.net


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such questions makes it independent from science and technology and places it in the realm of philosophy. Magic might be reliant on technology for its definition and its techniques, but as a form of theatre it is totally independent, and will remain so for as long as humanity exists. Over the past millennia, magic has proved to be extremely resilient to change. Magic survived the witch hunts of the Renaissance, the introduction of science, and the developments of competing entertainment technologies such as cinema and television. Magic has not only survived these disruptions, it has embraced them. When magic moved from the street to the theatre, a golden age started that lasted for decades. Now that the theatre is no longer the prime location for magic performances, magic has moved back to the streets, but now it is followed by television cameras. After the decline of theatre as a performance venue, magicians developed new markets and can be seen in restaurants, private parties and any other place where people seek to be entertained. The most important question is not whether magic can survive the current period of rapid change in the social environment, but how it can survive.


Chapter 10 Epilogue W HAT IS THE SCIENCE OF MAGIC ? Now that we have reached the end of this whirlwind journey through the scientific research about theatrical magic, we can reflect on the nature of the sciences themselves and their relationship to magic. Is there such a thing as the science of theatrical magic, or will research into this performance art always remain a loose collection of perspectives? Several scholars in this niche field of research, including psychologists Gustav Kuhn, cognitive scientists Susana MartinezConde and Stephen Macknik and literary scholar Lyn Gallacher, have called for an overarching theory of magic. They argued that a special theory can be developed about theatrical magic. While studying the Will Alma collection at the State Library in Melbourne, Lyn Gallacher found that the books and paraphernalia of magic are astonishingly repetitive. Gallacher viewed the magic tricks in this collection as a variation on a theme, which she tried to describe in order to better understand magic. The psychologists and cognitive 124

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scientists view the possibility of a theory of magic differently as they use laboratory experiments to explain how our minds can be deceived by magicians. Both approaches to define an overarching idea of magic illustrate the variety of perspectives in the fields of science associated with magic. The question remains, however, how successful the idea of a singular theory of magic will be. Is magic all about deception and should we follow the psychologists in their quest to find out how this is possible, or do we need to find the essence of magic as a performance art from a cultural perspective? In this book we have explored several varying approaches to studying magic, which can be divided into three main areas: the social and applied sciences and psychology. Each of these areas of science asks their own questions of magic and many different answers have been formulated by scholars, each discipline using their own perspectives and their own methods of investigation. The collection of research presented in this book is most certainly not the final word on magic as a mode of performance. Science is an ongoing conversation with ourselves and the world around us. The history of science shows that the more questions we provide answers to, the more new questions will arise. In this epilogue we discuss whether a meaningful grand unifying theory of of magic can be developed, or whether what has been reviewed in this book will remain a disconnected collection of ideas on the same topic. Before we can formulate an answer to this question we briefly review the current status of the different fields of science and look at what further questions can be asked of theatrical magic. I I I I The social sciences are the most diverse and difficult to grasp field with an interest in magic. There are many differing views on what questions social scientists should ask and in which way they should www.magicperspectives.net


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be investigated. Any view of what the social sciences are depends on the position one takes within the field. With respect to magic, scholars in the social sciences have asked a wide variety of questions about magicians and their audiences, depending on the expertise of the researcher. Historians have only recently developed an academic interest in theatrical magic, which caused a shift in how the history of magic is being written. Whereas most older histories of magic are impressive collections of biographies of magicians of the past, the new wave of historical writings takes a more analytical view of magic’s history. The task of the historian is not to provide a definitive account of historical facts or to develop an overarching theory of magic, but to collect historical evidence and interpret the available sources in order to tell a meaningful story. This interpretation and re-interpretation of the available sources—play bills, eyewitnesses accounts, books, props and so on—leads to an ever-changing narrative of the history of magic, with each historian interpreting the evidence from their own frame of reference. There are still many of avenues of enquiry that can be travelled in the history of magic, especially with respect to the role that non-European and female magicians have played in the development of their craft. There is also room to broaden the scope of histories of magic. Until recently, historians predominately focused their work on the magicians themselves and only in some instances on their audiences. The material aspects of magic shows have largely been ignored, but could provide valuable new insights. The props, décors and clothing used by magicians are directly related to the culture in which their performances are embedded. Studying the history of props could answer questions on how magic shows formed part of the material culture of their day. Objects also play an important role in how people define their www.magicperspectives.net


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identity, which is an important aspect of being a magician. For many professional performers, the lines between their public persona on the stage and off the stage are blurry. Being a magician is perceived to be a role that is played 24/7, a magician never has a day off work. A study of the material aspects of magic could shed some more light on the identity-creation efforts of magicians. With magicians being passionate collectors of antique props, a lot of material is potentially available to provide an answer to these questions. In performance studies, some academic work has been undertaken to develop a theory of what constitutes a magic performance. Most of the work in this field has been undertaken by practising magicians themselves, who are limited by their own internal perspective. Studying magic as a performance art from an academic perspective is still in the early stages of development. Given the specific qualities of magic shows, there is a lot of room for scholars to develop new perspectives. Magic as a performance art is different to other forms of theatre, not only due to its reliance on secrecy, but also because of the necessary interaction between the performer and the audience. Unlike actors in a play, the magician is aware of the audience being present and acknowledges their existence. Magic is, in the words of German playwright Bertold Brecht, a form of epic theatre. In this idea of theatre the fourth wall has been removed and a performance becomes, as it were, a two-way communication between actors and audience. Viewing magic as epic theatre could be an enlightening line of enquiry for scholars seeking to enhance knowledge of magic as a performance art. The sociology of magic provides interesting perspectives into the lives of magicians; how they are organised, the relationships between magicians and how they become magicians. The Internet has dramatically changed the dynamics in the social world of magiwww.magicperspectives.net


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cians. The role that secrecy plays within cultures around the world is changing as the openness of information sharing via the Internet is ever increasing. The success of websites such as Wikipedia are a testament to the willingness of people to share high quality information. This development of open information sharing contradicts the value that magicians have traditionally attached to secrecy. Many people are prepared to openly share the secrets of magic tricks on public websites, much to the dismay of magicians. Unfortunately to those who cling to the traditions, this development is unstoppable. It changes the way magicians relate to their audiences and how they relate to each other and ultimately how they define themselves as magicians. Future sociological work could reveal how magicians are responding to these changes and how they evolve their craft and their markets to remain a relevant form of entertainment. I I I I While scientists are mainly interested in explaining and understanding how the world functions, professionals apply this knowledge to improve the world for themselves and other people. In the applied sciences the fruits of scientific research are turned into practical applications, implemented by occupational therapists, software designers, teachers, nurses and other professionals. The literature on the subject of using magic tricks to improve people’s lives in quite extensive and covers mainly health care and education. In health care, both being actively involved with performing magic tricks or passively watching magic tricks has tangible benefits. Performing magic tricks can improve manual dexterity of people with physical disabilities or patients recovering from an accident. The passive experience of magic in a health-care environment also has benefits in that it can reduce the anxiety experienced by young patients. In these cases, the magic is performed by the medical professionals, www.magicperspectives.net


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specialised magicians or Clown Doctors. Another practical application of magic tricks is their use in education. Teachers around the world perform magic tricks to help students understand abstract concepts of mathematics, physics, computer science and other complicated subjects. Using magic tricks in education arouses curiosity in students and provides them with the motivation to discover the scientific principles that caused the illusion performed by the teacher. The literature on using magic tricks in a professional setting is comprehensive and some publications provide very detailed descriptions on how to establish a program that uses magic tricks. Using magic for practical purposes has a solid foundation and can most certainly not be considered a fad. Magicians are generally very passionate about their craft and professionals who are also magicians will always find ways to incorporate their deceptive skills in their chosen profession. I I I I The field most commonly associated with being the science of magic is psychology, as it seeks to answer the most profound of all questions we can ask of magic: how can our mind be so easily deceived? The interest by psychologists started more than a century ago, with a recent renewed interest. The research undertaken by psychologists and cognitive scientists exploring magic provides a theoretical foundation for the intuitions magicians have had for millennia. This research has, however, also practical applications. Insights in how our perception functions are used by the designers of technology, such as aeroplane controls or roads, to ensure people are not deceived by what they see and make correct decisions. Scholars in this field advocate a neurological approach to finding an answer to their questions. They want to read people’s mind while watching magic tricks by using brain scanners to see how our brain manages www.magicperspectives.net


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perception. Till date one study using brain scanning technology has been conducted and it is very likely that further studies using this method will reveal much about how the mind shapes our perception of the world. Psychologists and cognitive scientists often consider the science of magic as a specialised filed of study which falls within their domain, but the question of the possibility of an overarching science of magic from a psychological perspective has sparked some controversy in the academic literature, resulting in a short polemic. Stephen Macknik, in collaboration with his colleague Susana Martinez-Conde and some well known American magicians, published an article in the 2008 edition of Nature. In this article they claimed that studying magicians and how they are able to deceive people can help in studying the neural basis of consciousness itself. Peter Lamont and John Henderson responded to this article and denied that an overarching theory of magic can exist. Macknik and Martinez-Conde responded to the letter and emphasised that they believe that a neuroscientific view, looking inside the brains of people, will provide better answers than the psychological view of past research which is limited to observing people’s behaviour. Lamont and Henderson subsequently published a critical article where they expressed doubts about the possibilities of an overarching theory of magic, aptly calling it an illusion. They recognised that magic is an interesting resource for psychologists, but not a science in its own right because the aims of magic and science are diametrically opposed. The core of this misunderstanding between Lamont and the American scientists is that psychologists only focus on the deceptive aspects of magic while, as we have seen in this book, magic can be viewed from multiple disciplines and perspectives, which provides a more complete understanding than focusing on deception alone. www.magicperspectives.net


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This is not to say that psychological research on magic is a purposeless pursuit, but it will never lead to a full understanding of this complex phenomenon. I I I I What this journey through the scholarly literature on magic performances has emphasised is that there is no such thing as an all encompassing single science of magic; instead, there are many different sciences of conjuring, each providing their own perspective. Only collectively can they provide a deeper understanding of magic as a performance art. The question remains, however, whether there is a common denominator in all these approaches and whether we can find a way to further our understanding of magic by combining some of the expertise in this area. The word ‘science’ is often used as a value judgement, denying fields such as sociology or gender studies to be considered a science. This is not a productive point of view because it fails to acknowledge the essence of science, which is asking questions about the world around us and our selves. Some scholars profess that this problem can be solved by ensuring that all sciences use the same method as the physical sciences, but the different nature of the questions asked by the various realms of science requires them to be answered with different methods. Using a brain scanner to say something meaningful about magic’s status as an art form would be misguided and finding out why we can be deceived without using experiments would be equally unproductive. The idea of one science in the image of the physical sciences, one scientific method to bind all sciences is doomed to failure due to the complexity of the social world. Each of the three realms of science described in this book provide a unique perspective on the complex phenomenon of theatrical magic. Viewing magic from only one of these perspectives provides an unbalwww.magicperspectives.net


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anced understanding. Because magic is an essentially contested concept, we can never agree on an essential definition of what it is. Without an essential definition, any pursuit of a singular science of magic will be in vain. An often-used model to describe the relationship between sciences and technology is as a hierarchy. In this perspective, the exact sciences are considered the source of all other sciences and technology. The hierarchical model perceives the social and the applied sciences as subservient to the physical sciences. Some social scientists even attempt to explain human behaviour in terms of mathematical equations. The hierarchical model does not provide a valuable understanding of magic because magic cannot be understood in scientific terms. Magic is not an application of science; it has been developed independently from science, even though it frequently borrows from it to develop deceptive techniques. The idea of creating a science of magic using a unified method based on the exact sciences will not provide the level of understanding possible using different models of science. We can use the different perspectives of the sciences that investigated magic to provide some reflection on the relationships between the different types of sciences and to describe how we could move towards an integrated science of magic, although never fully achieving this ideal. This book is written from an interdisciplinary perspective. This means that a variety of scientific disciplines are used to answer their own questions using their own methods. There is currently little interaction between researchers from different realms of science to resolve common questions. Only few scholars have published across the boundaries of scientific disciplines. Peter Lamont, a psychologist who co-authored a standard work on the psychology of magic, is also known for his work on the history of the www.magicperspectives.net

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Indian Rope Trick and broader views on the influence of the Orient on European magic. Sociologist Peter Nardi has published several articles on magic, including inroads towards a social psychology of the craft and works on the gender imbalance in the magic fraternity. To develop a common science of magic, we need a multidisciplinary view where scholars from all respective fields gather to solve the mysteries of magic. In multidisciplinary science, researchers from different fields of study work together to research the same problem. Maybe this book will provide some inspirations for scientists to start such a project. In closing, there are more questions that can be asked of magic and hopefully this book can provide some inspiration for other scientifically minded magicians or magically minded scientists to continue to publish on this niche field of academic and professional enquiry and work towards a multidisciplinary project to develop a deeper understanding of this quaint performance art.

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When people watch a magician create illusions, the question that is most pressing on their minds is: how did he do it?. This is not the only question that can be asked of a magic performance. A psychologist might ask why it is possible that the mind can be deceived, occupational therapists are interested in how performing magic tricks can help people with physical disabilities and sociologists research the subculture of magicians. This book explores the questions that scholars from different fields of science have asked about the performances of magicians. For magicians this book provides new perspectives on their performance art. For people with a passive interest in magic, this book provides an insight into a quaint performance art that is normally surrounded in secrecy and clichés. Peter Prevos is a social scientist and engineer who also dabbles in magic. magicperspectives.net

Perspectives on Magic: Scientific Views on Theatrical Magic

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