Haldane of the Secret Service - Houdini (1922)

Produced by, directed by and starring Houdini, a film featuring the stage magician as a crime-fighting, detective magician, attempting to track down the vicious criminal gang responsible for his government agent father's death while also saving the girl he loves.

The Monster (1903)

Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Houdini

Source.

A COMPLETE EXPOSE' OF THE MODUS
OPERANDI OF FIRE EATERS, HEAT
RESISTERS, POISON EATERS, VENOMOUS
REPTILE DEFIERS, SWORD SWALLOWERS,
HUMAN OSTRICHES, STRONG MEN, ETC.

BY

HOUDINI

AUTHOR OF "THE UNMASKING OF ROBERT HOUDIN," ETC.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO MY LIFE'S HELPMATE,
WHO STARVED AND STARRED WITH ME
DURING THE YEARS WE SPENT
AMONG "MIRACLE MONGERS"
My Wife

c/f - The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin

Uncle Josh's Nightmare (1900)

The Humbugs of The World by P. T. Barnum (1865)

THE 

HUMBUGS OF THE WORLD.

AN ACCOUNT OF HUMBUGS, DELUSIONS, IMPOSITIONS,
QUACKERIES, DECEITS AND DECEIVERS
GENERALLY, IN ALL AGES.

BY
P. T. BARNUM.

“Omne ignotum pro mirifico.”—“Wonderful, because mysterious.”

"Maelzel's Chess-Player" (1836) by Edgar Allan Poe

In full.

Mickey Mouse Haunted House (1929)

William Castle and His Amazing, Shocking Movie Gimmicks

Urban Myths, Creepy Pasta, Fakelore and Legends: A Selection

Custom Urban Legends Search

A staple of even better online sites devoted to urban myths is how simple--sloppy, even--in all, both prose and storytelling are.

Yet still, in their un-self-consciousness, these clunky nail-biters often turn out more imaginatively in unearthing the terms of the symbolic than your most daringly reaching of contemporary artist.  

In cadence, language often resembles children retelling their own dreams. Tonally (but rarely thematically, or in a direct way), one hears the recurrent cry of powerlessness in regards to the institutions that be: corporate, detentionary, medical, scientific. 

Now and again, the stories grapple with subjects that, if laid out plainly, even the more saber-rattling of radicals would shrink from (i.e. the urban myth of the kindly terrorist, sparing judiciously potential victims on moral grounds).

Of course, this is hardly radical fair. Mostly these are small moral plays, if that. Sometimes, they are no more than gross-out pot-boilers, cringe fair of bodily embarrassment or bodily excoriation and excruciation. 

Different from pre-modern folklore, where cunning peasant heroes regularly outwit the horrors of myth, urban myths stand in awe before myth's boundlessness. Indeed, characters are sacrificed routinely to mythic forces in the most violent, troubling and inventive of ways.

We are in a subterranean (often suburban) realm, in the sway of a brutal and child-like Fate, trembling before the exaggerated imperium of the daily authorities. 

Video Footage of a UFO in Texas

The storyteller's typical first move is to paint a sheen of wonder (or terror) over the drab palette of what's conventionally possible, allowing her or him to narrate freely from the strict observations of naturalist constraint. The rules apprehended darkly from authoritative spheres--the complex specialties of doctors, scientists, government--are cast aside. But to limit the drift of wild imaginations, these spooky hobbyists instinctively parody the vocabulary of speacialization. Plot points are often science-y-sounding or reportage-oriented, attributed to untraceable but mundane sources (a friend of a friend, a TV show, an unattributed snapshot, a pamphlet). Dread substitutes for where since diapers we're trained to respect cause and effect. 

Midwestern Jackalope

All this whispers of a reality behind reality haunted by the uncanny, unlucky signs, coincidence and deja vu. Yet, strangely, consistently modern in framing, rarely does a god appear from a machine. Everything that comes has been exhaustively prepared for beforehand with props and sensory clues, then, post-reveal of their "shocking" conclusions, provided with a rationale, however weak. Significantly, despite the frequent interpolation of supernatural agents, terrible ends often derive from banal, contemporary objects. We are speaking of a world of human equipment, mundane experience and consumer products that has become mythologized.

Sometimes refinement in storytelling is a luxury not only of hindsight but also pretension or ambition. By contrast, this type of naive storytelling is very connected with motivations and improvisations that one imagines were present in even the first of story tellers: the boast, one-up-man-ship in regards to other entries in a genre, cheap dramatic thrills, liberal borrowing from other sources, base creep outs ingratiating base fears.

One must admire that they often do the work of entire horror films in a sentence or few.

Certainly one intuits the ongoing mutual exchange between urban legend and genre horror.

Photo with Tape Measure Helpfully Illustrating 
the Existence of Fairy Fossils

Economical in expression, free-wheeling exercises in letting the world have meaning, these invented memories take life via the fixation on a fear as it passes through half-recalled replays of the everyday. The situations each construction sets up unfold like sprung contraptions inside a fun house. They make as their allure the ionized thrilling of the blood, a lizard brain automatism applied to a world of facts and prosaic happenstance, and miraculously made legible.


The stories mostly resolve themselves around one surprise turn in narrative. I feel it is fair to judge them on their success not in terms of the virulence or speed of their being repeated as stories (often, now, these start their life as Internet hoaxes or tongue-in-cheek rumours), but how truly surprising that single surprise turn is. Therein lies the art.

Misdirection is the usual tactic. But there is an elegance, even a classicism or dream-like quality, to the story that motors, chockablock with dread, exactly to what terrible ends it presages from the start. 


Occasionally the stories resolve themselves around conventions familiar from clowning (jokes that take as their punchline too literal interpretations of language or mistakenly plain readings of how the world works) or truly imbecilic misrecognitions, something macabre and deadly mistaken for something common and benign. 


A prolific subgenre, Christian urban legends, serve by route of contemporary news items and modern props to illustrate the literal truth of a bible passage, particularly for those tenets which find no ally or correspondence in science, history, experience or nature.

The most sophisticated narrative trick that I observed in my brief survey of this material (and one that's possibly a happy accident) is the teller locating the original source of  her or his admitted urban legend (a cannibalism yarn) as the scarcity climate and moral zero hour of post-war Germany. This seemingly innocuous, single detail is as unverifiable as the story itself. Each such layered blurring of a frame invites the reader to slip a little more comfortably into the suspension of the-world-as-is.

This is an advanced technological society at its most primitive, its newly minted demons sparsely sinewy and brutal, its priests indifferent to both tradition and specialized knowledge alike. Yet these amateur shamans, sans religion or a grand tradition, are intent on having recourse to the grandest, most unknowable of themes.

Some Settings

A catalog of settings in urban myths goes a ways in explaining what our shrines are, our haunted or sacred woods, our temples. These are locations which we believe to be pregnant with enchantment, where magic perennially tips through, moving from the mundane into the mythic.

convenience store, mall, "secure facilities" (often shadowy), McDonald's, a drug store, a school, a gas station, an International House of Pancakes, lover's lane, inside a car (listening to radio), a woman in a car in a grocery store's (or shopping center's) parking lot,  a country house, under the bed, showers, dangerous and/or significant rod intersections (i.e. where a small town's main road crosses with highway), bus ride home, crowd, Berlin, babysat house, Las Vegas, Tjiana (border town), border check points, veterinary clinics, homes, transatlantic flight, airport, service counters, at a party of friends of a friend, death bed visitations, NASA, archeology digs, mountains of Ararat (the supposed site of the ruins of Noah's ark), Liz Clayborn, Southern California, Home for the dying in Calcutta, societies construed as exotically pre-modern (hence pre-civilized), inkwell, Halloween, boats, collapsing chapel, stairway, Kentucky, equinox, college dorm, Canada, a lake,a house under construction,

Monsters

I am being broad with my definition. I include not just the grotesques and perversions of creation, but threats to one's body and being, and "enchanted folk" also. As well, as in the Christian variant of urban legend, those proud sinners of science, the skeptics and conceited materialists who repent disbelief and disavow factual mastery when confronted with an event that illustrates beyond a doubt the literal accuracy of (usually) an eccentric interpretation of The Bible.

Cottingley Fairies

murderers ("sex maniacs," "the insane"), those armed with cruel and eccentric weapons (hook for hand),  the incarcerated, people missing body parts, benign objects of convenience ( lid of a pressurized dough can), stranger posing as the family dog, dead daughter, corpses mistaken for the living, blind man with envelope, obscene phone callers, man dressed as old woman, rat mistaken for dog, dead baby embalmed and filled with) drugs for smuggling, Darwin, NASA astronomers, Janet Reno, underground screams of agony,  bat-winged creature, Russian text "I have conquered,"scientists, archaeologists, Proctor and Gamble, Satanists, Coca Cola, Japanese business managers, doubting theologians, porn industry, abusive father, exotic cannibals, Satan as living force, Popes, money, world government, world economy, asteroid, secular power grabs, a three story computer in Belgium called The Beast, whales, gays victimizing and murdering hets, collapsing chapel, atheist activists, students, stupidity, the Holy of Holies, Harry Potter, professor, landowner, Mormons, Advanced sub-dermal implantable device, Canadian radio transmitter spy coins, a nest of snakes in water, snakes,

Instruments of Fate

Often a prop or more specific setting-within-the-setting serves to preface or propel the turn in narrative, and clutch, reveal or surprise. Examples:

passenger side or back seat of a car, blood, blood writing, kind terrorists, the radio, dogs, medical surgery, doctors, a note, envelope, the Internet, mirror, computer programs (especially ones that calculate), legislation, ornithology ("reports of a massive build up of vultures in the valley of armageddon"), pamphlets, microphone, sky writing, radio carbon testing, corporate logos, complex mathematical symbolism, talk show, department store displays, women whom one is attracted to, a "dark-sinned" preacher, George W. Bush, porn films, a devout foster family, prophetic announcements in demotic bible-speak, riddles, hitchhikers, a beautiful soft light, Moth Theresa, cameras, ink, apples, money, the mark of the beast, sworn allegiances, the Bible, dinosaur footprints, blow up sex dolls, man dressed as Jesus, bottles thrown against wall that will not break, rain rolling off broken roof down walls as if roof still in place, an early-stage foetus living outside the womb, therapy (especially "cure" therapy), fillings turning to gold, men unschooled in religion walking on water, improvised enema with compressed air hose, angels as tough guys, rope, the canceling of (particularly christian) network programming, Einstein, scientific study, tornado, science experiments, revelations, a mark on the skin, backma.sing on recordings,

Tricky Territory Navigated

A topmost level of meaning in these stories is a conventional situation, not conventionally addressed in normal conversation, occurrences sometimes taboo or even only mildly embarrassing. If the story arc provided is severe, outre or melodramatic, nonetheless, the stories often hone in on all the begging contemporary questions, if through an indirect route. 

how to act on a date, whether governments can do wrong, is it ok for women to be alone, how to trust doctors when one does not understand medical science, how to experience a social bond with strangers, what is evil, is it possible for enemies to do good, where does Truth reside, do specialists make mistakes, the difference between appearance and reality, 

A Few Representative Sites and Sources

• The portal page at the Open Directory Project is a good stepping off point for the most giddily amateur, most mission positive and cavalier of these sites, maintained with waning or swelling enthusiasm.

Totemistically, many of these sites are the way urban myth sites should look, if form is to compliment content: tonnes of backgrounds, ads, terrible fonts, indefensible graphics, no oasis of negative space--perfect. Magical shrines, generally syncretic, find their modern aesthetic in gaudiness.

• Urban Legend Zeitgeist is a store house for urban legends, with the advantage of having an index searchable by key word, although at present there is not much here.
• Snopses dedicates its site two retelling and debunking of urban myths, as well as Internet rumors, email hoaxes, doctored jpegs, and so on.
• The Museum of Hoaxes. Similar to the above.
• Religious Tolerance - a small island quixotically devoted to spiritual rationalism in an otherwise very perturbed sea. Many Christian urban legends retold here, but in a debunking fiat.

At the Memory Palace:

• episode 21 (a gas gas gas)

 a gas gas gas [5:46m].

A podcast about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon: "In 1944, the small town of Mattoon, Illinois was terrorized by a creepy black-clad prowler who sprayed anesthetic gas in his victims' faces. Or maybe it was all a case of mass hysteria based mostly on myth."

Some other Mad Gasser context from Boing Boing:

• Mad Gasser of Mattoon

Drugs

• Urban legends about drugs and drug use. Wikipedia's entry.

City Like Lizard (1934)

Source. "Did strange people live under site of Los Angeles 5000 years ago?" the article asks, supplying a bizarre treasure map through the city's undersides in the process.

c/f Ancient "Lizard People" Underground in LA?

Texts, Histories and Pre-Modern Sources

• Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1852).
• Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits

Other Wikipedia Entries on Urban Myths:

• Main
• The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs
• Bloody Mary (folklore)
• Chase Vault
• Choking Doberman
• The Hook
• Jersey Devil
• Killer in the backseat
• The Licked Hand
• Paul is dead
• Sewer alligator
• Spring Heeled Jack
• c/f Spring Heeled Jack by Anonymous
• c/f The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures
• c/f Spring Heeled Jack Page
• Vanishing hitchhiker 

Miscellaneous

• Weirdest Examples of Mass Hysteria. From Dark Roast.
• LibraryGhost - 24/7 livefeed of the supposedly haunted Willard Library, in Evansville Indiana
• Prof. Chuck Holliday's Jackalope Page
• Nov. 2009 NY Times story about the book behind the "alligators in sewers" legend
• "The most ridiculous urban legends." Houston Chronicle. 
• Ramsland, Katherine. "Texas Chainsaw Massacre is based on a real case the crime library — Other Speculations — Crime Library on truTV.com". Turner Broadcasting System Inc.. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/texas_chainsaw_massa/5.html. 
• David Emery (5 August 2010). "Deadly Rat Urine on Soda Cans - Urban Legends". The New York Times Company. http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/39382/. 
• Gross, Dave. "The "Blue Star" LSD Tattoo Urban Legend Page". the Lycaeum Drug Archives . http://www.lycaeum.org/drugs/other/tattoo/. 
• Elissa Michele Zacher (18 July 2010). "Urban legends: Modern morality tales". The Epoch Times. http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/39382/. 
• Pink Tentacle: Japanese urban legends, through a pop culture lens.

Other Urban Folklore

Folklore and the unintentionally or sensationally parodic anthropological disciple of the "paranormal" I include here, though structurally these are often less stories than brief vignettes relating one or several *witnessings.* Common with urban folklore however is their stock characters and intuition for setting and logic, their rationalizing while speculating on fate, unanswerable questions (what happens after Death being chief among them) and the ineffable. Whereas the pre-modern tradition of the occult often pursued more obscure and tendentious lines of truths as presented by canonical or traditional-but-apocryphal texts by digging deeper (both philosophy and religion are filled with such extravagant and even semi-blasphemous departures), the paranormal takes its narrative cues from the chronicler of natural phenomenon, the reporter and the tourist and the researcher. Photographs or video footage with blemishes play a large part in establishing an air of veracity. Transcripts become a novel mode of telling.


Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Possessions 

• Haunted Houses
• Haunted Schools
• Real Haunted Schools on Squidoo
• USA Today: Readers Share Stories of Haunted Hotels
• Emily Rose Transcript (the internet's most famous Catholic exorcism)
• Cornish Ghost Stories
• Google Video Search for "Real Ghost."

 

"Real" poltergeist footage.

Angels and Fairies

• I Believe in Angels 
• The Case of the Cottingley Fairies
• The Coming of The Fairies (1922) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was famously taken in by the fair hoax of two young women.

UFOS

• Alien Abduction, Experience and Research 
• Google Video Search for "real UFO sightings."

Funhouse Dreams - The Sopranos

Dream montage from season 2 finale of The Sopranos, Funhouse.

Rube Goldberg's Artwork

A site dedicated to Rube Goldberg, the unlikely prophet of systems complexity.

Dodging Bill Collectors  

Rube Goldberg mistakes a lot of broken glass for bath salts and when they pull him out of the tub he mumbles an idea for dodging bill collectors As Tailor (A) fits customer (B) and calls out measurements, college boy (C) mistakes them for football signals and makes a flying tackle at clothing dummy (D). Dummy bumps head against paddle (E) causing it to pull hook (F) and throw bottle (G) on end of folding hat rack (H) which spreads and pushes head of cabbage (I) into net (J). Weight of cabbage pulls cord (K) causing shears (L) to cut string (M). Bag of sand (N) drops on scale (O) and pushes broom (P) against pail of whitewash (Q) which upsets all over you causing you to look like a marble statue and making it impossible for you to be recognized by bill collectors. Don't worry about posing as any particular historical statue because bill collectors don't know much about art. 

Magic (llusion) - from Wikipedia

From Wikipedia.

For religious, ceremonial or paranormal magic, see Magic.

"Illusionist" redirects here. For the film, see The Illusionist. For the artistic tradition, see Illusionism (art).

Magic

Performing arts
Major forms
Dance · Music · Opera · Theatre · Circus
Minor forms
Magic · Puppetry
Genres
Drama · Tragedy · Comedy · Tragicomedy · Romance · Satire · Epic · Lyri

Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin,
the first modern magician

Magic is a performing art that entertains an audience by creating illusions of seemingly impossible^[1] or supernatural^[2] feats, using purely natural means. These feats are called magic tricks, effects or illusions.

One who performs such illusions is called a magician or an illusionist. Some performers may also be referred to by names reflecting the type of magical effects they present, such as prestidigitators, conjurors, mentalists, or escape artists.

History
The term "magic" is etymologically derived from the Latin word magi, a term that was used to refer to Zoroastrians. Performances we would now recognize as conjuring have probably been practiced throughout history. The same level of ingenuity that was used to produce famous ancient deceptions such as the Trojan Horse would also have been used for entertainment, or at least for cheating in money games, since time immemorial. They were also used by various religions from times ancient, and were even known as far back as the early 17th century to be used to frighten uneducated populi. However, the profession of the illusionist gained strength only in the eighteenth century, and has enjoyed several popular vogues.

In 1584, Reginald Scot published The Discoverie of Witchcraft. It was written in an attempt to show that witches did not exist, by exposing how (apparently miraculous) feats of magic were done^[3]. The book is often deemed the first textbook about conjuring. All obtainable copies were burned on the accession of James I in 1603 and those remaining are now rare. It began to reappear in print in 1651.

From 1756 to 1781, Jacob Philadelphia performed feats of magic, sometimes under the guise of scientific exhibitions, throughout Europe and in Russia. Modern entertainment magic owes much to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), originally a clockmaker, who opened a magic theatre in Paris in the 1840s. His speciality was the construction of mechanical automata which appeared to move and act as if they were alive. The British performer J N Maskelyne and his partner Cooke established their own theatre, the Egyptian Hall in London's Piccadilly, in 1873. They presented stage magic, exploiting the potential of the stage for hidden mechanisms and assistants, and the control it offers over the audience's point of view.

The model for the look of a 'typical' magician—a man with wavy hair,a top hat,a goatee, and a tailcoat—was Alexander Herrmann (February 10, 1844 – December 17, 1896), also known as Herrmann the Great. Herrmann was a French magician and was part of the Herrmann family name that is the "first-family of magic". Those who witnessed Herrmann the Great perform considered him the greatest magician they ever saw.

The Conjurer, 1475-1480, by Hieronymus Bosch. Note that the man in the back row is stealing another man's purse. He is also applying misdirection by looking up at the sky to misdirect the audience from his actions. The artist has even misdirected us from the thief, because we are drawn to the magician.

The escapologist and magician Harry Houdini took his stage name from Robert-Houdin and developed a range of stage magic tricks, many of them based on what became known after his death as escapology. The son of a Hungarian rabbi, Houdini was genuinely skilled in techniques such as lockpicking and escaping straitjackets, but also made full use of the range of conjuring techniques, including fake equipment and collusion with individuals in the audience. Houdini's show business savvy was great as well as his performance skill. There is a Houdini Museum dedicated to him in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

As a form of entertainment, magic easily moved from theatrical venues to television specials, which opened up new opportunities for deceptions, and brought stage magic to huge audiences. Famous magicians of the 20th century included Okita, Alexander, Harry Blackstone Sr., Harry Blackstone Jr., Howard Thurston, Theodore Annemann, Cardini, Joseph Dunninger, Tommy Wonder, Siegfried & Roy, and Doug Henning. Popular 20th and 21st century magicians include David Copperfield, Lance Burton, Penn and Teller, David Blaine, and Criss Angel. Most TV magicians perform before a live audience, who provide the remote viewer with a reassurance that the illusions are not obtained with post-production visual effects.

Many of the principles of stage magic are old. There is an expression, "it's all done with smoke and mirrors", used to explain something baffling, but effects seldom use mirrors today, due to the amount of installation work and transport difficulties. For example, the famous Pepper's Ghost, a stage illusion first used in 19th-century London, required a specially built theatre. Modern performers have vanished objects as large as the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, and a space shuttle, using other kinds of optical deceptions.

Categories of effects 
Production: The magician produces something from nothing—a rabbit from an empty hat, a fan of cards from thin air, a shower of coins from an empty bucket, a dove from a pan, or the magician him or herself, appearing in a puff of smoke on an empty stage—all of these effects are productions. 

Vanish: The magician makes something disappear—a coin, a cage of doves, milk from a newspaper, an assistant from a cabinet, or even the Statue of Liberty. A vanish, being the reverse of a production, may use a similar technique, in reverse. 

Transformation: The magician transforms something from one state into another—a silk handkerchief changes colour, a lady turns into a tiger, an indifferent card changes to the spectator's chosen card. A transformation can be seen as a combination of a vanish and a production. 

Restoration: The magician destroys an object, then restores it back to its original state—a rope is cut, a newspaper is torn, a woman is sawn in half, a borrowed watch is smashed to pieces—then they are all restored to their original state. 

Teleportation: The magician causes something to move from one place to another—a borrowed ring is found inside a ball of wool, a canary inside a light bulb, an assistant from a cabinet to the back of the theatre. When two objects exchange places, it is called a transposition: a simultaneous, double teleportation.
 
Escape: The magician (an assistant may participate, but the magician himself is by far the most common) is placed in a restraining device (i.e. handcuffs or a straitjacket) or a death trap, and escapes to safety. Examples include being put in a straitjacket and into an overflowing tank of water, and being tied up and placed in a car being sent through a car crusher. 

Levitation: The magician defies gravity, either by making something float in the air, or with the aid of another object (suspension)—a silver ball floats around a cloth, an assistant floats in mid-air, another is suspended from a broom, a scarf dances in a sealed bottle, the magician hovers a few inches off the floor. There are many popular ways to create this illusion, including Asrah levitation, Balducci levitation, Looy's Sooperman, and King levitation. Much more spectacular is the apparent free flight flying illusion that is often performed by David Copperfield and more recently by Peter Marvey (who may or may not be using a technique similar to that of David Copperfield). Harry Blackstone's floating light bulb, in which the light bulb floats over the heads of the public, is also spectacular. 

Penetration: The magician makes a solid object pass through another—a set of steel rings link and unlink, a candle penetrates an arm, swords pass through an assistant in a basket, a saltshaker penetrates the table-top, a man walks through a mirror. Sometimes referred to as "solid-through-solid". 

Prediction: The magician predicts the choice of a spectator, or the outcome of an event under seemingly impossible circumstances—a newspaper headline is predicted, the total amount of loose change in the spectator's pocket, a picture drawn on a slate.

Many magical routines use combinations of effects. For example, in "cups and balls" a magician may use vanishes, productions, penetrations, teleportation and transformations as part of the one presentation.

Secrecy
See also: Intellectual rights to magic methods

See also: Exposure (magic)

The purpose of a magic trick is to amuse and create a feeling of wonderment;^{[citation needed]} the audience is generally aware that the magic is performed using trickery, and derives enjoyment from the magician's skill and cunning.^{[citation needed]} Traditionally, magicians refuse to reveal the methods behind their tricks to the audience. Reasons for secrecy include the following:

• Exposure is claimed to "kill" magic as an artform and transforms it into mere intellectual puzzles and riddles.^{[citation needed]} It is argued that once the secret of a trick is revealed to a person, that one can no longer fully enjoy subsequent performances of that magic, as the amazement is missing.^{[citation needed]} Sometimes the secret is so simple that the audience feels let down, and feels disappointed it was taken in so easily.^{[citation needed]}
• Keeping the secrets preserves the mystery of professional magicians.

Membership in professional magicians' organizations often requires a solemn commitment to the Magician's Oath never to reveal the secrets of magic to non-magicians. The Magician's Oath may vary, but typically takes the following or similar form:

"As a magician I promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician, unless that one swears to uphold the Magician's Oath in turn. I promise never to perform any illusion for any non-magician without first practicing the effect until I can perform it well enough to maintain the illusion of magic."

Once sworn to the Oath, one is considered a magician, and is expected to live up to this promise. Magicians who reveal secrets, either purposely or through insufficient practice, may find that other magicians are unwilling to teach them any more secrets.

However, it is considered permissible to reveal secrets to individuals who are determined to learn magic and become magicians. It is typically a sequential process of increasingly valuable and lesser known secrets. The secrets of almost all magical effects are available to the public through numerous books and magazines devoted to magic, available from the specialized magic trade. There are also web sites which offer videos, DVDs and instructional materials. In this sense, there are very few classical illusions left unrevealed, but this does not appear to have diminished the appeal of performances. In addition, magic is a living art, and new illusions are devised with surprising regularity. Sometimes a 'new' illusion will be built on an illusion that is old enough to have become unfamiliar.

Some magicians have taken the position that revealing the methods used in certain works of magic can enhance the appreciation of the audience for cleverness of magic. Penn and Teller frequently perform tricks using transparent props to reveal how they are done, for example, although they almost always include additional unexplained effects at the end that are made even more astonishing by the revealing props being used.

Often, what seems to be a revelation of a magical secret is merely another form of misdirection. For instance, a magician may explain to an audience member that the linking rings "have a hole in them" and hand the volunteer two unlinked rings, which the volunteer finds to have become linked as soon as he handles them. At this point the magician may shove his arm through the ring ('the hole in the ring'), proclaiming: "See? Once you know that every ring has a hole, it's easy!"

Learning magic
See also: List of magic publications

From the 1584 publication of Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft until the end of the 19th century, only a few books were available for magicians to learn the craft, whereas today mass-market books offer a myriad titles. Videos and DVDs are a newer medium of tuition, but many of the methods found in this format are readily found in previously published books. However, they can serve as a visual demonstration.
Persons interested in learning to perform magic can join magic clubs. Here magicians, both seasoned and novitiate, can work together and help one another for mutual improvement, to learn new techniques, to discuss all aspects of magic, to perform for each other — sharing advice, encouragement, and criticism. Before a magician can join one of these clubs, they usually have to audition. The purpose is to show to the membership they are a magician and not just someone off the street wanting to discover magical secrets.

The world's largest magic organization is the International Brotherhood of Magicians; it publishes a monthly journal, The Linking Ring. The oldest organization is the Society of American Magicians, of which Houdini was a member and president for several years. In London, England, there is The Magic Circle which houses the largest magic library in Europe. Also PSYCRETS - The British Society of Mystery Entertainers, which caters specifically to mentalists, bizarrists, storytellers, readers, spiritualist performers, and other mystery entertainers. The Magic Castle in Hollywood is home to the Academy of Magical Arts.

Types of magic performance
Magic performances tend to fall into a few specialties or genres.

A mentalist on stage in a mind-reading performance, 1900

• Stage illusions are performed for large audiences, typically within an auditorium. This type of magic is distinguished by large-scale props, the use of assistants and often exotic animals such as elephants and tigers. Some famous stage illusionists, past and present, include Harry Blackstone, Sr., Howard Thurston, Chung Ling Soo, David Copperfield, Siegfried & Roy, and Harry Blackstone, Jr..
• Platform magic (also known as cabaret magic or stand-up magic) is performed for a medium to large audience. Nightclub magic and comedy club magic are also examples of this form. The use of illusionettes (small tabletop illusions) is common. The term parlor magic is sometimes used but is considered by some to be pejorative. This genre includes the skilled manipulation of props such as billiard balls, card fans, doves, rabbits, silks, and rope. Examples of such magicians include Jeff McBride, Penn & Teller, David Abbott, Channing Pollock, Black Herman, and Fred Kaps.
• Micromagic (also known as close-up magic or table magic) is performed with the audience close to the magician, sometimes even one-on-one. It usually makes use of everyday items as props, such as cards (see Card manipulation), coins (see Coin magic), and seemingly 'impromptu' effects. This may be called "table magic", particularly when performed as dinner entertainment. Ricky Jay and Lee Asher, following in the traditions of Dai Vernon, Slydini, and Max Malini, are considered among the foremost practitioners of close-up magic.
• Escapology is the branch of magic that deals with escapes from confinment or restraints. Harry Houdini is a well-known example of an escape artist or escapologist.
• Mentalism creates the impression in the minds of the audience that the performer possesses special powers to read thoughts, predict events, control other minds, and similar feats. It can be presented on a stage, in a cabaret setting, before small close-up groups, or even for one spectator. Well-known mentalists of the past and present include Alexander, The Zancigs, Axel Hellstrom, Dunninger, Kreskin, and Banachek.
• Theatrical séances simulate spiritualistic or mediumistic phenomena for theatrical effect. This genre of stage magic has been misused at times by charlatans pretending to actually be in contact with spirits.
• Children's magic is performed for an audience primarily composed of children. It is typically performed at birthday parties, preschools, elementary schools, Sunday schools or libraries. This type of magic is usually comedic in nature and involves audience interaction as well as volunteer assistants.
• Online magic tricks were designed to function on a computer screen. The computer essentially replaces the magician. Some online magic tricks recreate traditional card tricks and require user participation, while others, like Plato's Cursed Triangle, are based on mathematical, geometrical and/or optical illusions. One such online magic trick, called Esmeralda's Crystal Ball, became a viral phenomenon that fooled so many computer users into believing that their computer had supernatural powers, that Snopes dedicated a page to debunking the trick.
• Mathemagic is a genre of stage magic that combines magic and mathematics. It is commonly used by children's magicians and mentalists.
• Corporate magic or trade show magic uses magic as a communication and sales tool, as opposed to just straightforward entertainment. Corporate magicians may come from a business background and typically present at meetings, conferences and product launches. They run workshops and can sometimes be found at trade shows, where their patter and illusions enhance an entertaining presentation of the products offered by their corporate sponsors. The pioneer performer in this arena is Eddie Tullock.^[7]
• Gospel magic uses magic to catechize and evangelize. Gospel magic was first used by St. Don Bosco to interest children in 19th century Turin, Italy to come back to school, to accept assistance and to attend church.
• Street magic is a form of street performing or busking that employs a hybrid of stage magic, platform and close-up magic, usually performed 'in the round' or surrounded by the audience. Notable modern street magic performers include Jeff Sheridan and Gazzo. Since the first David Blaine TV special Street Magic aired in 1997, the term "street magic" has also come to describe a style of 'guerilla' performance in which magicians approach and perform for unsuspecting members of the public on the street. Unlike traditional street magic, this style is almost purely designed for TV and gains its impact from the wild reactions of the public. Magicians of this type include David Blaine and Cyril Takayama.
• Bizarre magic uses mystical, horror, fantasy and other similar themes in performance. Bizarre magic is typically performed in a close-up venue, although some performers have effectively presented it in a stage setting. Charles Cameron has generally been credited as the "godfather of bizarre magic." Others, such as Tony Andruzzi, have contributed significantly to its development.
• Shock magic is a genre of magic that shocks the audience. Sometimes referred to as "geek magic," it takes its roots from circus sideshows, in which 'freakish' performances were shown to audiences. Common shock magic or geek magic effects include eating razor blades, needle-through-arm, string through neck and pen-through-tongue.

Misuse of magic
Some modern magicians say that it is unethical to give a performance which claims to be anything other than a clever and skillful deception; the performer Jamy Ian Swiss, for example, makes this point by billing himself as an "honest liar."^[8] On the other side of the coin, many performers say that magical acts, as a form of theater, need no more of a disclaimer than any play or film; this viewpoint is reflected in the words of magician and mentalist Joseph Dunninger, "For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice."

These apparently irreconcilable differences of opinion have led to some conflicts among performers. For example, more than thirty years after the hugely successful illusionist Uri Geller made his first appearances on television in the 1970s to exhibit his apparently psychic ability to bend spoons, his actions still provoke controversy among some magical performers, because he never told the public that he was using conjuring techniques. On the other hand, because Geller bent—and continues to bend—spoons within a performance context, the Dunninger quote may be said to apply.

Less fraught with controversy, however, may be the use of deceptive practices by those who employ conjuring techniques for personal gain outside the venue of a magical performance.

Fraudulent mediums have long capitalized on the popular belief in paranormal phenomena to prey on the bereaved for financial gain. From the 1840s to the 1920s, during the greatest popularity of the Spiritualism religious movement as well as public interest in séances, a number of fraudulent mediums used conjuring methods to perform illusions such as table-knocking, slate-writing, and telekinetic effects, which they attributed to the actions of ghosts or other spirits. The great escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini devoted much of his time to exposing such fraudulent operators.^[10]

Fraudulent faith healers have also been shown to employ sleight of hand to give the appearance of removing chicken-giblet "tumors" from patients' abdomens.^{[citation needed]}

Con men and grifters too may use techniques of conjuring for fraudulent goals. Cheating at card games is an obvious example, and not a surprising one: one of the most respected textbooks of card techniques for magicians, The Expert at the Card Table by Erdnase, was primarily written as an instruction manual for card sharps. The card trick known as "Find the Lady" or "Three-card Monte" is an old favourite of street hustlers, who lure the victim into betting on what seems like a simple proposition: to identify, after a seemingly easy-to-track mixing sequence, which one of three face-down cards is the Queen. Another example is the shell game, in which a pea is hidden under one of three walnut shells, then shuffled around the table (or sidewalk) so slowly as to make the pea's position seemingly obvious. Although these are well-known as frauds, people still lose money on them; a shell-game ring was broken up in Los Angeles as recently as December 2009.^[11]

Researching magic

• Several notable public research collections on magic are the WG Alma Conjuring Collection at the State Library of Victoria; the R. B. Robbins Collection of Stage Magic and Conjuring at the State Library of NSW; the H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana at Brown University; and the Carl W. Jones Magic Collection, 1870s-1948 at Princeton University.

See also
American Museum of Magic
The Magic Circle
Indian magicians
List of magicians
List of magic publications