This page contains a list of magic tricks. In magic literature, tricks are often called effects. Based strictly upon published literature and marketed effects, there are hundreds of millions of effects; a short performance routine by a single magician may contain dozens of effects.
Some serious students of magic strive to refer to effects by a proper name, and are also concerned with the proper attribution of the effect's creator. For example, consider an effect where the magician shows four aces, and then they turn face up one at a time in a mysterious fashion. This effect might be recognized as Twisting the Aces, which is attributed to Dai Vernon, based on a false count invented by Alex Elmsley. Some tricks are listed merely with their marketed name (particularly those that are sold as stand-alone tricks by retail dealers), whereas others are listed by the name given within magic publications.
Read more about Magic Tricks: Stage Illusions, Close-up Effects, Mentalism, Levitations, Utilities/Accessories
Famous quotes containing the words magic and/or tricks:
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)