DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?

Do you believe in magic?

As children we all start out believing in magic.  This is because we haven’t yet learned the rules by which the world operates.  We begin to lose our belief in magic as we gain experience with the regularity of nature and as we discover that reality may be different from what our senses are telling us.  It is through this process that most of us eventually learn that what is portrayed as magic is really an illusion, a deception, simply a trick.  

But not everyone.  Some continue to believe in magic, to believe that certain individuals are able to override the otherwise universal laws of nature, either because they possess a special power or because they are able to channel a power possessed by a supernatural agency, and if the supernatural agency is for good, they call it a miracle.  Otherwise they simply call it magic.
Even though most of us do abandon our belief in the reality of magic, we maintain a sort of love affair with it.  On an intellectual level we understand that we are being deceived and that it is just an illusion.  We see the magician holding a coin in his hand and then it vanishes.  We know that coins do not just disappear, and yet we can’t figure out how the trick was done.  It’s this disagreement between what our senses are reporting, on the one hand, and what we regard as the inviolable rules of nature, on the other, that creates the charm that magic evokes.

I have watched dozens of magic acts over the years, mostly on TV.  But the magic act that remains perhaps most vivid in my memory is one that I saw in person at a variety show put on in the gymnasium of the Christian-based school I attended when I was in my early teens.

The gym was packed, but I had a good seat, perhaps 10 rows back from the stage.  The magician performed a number of standard illusions, making objects appear out of nowhere and making others disappear.  But it was his final illusion that I remember, a classic trick that many of us have seen multiple times.

For this trick the magician asked for a volunteer from the audience and chose, seemingly at random, a girl sitting in the first or second row.  Within 15 seconds of when the girl got up on the stage, the magician had put her into a hypnotic trance and, along with his assistant, helped her climb up and lie on a narrow pallet elevated to waist level by supports at either end.  The pallet was covered with a cloth that extended down in front.  The magician stood behind the pallet while the assistant pulled the cloth up, wrapping it over the top of the girl’s body and revealing that the only objects holding up the pallet were the two supports.  Then, following a couple of waves of the magician’s arms, the pallet slowly began to rise with the girl on it.  The assistant pulled the supports away from either end, revealing the girl to be levitating without any apparent support.

At this point I was searching, in vain, for the wires suspended from above that I assumed were holding up the pallet and the girl.  The magician, to “prove” that the girl was not suspended by wires, passed a metal hoop around her body from head to foot, not once but twice.  Then after a couple more of his flourishes, the girl and the pallet began to descend, while the assistant returned the supports to their original positions so the girl and pallet could once again rest on them. The magician then woke the girl up from her trance, and the assistant uncovered the girl, helped her off the pallet, and returned her to her seat.

The magician bowed to great applause from the audience, but I recall that there was some later criticism of his act.  It seems that some members of the church associated with school were concerned that the levitation trick might actually have involved “black magic.”  Their logic was, I suppose, that if the magician did possess a supernatural power and if that power was not used for good, that is, to perform a miracle, then perhaps it was derived from evil forces rather than from God.

That was not what was concerning me.  Instead, I was left with a number of questions:  I didn’t know the girl.  Who was she?  Was she truly just a volunteer selected at random or was she a confederate?  How could the magician put her into a trance in just seconds?  Most importantly, how did the levitation occur?  Were there wires, as I suspected, which the magician artfully avoided by how he handled the hoop or did the hoop have a gap in it that allowed it to move past the wires without disturbing them?  (Anyone who wants to know how this illusion is performed can find a complete explanation here: https://rebelmagic.com/the-levitating-woman-stage-trick-revealed/)

More recently my wife and I were in Las Vegas because we were meeting friends to spend a couple of days hiking in Zion National Park.  Rather than wasting time and money in the casinos, we were doing a little window shopping in a mall connected with the Venetian Resort, where I spotted a store devoted to the sale of magic paraphernalia.  One of the store clerks standing behind the counter was casually tossing a playing card into the customer area.  But rather than falling to the floor, the card was making a u-turn and returning to the clerk, who caught it midair and tossed it again, with the same result.  I couldn’t resist and walked over to ask the clerk how the trick worked.  He smiled, pointed to a display of packets that featured this as well as other tricks, and said, “$19.95.”

Two nights later we were back in Las Vegas from our hiking, and I found myself returning to the magic store.  A different clerk was behind the counter, and I asked him about the card trick.  “You mean this?” he asked, picking a playing card up off the counter and tossing it into the air, where it again made a u-turn and returned to the clerk.  He then told my wife to hold out her hand, palm up.  He placed the playing card firmly in her hand and waved his hand over hers.  The card then slowly rose from her hand—by itself—and he plucked it out of the air.  “$19.95,” he said, motioning to the display rack.  I didn’t bite and later visited the internet to find an explanation.

My reaction to both of these tricks was that they had to have a rational explanation.  Individuals simply cannot levitate in defiance of the law of gravity, nor can playing cards when tossed make u-turns, much less levitate.  But I couldn’t figure the tricks out on my own.  This is the essence of entertainment magic.  Both the magician and the audience know that the trick is just an illusion, but if the magician is skilled, the audience will not be able to figure out how the illusion works.  And this is the magician’s goal, to baffle the audience and thereby to entertain them.

Unless, that is, the magician holds himself out as able to perform real magic.  That may be the case with many palm readers, fortune tellers, and other supposed psychics, who prey on those who may, by reason of their circumstances, be compromised psychologically and desperate for answers.

That is also the case with faith healers who claim the ability to channel divine intervention to perform miracles.  Either they are self-deluded, which is unfortunate, or they are outright charlatans, which is significantly worse, with the goal of self-aggrandizement or monetary gain at the expense of the supplicants.

Bottom line: magic represents an ideal situation in which to invoke Ockham’s Razor:  All things being equal, as a rule of thumb, one should favor the explanation that requires the fewest basic assumptions.  (For a discussion of Ockham’s Razor see, e.g., https://skepticreflections.blogspot.com/2017/09/ockhams-razor-and-genesis-flood.html.)  In this case belief that true magic can occur requires acceptance not only of all the usual laws of nature but of one or more additional “laws” that would allow the overriding of the other natural laws, such as gravity.

In the words of Carl Sagan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

© 2019 John M. Phillips