Magic and the Art of Deception 2

In my previous post about this topic, I mentioned the fact that people who do magic tricks use the biased expectations of the audience  to their advantage to amaze,scare or sometimes fool them. Almost all of the magic tricks I saw have this one character in common,they have extra things on stage that distract the audience from fully understanding what’s going on. This distraction carefully directs the audience in to the ploy and makes them belief that everything the magicians do is normal. By normal I mean the magicians have super powers that makes them different from everybody else.

I remember  few years ago, a man appearing on the national television of Ethiopia ( where I grew up), telling the TV audience that he has super powers. He appears to do some cool card tricks and also some other very simple tricks on the studio stage ,baffling the journalists and presenters. It happens as if the journalists bought his words and believed that he has super powers. Not to the surprise, in the community where I grew up almost everyone believed that there are people amongst them known us “Tenkuaye’ ,which are almost like ‘the witchcrafts’ and ‘the wise men’ in the history books and also in some ancient communities. ‘Witches’ and ‘the ‘wise men’ are not some thing more than legends in the developed world,but where I grew up, come on ! they are the building blocks and centers of almost all of the community.People go to them when they are sick by seeking medicine and their super healing power, some go to them to take revenge’s by asking the ‘wise men’ to put a cult on their enemies.There are also the fools who go there in search of treasure and wealth which the ‘wise men’ promise to give them in return of a simple favor they do. What makes all this very complicated is the fact that it is widespread and almost everyone takes it for granted. Of course this all can be attributed to the low literacy level of the society but there is more to it which I will discuss in another post.

Getting back to the magic tricks, I stumbled up on this TV show called ‘ Magics Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed’. The show explains most of the tricks that are performed by magicians. Here is one  episode from Youtube, enjoy it and  make sure that you have a look at the other similar episodes of the show

After watching the show I felt pity for the magicians who go through a lot of thing to make their tricks work, but who cares after all, they have their audience who provide them with means of living.