The Dishonest Liar
It’s a maxim told in magical circles that the magician is the only honest entertainer; they say they are going to lie to you, then they do. I’ve talked about it in the past, with magicians selling access to their tricks (when obscured) then selling access to their tricks (when revealed), in the history of the discipline. Once, there was a purpose to explicating methods in courts, where magicians could be accused of consorting with dark powers, and needed to be able to prove and demonstrate what they were doing, actually. Books from the early days are full of explicated methods of magical tricks, and with the rise of the camera, luminaries of the pre-camera era did whole talks, whole lectures, explaining the language magicians used for just the entirely anodyne description of a technique, the sort of cladistic or medical language for academically explaining what an audience sees regardless of how a magician makes it happen.
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