Taxonomy

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Kevin Parry’s video on the 10 types of magic tricks is really great.

As a piece of art, I really enjoy that video. But is it useful in any way for us?

Magicians have been categorizing the different types of effects for at least a couple of centuries.

Here is Dariel Fitzkee’s list from The Trick Brain published in 1944

1. Production (Appearance, creation, multiplication)
2. Vanish (Disappearance, obliteration)
3. Transposition (Change in location)
4. Transformation (Change in appearance. character or identity)
5. Penetration (One solid through another)
6. Restoration (Making the destroyed whole)
7. Animation (Movement imparted to the inanimate)
8. Anti-Gravity (Levitation and change in weight)
9. Attraction (Mysterious adhesion)
10. Sympathetic Reaction (Sympathetic response)
11. Invulnerability (Injury proof)
12. Physical Anomaly (Contradictions, abnormalities, freaks)
13. Spectator Failure (Magicians' challenge)
14. Control (Mind over the inanimate)
15. Identification (Specific discovery)
16. Thought Reading (Mental perception, mind reading)
17. Thought Transmission (Thought projection and transference)
18. Prediction (Foretelling the future)
19. Extra-Sensory Perception (Unusual perception, other than mind)

While these sorts of lists are interesting, I think they’re a particularly magician-centric manner of looking at the tricks you do. Real, normal people aren’t really breaking down the tricks in this manner.

I’m not saying these categories aren’t “real,” I’m just saying they’re not useful. It’s like looking at the 7 basic story plots. In theory, that's a way to categorize stories, but I don’t know how useful it is to suggest that Dracula and Star Wars are somehow the same story.

If you do a card trick where the cards transpose, and then another one where certain cards transform to other cards, and then another one where cards vanish and reappear, those will end up merging in the spectator’s mind into one experience of “card tricks.”

However, if you transform a card from the Ace of Spades to the 2 of Hearts, and then transform an apple into a banana, those will be seen as two wildly different tricks to the spectator, simply because they use different objects.

Similarly, if you make coins appear, vanish, transpose, multiply, transform, etc., most spectators won’t feel like they’ve seen a wide variety of magic. They’ll feel like they’ve seen some coin tricks.

But you can take an appearance and put it into three different contexts and the person will have a distinct memory of three different tricks. 1) The Tibetan “Wishing Ritual” where the object they wished for appeared. 2) The time you hypnotized them to see an apple in the box that they had clearly seen empty just moments before. 3) The time you held a seance and the young spirit’s little dolly appeared on the table out of nowhere.

These are all they same “type” of trick (appearances). But they will be perceived as very different tricks and experiences for people because they’re three very different stories.

If you want to differentiate your effects for normal humans (not for magic researchers and historians) you will want to change up the props you use and the contexts/stories in which the tricks reside.

Those are the things people perceive and remember. When you realize that, you’ll understand that—from the spectator-centric perspective—there are unlimited “types” of magic tricks.