Une mystification absolue. Sur le «souper de Cazotte»

It is perhaps time to revisit «Cazotte's supper» (emphasizing the version provided by Nerval in Les Illuminés). The episode, as recounted by La Harpe, is all too famous: in 1788, Jacques Cazotte is supposed to have predicted the Revolution and the executions by guillotine during the Terror. This «prophecy» aroused reactions which were contradictory, but less so than one might think: the tendency to nuance these opinions to the point of neutralizing them is not the least paradox provoked by this «supper». The aim is not really to «demistify» the prophecy (to refute the illuminism using positivist rationalism) but to unravel and deconstruct its complex mechanisms - in short, to question the essence of what can be described (or not...) as a mystification.

I'll bet you can't: a choice collection of easy challenge tricks

Siamo tutti telepatici?

David Copperfield's Orient Express Card Trick

Des Herrn Ritters Pinetti de Merci physikalische Belustigungen

Kaspar Kroak's kaleidoscope

Oeconomische Encyklopädie

Magicians' Token

A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection

One of the 14 articles in the series The Psychology of Magic and the Magic of Psychology published on Frontiers in Psychology between 2014 and 2015.

Idée d'un cours de physiologie, appliquée à la pathologie