This legendary rope trick has generated over a hundred years of debate
February 28, 2022 8:40 AM   Subscribe

"The classic version of the rope trick [PDF] is performed during the day, in the open and with the performer completely surrounded. The performer causes a rope to magically snake into the air and remain erect. His boy assistant then scurries up to the top of the rope and promptly disappears." Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont explore its history and representation in the West and ask whether or not it ever actually happened. (via Squaring the Strange podcast.)

I'm arguably taking advantage of the last day of Doubles ChowBully to duplicate two nice posts about the author's other work by flex and fearfulsymmetry.

Alternative sources for the first link are here. The scholar's own site makes my browser complain about unencrypted content. (Which isn't a problem, but might put off some people.) It's hard for me to figure out what else might be paywalled right now.
posted by eotvos (12 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
With apologies for not originally finding a good single link to Peter Lamont, who seems to have done a lot of the work. Note that he did write a closely related book that I haven't yet read.
posted by eotvos at 8:52 AM on February 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


Raymond Smullyan is perhaps best known for his books of logic puzzles, with the islands with people who always and only say true things and those who say only false things. But he was a man of many talents, and one of those was, he was an expert at close-up magic and sleight-of-hand.

In one of his books (5000 BC*?) , he tells a story about performing at a dinner theater kind of place. One diner asked him to do one of his tricks again, then a third time. He thought hard for a while and then exclaimed: "It's a trick!"

*There are many wonderful stories in this book, such as Sidney Mossberger interrupting a speaker who claimed that no language has a double-positive construction that makes a negative with "Yeah, right", or the one about him asking B.F. Skinner "Let me make sure I have this right. Your position is that we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?")
posted by thelonius at 9:21 AM on February 28, 2022 [15 favorites]


Raymond Smullyan was a treasure.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:56 AM on February 28, 2022 [7 favorites]


The rope trick inspired the 1st edition Advanced D&D spell by the same name that has, happily, survived to the 5th edition.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 10:39 AM on February 28, 2022 [9 favorites]


It's been a long while since I've seen it, but Penn & Teller had a series of 3 specials on magic history around the world focused on magic traditions in China, Egypt, and India, and it goes into the rope trick a bit. I remember enjoying all 3 of the specials when I first saw them.
posted by msbrauer at 12:00 PM on February 28, 2022 [5 favorites]


With apologies for some language that did not age well, this section of one of Jack Spicer's long form poems has haunted me for years, and I thought this might be an occasion to share it.
10.

The Indian rope trick. And a little Indian boy climbs up it. And the Jungians and the Freudians and the Social Reformers all leave satisfied. Knowing how the trick was played.

There is nothing to stop the top of the rope though. There is nothing to argue. People in the audience have seen the boy dancing and it is not hypnosis.

It is the definition of the rope that ought to interest everyone who wants to climb the rope. The rope-dance. Reading the poem.

Reading the poem that does not appear when the magician starts or when the magician finishes. A climbing in-between. Real.
-- Jack Spicer, The Heads of the Town
posted by treepour at 12:18 PM on February 28, 2022 [4 favorites]



*There are many wonderful stories in this book, such as Sidney Mossberger interrupting a speaker who claimed that no language has a double-positive construction that makes a negative with "Yeah, right",


get it right ffs. one of the great linguistic anecdotes of all time.

Sidney Morgenbesser and the full tale is

in the 1950's During a lecture at Columbia in front of the great and the good, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative.

From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, "Yeah, yeah.". It was Morgenbesser.
posted by lalochezia at 12:38 PM on February 28, 2022 [8 favorites]


Peter Lamont’s book about the Indian Rope Trick is a fascinating read. There are so many variations and twists to the story but they all seem to have one thing in common: nobody has admitted to seeing it firsthand, only secondhand.
posted by dr_dank at 3:02 PM on February 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


It's like QAnon, but for ropes.
posted by flabdablet at 10:20 PM on February 28, 2022 [3 favorites]


My favorite quote from Raymond Smullyan: "Superstition brings bad luck."
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:01 PM on February 28, 2022 [5 favorites]


If nobody has ever actually seen this in the first person, and yet it has been one of the most celebrated and notorious magic tricks in the world for generations, what are we left with?

A direct emanation from the collective unconscious and the all too obvious Freudian interpretation?

With a generous scoop of Orientalism??
posted by jamjam at 11:23 PM on February 28, 2022 [3 favorites]


I'm pretty sure I've seen this trick firsthand. It was during the song "one step ahead" in Aladdin.

Animated counts, yeah?
posted by Acari at 8:51 PM on March 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


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