The Mind Games of Derren Brown: Unlocking the Secrets of Absolute Magic

Absolute Magic is a book written by Derren Brown, a renowned magician and illusionist. Published in 2000, the book delves into the secrets and techniques behind the art of magic and illusion. Brown presents a comprehensive exploration of magic, covering various aspects including misdirection, suggestion, psychology, and audience manipulation. Throughout the book, Brown shares his insights and experiences as a magician, shedding light on the intricacies involved in creating and performing magic tricks. He delves into the importance of timing, body language, and psychology in order to effectively deceive and entertain an audience. Brown emphasizes the significance of practice and dedication in honing one's skills as a magician, debunking the common misconception that magic is purely based on supernatural powers.

Witches are stereotypically shown wearing a tall, pointed hat. This dates from the time when the new religion (Christianity) was trying to discredit the Old Religion and make it look undesirable.

Whether Baldung intended his woodcut to not only reflect a real-life representation of witches but, more importantly, influence how they would be depicted by their persecutors in the future is debatable. My main focus was the early modern European witch trials and witches how they were depicted in art and popular culture and they survived into modern times.

Brown emphasizes the significance of practice and dedication in honing one's skills as a magician, debunking the common misconception that magic is purely based on supernatural powers. One of the key themes in Absolute Magic is the psychological aspect of magic. Brown explains how magicians use various psychological techniques to influence and control the thoughts and perceptions of their audience.

Where Did the Witch's Hat Come From? The Checkered Past of a Pointy Icon

In this essay, I deal with the Welsh national costume for women as a possible source and inspiration for what is now the familiar image of the Witch's hat, and delve into the ale-wives' tall hat, a millinery device to advertize their wares in crowded markets and street fairs. The 17th and 18-centuries' positive fashion influences on

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Yvonne Owens. Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art: The Witches and Femmes Fatales of Hans Baldung Grien. Foreword by Joseph Leo Koerner. London & New York, Bloomsbury. 2020. 312 pages. 47 Illustrations. Hardcover. ISBN-10 : 1784537292, ISBN-13 : 978-1784537296

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body.

Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography edited by Angeliki Pollali, Berthold Hub

In 2007, the Städel Museum presented ‘Witches’ Lust and the Fall of Man: the Strange Fantasies of Hans Baldung Grien.’ Curated and documented by Bodo Brinkmann, the show exhibited Baldung’s ‘Witch’s Sabbath’ works alongside his ‘Fall of Man’ themed images. This juxtaposition gave an overwhelming impression of the threatening allure with which Baldung imbued his graphic, nude representations of the dangerous, eroticized, feminine body. For the sixteenth-century Northern humanists who were the primary clients and collectors for these works, it seems that erotica just wasn’t sexy without the implicit, deeply affective threat of imminent physical and moral danger. Positing the womb as a kind of “Pandora’s Box,” classical and medieval antifeminist tropes fed into a coherent, elite discourse of the seductions and pollutions of witchcraft being firmly rooted in phlegmatic, feminine physiology. One image among Baldung’s idiosyncratic oeuvre stands out, however, as embodying a stunning range of discourses, emblems and tropes informing Renaissance ideas around toxic, feminine physiology and Woman’s ‘natural’ ability to inflict her fatal ‘witchcraft’ through sex. The youthful woman of a highlighted pen and ink drawing created in 1515, most often recognized by the title of The Witch and Dragon (Fig. 1), presents a comprehensive ‘buffet’ of sixteenth-century medical and theological figures informing the idea of the dangerous, female, sexual ingénue. Just setting out on her nefarious career as seductive enchantress and horrific nemesis, the adolescent ‘witch’ in this image represents the quintessential siren, irresistibly calling men’s virtue to its demise.

Baldung’s figurations of blood and fire, feminine hair, and the feminine body as poisonous vessel, negotiate this multivalent semiotics with both irony and verisimilitude. Within the complex codification that relies upon Death/Menstruation as the hermeneutic of the Fall, the Fall itself is presented as premier among Woman’s natural and inevitable maleficia. The dominant role Baldung’s witch takes in the production of visible maleficium echoes Hugh of St. Victor, who quotes from Augustine, and who is in turn echoed in the Malleus Maleficarum. Hugh paints Woman’s concupiscence conventionally, as the result of constitutional ‘weakness’ and ocular desire; the precipitous Fall of Man results from the Devil’s successful appeal to the lustful feminine gaze, as per the Augustinian trope. In the assertion that feminine malice outstrips even that of the Devil, Hugh glossed upon Augustine’s historical reading of Holy Scripture. This interpretation includes the punitive concepts of female concupiscence in bringing about the debasement of “mortal corruption” afflicting corporeal flesh through the Fall.

Preternature, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2014

"Scholarship on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century discourses of witchcraft has not focused to any great degree on the connection between the persecution of Jews and that of witches in Germany during this period, though the construction of Jews as Saturn-ruled, melancholic, phlegmatic, and physiologically toxic contributed much to the debates on witches. Typed according to simi- lar figures of “pollution,” Jews and witches were subjected to similar court procedures and suf- fered comparable “cleansings,” tests, and tortures at the hands of the Inquisition. This article argues that such concepts of the “polluted blood” of women, witches, Jews, and effeminate men may have influenced the witchcraft iconography of the sixteenth-century artist of Strasbourg, Hans Baldung Grien (1484/86–1545)."

The construction of ‘sorcerers’ in the Formicarius, Malleus Malificarum, Die Emeis and other treatises presented a comparatively impoverished imagery, whereas imaging the male victims of feminine witchcraft, like the harridan-ridden Aristotle, the mortified Adam, or the stable groom victimized by hippomanes, came near to approaching the affective, abject power of feminized witch iconography—which is to say, the naked and eroticized feminine body. More importantly, descriptions of male witches in the Malleus were based on specific, formulaic or ceremonial acts and not on grand theories of Natural Philosophy, which painted pictures of polluted physicality or sexually corrupted essential nature. Passages dealing with elite, masculine magic tended to present technical, imagistically boring reading compared to the richer, more dramatically detailed, sensationalistic sections on witches. They feature as less dramatic subjects for visual interpretation with far fewer classical antecedents and a far less universal symbol set. The closest exemplars of masculine iniquity, or ‘pollution,’ were to be found in the tropes surrounding ‘cuckolds,’ Jewish males, and addictive, ‘Faustian’ magicians – men who had lost control to the devil or his prime agent, Woman. And even these tropes relied, for their effect, upon the assignment of ‘effeminate’ attributes and the emotive language of contamination or pollution. Male witches deemed culpable for the usual, feminine stamp of maleficium were figured as woman-like in that they were constructed as ‘weak minded,’ or as ‘fools’ subject to demonic delusions and folly

Paper done for my senior History Seminar class at Indiana University Southeast in Spring 2014. Theme of the paper was history and memory; basically says to describe a certain historical event and how it is remembered. My main focus was the early modern European witch trials and witches how they were depicted in art and popular culture and they survived into modern times. My main point was that female witches were presented in three archetypes in early modern art: the hag, the seductress, and the inverted woman. I showed this through the various paintings and how said paintings reflected descriptions from the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches' Hammer) and the Compendium Maleficarum and how they survived into modern popular culture. Please note that this was an undergraduate project. Both my writing style and research methods were very basic at the time.

Journal of Literature and Art Studies

Witches’ Sabbath offers an overload of the emblematic characteristics which were attributed to witches during the early modern period, underpinned by the complete nudity of the witches. Naked witches were not often depicted in the illustrations of respectable, cautionary literary works concerning witches, hence this artistic choice on Baldung's part is a rather innovatory. Interestingly only a year after the unveiling of Witches' Sabbath in 1510, Die Emeis - which preocuppied itself with the Lenten sermons of Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg - was published in Strasbourg similarly depicting naked witches. Although we cannot say whether the inclusion of naked witches in Die Emeis was solely the result of Baldung’s depiction, it is very likely that Geiler would have been familiar with Baldung's work due to its popularity and this woodcut could have indeed influenced his own opinions and artistic choices. Whether Baldung intended his woodcut to not only reflect a “real-life” representation of witches but, more importantly, influence how they would be depicted by their persecutors in the future is debatable. Much of the debate surrounding this piece centres on this point: was it Baldung's intention to realistically depict witches or should Baldung’s work be viewed as satirical. Either way, there is much that this woodcut can tell us about what those who genuinely believed in the existence of witches and the way fear of witchcraft was constructed for public consumption.

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In the fifteenth century, the tall conical hat was very much in fashion for women of the court and with the upper classes. Eventually it went out of fashion. In those days it took time for fads and fashions to travel from the cities and towns to the villages and country folk. Long after the tall, pointed hat had become démodé in town, it was still being worn in the country. This was the time that the Church was trying to draw people away from the old Pagan religion and into Christianity. At that time, followers of the Old Religion were usually depicted wearing the nolonger-fashionable tall, pointed hats to subtly suggest that the Old Religion itself was out of fashion. It also tied in with the Church's view that all pointed hats were associated in some way with the pointed horns of the Devil.

He dissects the principles of suggestion and misdirection, revealing how magicians exploit the human mind's susceptibility to manipulation. By understanding the way people think and perceive the world, magicians are able to create powerful illusions that captivate and mesmerize. Another prominent aspect discussed in the book is the relationship between the magician and the audience. Brown emphasizes the importance of connecting with the audience on an emotional level, establishing trust, and creating a sense of wonder. He explores the art of storytelling and its role in enhancing the impact of magic tricks, providing examples from his own repertoire. Absolute Magic is not just a guide for aspiring magicians, but also a thought-provoking exploration of the principles and philosophy behind magic. Brown challenges the conventional understanding of magic and seeks to demystify the artform, revealing the underlying techniques that make magic possible. It is a must-read for anyone interested in magic, psychology, or simply fascinated by the wonder and deception of illusion..

Reviews for "The Psychological Manipulations of Derren Brown's Absolute Magic"

1. Jane - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with "Absolute magic derrwn brown". I was expecting to be blown away by incredible magic tricks, but instead, all I got was cheesy theatrics and predictable illusions. The show lacked originality and failed to captivate my attention. I found myself constantly checking my watch, waiting for it to end. Overall, it was a major letdown and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for true magic.

2. Michael - 1 star - As an avid fan of magic shows, I can confidently say that "Absolute magic derrwn brown" was a complete disaster. The tricks were sloppy and poorly executed, leaving no sense of wonder or amazement. It felt like I was watching a low-budget production with amateur magicians. The show lacked any creativity or innovation, and I couldn't wait for it to be over. Save your money and skip this one.

3. Sarah - 2 stars - I had high expectations for "Absolute magic derrwn brown" considering the popularity of the performer, but unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations. The show seemed rushed and lacked proper storytelling. The tricks were predictable and lacked the wow factor that you expect from a magic performance. Overall, it felt like a mediocre production and left me feeling unsatisfied. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone seeking a truly magical experience.

4. John - 2 stars - "Absolute magic derrwn brown" was a huge disappointment. The show seemed disjointed and lacked a cohesive theme. The tricks were average at best and didn't offer anything new or exciting. There was a lack of audience engagement, and it felt like we were simply being shown a series of random illusions without any emotional connection. It's a shame because I had heard great things about Derrwn Brown, but this show was a major letdown.

The Illusionist's Toolbox: The Techniques Behind Derren Brown's Absolute Magic