How Magicians Should Perform "Love Ritual"

Put every Got Talent judge in the world in one room, and there's one magic routine they'd all have seen. It's The Love Ritual, by Spanish magician Woody Aragon.

You've seen it before, even if you don't know it by name. Each audience member gets four cards. The cards are torn in half, one piece is set aside, and after a chaotic-looking elimination process, everyone is left with a single half-card. That half matches the one set aside at the start.

It's a great effect, and that's why magicians around the world perform it every week on TV, on stage, and at corporate shows. (If only Love Ritual needed a refillable gimmick, Aragon would be a happy millionaire by now.)

When every magician is doing the same effect, it's worth asking some questions. First: Should you keep doing it? (Got Talent might not be the best stage for it anymore.) Second: how do you make it truly original?

We made a similar argument about Double Cross when David Blaine performed it at a time when everyone was performing it, too.

Sometimes, it’s by looking at top magicians that we realise how a shop-bought trick can be turned into a bigger performance piece. This time, it might be the case with Love Ritual and Penn & Teller.

Love Ritual is practically self-working. It needs some audience management and, as we'll see, the ability to give the effect depth through the magician's character.

However, its popularity comes from more than its simplicity.

The whole audience actively participates at the same time, which is rare for a card trick. There's chaos and fun in the room. The effect works for everyone, and they will all be fooled by a trick that happens in their hands. It’s that good.

Love Ritual is a great choice for card magicians who get booked for a stage spot and don't have material that fits, or for short TV appearances.

You just need the budget and the means to get four cards into every audience member's hands before the effect starts. That's it.

This routine has been done so much that some magicians are now looking for more card tricks that carry a similar feeling. For the announcement of David Blaine’s National Geographic special, David Blaine performed a card trick at a Disney event, for which every member of the audience could follow along with their own deck of cards.

It will be interesting to see how this category of effects is explored in the future, especially with the rise of tech-based methods that enable customisable reveals built on genuinely free choices.