Zyto’s
Secrets of Mentalism
Notebook: One
Mentalists are entertainers whose performance appears to be based on ‘psychic’ abilities, featuring the ability to read minds, project the mind to alter the state of matter, foretell the future, and see distant and hidden objects. There are similarities with mentalism and parapsychology where a mentalist is defined as someone who is believed to read thoughts and place suggestions in people's minds.
While a psychic may claim to observe a hidden spiritual reality and report on it, in a process known as psychic reading’, a mentalist ostensibly mimics these supernatural behaviours by natural means.
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Note Book One:
This book is the first in a limited series of five notebooks. Each series will discuss five mentalism effects that I have both performed and admired over many years.
It is important to state at the onset that the effects I use are not best employed by someone billing themselves as a magician, a conjurer or as an illusionist. The term mentalist refers to the mind and not to magic. Even though gimmicks and the suchlike are employed by both the magician and the mentalist to create the illusion of mind control, I advise you to refrain from wherever possible using the word magic or to state that you are a magician. Experience also advises not to produce a deck of playing cards at any time during a mentalism routine, as the audience will now be expecting a trick to be performed. Once the spectator expects a trick to be performed, the illusion of the mentalist is lost and there is no recovery!
I make the important statement prior to any performance that I am not a conjuror of cards or small animals; I am a clairvoyant, a medium, a student of human physic abilities.
The effects you will find in this notebook, as with the other four are best played with the flair of the dramatics and each of the effects plays upon mankind’s ancient fears and old superstitions. You will enter...