A short history of mentalism

People tend to imagine mentalism as something recent, invented somewhere between Uri Geller and television. It is a good deal older than that, and its history is a long argument between performers who said they had a gift and performers who said they had a skill.

I am firmly on one side of that argument. But the other side wrote most of the early chapters.

1572, and the first name we can actually point to

The first recorded public performance of a mentalism effect is generally credited to Girolamo Scotto, an Italian nobleman and conjuror, in 1572. He performed feats of apparent mind reading for the courts of Europe, and he is the earliest figure we can name with any confidence.

He was almost certainly not the first. He is simply the first somebody bothered to write down, which is a different thing, and worth remembering whenever anyone tells you where something "began".

The nineteenth century, where it gets complicated

The 1800s were the making of mentalism and also its long embarrassment. The spiritualist boom meant enormous public appetite for contact with the dead, and a large number of performers were happy to supply it: seances, slate writing, table tipping, messages from beyond.

Much of the technique that underpins modern mentalism was developed in those rooms. It was developed, however, by people claiming genuine supernatural contact with the recently deceased, frequently to the bereaved, frequently for money.

It also produced the counter-tradition I would rather claim. Performers began exposing those methods publicly, demonstrating that everything the mediums did could be reproduced by skill alone. Houdini spent the last years of his life on precisely this, and made a great many enemies doing it.

That argument never really ended. It is why I am careful to say plainly that I am not psychic. The people who came before me made that a necessary sentence.

The twentieth century, and the move to entertainment

The genuine shift was one of framing rather than method. Performers stopped claiming powers and started presenting the same work openly as entertainment, which turned out to be both more honest and considerably better theatre.

Radio and then television did the rest. Mentalism suits a camera unusually well, because the interesting thing is happening on a participant's face rather than in a performer's hands. That single fact explains most of what has happened to the discipline since.

Where the history lives now

Much of it survives only in private hands. The original manuscripts, lecture notes and privately circulated books of this craft were never mass-produced, and many were deliberately restricted to working performers.

I collect them. I have acquired notes and books at auction between roughly one hundred and one hundred and fifty years old, and reading them is a peculiar experience: the same problems I worked on this year, worked on by someone in a different century, in handwriting, with better penmanship and worse spelling.

Very little in this craft is genuinely new. Most of what looks like innovation is someone rediscovering a solved problem and presenting it to an audience that has not seen it before. That is not a criticism. It is most of the job.