What Even Is Mentalism?

“Mentalism is not Magic in cerebral drag.” ― Max Maven, Verbal Control

Mentalism might be best defined in opposition to magic: at the highest level they both aim for mystery, but most people understand what magic is.

Magic is a demonstration of the impossible, done by trickery. It comes with an implicit contract with the audience, who know that the magician will lie and deceive them in order to accomplish his effects (similarly, mental magic is magic with a mental theme).

Mentalism is a demonstration of the impossible, also often done by trickery, but which does not come with an implicit contract with the audience. The demonstration, however absurd it might be (mind reading?!), is presented and ideally perceived as something real.

This is somewhat problematic because such a definition cannot be used in public (which might be why there are as many definitions of mentalism as there are mentalists). As soon as you explain that what you do relies on falsely presenting something as real, you have just let your audience know that you will lie and deceive them in order to accomplish your effects, turning your demonstration into magic.

Refining our definition a little, I would boil mentalism down to the following three aspects:

1. Presenting something as real: the implications of me using telepathy to identify the playing card you are thinking of are very different from the implications of having used sleight of hand. The demonstration is the same, but the effect is different.
2. Something perceived as impossible or at least improbable: otherwise, it is just a demonstration of skill. If I do a perfectly normal graphology reading for you, that makes me a graphologist, not a mentalist. But if I start stretching it to improbable heights—identifying your occupation based on your handwriting—then we get into the realm of mentalism.
3. In an entertainment setting: doing all of the above in day-to-day life for money would make me a scammer, not a mentalist. Similarly, if I were to do this within a religious practice, I might be a shaman, but not a mentalist. Entertainment, and the theatricality that comes with it, is what sublimates the lie.

All of these points come with large fuzzy areas: Are talking to the dead, telepathy, and lie detection truly impossible or at least improbable for your audience? Is a social performance really an entertainment setting? Do disclaimers stop people from perceiving something as real? Does putting something in the middle of what is clearly a magic show kill its ability to be perceived as real? Is it ethical to lie and maybe reinforce beliefs for entertainment?

But they boil down to what feels like a useful definition of mentalism:

“Mentalism is presenting something as being real, despite it being perceived as impossible or at least improbable by the audience, in an entertainment setting.”

Plus, we can easily turn it into something that can be shared with laymen (feel free to add caveats about using your senses, magic tricks, and a British accent to accomplish your results):

“Mentalism is presenting something that is real, despite it being perceived as impossible or at least improbable by the audience, in an entertainment setting.”

Now, does this definition stuff really matter? I would argue that it does. Stealing an example from T.A. Waters: pseudo-psychometry can be a great mentalism demonstration, a show-stopper in the right hands, but it is a terrible magic trick. As soon as the audience expects trickery, it will not take them long to think about marked envelopes, and there is very little entertainment value in watching someone fake psychometric readings. The frame of mentalism is necessary to make some effects even possible.

Mentalism’s way to mystery is not to build a method so strong that you cannot pierce it despite your best effort (which, I would argue, is one of the pleasures of magic) but rather to lean into the primal instinct that tells you that there is such a thing as mystery. Leading you through the garden path to something that you would never have accepted as possible so that, when you look back to that end point, having forgotten the way there, you realize that it is disconnected from reality, leaving you to question the nature of what you experienced.

That, to me, is the primary effect of mentalism. Everything else is footnotes and tools to get there.