The Dangerous Allure of Prop-less Mentalism by Christopher Parrish

Since deciding to share some of his pet material with the Mentalism community, Christopher has had the most fun jamming with artists who were either fans of his work, or curious/skeptical about his performance style.

A lot of these creative jams have blossomed into full-fledged friendships, allowing the differences in performance philosophy to impact how Christopher learns, develops, and ultimately performs Mentalism in front of a lay audience.

Inspired by how information was written, shared, and refined by 19th and 20th-century philosophers, the Esse e-books are a planned series of releases from the creative mind of Christopher Parrish, aiming to share his current thoughts and reflections on many aspects of Mentalism performance, methodological design, and blindly accepted inherited “knowledge.”

These e-books are designed to be packed full of information but also designed to be brutally honest when need be; as the potential for real critical thinking and debate is lost when artists are too polite to state what they truly think about certain topics of conversation.

Besides using real-world performance experience to inform much of his performance style and methodological preferences, Christopher also cites principles and techniques that he has learned from his time studying Cognitive, Corporate, and Clinical psychology at university.

Additionally, Christopher cites information that he found success in performance through reading and engaging in poetry, philosophy, music, and popular social media trends! This echoes one of the most important pieces of advice Christopher has learned from artists he respects: have many interests and learn as much as you can about different things!

The first volume of the Esse series is dedicated to Christopher’s current thinking on the controversial genre of Prop-less Mentalism. Rather than being a love letter to this genre of Mentalism, Christopher tackles what he hates about Prop-less Mentalism, what he loves about Prop-less Mentalism, and the foundational principles he designed for his own work to develop and perform prop-less routines that are genuinely worthy of his audience’s time and attention. Christopher has little patience for any kind of Mentalism that leaves audience members still waiting for something magical to happen!

Three prop-less routines are included in this e-book, which is meant to accompany and highlight all of the theoretical frameworks established in this body of work:

Prop-less Cartomancy Plus: A sitter is provided insight into a question they have about their life using the oracle of Cartomancy. However, a magical moment occurs that leaves sitters stunned at the magic created through coincidence!

The Ring of Light: First published in Christopher’s e-book, Monad, The Ring of Light is Christopher’s go-to prop-less date of birth divination! No anagrams, hanging statements, asking people to focus on specific digits or complicated mathematics. Using a genuine psychic tradition that can be found in many New Age books, the mentalist can offer a sitter an intuitive reading and is able to secretly harvest their date of birth! This allows for direct reveals, predictions, and One-Ahead style routines! The mentalist has complete creative freedom on how they would wish to use the information! Also included in this chapter is a way to consistently divine a thought-of name in a prop-less manner, using tools and techniques developed by Phedon Bilek! This was the stand-out routine that customers of Monad praised Christopher for sharing with the community!

The Unnamed Prop-less Name Divination: Using methods developed by Q&A authors George Anderson and Robert Nelson, this chapter provides a framework on how to divine thought-of names in a prop-less manner! No cognitive or facial detection methods, no extensive and boring letter-based procedures, and no use of common uni-sex male names! Rather than being a self-contained routine, this approach to divining names is best integrated into any sure-fire Mentalism routine you wish to perform!

With your purchase of The Dangerous Allure of Prop-less Mentalism, get ready to transform how you create and perform Mentalism!