Why Do Magicians So Often Become Mentalists?

Many years ago, I read something Lloyd Barnes shared online: you either die a magician or live long enough to see yourself become a mentalist.

I don't know where the phrase originated in its magical incarnation. It is, of course, a play on Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight line: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

There is this trope in magic in which people get into magic, perform magic tricks, and then slowly but surely transition into mentalists.

Why does this happen? Is it a good thing? And are there lessons to be learned from mentalism that magicians can build into the ways they perform their tricks?

Magic Vs. Mentalism

Honestly, I sometimes struggle to put into words the differences between magic and mentalism. It certainly seems easier to define mentalism. In fact, if there were no such word as a mentalist, we'd likely allow every mentalism effect to get categorized as a magic trick.

Even the word mentalism sounds weird to me. I once sat down to write an essay for One Ahead readers all about how mentalists should be calling themselves mind readers instead of mentalists. I thought that surely more people know what mind reading is than they know about mentalism.

In my own experience, I've had a ton of people in television production crews, and even commissioning rooms ask what on earth mentalism is. They wouldn't ask the same question if I had simply called it mind reading.

But when I sat down to write about it, I did some research, and the data I found seemed to contradict my personal experience. While the term mind reader is more intuitive, more people understand that mentalists are performers who create the illusion of mind reading and predicting behaviors. When looking to hire or see a mentalist, people are more likely to search for one with that term.

For this article, we'll define mentalism's effects as predicting, influencing, and reading human behavior. Magic, on the other hand, tends to be much more visual and can exist with or without spectators.

Why Start With Magic

Nothing travels quite like magic. If I ever do visit YouTube and look at the trending reels, I often see non-magicians performing magic tricks there. There's no denying it: magic is surprising, visual, and engaging, regardless of what language you speak and whether you are or are not sitting watching it on the loo.

The same cannot be said for mentalism – it is rarely visual, requires a spectator, and almost always involves the written or spoken word.

It's easy to see how magic is able to read hundreds of millions of more people each day than magic. This is why the first argument for why most people begin with magic is that most people discover magic long before mentalism. It is not the case that they are aware of and decline to learn mentalism before learning magic.

Magic is the gateway.

There's also something rather unique about mentalism, which we'll touch on later, but it's good to raise now, too. Mentalism is believable in a way magic never entirely can be.