The Secret - The Secrets of Mentalists.

What does the word “secret” really cover?

If you entrust a secret to a friend, can you be absolutely sure it will not be revealed? Everything mysterious falls within the realm of the secret—secretum in Latin. It also means discretion, silence about something entrusted to someone. It is a veil concealing truths, everything that must be kept hidden, left unsaid. It may be an event or information to which you have no access, or, depending on the circumstances, something you must bury deep within yourself so that it will not be revealed. To know a secret is also to hold the power to betray it—and that is precisely the whole problem with human beings!

In magic, so that the art may survive, the obligation of secrecy appears at first to be extremely simple; but the reality is less obvious, and the boundaries of secrecy are often difficult to define, insofar as the demand for discretion comes up against imperatives such as social interests. A secret disappears the day it becomes known to everyone, turning into an “open secret”... And as a consequence, the magic trick dies.

The word “secret” is easily associated with many other words, giving it a different interpretation, more or less positive depending on the context: secret of nature, secret against illness, secret society, keeping a secret, betraying a secret, secret affair, secret passion, secret desire, secret plans, family secret, secret agent... But in every circumstance, we find the same notion of mystery. A secret is generally shared by only a very small number of people; it can therefore quite readily be associated with a form of conspiracy.

Is there an initiatory secret in mentalism?

The few revelations on this subject, whether on the Internet or in books devoted to mentalism experiments, suggest the existence of secrets linked to knowledge and to the transmission of technical expertise, but they never truly describe the experiments in depth or explain their conditions. Seen from the outside, they seem inaccessible. These secrets have only one purpose: to keep the know-how protected from prying eyes and to make the performance ever more astounding. Thus, beyond the methods taught during the learning of the craft, the conditions of performance before an audience, the manipulations, the words, and the signs will be kept hidden in order to create the illusion and establish the notion of mystery. These are secrets which, far from being transmitted outside, must therefore always remain protected.

Initiation into mentalism is linked to silence, and the secret can only be approached through disclosure by the mentalist himself.

In magic, as in mentalism, it is possible to break the oath of secrecy, and therefore of silence, in only two circumstances. The first, the less honorable one, is disclosure to a third party—for example, a candidate or a friend, an accomplice. This is nothing more than an attempt to popularize the secret. The second, proper to initiation, is the revelation given as part of a true apprenticeship in the craft, either through transmission from a master or through the study of books or videos on the subject.

Never reveal your secrets. Resisting the urge to disclose them will be one of the most difficult stages in your learning of mentalism. You will constantly be confronted by people asking whether you possess a real power, so powerful can the mental effect be. If you answer, “No, I have no power,” it will be difficult not to give in to the pleas of your relatives and friends, who will then want to know the explanation at all costs!

The best attitude is to leave the spectator in doubt, without answering categorically “yes” or “no,” and without being forced to lie. If a mentalism experiment is well presented, the simplest of secrets can bluff the greatest number of people, even the most skeptical. If the secret is not revealed, on the one hand you will not disappoint them, because the explanation is often very simple; and on the other hand, it will inspire confidence in your spectators, allowing you to present them with effects that are increasingly astonishing, increasingly powerful, and increasingly inexplicable.

We are therefore counting on you to keep the secret alive and not reveal what you are about to learn in this book.

And now, enter the very closed world of mentalists and their secrets...