ESP in Mentalism & Spiritism

ZenerPhobia is a compilation and collection of ten effects that can be done with a Zener deck or as it is more commonly known the ESP deck.

Included in the book:

An introduction to the symbols and a brief description of the Piatnik and Royal Magic ESP decks and their little known secrets.

Mix-a-Mastosis
A spectator uses her inane ESP powers to predict whether five unseen cards will match another five unseen cards.

Janus Syndrome
Five Zener cards are openly put into five envelopes and mixed by a spectator. The magician predicts what symbol will be chosen, and another spectator chooses...

1st edition 1980; original 36 pages; PDF 44 pages.

5. Contents
6. Dedication
7. Foreword
8. Preface
9. One Out Of Five?...It's THIS One!
15. Living And Dead Test....No.1,269!
18. Prelude To The Classic Book Test
21. The Classic Book Test
25. Brain Echoes
31. The 'Escee' Bluff Switch
34. The Astromental Prediction, Mark 1
37. The Astromental Prediction, Mark 2
39. The Master's Miracle Reading
44. Conclusion

Here are 25 tricks with ESP cards. Some are impromptu (marked below with a single star), some require a bit of preparation (marked below with two stars), and a few require more involved preparation such as gimmicked cards (marked below with three stars).

Most are suitable for jumbo ESP cards as well as regular poker or bridge sized cards. And most use only a single deck of ESP cards.

1st edition 1978; original 29 pages; PDF 32 pages.

4. Dedication
5. Contents
6. Author's Preface
7. Foreword
8. Guessing Gordon*
9. Psycho-Symbol*
10. A Five Star Miracle**
11. The Magical Match-Maker**
12. Mental Simplicity*** ...

In Sean Waters release solely devoted to ESP demonstrations with Zener symbol cards, you will acquire the ability to ascertain the right time and place for predictions to come true, along with intuiting when people intend to do you harm. You will learn numerous techniques for duplicating the enhanced abilities of "psychics". The secret of how to implant the thought of a single Zener shape in your participant's mind is detailed as well. With the help of a Zener pack, you will aid your onlookers exploration of determinism, the weight of foreknowledge and a litany of impossible seeming demonstrations....

The original Magic With An ESP Deck was written in 1972 as an “instruction manual” to go with an ESP Deck marketed as a magic prop. The mimeographed manuscript contained a hand full of good self working effects with an ESP Deck, written and produced over a couple of days. Sam Dalal thought no more of this than the hundreds of similar manuscripts and instruction sheets he has written over the years for commercial magic items.

He was delighted when he found the book had achieved the status of a reference book on the subject. Republished by Micky Hades, references to this manuscript popped...

Excerpt from the introduction:

• Symbol synchronicity
• The Rhine reaction
• Zenner mate
• ESP topper
• ESP round-up
• Down-under divination ...

Not one, but a complete series of thought-provoking mental routines with ESP cards.

These sensational effects give you, the psychic entertainer, the ability to add punch to your program. One effect alone is worth a ten-dollar bill. Sufficient routines and material are included for a complete act of Extra Sensory Perception tests. Full patter presentations for many of the effects are given, too.

New to this edition are camera-ready master images of the ESP symbol cards, allowing you to print your own, all the way up to jumbo size for stage presentations. And, we didn't stop there. Each...

"Top Routine. Bravo!" - Roland Henning, Zaubertheater Lübeck, and owner of weeklymagicfailure.blogspot.de

The mentalist hands out a prediction for things to come. Then a spectator mixes five envelopes, each envelope containing one of the five ESP cards. he places them next to each other on the table. He has full control over the order.

Five more envelopes with ESP cards are shuffled and placed on the table, each on top of one of the other envelopes. The spectator has a free choice, where to place the envelops and he can change the order again if he wants to. At the end there...

Here is a straight forward effect which is enabled by a clever gimmick. You ask somebody to think of any one of the five ESP symbols. Then you look deep into their eyes, read their mind, and commit by writing what you read in their mind on a little notebook. Then you ask them to reveal their thoughts. You will be able to show that you wrote down the same symbol.

• No force. Any one of the five ESP symbols can be selected.
• You are not limited to the ESP symbols. Any other small number of symbols, numbers, etc. can be used.
• The notepad is gimmicked. It can be shown but not handed out.
• A bit...

These are three self-working routines with ESP cards with the general theme 'impossible coincidences', facilitated by a cyclic stack. (Two effects are based on work by Werner Miller from his Ear-Marked book, and one routine is from Shane's book Automata.)

As always with Shane, you don't just get a routine and method, but the reasons why these routines work, what is important and how you can change or alter them to suit your needs and make them your own.

In Search of Synchronicity
A deck of ESP is shown, shuffled, and cut. The spectator cuts the deck several times, finally stopping whenever she wants, and removes the...

Paul A. Lelekis presents 8 real-world ESP effects for Close-Up and Cabaret performance. ESP is always a favorite with spectators. With these offerings, you can perform an entire amazing show, out of your pockets!

1) Fantasy Jacks is one of Paul's favorite effects to perform…and it's easy to do. The four Jacks are placed into the empty card case. Two selections are made and lost in the deck. The performer asks the spectator to choose any three of the Jacks…when the deck is spread, the three Jacks are seen "sandwiching" the two selections! But that's not all! When the card box is opened...

Two sets of five ESP cards are freely displayed, one set with red backs, the other with blue. The red set is given to the spectator who shuffles them, the magician mixing the blue set. One at a time the performer places his cards face down onto the table and each time the spectator then places one of his cards at random next to the performer's. When the pairs of cards are turned face up, all five sets are seen to have been put down in matching pairs!

This is a streamlined version of my card matching routine which has extra subtleties and a cleaner handling than earlier versions.

...

You will receive four sets of 5 ESP cards (circle, cross, three wavy lines, square, star), a total of 20 cards. Two sets have a red Bicycle back and the other two sets have a blue Bicycle back. These cards were manufactured by USPCC on their standard air-cushion cardboard.

All cards are marked on the back in an easy-to-read way. A short glimpse is all you need to know which symbol it is. The Bicycle back design wonderfully camouflages the markings if you do not know where to look. These cards match regular Bicycle cards allowing combinations of effects with ESP symbols and standard card symbols. ...

Take your ESP card effects to a new dimension. This is a complete, multi-phase telempathy routine, that progresses from a simple match card effect to a magazine test, then a book test, then a more profound reveal of complex and detailed information - above and beyond expectations and traditional telepathy routines.

There is a bonus ESP card effect that will leave the audience speechless.

The 'explosion' is the belief in mind-to-mind communication.

This uses 'Once Removed' techniques and requires an ESP deck and book test familiarity.

1st edition 2021, PDF 52 pages.

The performer hands five ESP cards, each bearing a different symbol, to a spectator and requests that he remember one. The spectator is then asked to shuffle the cards. The magician takes the cards back and, after an apparently fair mixing procedure, correctly divines the selected symbol without even looking at the faces.

The method uses an old mathematical ploy but it is dressed up differently here.

This effect was featured in the May 2005 issue of Magic Magazine.

1st digital edition 2014, 2 pages.

You get professionally designed ESP symbols:

• Circle
• Cross
• Wave
• Square
• Star (in two sizes)

The files are vector files (SVG format). This means you can blow them up as much as you want without loosing resolution - great for jumbo or giant cards. Each symbol is available in 10 color background combinations. They are:

• black on white background
• blue on...

Here's a complete four-phase routine using a deck of ESP cards.

Do you know the true facts about the ESP deck? J. G. Thompson, Jr. has thoroughly analyzed the deck and come up with some most amazing discoveries which he has blended into the first completely routined demonstration with a standard deck of Rhine E. S. P. cards.

Now you can prove your mastery over extra sensory perception (ESP) and demonstrate to your audience that you are a mentalist by using an ESP testing deck - a scientifically approved accessory. You go through a series of experiments such as Rhine has only hoped to...

A collaborative effort between the author and Ken Kline, an expert on extrasensory perception.

Excerpt from the preface:

Cash in on interest in ESP and mind power with this 15 minute lecture and 30 minute demonstration that you can give.

The author has presented this lecture many times with great success. It is both educational and entertaining and will be enjoyed by most any audience from teens to active seniors. At the conclusion of the lecture, a demonstration of ESP (or is it?) follows. Audience participation is encouraged. Any magician or mentalist can perform the lecture. It can be read straight from a printed copy, performed from memory, or better yet, given as a PowerPoint presentation.

Use this...

David Hoy was a mentalist who later billed himself as genuine psychic. In this audio recording he tries to teach you how to develop your own psychic abilities.

Here is the original back cover text:

To significantly improve on an effect by Max Maven is a hard thing to do for anybody. But David has achieved this feat here with his Coincidence and Fate. One could even say that he has "out-maxed Maven!" - Chris Wasshuber

A shuffled ESP deck is placed on the table. A spectator rolls a pair of dice until satisfied. Using the total on the dice, the spectator deals down into the deck, and places the card at that number off to the side unseen. The deck is reassembled, and a second spectator repeats the process. When the two randomly selected cards are turned over, they match. The performer explains...

David Devlin, the guy who brought you Coincidence & Fate, gives you a three-phase routine with an E.S.P. deck. And best of all, the entire routine is self-working!

Phase 1: The deck is shown to consist of five different symbols repeated five times. The cards are then mixed and the squared deck is placed face-down in front of a spectator. The mentalist turns his back to the spectator, and tells her to cut the deck wherever she wishes, and to complete the cut. Once that is done she is to take the top card of the deck (the card she freely cut to, no force!), look at it and then hold it behind her back so that...

(not to be confused with David’s E.S.P. Routine)

In effect, the performer lays out five cards, each of which has an ESP symbol on in. All of the cards are different and unprepared. Attention is now drawn to a small coin envelope, which, as the performer explains, contains a duplicate of one of the cards on the table. This is the prediction, and is kept in full view throughout the entire proceedings. A spectator now uses his mind to determine which four of the five cards are eliminated. The spectator makes real and honest decisions throughout the elimination process. The envelope is now opened, and it is found...

Here is the effect: a spectator has a packet of 5 cards. For argument's sake, let's assume the five cards used are simply numbered 1-5 (the actual make up of the cards is up to your imagination). The spectator goes through a procedure in which cards are turned face up, face down, left as they are, the packet is cut, some-times the spectator decides whether the cards are turned over or not, sometimes the performer decides. But in the end, no matter who made the decisions, or which decisions were made, only the center card is face up and it is the 4. Not only that, but no matter what decisions...