Reviews of products by Hereward Carrington
Thayer's 21st Century Mindreading Act
Overall customer rating: ★★★★★reviewed by Jeffrey Whiting (confirmed purchase)
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Wednesday 06 May, 2026)
As a keen devotee and practitioner of Two Person codes, I’m always interested in historical methods of this particular branch of mentalism.
Carrington’s 21st Century Act, originally known as the Psycho Act, offers an innovative take on the concept of coding and Q&A. Rather than use 26 separate codewords for the 26 letters of the alphabet, you only have to learn 4 code words, plus 5 prefixes…greatly reducing the learning curve for an act of this nature.
The use of these prefixes also gives you more flexibility in coding with NATURAL sentences rather than some stiff, overly formal dialogue. Likewise, conformation codes are sent with 10 codewords and 2 prefixes. For certain doubled letters/numbers and specific questions, additional words are suggested.
Of particular interest to both historians and modern mentalists are the lists of typical questions and queries. They are arranged logically with alphabetical, common sense abbreviations ie BS (Business Succeed?)
It’s not all-encompassing, or claims to be, but it’s more than enough for real-world applications.
If you come across a question you can’t code, just ask them to see you for a private session later!
I’m reminded of a similar situation with Volta’s Question & Answer act, which gives codes for 180(!) questions - encyclopaedic but too unwieldy for practical purposes, in my opinion.
Disadvantages?
This ISN’T an article act, although Carrington does suggest how to use it as such, but counsels it’s more of a “knockout” ending rather than a full feature!
And yes, some of the language sounds archaic and awkward today, but with his structure, I’m sure any neophyte code act can adapt it to their purposes
The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism: Fraudulent and Genuine
Overall customer rating: ★★★★★reviewed by bob tong (confirmed purchase)
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Wednesday 09 March, 2022)
Simple straightforward and no ambiguity involved in the understanding of Spiritualism and historical backgrounds supported by genuine incidents that occurred pertaining to the area of discussion and information sharing. It is quite astounding that there are still charlatans that desire to disillusion those who may have some level of belief in spiritual matters. It is very objective though at times, subjective to the extent of the spiritual matters concerned. This does open the corridors to differentiate between fraudulent and genuine incidents and issues on spiritualism. Hence, I would give a 5-stars rating for the excellent work done to understand Spiritualism though it does depend on the individual concerned to be able to discern between reality and fantasy.