Guest Post: Caesar's Stack by Akshay Mishra

I used to be a mentalist. I say 'used to' because I lost all interest in mentalism when it started becoming more and more popular and magicians who were average at best started branding themselves as mentalists in the hopes of corporates paying more for using this buzzword while they executed the TOXIC force on their shiny new iPhone and then revealed it written (in horrible handwriting, I must add) on an A4 sheet, leading to polite applause and whispers of "App! Yes, app!" coming from the audience. Anyway, I digress. That is a topic for a different day.

So I used to be a mentalist, long ago. And I left it behind completely in 2020, during the lockdowns. From 2015 to 2020, I used to perform a routine I called THINK OF ANYTHING. The method as well as presentation is nothing groundbreaking and I came up with it after seeing a mentalist perform a book test I can now identify as some version of MOABT. The other thing that inspired it was, and I am not kidding, Ceaser's Cipher.

Caesar's Cipher, for those not particularly interested in weird stuff, is a secret code used apparently by Julius Caesar to send and receive messages during his military campaigns. It is kind of like the famous Enigma code but much simpler in nature than that. While writing something in this code, the letters of the words are switched with the third letter ahead of it. For example, A is switched with D and D is switched with G. So, ADD will be written as DGG. Similarly, STACK will be written as VWDFN. You get my drift. If you are still with me, now comes the effect, or prop, or concept, whatever.

It originated from the idea of letting a person think of anything (holiday destination, food, animal, porn star, serial killer) that they liked and being able to reveal it with minimum procedure, preferably without having anything written down. I was a coward back then, I didn't trust my ability to get a single peek. Anyhoo. The obvious answer for me was to create a limited list of things that people could THINK (pick out, choose, select) OF ANYTHING from. And so I did.

I used the following criteria while creating that list.

1. The list will consist of 26 items, which means each item can start with a different letter of the alphabet. 
2. The items will all be ones which people are usually familiar with and like. So, the people will be celebrities, places popular tourist destinations in India, and delicious foods. I kept the animals random for a joke that I used to make.
3. The items will all be different in length. Some were in fact two or three words too. The shortest I remember was 'Goa'.
4. The list had to look created by different people, not just by me.

Once I was done creating the list of twenty six different 'things', I bought a pack of blank playing cards and wrote it out, one item on each card. It took several different colours and thicknesses of permanent markers and pretending to be different people and writing in different styles to accomplish this very simple task. I wrote in all caps, all smalls, first word capital, cursive, non cursive and in different font sizes too. All this work was to distract from the fact that all the items started with a different letter in the alphabet. Helping me was the fact that they were not random things, they were 'favourites of people that I performed for'. At least this is what I told my audience. After all was said and done, I arranged these cards in such a way that if you cut the cards at a random place and looked at the bottom card, the card at the top would have a word/s that started with the third letter ahead of them in the alphabet. (Remember? Caesar's Cipher?)

I understand now that what I created was basically a Si Stebbins stack with nouns instead of playing cards. I also learned later on that I had essentially recreated the ODDS stack by Richard Osterlind which is pretty much identical to mine. I also don't believe that he was the first person to think of this idea as it is a very intuitive one. Anyway, I just want to acknowledge it here and give credits where they are due.

I believe that by now you have understood the essential concept behind this stack. In short, create a list of things that people in your demographic or universally would admire/like/love while making sure that each of those things started with a different letter of the alphabet. Then, get some blank cards and write it out on them while using different writing styles and colour pens for each. Then, set them up in the order I discussed earlier. Now, you have a tool that you can use to read people's minds. The simplest effect will be identical in method to getting a card selected in a deck set up in Stebbins and then revealing it. Only now, you can add a lot of 'personality' to these reveals. The items each starting with a different alphabet is a failsafe in case you drop the deck, accidently shuffle it, an audience member wants to see the deck and shuffle it, or you just forget what you peeked.

The last time I used these cards was in a performance in my university as a part of a talent hunt in early 2019. Here it is, should you be inclined to see the moment I won an award for the routine that I performed. 

AWARDED FOR "MENTALISM"

I will discuss that routine and more tips in a future post. 

Till then, Love You!

- Akshay Mishra