Christopher Parrish
Digital deception, psychic octopuses and the future of mentalism
First of all, I just want to say, I know this a long one but it will be worth it, because Christopher has a very important announcement at the end!
In the swirling depths of the vault of wonders,
just beyond the dusty shelves marked:
DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE SUPREME ASTRAL COUNCIL
There’s a folder labelled simply: PARRISH.
Its contents are full of unconfirmed sightings, mentalist experiments that defy explanation and a
suspicious coffee stained doily that looks like a squid.
This is the story of the day I tried to find Christopher Parrish.
It all started in a book shop that shouldn’t exist.
You know the type; faded sign, not listed on Google Maps and the smell of burnt toast and secrets.
I was searching for information on Christopher Parrish’s mentalism origins when I met her:
Madame Whiskers.
A beautiful cat with three eyes and a tendency to knock tarot cards off the table if you asked a stupid question.
She only answers to purring vibrations and questions about fate.
The owner said.
I placed a KitKat bar in front of her. She looked at me and blinked twice.
Then she walked over to a dusty book titled The Arithmancer.
Was this a coincidence?
Not when the author’s name is written
with ink that glows in dimly lit corridors.
She hissed dramatically,
leapt off the table, and disappeared behind a curtain marked:
DO NOT FOLLOW THE CAT!
So, I didn’t… I’ve made that mistake before!
Now this is where things got slippery.
After visiting the bookstore, I received a mysterious postcard. No return address. Just a tentacle print and the coordinates to a seaside aquarium called
Mystical Marine.
I went and that’s when I met Oraculus the psychic octopus.
He wore a monocle and refused to be interviewed… RESPECT!
He communicated with me through interpretive suction cup placements on laminated Zener cards.
I showed him a picture of Christopher Parrish.
He pressed his tentacle to the star symbol five times.
Then inked the words: SYSTEM ADDICT!
When asked if Christopher was human,
Oraculus turned purple and waved a tentacle in a spiral motion.
Aquarium staff later told me Oraculus was rather keen on music from the 80’s.
Who is Christopher Parrish? I needed to know!
All I really know is he’s a creator, a performer, and maybe even a dimension hopping cyberclone disguised as a very pleasant human man.
What you can expect from this interview, other than whiplash?
A chat about his work, poetry and octopuses
because I take cephalopods seriously!
Grab your psychic antenna, download your subconscious, and get ready to meet one of the most innovative minds in modern mentalism.
MB: Can you walk me through a typical day in your life? How do you balance creative work, performance, and personal time?
CP: I recently quit my day job to pursue performing full time and that’s worked out really well for me. When I’m not performing, I also do readings for people. I also finished my psychology studies at college, this change from studying and working a full-time job has given me so much freedom.
So I enjoy spending time with my girlfriend and our new cat.
For the creative stuff, I do my best to let creativity do its own thing in the back of my head. I subscribe to the idea that the subconscious is working behind the scenes and when it’s ready to form an idea it will push it into the consciousness. Then it’s up to me to refine it, road test it and tweak it.
And some ideas come for a reason, for example with Arithmancer Dan and Lewis mentioned that had Dan and I not worked on Arithmancer when we did, the mathematics’ probably wouldn’t have worked out.
So, I do believe that ideas come when the time’s right
and I just kind of allow things to happen.
I also believe that a person should have a poetic or creative world view to be able to see those cogs turn and recognise that an idea has been presented to them. So, for the most part I just allow creativity to do its own thing throughout the day. Besides that, I read a whole lot.
I read a lot of nonfiction. I love books on history, biographies, psychology and philosophy. About 2-3 years ago I realised that those books were having an influence on the type of mentalism I was performing so I allowed them to trickle into my performances.
MB: What keeps you grounded?
CP: Portrait photography and writing poetry. Photography would be main one because poetry does have an influence on the mentalism that I do.
MB: How did you first become interested in mentalism?
CP: I started out as a magician and I used to watch the Chris Ramsay vlogs.
I saw a vlog of Chris with Pete Turner because they were doing the ‘At The Table Live’ thing. I saw Pete Turner guess someone’s star sign and date of birth and I just thought that was the most magical thing on the planet.
And I think most of my work that I publish is just me chasing my vision of the perfect way to deduce someone’s star sign or their date of birth.
MB: At what point did you think mentalism would be more than just a hobby?
CP: Probably when I was in college, as much as I loved learning about psychology, philosophy and history.
In the back of my mind, I just knew mentalism was my dream job.
Even though I would still consider pursuing a career in psychology, I just can’t let mentalism go. I’ve had breaks from performing every now and then, but it always came back and that’s how I know my life needs to be centred around it.
I thinks it’s a real testament too, that whenever I think about different things, like poetry, watching TV or even just talking to people, all those things influence the mentalism that I do.
My effect ‘If Seinfeld could guess pin codes’ came from a comedy movie where a character was trying the guess the code to a safe.
Whenever I’m engaging in different artforms, I start to wonder if I can turn it into a presentation. I can’t ever imagine not performing or giving readings.
MB: How long have you been performing for?
CP: I’ve been into magic since I was 11 years old and I got the mentalism bug about 6 or 7 years ago. My first paid gig was about 5 years ago. As I was getting closer to finishing college, I started to push it harder for more gigs and now I’m completely full time.
MB: What does a typical performance look like for you?
CP: I love intimate close up and parlour, those are my two loves, but I’ve really had a struggle to find my comfort in close up because I don’t subscribe to the quick snappy effects. I believe mindreading is a little more intimate than being able to just guess a number in a matter of seconds.
I present myself as a hypnotist or an intuitive reader, I’ve found that by claiming to be a reader it’s allowed me a smoother entry to people’s tables, personally I don’t like to start by explaining what I can and can’t do.
By saying I’m a reader the people who want to engage with me will and for those that aren’t interested, they can just continue eating their omelette.
I use palm reading too even in everyday life.
In previous jobs if somebody handed me something like a form to fill in, I’d say something like; ooh that’s interesting, your headline runs a little deeper in your palm than most people’s, I haven’t seen that before.
It’s a fantastic way to engage with people.
MB: Have you got any funny or strange gig stories you’d like to share?
CP: My first parlour show was about 4 years ago, I was nervous but after about 10 minutes those nerves turned to excitement.
There was a moment where I hypnotised someone to be stuck to their chair. An older guy who was present wasn’t having any of it he thought that hypno was BS.
He was claiming that the person I had hypnotised was just playing along and he proceeded to challenge me, he offered my participant $20 to get up out of his chair, my participant was struggling to get out of the chair and this older guy just kept egging him on, offering him more money and becoming increasingly frustrated. It ended with the older guy offering my participant $120 to get up out of his chair and walk to the bar.
My participant couldn’t get out of his chair and the older guy was humbled, but what was nice, is that after the performance the older guy came to me and said it’s not often he’s humbled by a younger person and he gave me the $120 as a tip.
MB: Describe your persona.
CP: The first word that comes to mind is poetic.
I hope that doesn’t come across as pretentious but if there is one thing I’m really confident about is that most performers tend to go toward the realms of sociology and psychology to find stock lines and Barnum statements for their cold reading techniques.
I personally go the other way; I look towards artists and poets because I learnt some time ago that scientists struggle to define emotions and feelings.
Whereas even though a poet or an artist aren’t always precise with what they mean, their message seems a lot clearer.
We can see how a scientist would struggle to explain to a layman what emotions and feelings are but when you hear a poet explain it. It’s like ‘yea, that is exactly what it feels like’.
My style is much more poetic, I try to invite poetic language and poetic technique into my performances, I get a lot of my stock lines from poetry books and from watching poets speak live, I watch and listen to what the audience are resonating with. I’ll write some of it down then script it.
When I perform I speak in a poetic way, so it comes across as more of an observation rather than a line in a poem.
I also think my performance is like an iron gauntlet in a velvet glove.
It shows people that I care about them but I still have that air of authority and power that needs to come from a mind reader.
I’m very mindful that if I want people to care I need to have a sense of knowing what I’m talking about. It could be described as assertive but not dominating.
MB: What qualities do you think makes a good mentalist?
CP: Charisma, because it transcends performance style, I think mentalists should be empowering too. We should always strive to empower people.
MB: If you could implant one thought into every beginner mentalists mind, what would it be?
CP: If I could implant a thought into every beginners mind it would be; create a world view because so many people go out there with this idea in mind that when they’re performing their only job is to be a mind reader, for me there needs to be a lens through which the mindreading occurs.
My view is poetry, the beauty of human imagination and creativity in action.
Because I think intuition is creativity at play.
Also, by crafting a world view, you have a reason why your character does certain things, it helps you create methods and principles.
You should be thinking why is this important to me?
We lost stuff here… Glitch in the matrix? I’ll let you decide!
MB: A lot of mentalists keep their private lives separate and guarded; how do you navigate that line between your public persona and your personal identity?
CP: The character and the person kind of become one, I’ve learned to become the character, in my mind I have this perfect idea of what a mentalist is.
I don’t subscribe to the idea of being an exaggerated version of yourself, I am slowly creating my vision of a mentalist for me to live in the real world.
Hopefully in 5-10 years I will be completely immersed in it so I can introduce my performances into everyday life. I do perform as much as I can in social situations. If you observe musicians during interviews, they say they live their lives through the lens of music and I am trying to do the same thing with my mentalism. My character and myself are slowly becoming the person.
MB: Who inspires you?
CP: Outside of mentalism, there’s a poet called Rupi Carr and I think she’s great at what she does, her books are fantastic and her audiences almost become hypnotised and I take a lot of inspiration from her.
She reminds us that art is in service to laymen, it’s not to prove how unique and special we are.
Within mentalism it would have to Phedon Bilek and Luke Jermay.
MB: If you could collaborate with anyone, living dead or even a fictional figure, who would it be?
CP: Because my performance style’s been so heavily influenced by him, I think it’d be fun to jam with Lewis Le Val, what I get from him is simple method and engaging presentation, no one exemplifies that better than Lewis.
From the dead I would love to have been able to jam with Bob Cassidy. He is a personal hero of mine.
MB: What drives you creatively? Any themes, philosophies or life experiences that have consistently inspired your work?
CP: One theme is the star sign guess; I obsess with it because I found that a lot of methods don’t emulate the practise of astrology.
One core principle of mine is; if I’m going to tackle a method or a presentation that I find interesting, I first have to research the practise of it.
With Arithmancer, I first researched numerology.
I’ve developed my own psychometry routines and I’ve taken inspiration from Hollywood. In movies when they portray psychometry, somebody will touch an object and have a flash of a memory.
In my psychometry routine I divine memories in the same way.
MB: If your creative process was a creature or a mythological beast,
what would it be?
CP: Magpie, because I’m always striving for perfection, a magpie is always attempting to find gold, they get close but not very often they find gold.
Or maybe a truffle pig, I’m just so obsessed with trying to find the most aesthetically pleasing effects and methods.
MB: Most people use magic apps the way they were intended to be used but you went outside the box with hydra and Cipher pro, what inspired you to do that and then create the digital mentalism series?
CP: With Hydra, that was a happy accident, a friend of mine bought Hydra, he was telling me how it can be used to predict stuff on Facebook and Instagram, but predictions aren’t really my style, so I wasn’t really all that into it.
Then my friend said I just bought this but I don’t think I’m going to use it.
So, we sat down together, deconstructed it and done away with artistic bias to see how it could be used differently.
I then obsessed over it and expanded on it until I was happy with it.
MB: What has the response to your creations been like? More specifically Arithmancer?
CP: So far, Feedback has been great. The Arithmancer has had good reviews, I was performing it to anyone that would let me at Blackpool this year.
Overall there’s been a good response to my work.
MB: What has been your most significant challenge in your career so far? And how did you overcome them?
CP: My biggest challenge was when I was asked to consult on someone else’s show, because a lot of my creativity stems from my worldview as to how I think mentalism should be performed and having to fit my ideas into another person’s lens of mind reading is quite challenging because even though they came to me and they may have a similar style to mine,
there’s also some very important differences in each style and then you have routines and methods that I’m not aware of so I had to quickly learn them and think of ways to use them.
I overcome the challenges just by being honest.
I think honesty is the main thing and doing your best to remove any artistic bias that any method or presentation has.
There was one routine that I was working on for someone’s show, it was a dual reality piece, that they didn’t like because the ending could have made things confusing. We had to fix that part because the book didn’t detail how to fix the ending, I had to remove not only my bias for this but my clients bias towards the effect and method.
I had to look at it as objective as possible and consciously remove any bias, so all we were left with was just pure mechanics but once we did we were able to find fluidity with how to solve the dual reality thing so the big challenge was just removing that bias.
Because I would say it’s easier to do that if you’re working on something for yourself but if you’re working with another person that’s much harder because they might agree to a certain extent but they might not agree with everything that I’m saying and we need to create something that they’re happy with but also they hired me to be honest and creative.
So you know that was the biggest challenge, just dealing with other people’s creativity because everything that I publish is just my personal stuff.
MB: What’s an ethical line in mentalism that you wouldn’t cross?
CP: Faith healing or Reiki. That’s my boundary because I think it’s easy to frame readings and psychic readings as a poetic or creative act.
I see readings as no different to how someone listens to a piece of music and the song is making you think that you need to change certain things about your life.
If you read a collection of poetry and maybe there’s a certain verse that makes you completely rethink your outlook on romantic relationships or friendships. I see mentalism as being able to do that same service. It’s not counselling but it’s artistic expansion so for me my line is Reiki and faith healing.
MB: Has becoming a mentalist changed the way you interact with people in your everyday life?
CP: Yes, it’s made me better at being able to remember names and faces of people a lot better so that I think is a godsend because there’s time when you see someone and you just forget about them and maybe three weeks go by and they see you again and they’ll say; oh you remembered my name. That’s really powerful.
I guess we could sum it up as empathy and then also being able to remember names and faces easily so that’s a real bonus.
MB: What is mentalism to you? What does it truly mean?
Has your definition changed over the years? If so, what triggered the shift?
CP: I would describe mentalism as poetry in its most magical form.
I say that, looking at it through my lens as a mind reader.
So, for me just being able to give a reading feels like free verse poetry.
I feel as though a mentalist is just a poet who’s creating free verse poetry in the moment for that person. My view of mentalism has changed over the years.
Before I thought it was just like the theatrical act of mind reading but then after a while I was realised this is creativity at play and that is poetry in its most magical form which has now become a magical conversation at this point.
MB: Do you believe in psychic ability?
CP: I believe in the ability of human creativity in conversation and I do believe that we pick up on signals that we’re not aware of that just come across as intuitive statements or psychic statements there is science to back that up too! I don’t really like the whole psychic healing stuff like Reiki.
But I do believe that someone can just use art and creativity to get to know someone in minutes whereas it could have taken them months otherwise.
I believe in the power of art as a psychic experience much the same way that an atheist would go to the Sistine Chapel and have a moment to experience God and I believe in coincidences too.
MB: If you had an evil genius twin, what would they be called?
CP: Connor and I think Connor would do Reiki healings and heal the blind.
MB: Tell us something most people don’t know about you. Have you really got a psychic octopus?
CP: Yes I have a psychic octopus, his name’s Oraculus.
But what most people don’t know about me is that I have a fortune telling cat and the octopus and the cat are always at odds with. I have to keep them apart and stop them from killing each other.
The octopus doesn’t like that the cat can just read its own $h*t.
MB: You and Oraculus are in an underwater escape room unfortunately there’s not enough room for the cat. To get out you must perform a routine that is original and deceptive that will even stun the coral. What principles of mentalism will you rely on to fool both the fish and the fortune tellers?
CP: I think we would use keen observation because octopi are very observant, they are intelligent creatures and behave very cleverly around scientists.
The octopi know how to get what they want and know how to escape from their aquariums whenever the scientists aren’t present.
I feel like they know how to do sneaky stuff and if nothing else Oraculus would probably just secretly palm things like credit cards and drivers licences.
MB: If mentalism was suddenly outlawed, how would you secretly recruit new mentalists into your underground mind reading resistance?
CP: Charles Xavier style, I would place my psychic octopus on top of my head and astral project cryptic messages into people’s minds.
Those who are able to interpret those messages would then undergo a trial by litterbox: I would scry into my cat’s litterbox to determine if candidates are capable of upholding the secrets of mentalism.
MB: What’s your long term vision for both for your career in mentalism and your own personal journey?
CP: My goal is to not allow like the shady aspects of life to get in the way of my worldview of art and beauty, I never want to lose that that touch of seeing the world with beauty, art, poetry and creativity.
With mentalism my long time goals are really just to keep performing for people that’s what I love doing and it’d be great if I could increase the scope of performing.
MB: Would you like to leave my readers with some cryptic advice?
CP: LIVE IN THE WEIRD!!!
Well there you have it… He’s barking mad isn’t he?
Only kidding, he’s clearly a very intelligent performer and an all round nice guy. Now I know it’s easy to say ‘Oh yea he’s great!’ But Christopher really is a superb fellow and he is very generously giving away any of his products to the first 5 people who contact him by email or on instagram.
You literally have nothing to lose by messaging him… Links below!
Well friends, we can take quite a lot away from this interview;
Christopher reminds us that the future of mentalism is as wild, weird and wide open as the mind itself.
If you didn’t enjoy this interview.
Go back and read it again… Slower, or upside down!
Until next time, keep your thoughts mysterious, your props invisible, and always question whether that octopus is eyeballing you.
Stay weird. Stay mental.
ЯYΛП MΣПƬIƧ
P.S: His email address is: christopherparrishmentalism@gmail.com