Julius and Agnes Zancig

Julius and Agnes Zancig were stage magicians and authors on occultism who performed a spectacularly successful two-person mentalism act during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Julius Zancig (1857–1929) – born Julius Jörgensen in Copenhagen, Denmark – and his wife Agnes Claussen Jörgensen (c.1850s −1916) – also born in Copenhagen, and known as Agnes Zancig – were the originators of the routine.

Career

Several versions of The Zancigs' mind reading act appeared over the years:

Retirement and private work for clients

During the 1920s, the Zancigs retired from touring. Julius was in his mid 60s, and the couple settled down to a quiet life as professional astrologers, tea leaf readers, crystal ball seers, and palmists, working for private clients. For a while they resided in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Julius wrote his last book, on crystal gazing, in 1926. They were living in Ocean Park, California (now Santa Monica, California), when Julius died in 1929, at the age of 72.

Method

The Zancigs worked their stage act by means of an extremely elaborate and undetectable verbal code, which in later years became known as the Zancig Code. In 1921 a small (but by itself essentially useless) portion of the Zancigs' methodology was published by their friend and fellow mentalist-magician, Alexander the Crystal Seer.

The spiritualists Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead were duped into believing that the Zancigs had genuine psychic powers. Both Doyle and Stead wrote that the Zancigs performed telepathy. In 1924 Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used under the title of Our Secrets!! in a London newspaper.[1]

Writing in 1929, the year of Julius Zancig's death, the British magician Will Goldston also attempted to describe the code in some depth, but he did not reveal its entirety. In the 1940s Robert Nelson published a simple stage code which superficially resembled that of the Zancigs, but it did not permit the diversity of expression they had achieved.

To this day, the Zancig Code, also known as "Two Minds With But a Single Thought," is considered by many professional mentalists to be the most dauntingly complex two-person communication system of its type ever devised.

In popular culture

When Stan Laurel, of the comedy team Laurel and Hardy, was approached by the fans who were starting the Laurel and Hardy fan club, "Sons of the Desert," he was asked to supply a motto for the lodge's logo and suggested a parody of the Zancigs' famous tag-line, "Two Minds Without a Single Thought!"

Publications

Influence

In 1908 Julius Zancig met Edward Cyril De Hault Laston who became the stage performing mnemonist known as 'Memora'. It was Julius Zancig who promoted Laston's talens to W.T. Stead. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5140425

References

  1. ↑ John Booth. (1986). Psychic Paradoxes. Prometheus Books. p. 8. ISBN 978-0879753580
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