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 and Agnes had been childhood sweethearts in Denmark but grew apart, then met and fell in love again after both had emigrated to the United States.
[4]: 213 Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, used the tabloid to "influence opinion in favour of telepathy, which he believed took place between Julius and Agnes".
[4]: 213 As a performing duo, The Zancigs toured the world, visiting England, India, China, Japan, Australia, and South Africa.
Both individually and as a pair, Agnes and Julius also wrote and published several books on such occult methods of divination and fortune telling as cartomancy, palmistry, and scrying with a crystal ball.
David Bamberg performed the Zancigs' mind-reading act with Julius under the stage name "Syko the Psychic".
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.
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.
[7]The spiritualists Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead were duped into believing that the Zancigs had genuine psychic powers.
[9]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 1908 Julius Zancig met Edward Cyril De Hault Laston who became the stage performing mnemonist known as 'Memora'.
[11] Through Theo Bamberg (aka "Okito"), in 1916, Julius Zancig met the man who would become the extraordinary magician Paul Rosini (1902-1948).