Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (10 page)

Though Epidaurus held the most famous temple of Asclepius in the Greek world, there were other eminent sites at Athens, Corinth and Troezen on mainland Greece; on the island of Cos; at Lebena in Crete; and at Pergamum in modern Turkey. Here are a couple of sample temple records of cures, found on inscriptions at the Epidaurian temple.

There came as a suppliant to the god a man one of whose eyes was so blind that it consisted of no more than the lids, which were entirely empty and contained nothing. Some people in the temple laughed at him for being so foolish as to think that he would see with an eye that was not there. Then he had a dream while he was asleep; after boiling some herbs, the god seemed to prise apart the lids and pour in the medicine. At daybreak the man left the temple seeing with both eyes.

A man had a stone in his penis. He dreamt that he was having sex with a handsome boy. Along with his seminal discharge he ejected the stone, which he picked up and carried out of the temple in his hands.

Not all the dreams healed you immediately; sometimes they suggested methods of treatment which you were to go away and carry out. A certain Marcus Julius Apellas, for instance, who was suffering from chronic indigestion, was given in a dream a long list of actions to perform – not just a special diet (cheese and bread, celery and lettuce), but also a regimen including running, sprinkling himself with sand and pouring wine over his body before entering the baths. In his dream he asked for a less complex way of curing himself, and had another dream in which he smeared his body with a paste of mustard and salt. After waking up he tried a mustard-and-salt poultice on his stomach, and the pain was cured.

The dreams were invariably direct and comprehensible by the dreamer, so that there was no need for interference by the temple priest or officials. Reporting his own experience, the second-century sophist Aelius Aristides says that even his doctor yielded his own professional opinion to the clarity of the dream (
Sacred Discourses
47.57). It is important to remember that dreams were assumed to be god-given. They are, after all, mysterious – hence the continuing fascination of dream-interpretation dictionaries and so on. The practice of interpreting dreams as god-given messages is taken for granted in ancient Western literature, from Homer (
Iliad
1.62–8) onwards.

Because dreaming was held to be as close as a mortal person got to direct contact with the gods, dreams were not seen (as nowadays we tend to see them) as stories, but as a series of symbolic still photographs. As a result the Greeks had become quite sophisticated at classifying dreams, and at giving the kind of thumbnail and superficial interpretations that modern dictionaries still give. In fact, this is another practice that goes back to ancient Egypt. A papyrus in the British Museum (BM Papyrus 10683), which dates from around 2000
BCE
suggests, among many other things, that it is good to dream of eating donkey-meat, because it means promotion, but bad to dream of copulating with a female jerboa, because it means that a judgement will be passed against you! Such stock interpretations were known in the Greek world, and in the second century
CE
Artemidorus of Ephesus travelled around the Mediterranean to compile his dream dictionary from more ancient sources.

Incubation is a fascinating subject: after all, here we have evidence of hundreds of miraculous cures. What is one to do? Dismiss them?
That would be foolhardy, and a clear sign of prejudice: in trying to understand ancient cultures, we do not so cavalierly dismiss other pieces of evidence which are more to our liking. Should we explain them as spontaneous remission? But surely there could not be so many. It is possible that there was embroidery of the facts, from either or both of the patients and the priesthood, for the greater honour of the god; but even allowing for a certain degree of embroidery, a solid residue of miracles remain. Two factors are relevant, I think. First, it is worth remembering that in all likelihood many patients will just have improved rather than being totally cured, and that in many cases the ailment with which they presented in the first place was not very severe. Second, faith healing and the cure of psychosomatic illness cannot be ruled out in a number of cases. The patient's faith would have been enhanced by the sight of the records of previous cures up on the walls in and around the temple – precisely the records that are still our main evidence for the cures, and a couple of which I quoted just now. In
Chapter 11
I will return to the topic of how optimism and expectations can cure even organic illnesses.

However, when the topic of hypnotism was in everyone's minds in the nineteenth century, and it was seen that it could have remarkable therapeutic value, people began to assume that it must have been involved in Asclepius' temples, and the idea has been perpetuated in many a tome on hypnosis. But it is clear from this brief survey of the subject that there is not the slightest possibility that hypnosis was involved. It could only have happened if there was interference from the temple officials, such that they could induce a trance in a patient and suggest that he was cured. But there is no evidence that the temple officials were involved except to administer the temple, and in purely managerial capacities. In Aristophanes'
Wealth
a witness sees the god healing a patient in the temple, and some writers have supposed that one of the priests disguised himself as the god and went around at night treating the entranced patients. But a comic play is hardly good evidence for this, and no scholar of ancient Greece believes that this is what happened. All the evidence shows that the god was seen in a dream world, not in this world; given the strictures of staging a play, Aristophanes projects the dreamt god into concrete reality.

Nor is there any evidence of hypnotic chanting, as has been suggested. In very rare cases one of the temple officials, the
zakoros
(who was sometimes a trained physician as well), might interpret an obscure dream – but if this is interference, it is interference after the event, and constitutes no kind of evidence for hypnosis. Nor is there any evidence of self-hypnosis. Incubation in some form survives under the auspices of the Church at shrines such as Lourdes and St Anne de Beaupré, but I have never seen any suggestion that hypnosis or self-hypnosis is going on there.

Aristotle's pupil Clearchus, writing perhaps at the end of the fourth century
BCE
, told a story in one of his works,
On Sleep
, of how a magician with a ‘psychopompic wand' drew the soul out of a sleeping boy, leaving his body inert and insensitive to pain. This is suggestive, but should be treated with caution. In the first place,
On Sleep
was a fictional dialogue; in the second place, the actual work does not survive, and this report exists only as a fragment (fr. 7) in Proclus, an author writing 750 years later; in the third place, it looks as though the boy was already asleep, rather than being put to sleep by hypnosis; in the fourth place, the boy seems to have remained asleep, rather than being in the receptive hypnotic state.

The Greek statesman Solon, whose constitutional reforms were so important that the Athenians dated the beginnings of their experiment in democracy from the time he was in power (594
BCE
), was also a rather good poet. Only fragments of his poems survive, but in a long one preserved by John of Stobi in the anthology he compiled in the fifth century
CE
, there are a number of lines on various professions, usually making the point that in all of them good is mixed with bad; farmers, for instance, have to work extremely hard to make a living. At one point Solon turns his attention to healers:

Others, who understand the work of Paion [the physician of the gods, later identified with the god Apollo], with all his drugs, are healers. But their work too is imperfect, because often a small ailment turns into a major illness which no gentle remedy can relieve, while someone else, who is riddled with terrible and serious diseases, is cured all at once by the touch of a hand.

Apart from the fact that there is no evidence of the induction of a trance, this should not be adduced as evidence of hypnotherapy in ancient Greece. The lines are usually taken out of context, but it is clear that the ‘touch of a hand' is almost an accidental remedy, not a special technique. Hypnotherapy would be signposted as a special technique.

In his tragic masterpiece
Bacchae
the fifth-century Athenian dramatist Euripides talks of how in a state of religious ecstasy the followers of Dionysus pierce their cheeks with pins without feeling pain or even bleeding, and in the climax to the play the Bacchants hallucinate that the king of Thebes, Pentheus, who is resisting the introduction of this barbaric religion into civilized Greece, is a lion cub, and they tear him apart. Although this play is often mentioned in books on the history of hypnosis, it would certainly be a dangerous precedent to think of religious ecstasy as a hypnotic state.

Much more promising are a couple of lines (313–14) from the Roman comic playwright Plautus'
Amphitryo
, which was written about 195
BCE
. It was based on a lost Greek original, but the extent of the borrowing is uncertain. The god Mercury, in confrontation with a slave called Sosia, says: ‘What if I were to touch you with gentle strokes, so that you fall asleep?' Despite appearances, however, this is not evidence of hypnotism. Mercury is a god, a supernatural agent; sleep, and occasionally death, were regarded as creeping slowly over one, from head to toe or the other way round. So this is only a way of describing the process of falling asleep naturally, ascribing it to the influence of a god.

Another careless reference to an ancient text by modern writers on hypnosis, anxious to find mention of their art in classical times, has been to what the first-century encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus says about Asclepiades of Bithynia, a medical writer alive a couple of hundred years before Celsus. It is said that Asclepiades
used to lull madmen to sleep by making hand passes over them. Even a glimpse at the original text would have shown that this is a load of rubbish. Celsus reports that Asclepiades used to practise ‘rubbing' or ‘massage' (
frictio
) for a number of ailments, but that such rubbing (as opposed to gentler anointing) is unsuitable for acute diseases, ‘except to induce sleep in madmen' (
On Medicine
2.14.1–4). The idea that rubbing can produce sleep (and not just in madmen) is also attributed to Asclepiades at 3.18.14. The reference is clearly to a hands-on technique of dispelling pain and fever, or of calming a patient down, and therefore bears no true relation to hypnotic or mesmeric passes. Pliny the Elder, who famously died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79
CE
, talks of curing certain diseases – burns and rheumy eyes – by the application of magnets (
Natural History
36.25.130), but magnetic healing has a long history in the West, and is not in itself evidence of mesmerism, let alone hypnosis.

There is no further evidence of any practices suggestive of hypnosis in either ancient Greece or Rome. In the area of magic, there is a great deal of continuity between Egypt, Greece and Rome, such that it makes sense to talk of the ancient Mediterranean world in general. So it is not surprising that, for all the centuries of its history, Rome should not throw up any new evidence. They simply continued the same practices. Of course, there was a lot more to ancient Mediterranean magic than the couple of practices I have mentioned. They used talismans, spells, incantations, charms and so on – but none of these could conceivably be construed as hypnosis, so I have ignored them. Spells and incantations might come close to hypnosis if they were cast by an operator in the presence of the subject, but in fact they were cast secretly, remotely, at a distance from the subject. For instance, if someone had been bitten by a snake, the local healer would chant in the field where the incident occurred, but the sick man remained home in bed. The only respect in which these practices draw at all close to hypnosis is that they may require passive suggestibility in the subject. However, it is interesting to note in passing that magic was far more pervasive in the ancient Mediterranean world than many scholars would have us believe. It is, of course, a dark subject, and so it is usually overlooked in cultural histories of the period, but comparison with the
cultures of any other country shows that it must be taken into afolk ccount.

This is the claim put forward by Ian Wilson in his book
Jesus: The Evidence
. Actually, he wasn't the first to make the claim, although he writes as if he were. It can be found, for instance, in William J. Bryan's
Religious Aspects of Hypnosis
, written some twenty years before Wilson's book. Bryan claims that what is called in the Bible ‘casting out devils' is hypnosis, and also that Jesus used hypnosis for all kinds of healings; but he undermines his case by failing to provide any evidence. He simply paraphrases a number of cases of healing from the New Testament, and calls them hypnotism. He doesn't argue for the thesis. All cases of faith healing are termed cases of hypnosis or self-hypnosis, let alone any cases where the laying-on of hands is involved. The casting out of spirits by hypnosis is more or less what happens at one point in Noël Coward's 1941 play
Blithe Spirit
, but I'm not sure anyone has tried it offstage.

Wilson's thesis is just as thin as Bryan's, although he at least makes an attempt to argue the point (while admitting that his argument is ‘circuitous'). First, he describes hypnotism in a deliberately broad manner, as a therapeutic method in which a belief system is imposed on the patient in order to effect a cure. This is a good description of faith healing, but that is not the same as hypnotism. As for ‘imposition', Wilson adduces the authority with which Jesus consistently spoke while healing. So is anyone who speaks with authority and wields charisma a hypnotist? Only if that is the case might one be able to describe Jesus as a hypnotist. Second, Wilson makes much of the fact that the few cases where Jesus is reported to have failed in a healing (as in Mark 6:1–6) took place in his home town. Wilson says: ‘The significance of this episode is that Jesus failed precisely where
as a hypnotist
we would most expect him to fail, among those who knew him best … Largely responsible for any
hypnotist's success are the awe and mystery with which he surrounds himself, and these essential factors would have been entirely lacking in Jesus' home town.' But this does not make Jesus a hypnotist: exactly the same (if true) holds for faith healers too.