Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (11 page)

Here is a typical healing performed by Jesus, as reported in the Gospels:

And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace and come out of him. And when the unclean spirit had torn him, and cried with a loud voice, he came out of him. (Mark 1:23–6)

Where is the hypnotism in this? Clutching at straws, and in the spirit of rationalistic dismissal of the miracles, Wilson goes on to claim that Jesus never really turned water into wine, but hypnotized the guests at the wedding at Cana ( John 2: 2–11) to believe that they were drinking wine rather than water, that the transfiguration was a hallucination induced by hypnotic suggestion, as were the disciples' visions of the kingdom of God, and that post-resurrection sightings of Jesus were induced by suggestions planted by Jesus in his hypnotized subjects while he was still alive. This is all extremely flimsy. While I must confess to disbelief – or at any rate amazed incredulity – where Jesus' miracles are concerned, and therefore to a tendency to look for more plausible explanations, I can see no evidence at all that Jesus was a hypnotist.

There is a certain folk belief which crosses all geographical and temporal boundaries. It can be found even today, and not just in places such as the Philippines, but also, closer to home, in some of the Greek islands or Sicily; it is particularly prevalent, I have found,
in Turkey and Corsica. This is belief in the evil eye. It is said that someone with the evil eye can cause another person to fall ill (since contagion is thought to be transmitted by the eyes) or to become immobile. There are traces of this belief in English phrases such as ‘Looking daggers at someone' and ‘If looks could kill…' And in general, of course, we attribute a great deal of potency to the eyes and to looks: the eyes are the carriers of curses or charms, attraction or repulsion. At the height of the European witch-hunt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, supposed witches brought to trial were often required to keep their backs turned to the judges, lest they bewitch them with their gaze.

Literature from all over the world warns the man who would be chaste to avoid meeting a woman's eye. The ambiguity between attraction and repulsion, life (through sex) and death, is present in the Latin term used throughout the Middle Ages for the evil eye –
oculus fascinus
, the bewitching eye. And
fascinum
might mean ‘bewitchment', or in other contexts refer to the penis. Phallic gestures are still the most common means used to ward off the evil eye, but there are others. In many cultures it is or was believed that if you praise a child you then have to curse him, or find some other way – such as spitting in his face – of defending him against the evil eye, to which children are particularly vulnerable.

In the ancient Greek and Roman world, there are enough references to make it certain that the belief was pervasive. Even wolves and certain snakes were considered to have the evil eye. You could say that the mythical and monstrous gorgon Medusa is the evil eye writ large, with her ability to turn men to stone, even after Perseus chopped off her head. Pliny the Elder attributes the evil eye to certain Scythian women, who are distinguished by having double pupils (
Natural History
7.2.16–18). Fifty or so years later, Plutarch was composing his urbane
Table Talk
, in which he recounts the learned discussions held over various dinners at which he was present; he devotes a whole chapter to the question of the evil eye, which he attributes to certain emanations which are given off by the whole body, but by the eye in particular. Some are beneficent, but some are harmful, and these can injure those who are especially vulnerable, such as children.

There are numerous references in the Bible, in both testaments,
to magical practices (most of which are ‘abominations unto the Lord', as at Deuteronomy 18:9–15). The evil eye is mentioned specifically at Deuteronomy 28:54–8, Isaiah 13:18, Proverbs 23:6 and Mark 7:22. Proverbs 23:6, for instance, recommends that we refrain from the bread and the ‘dainty meats' of someone who has an evil eye – probably good advice! The frequency with which belief in the evil eye occurs in the Bible guaranteed lively debate throughout the Middle Ages. In his
On the Natures of Things
2.153 the British writer Alexander Neckam, who died in 1217, speculated that evil rays can emanate from a person's eyes and cause ‘fascination' (which is the usual medieval term). He claimed that the way to cure a child who had been subjected to the evil eye was to have its nurse lick its face.

With rather more psychological profundity, it was common to explain the phenomenon of fascination as due to one person's will dominating another. So one of the dominant figures in medieval learning, the thirteenth-century writer Albertus Magnus, cites eminent Arabic authorities in his attempt to justify his theory that fascination is a case of occult influence exerted by one man over another (
On Sleep and Waking
3.1.6). It is because man's mind is of a higher order than matter that it can act upon it; similarly, one person's mind may dominate that of another person. In another work, which was either written by Albertus Magnus or in imitation of him, the author proposes ‘that superior intelligences impress inferior ones just as one soul impresses another … and by such impression a certain enchanter by his mere gaze cast a camel into a pit.'

In later centuries it became more common to deny or explain away phenomena such as fascination, but it was perfectly acceptable earlier, and the theories could get quite complex. Nicolas Oresme, for instance, a French divine of the fourteenth century, proposed that the imagination of some people could be so intense that it could alter their bodies; this alteration then affected the surrounding air, and ultimately other bodies. Even such pseudo-scientific explanations are preferable to the retrograde step taken by many Christian writers of the period, who simply attributed all such phenomena to demons and either left the matter there, or at the most allowed the efficacy of Christian incantations.

There seems little reason not to think of the evil eye, or
fascination, as an early trace of hypnotism. It satisfies the criteria. Both an operator and a subject are involved, and there is inequality of will (as I called it) between them. There is (or is supposed to be) a deliberate attempt on the part of the fascinator to dominate the subject, and no doubt if one came from a culture in which belief in the evil eye was prevalent, there would be a strong element of suggestibility to enhance the effect. But there are two features of fascination which do not sit easily with our ideas about hypnotism. In the first place, it is the
evil
eye; it can be used only for malign purposes – including the satisfaction of lust, says Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). The idea that it might be used for good, for healing, does not seem to have occurred. In the second place, it is used only for limited purposes – basically, causing illness, bad luck, or immobility. There are no traces of the familiar phenomena of hypnosis, such as amnesia and anaesthesia.

These differences between medieval fascination and modern hypnosis can easily be explained. There is no trace of technique among the medieval fascinators. It appears to have been a gift with which you were born (or cursed); it appears to have happened rarely and at random, with no continuity of research, or passing on of technique from one practitioner to the next. But it is only when there is such continuity that knowledge of hypnosis can grow, as it did in the nineteenth century. The wide variety of uses to which hypnosis can be put were only gradually discovered. The familiar phenomena of amnesia, anaesthesia and so on depend on the operator planting suggestions in the mind of the subject, and the discovery of hypnotic suggestion also had to wait until the end of the eighteenth century. If we add to all this the climate of superstition of the Middle Ages, with witches and amulets, periapts, spells and occult forces, it is not surprising that fascination should be assumed to be used only for evil purposes. The Church was constantly having to battle against what it saw as satanic forces, which were preserved above all in the folk heritage. And so hypnosis became the evil eye, and the world had to wait several centuries for a more balanced view of the practice and its possibilities.

Although fascination was considered a dangerous and evil ability, and was never used for healing, there were other, non-hypnotic means of healing, such as incantation, and it is interesting to note that medieval theorists were already speculating along lines that seem to have been confirmed by recent research on the placebo effect and on the therapeutic properties of visualizations. So the French medical writer Oger Ferrier (1513 –88) claimed that incantations and so on work thanks to the confidence of the healer and the patient. His contemporary, Georg Pictorius von Villingen (
c
. 1500–69), in his
Physical Questions
, explained that incantations could sometimes more effectively cure diseases if they were accompanied by the use of the imagination of both the enchanter and the enchanted. A little later, with rationalism beginning to rear its head, one finds claims such as that made by Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), a French scientist who denied that incantations work in themselves, but accepted that they might inspire the patient with confidence. The great scientist and occultist Paracelsus (1579–1644) also stressed the power of the imagination to affect the body: ‘The spirit is the master, the imagination the instrument, the body the plastic material.'

This emphasis on imagination and confidence is striking. Physicians of the time believed that the imagination could cause healing or disease as follows: an image creates an emotion, the emotion affects the humoral balance of the body for better or worse. Given this notion, it is not surprising to find that they were able to recognize the existence of psychosomatic disease, to argue that placebos such as talismans were effective, and to use methods such as musical therapy, which works directly on the emotions, to heal some cases. The great medical theorist Galen of Pergamum, of the second century
CE
, whose ideas held sway for 1,000 years and more, even argued that it works both ways. Not only does an image cause an emotion, but an emotion can cause an image and so one can use
the analysis of dreamt images to diagnose the underlying emotion and get back to the basic humoral imbalance. It was only when Descartes forced a complete separation between mind and body that natural recognition of the psychosomatic origin of some illnesses began to wane, before being rediscovered and put on to a modern scientific footing in the twentieth century.

But this is a digression, since we have decided that incantations are not hypnotism. Slightly more suggestive is the talk by Peter of Abano (fl. 1300) of cures being effected simply by strength of will. This sounds like autosuggestion, and he also defines sorcery as ‘taking possession of a person's powers so that he loses self-control'. But, like all these medieval authors, he fails to illuminate us with talk about specific techniques and practices, so that we are left guessing. Part of the problem is that they are all Christian writers, and they did not want to draw attention to supposedly occult practices.

While we're in this period of history, I should mention that in
The Three Hostages
John Buchan attributes considerable knowledge of hypnotism to the famous thirteenth-century astrologer and physician Michael Scot. I have not been able to confirm this at all. I suspect, then, that Buchan simply chose the name of Scot at random for his own fictional purposes.

Anyway, given that there is evidence of the practice of hypnotism in the Middle Ages, in the evil eye, some more tantalizing texts slot into place. Here are the most important, in chronological order. The best one is also the earliest: a certain Theophilus, in his
Breviary of Diverse Arts
, quoted in the thirteenth-century encyclopedia
Lumen animae
(
The Light of the Soul
), is reported as remarking how difficult it is to wake someone up when they have been put to sleep by enchanters and thieves. He doesn't say that they were drugged; he clearly takes for granted that people could be and were put to sleep by unscrupulous people. This surely is certain evidence of the practice of hypnosis, although details of the theory (if there was one) and the practice are lost.

In the light of Theophilus' testimony, other glimpses start to sound like relics of hypnosis. Nicolas Oresme (whom we have already met) told in
Quodlibeta
2 and 44 how incantations can make men beat themselves, or unyoke their horses and put the yokes on
their own necks. In the light of modern stories about the absurd things hypnotized people can be persuaded to do, this looks significant. However, Oresme adds, in fairness, that he has never personally witnessed any magicians getting people to do such things.

Another fragmentary glimpse is provided by Giorgio Anselmi, a philosopher from Parma, who was alive in the middle of the fifteenth century. In his
Astronomia
he makes a careful distinction:

Haustus
is more powerful than fascination. This is the phenomenon whereby through incantations or spells or invocations a man is so thoroughly bound that nothing gets through to him, and it is as if he has lost the use of his senses, and is dull and mindless, and for whole days at a time he seems to be absent, as though he had been drained of all his physical and mental strength.

This is interesting. Anselmi associates
haustus
with fascination, except that fascination uses only the eyes, whereas
haustus
uses speech. Could a practitioner of
haustus
have used rhythmic speech, as many modern hypnotists do? Unfortunately, there is no further trace of
haustus
as a distinct practice, and we don't even know whether the spells were to be chanted by the operator while the subject was actually present. The word
haustus
gives us no further clue: it literally means ‘drawing' or ‘draining' (as in our word ‘exhaustion'), so what is important about the experience for Anselmi is that it leaves its victim in a zombie-like state, with his powers drawn out of him.