Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (9 page)

However, to talk like this of these phenomena, both subjective and objective, begs an important question, since it makes it sound as though the hypnotic trance is a definite, distinct, recognizable state, an altered state of consciousness (ASC) with its own signs and symptoms. This is in fact a highly controversial idea. Although it was taken for granted in the last century (and still is unthinkingly assumed in some circles) that hypnosis is such an ASC, there has been intense debate about this and related questions in academic circles in the last fifty or sixty years. In fact, it is safe to say that among professional psychologists there is probably nothing that impinges on their field that arouses more contrasting and contradictory views. They disagree not just about what hypnotism is and what is involved, but even about whether there is such a thing (some prefer to surround the
word with scare quotes); they disagree about the best measures of susceptibility, and even whether such measures are worth anything; they disagree about induction techniques; they disagree about what and how much it can achieve; they disagree about whether other practices, such as acupuncture, are really hypnotism. It is so hard to prove the existence of hypnotic trance that, as a publicity stunt, the magician Kreskin (George Kresge) has offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone who can do so, and has already beaten off in court two hopeful claims. By the end of this book I won't have made you able to claim the reward, I'm afraid, but I hope to have convinced you that there is such a thing as the hypnotic state.

^*
Sources for quotations can be found on pages 426–31.

In the beginning (or pretty close to it, anyway) was … hypnosis, possibly. We read in Genesis 2:21: ‘And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept.' Of course, this isn't a reference to hypnosis, although it has been cited as such by one or two over-enthusiastic writers, because even if we were to take it as literal fact, there is no mention of
how
the Lord God put Adam to sleep. He might have used drugs growing in the Garden of Eden, for all we know. But had this been relevant to hypnosis, it would also have been the first mention of hypnotic surgery, since while asleep Adam undergoes the rather painful operation of having a woman created from his spare rib!

Joking aside, one invariably reads, within the first chapter or even the first paragraph of a book on hypnotism, something along the following lines: ‘Hypnotism is an ancient art, whose secrets were known to the Egyptians and Greeks, and have been transmitted down to our own times.' Of course, it is a natural tendency for enthusiasts to try to invest their favourite subject with an aura of respectable antiquity, but it is to be hoped that truth has a larger claim than such partisan concerns. Unfortunately, these statements are never supported by footnotes and references to relevant texts and authorities. We need to look at the matter afresh, which means re-examining the texts. There are few enough of these, and most are ambiguous. In short, the prehistory of hypnotism in the West, in the centuries preceding Mesmer, is poorly documented and hard to excavate.

There are certain Egyptian paintings which show a person apparently asleep with others standing over them whose hands give the impression of making hypnotic passes. These paintings used to excite a great deal of interest in historians of hypnosis. But the interpretation of ancient wall paintings is difficult, and they would form a weak foundation on which to base any historical theory. Texts are somewhat less fluid, and there are a number of Egyptian magical texts preserved on papyrus. The most likely source of information about hypnotic practices is the famous Demotic Magical Papyrus, dating from the third century
CE
, which was discovered at Thebes in Egypt early in the nineteenth century, torn in two parts. Both parts, in demotic script, were bought by Jean d'Anastasy, the Swedish consul of the time in Alexandria, for his fabulous private collection, and were subsequently sold, one part to Leiden, and the other to the British Museum in London. Column 16 of this papyrus contains the text of a divinatory rite, which is typical of a number of practices preserved on this important papyrus. It begins with instructions for the careful preparation of the lamp which is to be used in the ritual. Then it goes on:

You take a boy and seat him upon another new brick, his face being turned to the lamp, and you close his eyes and recite these things that are written above down into the boy's head seven times. You make him open his eyes. You say to him: ‘Do you see the light?' When he says to you, ‘I see the light in the flame of the lamp,' you cry at that moment, saying ‘Heoue' nine times. You ask him concerning everything that you wish.

What is going on here is typical of divinatory practices around the ancient Mediterranean world. Someone (here a ‘boy', which perhaps means a slave) in a trance state is asked questions; because he is in a trance state, he is assumed to have contact with the world of the gods (as they thought dreamers did, for instance), and so his answers
are taken to be significant. It has been said that this illustrates the technique of self-hypnosis using a light as a source of fixation, but it takes a certain amount of audacity to maintain such a view. At first the boy has his eyes closed, so he is clearly not hypnotizing himself by means of the lamp at this point. Subsequently, when he has his eyes open, he is only asked ‘Do you see the light?', and there is nothing in the text to indicate that he is using the lamp for self-hypnosis at this point either. It's possible, but far from certain. At the same time, it's clear that the boy's interrogator is only an interrogator, someone who is consulting the gods to see what message they have for him, and that there is no question of his being an external hypnotist.

Practices similar to the one implied in this ancient Egyptian text continued for many centuries. For instance, we can find it referred to by Apuleius of Madaurus in his defence speech
Pro Se De Magia
(sections 42ff.), which was written in the second century
CE
, although rather than using a lamp, his seer (who is again a boy) is lulled into a trance by means of spoken spells or certain unspecified scents. Or, much later, the Elizabethan magus John Dee used Edward Kelley as his means of contacting the astral and angelic realms. Kelley would ‘scry' (look into a mirror or a crystal ball or a pool of black ink) and tell Dee what he saw there. No one assumes either that Dee had hypnotized Kelley, or that Kelley had hypnotized himself; Kelley simply reported what he saw, and our Egyptian boy may just have used the flickering lamp to conjure up images suggestive of answers to the questions put to him. There may be no reason not to call this a trance state – but there is also no particular reason to call it a hypnotically induced trance state. The most interesting aspect of this Egyptian text for this book is that the belief that entranced subjects can contact the world of the gods, however that is envisaged, will recur in the nineteenth century and beyond; the persistence of the belief is remarkable.

The similarity between the ancient Mediterranean divinatory practice just described and the modern phenomenon of ‘channelling' (which is also a descendant of nineteenth-century spiritualist mediumship, and of possession in religions such as voodoo) is striking. A ‘channel' appears to go into a trance and then through him or her there speaks an alien entity, often supposed to be from another
planet or another plane of existence. Later in the book we will see that in Victorian times interest in mesmerism and passion for spiritism went hand in hand; but at this stage we can conclude that channelling on its own is not a form of hypnosis. A person may be hypnotized or may hypnotize herself to act as a channel; but it is not necessary to be hypnotized to act as a channel.

I cannot resist concluding this section by debunking the idea, commonly found among tourists and others, that other ancient Mediterranean seers, such as the Pythia at Delphi and the Sibyl at Cumae, relied on drugs to attain their divinatory trance state. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. One even hears it said that at Delphi narcotic fumes would arise from the depths of the earth through a crack in the floor of the shrine – but no such crack has ever been discovered. In fact, the Egyptian text translated above gives us a more accurate idea of how these priestesses worked: they relied on their own resources to go into a trance.

In 2 Kings 5 we hear about Naaman, a Syrian general who had contracted leprosy. One of his slaves, a captive Israelite girl, tells his wife, her mistress, about the miracle-worker (she would have called him a
nabi
) from her native land called Elisha. ‘He would certainly be able to cure your husband's leprosy,' she says. Naaman gets the Syrian king to send a letter to the Israelite king, along with a great deal of money and valuables. Elisha is happy to comply, and suggests that Naaman comes to Israel. But when Naaman does so, Elisha tells him – by messenger, not even in person – to wash seven times in the River Jordan. Naaman is not best pleased: what advantage does this river have over rivers back home? He's convinced that Elisha has some trick up his sleeve: ‘He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and move his hand up and down over the place, and recover the leper' (2 Kings 5:11). His servants persuade him to try the washing anyway – and it works.

But what was Naaman expecting? The Hebrew word translated as ‘move up and down' is also translated, in the King James version, as ‘strike'. Was Naaman then expecting physical contact? Most probably not: the root of the original Hebrew word is
nuf
, which commonly refers to some kind of rhythmical movement of the hands, such as waving. The Greek translators of the Old Testament, some centuries later, rendered the Hebrew word by the Greek verb
epitithenai
, the usual word for the laying-on of hands. But this was an interpretation, perhaps influenced by the kind of hands-on faith healing which was current in their day. Naaman, however, seems to have been expecting the
nabi
to make some healing passes over the affected part of his body. But although passes have been common in hypnosis and hypnotherapy, their presence does not constitute hypnosis. We would need, in addition, evidence of the induction of trance, and of course there is no such evidence.

Fundamentalist Christians have been known to cite Deuteronomy 18:10–11 as a biblical prohibition of the practice of hypnosis. The text reads: ‘There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.' The only two categories of prohibited practice which might be relevant are using enchantment and charms; but neither of them are hypnosis. In any case, this translation of the terms, from the King James version, is far from secure. Here is the New International version: ‘Let no one be found among you … who practises divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or a spiritist or who consults the dead.' Clearly no mention of hypnosis there. An eminent professor, an expert on Hebrew and a practising Christian, has concluded that reference to these verses by Christians wanting to condemn hypnosis is ‘exegetically indefensible'. What he means is this. The word translated ‘charm' in the King James version and ‘cast spells' in the New International version comes from the Hebrew root
br
, which means ‘to attach, join, or bind'. Since people who have spells cast on them are bound – spellbound – the word also means ‘to enchant, or cast spells'. It does not refer to hypnosis.

Curiously, Christian objectors to hypnosis appear to have missed the way this verse more plausibly supports their case. The word translated as ‘observer of times' is
me'onen
. Now, the Talmud (at Sanhedrin 65b) gives an alternative interpretation of this word: ‘The sages say it means one who holds the eyes', because they link
me'onen
to the Hebrew for eyes,
einayim
. If this interpretation is correct – and note that it is only one possible interpretation – and if it therefore refers to some hypnosis-like practice (perhaps the evil eye, which I discuss below), then the text could be understood as condemning such a practice. But the ‘ifs' here have piled up; there is really no plausible case for reading the verse as banning hypnosis. In any case, it could be read as banning evil uses of a number of practices, but not as banning therapeutic uses of any of them.

There are myths, folk tales and legends from all around the world about how certain demonic or supernatural figures entrance humans and put them to sleep for a number of years. But magic sleep or forgetfulness, however caused – by the gods, music, wand, or charms – is not a hypnotic trance. This is what makes it nonsense to say that Genesis 2.21, with which I started this chapter, is a reference to hypnosis.

Here endeth, inconclusively, the lesson from the Old Testament.

The other feature in the ancient world which chiefly excites the imagination of some writers on hypnotism is the practice of incubation, spending a night or two at a religious sanctuary. This took place in Egyptian temples as well, especially those of Isis and Serapis, but it is not certain that the practice originated in Egypt, as is often carelessly assumed; we have no evidence for incubation in Egyptian temples at a very early date, and it may have spread to Egypt from Greece. Certainly, our best evidence comes from Greek temples, and especially the temples of the healer-god Asclepius, though the same
or similar practices occurred also at shrines sacred to Trophonius and Amphiaraus.

Suppose you were suffering from an ailment – though not an incurable one: the temple priests were canny enough to recognize that too many failures would challenge the reliability of the god's healing. One of the methods to which you might resort was incubation in the temple of the healer-god. After purifying yourself and making an offering at the shrine's altar, you entered the sacred centre of the temple and lay down to sleep. During the night, you hoped to have a significant dream, which would indicate what you had to do to cure your ailment. If it didn't come in the first night, you might stay as long as you could afford to, until the appropriate dream came along. Once you had dreamt your cure, you made a thanksgiving offering at the temple (which might typically be a terracotta sculpture of the part of your body that had been affected; hundreds of these sculptures have been recovered), and went on your way. You were not required to pay a fee, though no doubt many grateful patients did, and the whole procedure was carried out in a highly matter-of-fact fashion.