Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  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.

  Was Jesus a Hypnotist?

  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.

  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.

  The Evil Eye

  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.

  Glimpses of Hypnosis in the Middle Ages

  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 suc
h 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.