HYPNOTISM - Its History and Development To 1889

Contents: Historical RetrospectDefinition Of Hypnotism; Susceptibility To HypnotismMeans Of Methods Of HypnotizingStages Or Degrees Of HypnotismUnilateral HypnotismPhysical Effects Of HypnotismPsychical Effects Of HypnotismSuggestionHypnotism As A Remedial AgentHypnotism As A Means Of Education, Or As A Moral RemedyHypnotism And The LawMisuses And Dangers Of Hypnotism *** an excerpt from the beginning of: CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL RETROSPECT. THE wonderful psychical phenomena that are now-a-days embraced under the names of hypnotism and somnambulism, and which as animal magnetism or mesmerism, stirred the world in the latter part of the last century and far into the present were known and used from the earliest times in the service of mysticism, prognostication, and religion, by the priests of ancient Egypt as well as by the old Indian fakirs, the Greek oracles, the Roman sibyls and the mediaeval magicians, exorcists, conjurers, pneumatologists, etc. At certain festivals in ancient Egypt, women and children were wont to be inspired by the god Apis, and so entered into a prophetic trance. Traces are found also of spiritism: in Babylon there was a belief in rapping spirits, among the Israelites the Witch of Endor conjured the shadows of the dead just as does a spiritistic medium of the 19th century. In the temple of Ceres in Achaia, there was on the bottom of a well a mirror, in which the priests could produce the image of the sick for whom a cure was sought; this corresponds, in a measure, to the photographic pictures of spiritism. In the temple of Apollo, in Delphi, the priestess was seated on a tripod, placed over a chasm in the ground, from which vapors of sulphur arose. Prepared by fasting and mortification, she soon was in a kind of hypnotic trance, during which she transmitted her oracles from the gods, just like a somnambule. The Greek and Roman sibyls were clairvoyant only on certain occasions, when they had convulsions. The skill of the Indian fakir in spiritistic matters approaches the incredible, and deserves a special description that space will not allow here, particularly as it widely passes the limits of ordinary hypnotism. After the introduction of Christianity, the belief in the divine origin of these phenomena ceased. They were looked upon instead as the works of the devil, and those who possessed such power were regarded as obsessed, as sorceresses, as bewitched, etc. Those witches who were inhumanly persecuted during the middle ages and even up to recent times, were nothing but somnambules, who easily entered into the hypnotic state; and this was so common, that in the year 1600 the number of witches in France was reckoned to be nearly 300,000.