I’ve read a number of histories of hypnotism. Not as many as @hypnoticharlequin, who specializes in deep dives into hypnohistory, but enough. And while it’s fun to read the Wikipedia entry on history of hypnosis and read about Avicenna and Paracelsus, I think that this isn’t a history of hypnotism. It’s a history of hypnotizers.

To nail down my terms, I’m talking about hypnotism specifically as the act of hypnotizing, involving two people, a hypnotist and a subject. This is also called hetero-hypnosis, but I don’t like this terminology as it confuses the state of hypnosis with the process.

If you put together a history of hypnotism itself, you would be writing about inductions and suggestions. You would discuss the mental state needed to completely focus on one thing, and you would ask questions about how the mind processes thoughts. You would investigate how to persuade people to follow a particular course of action, and ask how persuasion works in general. And because concentrated focus and persuasion are ancient human activities, you would start teaching people how to do this soon after civilization started.

This is, of course, exactly what happened. The study of concentrated focus is called meditation. The study of persuasion is called rhetoric. Both meditation and rhetoric have been practiced for thousands of years. My thesis is that hypnotism is a synthesis of meditation and rhetoric, and therefore a history of hypnotism is a history of meditation and of rhetoric.

Definition of Hypnotism

Let’s address the definition right out the gate. Why do I say that hypnotism is a synthesis of meditation and rhetoric?

Wikipedia defines meditation as a “practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing their mind on a particular object, thought or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state.” In conventional wisdom, meditation is centered on being aware of the present moment, or on compassion or mercy, but meditation can be used to focus the mind on any object, thought or activity.

Wikipedia defines rhetoric as “the art of using language to convince or persuade.” Rhetoric is most commonly associated with political discourse, but one branch of rhetoric is the act of picking out selective facts and weaving together a consistent story and worldview from those facts.

My interpretation of hypnotism in this context is that it is an act of meditation on the part of the subject, and an act of rhetoric on the part of the hypnotist. The hypnotist provides the rhetoric in the form of a consistent story backed up by facts (“convincers”) that the subject is becoming deeply hypnotized, and the subject provides focused concentration on the hypnotist’s suggestions, producing a meditative state that blurs the line between the suggestions of the hypnotist and the thoughts of the subject.

This is, of course, only one interpretation of hypnotism, and far from the only one. I believe this interpretation is useful, as it provides access to the concerns of rhetoric and meditation in a hypnotic context, and opens the door to useful analogies and discussion of issues that relate to those disciplines.

Sophists as Hypnotists

First, I’ll talk about rhetoric. Rhetoric was first invented by the (possibly apocryphal) Corax and Tisias but the first well known practitioners of rhetoric are the Sophists. Sophists were in some ways, the first hypnotists, and I’m going to take a sidebar to talk about them because the Sophists got unfairly trashed, and they are a fascinating bunch of people in their own right.

The Sophists were a group of teachers in ancient Greece. They were known for teaching the virtues of excellence “aretē” which was controversial for several reasons. One, the Sophists claimed that aretē was teachable, rather than an inherent quality that was bound to individuals at birth. Two, having established that they could transmit aretē to their students, they then asked for large sums of money to teach students. Three, the Sophists used rhetoric, and would teach it to their students.

At the time, it was assumed that each individual had a set level of aretē, provided by, and that was it. If you were a plumber, you’d stay a plumber. The Sophists not only disputed the aristocratic view of aretē, but they directly profited from their viewpoint. Either the Sophists were selling bullshit, in which case they were con artists, or they were teaching aretē to anyone who could afford it and thereby upsetting the natural order.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The Sophists were using rhetoric, the art of persuasion, and teaching it to their students.

To understand why the practice of teaching rhetoric was a hot-button issue, it helps to get some context. Greece in fifth and fourth centuries BC was a happening place. It was the most advanced economy in the world. However, Athenian democracy developed around fifth century BC. Democracy, the idea that each citizen had a vote, was new.

Because every citizen had a vote, it was no longer possible to target one man and flatter him. Instead, leaders had to speak to the populace at large, and convince them. They had to become politicians. The quality of eloquence and clear speaking was considered to be an inherent quality of aretē, owned by natural leaders. By codifying that quality as a teachable skill and teaching rhetoric, the Sophists were altering the course of lawsuits, influencing the way that the populace voted, and generally messing things up.

But it wasn’t about money and power. There’s a good argument to be made that by spreading rhetoric, the Sophists played a critical role in spreading democratic practices through peer polity interactions.

The Sophists were relativists. Protagoras said “Man is the measure of all things”, meaning that every man decides for himself what he believes. Following on from relativism, sophists believed that rhetoric was epistemic and rhetoricians had the potential to sculpt reality for their listeners, to create knowledge. To create the best reality, the Sophists genuinely believed in proof by argument and debate, and following dialectical arguments regardless of the existing convention. It’s interesting to note that although Sophia literally means wise, it also has a secondary meaning of “clever.” I suspect the ancient Greek translation of “sophist” was closer to “smartass.”

The Sophists famously “made the weaker argument stronger” according to Aristophanes. The Sophists argued for the perspective of the weak. It’s a stretch to say that the Sophists were tireless campaigners for the underdog, but they were willing to advocate for those positions regardless of the common wisdom. They were as “woke” as it was possible to be in ancient Greece. Alcidamas argued against slavery, saying “God has left all men free; nature has made no man a slave.” Protagoras proclaimed ignorance of the Gods. Gorgias argued against misogyny in An Encomium of Helen.

An Encomium of Helen is especially interesting, because of how much it packs in to a few pages. Gorgias’s description of rhetoric is immediately familiar to hypnotists.

Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity.

The discussion of hypnosis is often hamstrung by the conception of hypnosis as a party trick. Gorgias points out the power of words explicitly, reminding the audience of the effect of well chosen words.

Gorgias then posits Helen as being especially suggestible.

What cause then prevents the conclusion that Helen similarly, against her will, might have come under the influence of speech, just as if ravished by the force of the mighty? For it was possible to see how the force of persuasion prevails; persuasion has the form of necessity, but it does not have the same power. For speech constrained the soul, persuading it which it persuaded both to believe the things said and to approve the things done. The persuader, like a constrainer, does the wrong and the persuaded, like the constrained, in speech is wrongly charged.

Gorgias points out the loophole in free will, in that speech may “constrain the soul […] both to believe the things aid and to approve the things done.” This is relevant to hypnosis, because it’s been said that hypnosis can’t make you do things that you don’t want to do. This is missing the point, in that rhetoric (and by extension, hypnosis) is a tool designed to make you want to do and believe things in the first place. Gorgias also “coming under the influence” of the rhetorician, which is a classic depiction of hypnotists, and the issue of non-consensual influence.

Gorgias further describes the power of rhetoric as follows.

The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.

Gorgias is clearly describing speech (logos) as having real, physical consequences with the ability to heal or harm, rather than speech as an abstract intellectual exercise or a game. This paragraph is thousands of years old, and could be pasted as is into a hypnotherapy book.

In philosophical terms, Gorgias espouses a deflationary epistemic anti-realism. In plain English terms, Gorgias says we are all easily manipulable meat bags.

Gorgias is also interesting because of his style. He was a professional diplomat, sent to Athens to ask for protection against the aggression of the Syracusans, and he was known for being able to argument on any subject. Crucially, Gorgias was interested in persuasive argument, rather than logical argument. Per Wikipedia, many philosophers take issue with Gorgias because his rhetoric was “frequently elusive and confusing; he makes many of his most important points using elaborate, but highly ambiguous, metaphors, similes, and puns.”

But Gorgias’s use of confusion and elision is deliberate, as is his use of ambiguity and metaphor. Gorgias is tying up the critical faculty of his audience and eliciting emotional states directly. His language is perfectly oriented to his goals. Andrew Patrick in Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader describes the style as “musicality, a rhythmic performance” and again, music and rhythm appeal directly to the senses without going through the critical faculty.

Gorgias cannot be called a hypnotist because he never explicitly called on his audience to focus on his words and believe him uncritically. However, because Gorgias codified and taught methods of persuasion to his students, and justified his teachings with a theory of mind and an understanding of the power of suggestion, he has a connection to hypnosis.

Mediators as Subjects

Hypnosis has a complicated relationship with meditation.

The big difference between hypnosis and meditation is the goal. Meditation is specifically goal-free: you’re not even supposed to seek enlightenment. Hypnosis is goal oriented: you induce, you place suggestions, you finish up. Yapko says “Mindfulness applied in a clinical context for the purpose of changing someone is quite different than mindfulness for spiritual enlightenment.” Adam Eason describes hypnosis as a form of goal oriented focused attention meditation, and while that’s literally true, it has other implications that we’ll get to. Nevertheless, I am not aware of anything that is more like hypnosis than meditation, and I am keenly aware of falling into the “everything is hypnosis” trap. By keeping the definition of hypnosis as goal oriented focused attention meditation, there is at least a model which allows “like for like” comparisons of other forms of meditation to hypnosis.

In Mindfulness and Hypnosis, Yapko is careful to differentiate hypnosis and mindfulness, saying “they differ in philosophical foundations and stated intentions, [but] do share a common practical foundation, common methodology, and common therapeutic orientation” and also “clinical hypnosis and mindfulness share core values and practices.” Yapko then analyzes several guided mindfulness meditation techniques and points out that they are composed of many direct and indirect suggestions.



There’s been a large amount of attention paid to the neuroscience of meditation recently, and it really solidifies the early literature with clinical studies and hard science. Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation shows the ins and outs of attention regulation, and it’s clear that many of the same parts of the brain are being used in meditation as hypnosis. Hypnosis and Meditation: Towards an Integrative Science of Conscious Planes is an excellent book, for discussing the links between hypnosis and meditation, but do so from a cognitive science perspective.

Interestingly enough, in the course of research I found that meditation retreats can involve ‘Dark Night’ stages that can involve psychotic breakdowns, and Dr Daniel Ingram and Professor Willoughby Britton look like great resources to check out in the future.

However, this doesn’t get us closer to a history of the practice of meditation and how it relates to hypnosis. What would be interesting is a discussion of depth in meditation. Intimations that suggestibility may be increased in states of meditation. Discussions of catalepsy and a correlation to Esdaile state. This doesn’t show up so much in meditation. Monks will fall asleep, but monks are not known for moving around other monks in a state of tonic immobility. There are references all the way back to “temple sleep” and Imhotep, but this is not specifically related to meditation, but to healing. The earliest reference I can find is the Ebers Papyrus, referenced from Jon Mongiovi.

Things get more interesting when looking at the history of western hypnosis. The official record that Esdaile had seen mesmerism tried at the medical college, and used it for analgesia. Will Durant says “The Englishmen who introduced hypnotherapy to England- Braid, Esdaile and Elliotson- undoubtedly got their ideas, and some of their experience, from contact with India.” He does not cite his sources, but it seems likely that Esdaile’s contact with India prompted his curiosity. Durant does not mention which brand of hypnosis was at work here, but India has a strong tradition of hypnosis-like states. So, let’s pull on that thread.

Esdaile was clearly aware and fascinated by Fakirs and mesmerism. In a letter to James Braid, Esdaile says “It happened curiously enough, that the sleeping Fakir of Lahore had attracted my attention about the very time your interesting account of him appeared, and I had actually written to Sir Henry Lawrence [an influential British statesman and soldier in India], begging him to procure us information on the subject; but my departure from India, shortly after, prevented my prosecution of the subject.”

More importantly, Esdaile wrote a book, Mesmerism in India! This is a fascinating read right from the Editor’s preface, in which the editor hypnotizes a friend with insomnia who then refuses to come out of trance. Cultural factors convinced ors probably contributed to Esdaile’s success. Esdaile says “the people of this part of the world seem to be peculiarly sensitive to the mesmeric power” and says “the success I have met with is mainly to be attributed […] to my patients being the simple, unsophisticated children of nature.” Esdaile’s authority as a doctor and the population’s general acceptance of hypnosis may have done most of the work for him. Esdaile also describes a magician in Bengal and they compare methods, and Esdaile allows that “if these charmers ever do good by such means, it is by the Mesmeric influence, probably unknown to themselves.” The magician, presenting himself as a subject, said afterward “it is allowed that you put me to sleep.” So both recognize the other as using different means to the same ends.

On the part of Braid, it’s clear that although he was familiar with Hindu Yoga, he was extremely skeptical: “So much for the lively fancy and fervid faith of these religious enthusiasts, during their dreams, in the state of self-induced hypnotism, through fixing their thoughts or sight upon some part of their own bodies, or on some ideal [i.e., imaginary] or inanimate objects, and holding their breath, or suppressing their respiration.”

Braid’s experience is on the nose. Trying to find a direct line between hypnosis and meditation is a mess, because there are so many pathways into the mental state, and they are deeply entangled in the context of a particular religious or mystical framework. The powers of imagination and belief will do the rest. A person is hypnotized because they believe that they are hypnotized.



This has larger epistemic implications. Hypnosis itself may be inextricably bound to culture. You can’t do a hypnosis experiment without invoking the concept of “experiment” and the scientific tradition behind it. All the theories of hypnosis put together still operate within a “hypnotherapist” or “hypnotist” Western role, and Kihlstrom’s Third Way explicitly defines hypnosis “simultaneously as both a state of (sometimes) profound cognitive change, involving basic mechanisms of cognition and consciousness, and as a social interaction, in which hypnotist and subject come together for a specific purpose within a wider socio-cultural context.”



Summary

Hypnotism can be interpreted as a synthesis of rhetoric and meditation. On the part of rhetoric, it can be traced fairly directly back to Gorgias. On the part of meditation, although it’s possible to define hypnotism as a particular form of meditation, I was unable to find a good historical precedent for a goal-oriented meditation. My theory as to why meditation does not have a historical precedent is based around the formulation of meditation in a cultural context, and the idea of hypnosis as a problem-solving activity is in itself very specifically tied to Western culture.