Hypnosis: Ancient Times to the Start of Mesmerism

The phenomenon we have come to know as hypnosis has been known of for millennia. The ancient Greeks were aware of the process and the Egyptians are said to even have had what were known as Sleep Temples where these alternative states were formally accessed. Trance states have been utilesed in many ways by many cultures, from the crude use of drugs and alcohol to the subtle uses of meditative practices by Buddhists, Hindus and Jains. One could make a case for some of the practices of Islam to be alternative methods of accessing trance states, from the rhythmic chanting and self flagellation of some Shiite sects to the more subtle and lot less painful practices of the Sufis.

Referred to as whirling dervishes at one time these performers use a form of circular dance wherein one hand reaches up to the heavens whilst another points down to the earth. In this process they reunite that sense of contact between higher states and the more mundane. The Sufis are able to dance in such a way for extended periods and thereby achieve contact with states beyond the norm. Mantra, a form of rhythmic chanting, has also been used extensively, perhaps particularly in the Hindu tradition where the adept can spend hours rhythmically repeating the chosen mantra, perhaps focussing on a value they hold dear such as love or peace, or perhaps the name of a god.

Focussing now on ancient Egypt, at the time of the Pharaoh Zoser, there lived a man of many talents – a vizier, an architect and a priest. This man was known as Imhotep and was largely responsible for the first Pyramids known to man as a place called Saqqara some miles south east of the modern day Cairo. Amongst his many contributions to Egyptian society was the foundation of the earliest sleep temples. These were places where a person, suffering a mental or physical ailment, might come and hope to be gifted a healing dream which would indicate exactly how the gods would help this person. In order to enter this particular type of dream filled sleep a priest would perform rituals over the supplicant and chant incantations until the subject went into the sleep like state. There is some controversy as to whether this could be considered an hypnotic induction or not but, given the context of the times, the description of this practice, taken from the Ebers papyrus, would strike one as very close to an hypnotic induction.