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 Sean Michael Andrews

STREET HYPNOSIS

World’s Leading Street Hypnotist Shows Techniques

for the Office, Stage, and Street
For Stephanie, who makes everything possible.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 – Why should YOU do Street Hypnosis?
Chapter 2 – What is Hypnosis?
Chapter 3 – The Pre-brief – Laying the Groundwork
Chapter 4 – Where to Go to Do Street Hypnosis
Chapter 5 – Drawing the Crowd
Chapter 6 – Choosing Volunteers
Chapter 7 – Suggestibility Testing
Chapter 8 – The Dave Elman Induction
Chapter 9 – Indications of hypnosis
Chapter 10 – Deepening the Trance
Chapter 11 – Emerging
Chapter 12 – Shock Inductions
Chapter 13 – Confusion Inductions
Chapter 14 – Safety
Chapter 15 – Waking Hypnosis
Chapter 16 – YouTube
Chapter 17 – Party Hypnosis
Chapter 18 – Novelty Inductions and Re-inductions
Chapter 19 – Tales from the Street
Chapter 20 – Hypnosis Organizations and Conventions
Chapter 21 – Frequently Asked Questions
Chapter 22 – Parting Thoughts
Conclusion
Bibliography
Foreword
Congratulations on choosing this book. You are sure to find it to be
entertaining, informative, educational, and a fun read. This book will
take you from history to technical information on hypnosis. It will
give you an insight into hypnosis that you may never get anywhere
else. If you’re not a hypnotist, you may find this book will open a
whole new world of understanding hypnosis and may even inspire
you to investigate the field further. If you are a hypnotist, this is a
valuable learning experience for you too.

I’ve been chairman of the Mid-America Hypnosis Conference for over

20 years and have worked in the field of hypnosis over 49 years. I’ve
also been to scores of conferences and have seen many amazing
people. This author is an exceptionally skilled hypnotist. Sean
Michael Andrews is an excellent stage hypnotist, therapist, and
hypnosis trainer. He is one of the most skilled teachers I’ve met. You
will find this book an easy, comfortable read and you will learn so
much without even realizing that you are learning.

I was fortunate enough to meet Sean at the National Guild of

Hypnotists. I was quite impressed by the way he presented himself.
He has a way of speaking that makes you feel comfortable just
listening to him. Sean is one of the most ethical and entertaining
hypnotists in the field. The hypnosis community is very fortunate to
have him presenting hypnosis in such a professional manner. I also
was invited to critique a certified hypnosis course where Sean
Michael Andrews and a few other professionals were training new
hypnotists. He presented his part of the course in such a fun
practical way, I’m sure that his students were immediately able to
use the materials he presented. They learned how to keep their
subjects safe and do no harm making hypnosis an enjoyable
experience for everyone.
The Mid-America Hypnosis Conference (near Chicago, Illinois) was
the first hypnosis conference to feature street hypnosis. Sean also
did a fabulous stage show for the conference that was so well
received, we are constantly getting requests for him. When he
presents, the room is always full and filled with excitement.

Sean shares his knowledge and experiences working with people

throughout the world. In this book you’ll find references to some
fantastic YouTube videos actually showing how he does the
hypnosis. After enjoying this book, I am sure you will be interested
in his newsletter, which has tips, videos, and information on his
classes and where he’s appearing.

When Sean teaches Street Hypnosis Training, the students gain such
a fantastic feeling of confidence, as well they should, learning from
the best.

I feel honored knowing Sean Michael Andrews and having him in the
field. He works tirelessly to improve the skills of hypnotists
throughout the world. His professionalism shows through his
entertainment, training, and ethical way he conducts himself.

Carmelo M Blacconiere
Chairman of the Mid-America Hypnosis Conference
Acknowledgements
When you come right down to it, there is nothing really new in
hypnosis. Virtually none of the techniques described in this book are
my inventions or discoveries; in fact almost all of them have been
around for many years – and in some cases, for centuries. They are
constantly being rediscovered, revived, and repackaged. I’ve always
been a firm believer in giving credit where credit is due and have
made every effort to do so here, as you will see throughout the text.
I’m not going to try to list everyone here simply because I’m afraid
I’ll inadvertently leave someone out!

There are a few other folks whom I would like to mention by name,
however, who were tremendously helpful with the non-hypnosis
aspects of the book’s production. A big thank you goes out to
photographers Sally Kolar and Ralf Hebauf; models Emily E.
Hammond and Stella Sanches; and proofreader Sue Peterson. Your
work was invaluable for making the book even more useful to the
readers!

Throughout my hypnosis career I’ve always stressed the importance

of sharing and cooperation. I have had the honor to study with the
best in the business, and I want to let everyone in on all of the great
things I’ve learned. We’re just beginning to tap the huge potential of
hypnosis, and only by sharing our knowledge and working with each
other can we ever hope to improve our skills and bring hypnosis into
the mainstream where it belongs. There is plenty of business to go
around!
Introduction
Why do I do street hypnosis? I get this
question a lot...
And it is so hard to put into words, but I'll try. If you really think
about it, what is the coolest thing you've ever done?

Maybe you hit a game-winning home run in a baseball game, or

scored the perfect goal in football (soccer).

Maybe you were at a party and said something so clever that

everybody was falling on the floor laughing and people still talk
about it to this day.

Most of us have had these kinds of things happen to us. I know I

have, but I can honestly say that these events were nothing
compared to hypnotizing someone!

There is a thrill that you experience when you hypnotize your first
person and feel her slump into trance. Your first thought will be, "Is
she faking this?" You continue with the deepening and she slumps
even more and you get this feeling of "Oh my God! I really did it!"

Perhaps you run through the usual process and then take away her
name. She gets that look on her face – you'll learn to love this one –
where she looks super confused and then amused. Then she rolls
her eyes around, desperately looking for her name. Bystanders roar
with laughter. I can't express how cool it is to do this!

And it never stops. After all these years I am still in awe of the
power of the human mind and every time I do it I get the same
thrill.
So what are you going to do? Will you sit on the sidelines and wish
you could experience this or are you going to finally take the leap?

My first encounter with hypnosis

It was my sophomore year in high school and I was in Mrs. Currie’s
Psychology class. We were all very excited because she invited a
hypnotist to come in and give us a lecture and demonstration.
Anyone who wanted to be hypnotized had to get a parental consent
form signed, so of course I did! The hypnotist explained how
hypnosis worked, but he didn’t do a very good job of dispelling fear,
at least not in my opinion. When he called for volunteers, my hand
shot up. He brought four of us up.

He started out with a progressive muscle relaxation induction and

then moved on to an arm levitation: “I want to draw your attention
to your arms. Notice how they rest comfortably on your lap. Now in
a moment, one of them might start feeling a little different. Maybe
it’s your left hand, or maybe it’s your right hand, but notice how one
of them begins feeling a little lighter. That’s right. It is almost as if I
have tied a string around your wrist. And that string goes up to a
huge bouquet of helium balloons! And that string begins tugging on
your wrist. Notice how your arm is starting to feel lighter already as
the string PULLS and TUGS. And the arm begins lifting and rising
and lifting and rising. Higher and higher still! That’s right. Lifting and
rising and lifting and rising!”

My arm began lifting in what I now recognize as jerky, subconscious

micro-movements as the hypnotist continued to suggest that it was
getting lighter and lighter. I was fascinated with the way I was
responding, but I wondered if I was doing it or if my arm was truly
responding to the hypnotist’s suggestions. He suggested that in a
moment my hand would begin moving toward my nose and that
when it touched, I would go into a profound trance. This is when I
began to wonder. “What will he make me do? Is this really
happening? Will I lose control?!” Just before my hand touched my
nose, I pulled myself out of trance. The three other volunteers also
failed to achieve trance. Looking back on it, he must not have been
a very good hypnotist! After all, if you can’t hypnotize at least one
out of four high schoolers – the most hypnotizable group on the
planet – you can’t be very skilled!

Having failed miserably, he needed to recover. Luckily he had a plan

B. Dee, a particularly hot girl who had been hypnotized in an earlier
class, was invited up and re-hypnotized. He ran her through some
simple tests and then gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion: when he
scratched his chin, Dee would feel compelled to run up to the front
of the class and slap him on the back and say, “Great job, Mr.
Smith!” He further suggested that after she did this, she would have
no idea why she had done it. Sure enough, at the end of the lecture
he scratched his chin and Dee did as she was programmed. Thinking
back on it, perhaps the prospect of hypnotizing a hot girl was the
spark that started my career all those many years ago!
Chapter 1 – Why should YOU do
Street Hypnosis?
Street hypnosis will increase your skills
Many years ago, before I first became heavily involved in street
hypnosis, several of my colleagues convinced me to participate in a
World Hypnotism Day promotion, which I will talk more about later
in the book.

We gathered four hypnotists and invited the local newspaper to

come and interview us about hypnosis. We made sure we had a
stage hypnotist as well as hypnotherapists who specialized in
different issues so that the reporter would get a well-rounded view
of our profession. We had a very nice interview and the reporter
seemed very interested in what we did. Then he asked if one of us
would hypnotize him so that he could experience trance. I jumped
up and said, “Follow me to the therapy room!” The cameraman
followed us as I plopped the reporter in the chair and did a Dave
Elman induction and a deepener. I then jumped into convincers
(more about those later) because I wanted to make sure the
reporter knew he had been in trance. The cameraman snapped
photos as I sealed the reporter’s eyes shut and convinced him that
no matter how hard he tried, he could not bend his arm. I then
stuck his hand to the arm of the chair. He struggled, but could not
lift it.

Then I made a mistake. Through sloppy semantics and by mistaking

the level of trance the reporter was in, I had him open his eyes and
try again to lift his hand. He did lift his hand! Unfortunately, that
convinced him that he had not been in trance. As a result, he wrote
a nice article but not the attention-grabbing killer article I’d been
hoping for.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have used proper
semantics and would have said, “In a moment I am going to have
you open your eyes and when you do, you will go deeper into
trance… and your hand will stick even tighter to the arm of the
chair.” Instead, I left out the part about him going deeper into
hypnosis. This is something that I have learned through trial and
error by doing street hypnosis. Another thing I have learned through
street hypnosis is how to judge the depth of a candidate. If you
sense that the person is not deep enough, you can stop before you
give her a test that she will not pass. This is a skill that can only be
learned through practice and street hypnosis is the best way to get
this experience!

When I started out in hypnosis, one of the things that amazed me

the most was the way experienced hypnotists could generate a
never-ending stream of “hypno-speak.” With just a mouth full of air,
they could easily talk on and on and always had the perfect words. I
had always been rather shy and quiet and I wondered how I would
ever be able to talk on and on like those guys. Street hypnosis
taught me how, and now I can prattle on with the best of them!

Your confidence will increase with street

hypnosis
Confidence is one of the most important qualities that a hypnotist
can have. A hypnotist who lacks it will have a much more difficult
time hypnotizing subjects – they will sense this and it will inhibit
them from going into trance. Street hypnosis instills a sense of
confidence more than any other kind because it is the most difficult
type. If you think about it, the hypnotherapist has a much easier
time. His clients come to his office with the intent to be hypnotized.
How easy can it be when someone comes to see you and intends to
pay you money to hypnotize her? A stage hypnotist also has an
easier time than does the street hypnotist. When the stage hypnotist
calls for volunteers, dozens of people willingly rush the stage. Many
of them have been to shows before and some of them have been
hypnotized before. The stage hypnotist has several minutes at the
beginning of the show (although some take much longer) to lay the
groundwork for the trance. But consider the street hypnotist. A
young couple is strolling down the boardwalk or a city street, looking
in the shops, maybe enjoying some snacks, possibly on their way to
a restaurant or bar… and a stranger walks up to them and suggests
that they try hypnosis. Talk about an idea from left field! So when
the street hypnotist can effectively hypnotize people in that
environment he becomes super confident. He knows that he can
hypnotize anybody anywhere.

So that same street hypnotist, when he is offered an interview on

radio or a television show, readily accepts, and knows confidently
that he will do well. After all, he has proven himself in the harshest
of conditions. When I was invited to be on Canada Television’s CTV
Morning Live show, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. The thought that
I might embarrass myself by not being able to give a credible
hypnosis demonstration didn’t even cross my mind. I worried about
getting stuck in traffic and about having trouble finding the station,
but as far as the hypnosis was concerned, I felt bulletproof.

When after only six stage shows I was offered a chance to headline
at a major convention and after only six more I was offered a show
at a major casino in Las Vegas, was I scared? Well, yes, maybe a
little scared about being an entertainer, but not about the hypnosis!
There was never the slightest bit of doubt in my mind that I would
hypnotize almost everyone! Street hypnosis did that for me!

You can be the life of the party

Although meeting people at a party is something that is very easy
for some people, for most of us mere mortals it can be difficult. Not
so for the street hypnotist. And probably the people you meet at a
party will never have met a real live hypnotist before. So this is an
opportunity to be the life of the party! After all, they are all there to
have fun, and few things are as fun as hypnosis.
One of the most important things to remember is that it is best if
somebody other than yourself mentions the fact that you are a
hypnotist. If you meet someone and tell them that you are a
hypnotist, they may not believe you. Most people have never met a
hypnotist, so it is possible that your statement might be considered a
joke or simply untrue, particularly if the person you are talking to is
a stranger. Here is a much better way to do this: I get a friend to sit
or stand next to me. As we meet people, he will say, “Whatever you
do, don’t look into Sean’s eyes!” The other person will ask why and
my friend will tell them, “He’s a hypnotist!”

The person we have just met will almost always ask, “Is that true?”
and when I admit that it is, the conversation has begun. From this
point it is easy to continue the conversation and move toward the
induction.

This is where some knowledge of the history of hypnosis and

general knowledge about your craft will come in handy. Most people
know nothing about what we do, so you won’t need to know very
much to be able to speak like an authority. Gradually move from an
overview of hypnosis and dispelling of the myths to suggestibility
tests, then to an induction. We’ll be covering all of these subjects in
much more depth throughout the book.

You can promote your show or business

Stage hypnotists have an exciting job. They get to travel and meet
lots of new people and entertain them, but for those stage
hypnotists who work the comedy clubs and bars, there is one big
challenge. They need to get people to come to see the performance.
“Bums on seats” is the term my Australian friends use. Nothing is
more challenging than putting on a comedy hypnosis show in a bar
with 5 people in it, including you and the bartender. It can
sometimes be difficult even if the bar is crowded to get volunteers,
but when you can hear the crickets chirping… it’s rough!
Street hypnosis is an excellent way to generate interest in your show
and in you. I have friends who will do street hypnosis in the town
square before their show just so that people will know who they are.
Then they give out free tickets or ads for the show that will take
place that night.

When I do a show at a fair, street hypnosis works very well for me.
Fairs can be a little difficult. There is so much going on and the
venue tends to be very noisy. Between the animal noises and the
incessant announcements for lost kiddies, the noise level is high!
Also, until you have done a few shows and gained a reputation, it is
very difficult to get people in the seats. Until people have seen your
show and told their friends, you may find yourself playing to sparse
crowds. That is where street hypnosis comes in. The morning or
afternoon of the show, I set up my “Free Hypnosis” sign near the
entrance of the fair. As people enter the fair, they pass by me and I
ask them to do hypnosis. Of course my posters are plastered all over
the place, so some of them already know who I am before they
reach me. I keep a couple of chairs nearby just in case I want to do
hand drop inductions, but usually I’ll start with suggestibility tests.
After playing with each person, I tell them about the show. I make
sure they know what stage it’ll be on and what time to show up.
Another bonus with doing this before the show is that sometimes I
meet high responders, otherwise known as somnambulists.

Impromptu hypnosis is a great way to pick up a few fans even

AFTER your hypnosis show, when it is almost guaranteed that some
audience members will approach you and say something like, “If we
had known how much fun people were going to have up on the
stage, we certainly would have volunteered!” This is an excellent
opportunity to do some inductions. They are still buzzing from your
performance and your prestige factor is extremely high. In this
rarified atmosphere it’s difficult for you to fail!

I teach classes on these techniques

New York, Toronto, London, Sydney… All these places are great for
street hypnosis and I have taught my class in all of them. Some
people are surprised when they find out that you can learn street
hypnosis in just two days, but it’s true. I have taught classes as
small as one person and as large as sixty and when we finish, they
know everything they need to know to do street hypnosis. And
they’d better, because at the end of the class we take to the streets
and practice in the wild!

My class is very intensive and always comes with a money back

guarantee that if the student is not completely satisfied with the
class by lunchtime on the first day, I will pay him back his tuition in
cash. So far, I have never been asked for that refund and I think the
reason is that I take this very seriously. Students often say, “You
really look like you’re enjoying yourself in class!” And they are right!
I have had many jobs in my lifetime, most of them very cool, but
none of them comes close to hypnosis. There is a thrill that happens
when you hypnotize another person which is hard to describe. Every
student gets to experience that thrill very early in the class – in fact,
my street hypnosis classes are set up so that before lunchtime on
the first day, you will have actually hypnotized someone.

My students range from beginners to experts. Of course I train a lot

of stage hypnotists and hypnotherapists, but also a lot of physicians
and nurses because of the medical and pain management concepts I
teach. But many of my students have absolutely no background in
hypnosis or medicine, and they still hypnotize their first person
before lunchtime!

I say “street,” but this is really impromptu

hypnosis
My friend “Hypno-Hammer” is an animal. He admits it. The guy
cannot keep himself from hypnotizing people! Like me, Hypno-
Hammer has been truly bitten by the bug and gets such a charge
out of doing impromptu hypnosis that he wants to do it everywhere.
Luckily for him, his business requires him to travel all over the world
and meet lots of people… whom he hypnotizes. It doesn’t matter if
he’s on a plane or in a hotel lobby or restaurant – Hypno-Hammer is
up to the challenge. And I agree with him. There is almost nowhere
that you can’t do hypnosis. Anywhere you can interact with people,
you can do hypnosis, whether it’s standing in line to get into a
movie, having lunch with some friends, or wandering around on the
boardwalk at the beach. It just occurred to me that maybe a funeral
wouldn’t be a good place… but during the wake afterwards, I might
consider it! Obviously if the deceased passed in a tragic manner,
doing hypnosis would be totally inappropriate, but what if the
deceased was a well-loved relative who lived a full life and died in
his nineties? Wouldn’t it be interesting to hypnotize people and have
them recall their favorite happy memory of the departed? Place
heavy emphasis on the word HAPPY. I believe this could be a very
interesting exercise. Let me know if you decide to try this and tell
me how it worked out!
Chapter 2 – What is Hypnosis?
This is an important chapter for you. Why? Because if you want to
hypnotize people, you need to show them that you know what
you’re doing. When you look like the expert, people will go into
trance so much easier!

A brief history of hypnosis

Imagine the year is 1000 BC. You are a farmer in ancient Egypt and
you are suffering from depression, or maybe you have unexplained
pain in your leg. It’s not getting better, and it’s beginning to affect
your ability to do your job. The elders recommend that you go to the
sleep temple for treatment. The sleep temple is a pretty impressive
place for a fellow like you, and a far cry from your little mud hut.
The place is made of carved stone and is decorated with beautiful
artwork. Exotic incense fills the air and fountains bubble. People
there are dressed beautifully and they wear expensive adornments.
In short, you are impressed. They lay you out on a stone table and
begin chanting prayers. You know that you are going to be healed
because these priests are on a first name basis with the gods. As
they continue to pray and make passes over your body with magical
implements, you go into a trance. They tell you that you are getting
better. A modern day translation is that you have been hypnotized,
made suggestible, and you have been given the suggestion that you
will heal. And guess what happens to you? You get better!

Western physicians would call this the placebo effect. Your belief
that the cure will work is why you get better. Let’s not forget that
Western doctors used to prescribe placebos well into the 20th
century, and why did they do it? Because it works!
Now let’s look at another aspect of this treatment. What if the
suggestions from the priests actually revved up your body’s natural
healing power and that is why the treatment worked? This probably
isn’t the place for that discussion, but it’s something to think about.

Franz Anton Mesmer and “magnetism”

As a young medical student in Vienna, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-
1815) was fascinated by street magicians. In the mid-1700’s,
magnets were all the rage. They seemed to have magical powers.
How was it that they were drawn to one another, and yet if you
turned them around they now repelled one another? Their strange
power could be felt through other objects and they would stick to
metal even if you turned them upside down. They actually seemed
to defy gravity!

As a young medical student, Mesmer knew that there must be some

way to use this seemingly magical power to heal people. Where did
magnetism come from and what would be its effect on human
beings? In his doctoral thesis, Mesmer postulated that since the
moon has an invisible pulling effect on the earth and the tides, it
also has a magnetic effect on human beings. Every one of us,
according to Mesmer, has a sort of magnetic charge inside which he
referred to as “animal magnetism.” We become ill, he wrote, when
our internal magnetism becomes disrupted. In order to heal a sick
person, the magnetism needs to be rebalanced.

Mesmer came up with many ways to balance people’s magnetism. In

the same way that metal filings will spread out or come into line
when you pass a magnet over them, Mesmer would balance a
patient’s magnetic field by passing magnets over the body. Later he
progressed to passing metal rods over the body and finally he got to
the point where he would simply pass his hands over the person.
Mesmer would also “magnetize” water, and when a patient drank it,
he would get better.
Marrying a rich widow enabled Mesmer to pursue his research and
finally set up a clinic in Paris. Paris was a happening place even back
then, where new ideas and therapies flourished. His new magnetic
therapy became extremely popular and thousands flocked to be
treated by him. Mesmer was up to the challenge and he found ways
to force-multiply his abilities, such as large tubs of water which
contained metal filings, with iron rods fixed to the outside of the
tubs. Patients could simply sit around one of these tubs and hold
onto a rod, and the magnetism would go straight into them, put
them into a trance, and heal them.

If all this sounds silly to you, google “magnet” and “arthritis” or any
other disease and see how many offerings there are for magnetic
bracelets, rings, mattress pads, etc. We haven’t come very far in
over three hundred years!

With popularity came jealousy from other doctors. After all, they
were using tried and true scientific medical procedures, like bleeding
and leeching people, and this young upstart was taking away their
patients with this unproven procedure! King Louis XVI was
persuaded to open an investigation of magnetism and he set up a
commission of some of the greatest scientific minds of that time.
Two notable scientists were the American Ambassador to France, a
gentleman you may have heard of, by the name of Benjamin
Franklin, and the inventor of the world’s most effective haircut
machine, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. One of their experiments that
was especially damning for Mesmer was the magnetic tree switch.
Mesmer would often “magnetize” objects, such as a tree, and then
he would instruct the patient to sit under the magnetized tree. The
patient would go into a trance, and when he awakened he would be
healed. So the commission devised an experiment where they had a
patient sit under a placebo tree – that is, the patient was told the
tree was magnetized when in fact it was not. Sure enough, the
patient still went into a trance even though the tree had not been
magnetized. Experiments such as this proved that Mesmer’s
treatments were nothing more than suggestion, in other words,
placebo.

Is reiki the same as mesmerism?

Reiki is a Japanese healing art that dates back to 1922. Mikao Usui
(1865-1926), the founder of reiki, was a scholar who dedicated his
life to finding ways to heal people both physically and mentally.

Usui was walking down a mountain on an autumn evening in 1901.

He must not have been paying attention, or possibly he was deep in
thought, but he tripped over a rock and badly hurt his foot. He sat
and meditated as he rubbed his toe and by some miracle, the toe
was healed. This scholar, who had traveled the world looking for
ways to heal illness, had hit upon a seemingly magical method to
take away pain, stop bleeding, cure mental illness, and treat a host
of other ailments.

Excited, he went into the first village he found and began showing
people how he could heal them. He would lay a sick person down
and slowly make passes with his hands from the top of the patient’s
head to the bottom of his feet. He would make these passes over
and over again for hours if necessary, and the patient would get
well.

Does this sound familiar? It should. There are striking similarities

between reiki and mesmerism, and if Usui was truly a healing
scholar, it is difficult to believe that he was not knowledgeable of
mesmerism. Reiki teaches that there is a universal energy – think
Mesmer’s magnetism – that permeates everything in the universe.
The reiki practitioner passes his hands from the top of the patient’s
head to their feet over and over – of course this is similar to
mesmeric passes. And during a reiki treatment, the patient often
does go into a trance. Just as in mesmerism, the patient has the
belief that he will get better – and he does. My take on this is that
the same placebo effect that we see in mesmerism is what is at
work in reiki.
Who did the first instant induction?

Abbe de Faria (Custódio de Faria, 1756-1819), a Catholic monk of

Portuguese descent, is credited as being the father of instant
hypnosis. He was somewhat of a party animal and was known for his
skill of inducing hypnosis very rapidly. A large statue of Abbe Faria
stands in the public square in his birthplace of Goa, India. The statue
depicts the abbe standing over a young woman who is swooning
from his hypnotic power. Those hypnotic skills were documented by
some of the partygoers whom he entertained back in 1813.
Apparently the abbe would have a partygoer, preferably an attractive
woman, seated in a chair in front of him. He would tell her to close
her eyes and to think about sleep. He would watch for her to relax,
and when she looked relaxed enough she would shout the word
“SLEEP!” According to the reports from the party attendees, the
subject would jolt, sometimes scream, and then slump back into the
chair, perspiring in a deep, hypnotic trance. If trance did not occur,
the abbe would run through this process two more times. If the
subject did not go into trance after the third try, the abbe would
pronounce her unhypnotizable and move on to the next volunteer.
But even though Abbe Faria was working mostly in social settings,
he did notice some principles that contributed to the understanding
of what goes on during hypnosis. The abbe, like most others during
the late 18th century, was initially a student of magnetism very much
in the style of Mesmer. However, he came to realize that the concept
of the magnetic fluid was invalid: objects such as “magnetized” trees
and water had an effect on subjects only because the subjects
believed them to have been magnetized. In other words, the abbe
recognized the power of suggestion. He also discovered throughout
his many inductions that the success a hypnotist could have with a
subject depended heavily upon the trust the subject had in the
hypnotist. [1] As we’ll see, these are two points which are still very
important today.

Here’s an interesting fact about Abbe Faria: He was the son of a

Catholic priest and a Catholic nun – and the church had no problem
with it. Here’s the story. José Custódio de Faria (later Abbe Faria)
was the son of Caetano Vitorino de Faria and Rosa Maria de Sousa.
His father Caetano Vitorino was studying for the priesthood when he
met Rosa and decided to get married. Young Custodio was born in
1746. Unfortunately, the marriage did not last and Custodio’s parents
petitioned the church for an annulment, which was granted. The
father then re-entered study for the priesthood and the mother
entered a convent and spent the rest of her days as a Catholic nun.
[2]

As a side note, my stage partner Kenda Summers and I were asked

to do a hypnosis show in 2013 for the Mid-America Hypnosis
Conference in Chicago. We began the show with a demonstration of
instant hypnosis a la Abbe Faria. As Kenda described how the monk
would entertain at parties, I circulated among the crowd and
dropped people into instant hypnosis. A cameraman followed me as
I went along and projected my inductions up on two large movie
screens in the front of the stage. He got some really great shots
including one of a woman who went into trance even before I
triggered the induction! As I looked into her eyes you could see
them glaze over. The arm pull was simply a formality! More about
this later.

Why was James Esdaile important?

James Esdaile (1808-1859) was a British surgeon stationed in
Calcutta, India. He was assigned to the prison hospital in the 1840’s
and worked there for several years. At that time chemical anesthesia
did not exist. If a patient was lucky, he might be offered a bit of
whiskey to take the edge off the pain of an operation, but usually his
arms and legs would be held down by four strong attendants while
the surgeon carved him up. Imagine what that must have been like
– and in fact during Esdaile's time, people would only agree to an
operation if they knew they would die without it. And given the state
of medicine at that time, there was a good chance they would die
even with the operation.

Esdaile had studied the works of Mesmer, so he knew about the

amazing cures possible by using mesmerism, and that mesmerized
persons did not feel pain. So Esdaile was determined to use
mesmerism to help his patients withstand their operations better. In
his book Mesmerism in India and Its Practical Application in Surgery
and Medicine , he describes how he used his hands to make passes
from the top of a patient’s head all the way down to the pit of his
stomach. This was hard work, given the excessive heat in Calcutta
and the fact that the passes might need to be performed for hours
at a time, sometimes days, until the patient would go into a trance.
But when trance was finally achieved and the surgery could go
ahead, the results were amazing. Esdaile performed over 300 major
operations using mesmerism. The patients would awaken from
trance and ask the doctor when the operation was going to start. So
they were surprised to find that the operation was over and the
doctor had already stitched them up. The survival rate for Esdaile’s
patients was also incredible, perhaps because they had no shock
from the pain of the operation. It is also possible that mesmerism
helped them ward off infections.

After 1848, chemical anesthesia made its way to India, and Esdaile
had the opportunity to compare the results of surgery under
mesmeric and chemical anesthesia. He observed that generally
outcomes were better with mesmeric anesthesia, especially in more
extensive operations, since one effect of mesmeric anesthesia was to
lessen bleeding. Esdaile also contrasted the benign after-effects of
mesmeric anesthesia with the dangers of chemical anesthesia. [3]

Later research, however, turned up a more complete picture of

Esdaile’s work. Apparently, even though Esdaile was extremely
successful in achieving anesthesia, there was no follow-up to see if
the patients survived in the medium term. As soon as the patient
was sufficiently recovered to leave the hospital, Esdaile’s team
stopped monitoring. [4]

Esdaile returned to England, determined to introduce the medical

community to this technique. The very deep state of trance which
the mesmeric passes induced is now known as the coma state or the
Esdaile state. The latter is generally the preferred term, to avoid
confusion with medical coma. Unfortunately, however, the English
medical community was not receptive to mesmerism. So when
Esdaile attempted to demonstrate this hypnotic anesthesia at
medical schools, he ran into a problem: Europeans did not seem to
be as susceptible to mesmerism as were the Indians he had worked
with in Calcutta. Sadly, as a result, Esdaile and his ideas were
discredited.

The Indian Subcontinent and the Bengal region in particular had

superstitions and traditions that made it a perfect place for Esdaile
to practice mesmerism. For example, venomous snakes infesting a
village were not to be killed. Instead, a charmer would be called in
to coax the snake out to be captured. Such charmers wandered the
roads in India and were feared and respected for their powers to
make people do their will. The story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin was
based on an old Indian folk tale. Remember how he charmed the
children and made them follow him out of town? In Mesmerism in
India and Its Practical Application in Surgery and Medicine , Esdaile
wrote about a case where a little boy had disappeared: he had met a
charmer who placed a spell on the boy and lured him away.
Eventually the boy was spotted and the villagers arrested the
charmer and brought him to trial.

James Esdaile was actually called to testify for the prosecution so

that he could explain how the charmer could have given the boy a
suggestion in a trance state and compelled him to follow him. As a
result of Esdaile’s testimony, the charmer was convicted and thrown
in jail. [5]

The point of this is that charmers and magicians were respected, or

at least feared, in India. Going into an altered state was a very easy
concept for the Indians to accept. Because they were superstitious
and believed in charmers, the inhabitants of the subcontinent tended
to be excellent subjects. Not so the northern Europeans.

In the same vein, it's been said that in the United States during the
early 1900s, it was a lot easier to hypnotize people than it is now. It
has also been said that city dwellers are more difficult to hypnotize
than their country brethren. Although it is true that people in rural
areas tend to be more easily hypnotized than urban dwellers, it's still
pretty easy to hypnotize most people.

From magnetism to hypnotism

Many histories of hypnosis give the impression that after Mesmer’s
fall from grace there was no further work in magnetism until it was
supplanted by hypnosis in the mid-nineteenth century. This,
however, is most definitely not true; many so-called “magnetic
demonstrators” continued to advance the art in both Europe and
America. The shift came in the second half of the 19th century with
the attempt to explain the phenomena observed during magnetism
that we nowadays also observe in hypnosis in a more scientific way,
without invoking the theory of magnetism. The pioneer in this regard
was James Braid.

James Braid
James Braid (1795-1860) was responsible for coining the term
“hypnosis.” Like Esdaile, Braid was a surgeon. However, Braid did not
use hypnosis chiefly for anesthesia, but to treat various medical
issues not requiring surgery, such as paralysis brought on by stroke,
and “nervous headache,” probably referring to migraines. Another
important contribution of Braid was the debunking of the idea of any
sort of “magnetic fluid” being responsible for the effectiveness of
hypnosis. He stated that “any one can hypnotize himself by
attending strictly to the simple rules that I lay down.” [6] Braid was
also one of the first to realize the importance of influencing the
subject’s mind by suggestions spoken to her while in hypnosis.

Milton Erickson
Milton Erickson (1901-1980) was a psychiatrist who was largely
responsible for getting the medical community to accept hypnosis. It
is often said that Erickson’s extraordinary ability to assess people
merely by observing their behavior probably began during his
recovery from polio in his late teens. His hearing and eyesight were
unaffected, but he was otherwise almost completely paralyzed.
While lying virtually motionless in bed for months, he observed
everyone and everything around himself in great detail. He also
happened upon something very much like self-hypnosis when, tied in
a rocking chair, an intense desire to move closer to a window
apparently made the chair start rocking slightly. He later credited
this type of auto-suggestion as the greatest contribution to his
recovery. [7]

Erickson’s approach to hypnosis was often conversational and

involved heavy use of story-telling and metaphor. Although my style
of hypnosis is much more in the style of Dave Elman, whom we’ll
meet next, I still use quite a few Ericksonian techniques because
they are extremely effective. Probably the one you hear the most
about is what’s called “utilization.” It means simply that the hypnotist
uses anything that the client or the environment presents as part of
the therapy. For example, say you’re working with a subject in a
setting where you know that a cell phone is likely to ring. During
your induction, you can add in a statement such as “any sounds you
hear, such as the ringing of a cell phone, do not bother or disturb
you – as a matter of fact, they just help you go deeper into
hypnosis.” We’ll talk about other utilization-style techniques
throughout the book.

Dave Elman
Dave Elman (1900-1967) was a pioneer in hypnosis and considered
by most to be one of the two most influential hypnotists of the
twentieth century (Erickson being the other). It has been my good
fortune to meet and become close friends with Dave Elman’s
youngest son Colonel H. Larry Elman, and from him I have learned a
great many things about this hypnosis icon that I will share with you
here.

Dave Elman was born on May 6, 1900, in Park River, North Dakota.
Elman’s father Jacob was a student of hypnosis who had an
extensive library of hypnosis works. He often used young Dave as a
demonstration subject. Dave Elman’s interest in hypnosis was sealed
when he was eight years old and his father was dying of cancer.
Dave saw how his father’s cancer pain was completely removed by a
visiting stage hypnotist who was a friend of the family. From that
early age, Elman knew that hypnosis was far more than a mere
parlor trick and could be used to relieve the most serious forms of
human suffering.

In the early to mid-19th century, it was a common threat among

children who were unhappy with their chores or in some other way
were dissatisfied with life at home to say, “I’m going to run off to
join the circus!” At the age of twelve, Dave Elman did (almost)
exactly that – he ran off to join Vaudeville. That, by the way, is how
he came to be called Dave Elman. His name was actually David
Kopelman, but he shortened it for Vaudeville: lopping off three
letters made it easier to fit on the theater marquees!

In Vaudeville, Dave Elman worked as a musician, stand-up comic,

and also as a stage hypnotist, making a name for himself as “The
World’s Youngest and Fastest Hypnotist.”

Vaudeville was an interesting community. Many of the 20th century’s

biggest entertainment stars got their start there. The schedule and
expectations were demanding and if a performer did not successfully
entertain the crowd, he could find himself without a job many miles
from home. This was one of the drivers that caused Dave Elman to
perfect his fast hypnotic inductions, and the famous “Dave Elman
Induction” was developed to get deep hypnosis fast so that Elman
could keep the crowd engaged… and keep his job!

Vaudeville audiences loved Dave Elman’s hypnosis shows, but there

was another side to the coin. As the Vaudeville troupe travelled
throughout the Midwest, young Dave got to meet girls in the towns
where he performed. The girls were extremely impressed with the
handsome young hypnotist, but the girls’ fathers were not. They
were not about to allow their teenage daughters to date a hypnotist.
Who knew what might happen! So according to his son, Dave Elman
gave up hypnosis because it was ruining his love life!

In 1949, doctors from the New Jersey chapter of the American

Medical Association attended a stage hypnosis performance by Dave
Elman. They had taken medical hypnosis courses, but they found
that the hypnotic inductions they were taught could not be used in a
medical setting – they were too slow. Even back in 1949 a physician
had only a brief period of time to spend with each patient, so if a
hypnotic induction took more than a few minutes it was virtually
useless. The doctors had heard about Elman – no doubt many of
them were fans of his hugely popular radio show Hobby Lobby – and
they wanted him to teach them fast inductions. Dave Elman’s
techniques were just what the doctors were looking for: his longest
induction lasted only three minutes, and he also knew inductions
that could achieve hypnosis instantly. Many of the techniques which
Dave taught the doctors are described in his book Hypnotherapy ,
which was originally published as Findings in Hypnosis.

Perhaps it was the performer in Dave Elman that drew him to

teaching hypnotherapy. During the classes he taught for doctors and
dentists, he was at center stage and commanded the attention of all
in the room. His wife Pauline was an accomplished hypnotist, and
some of the students used to joke that she was a much better
hypnotist than Dave. But during the class, Dave was the center of
attention as he amazed the physicians and dentists with his skills.
The Dave Elman Medical Hypnosis Class was ten weeks long and the
final class was called “The Playground.” During this class Dave would
invite the students, their wives, and children to come up on the
platform with him for a hypnosis show. This was billed as a
culmination of the skills the students had learned, but it was most
definitely a show! The volunteers demonstrated amnesia, olfactory
hallucinations, and all the phenomena typically seen in a 1950’s
hypnosis show. From the recordings, it sounded like a blast!

So what IS hypnosis?
“Hypnosis is a state of mind in which the critical faculty of the
human is bypassed, and selective thinking established.” [8] (Dave
Elman)

Even though it looks like sleep, hypnosis is not sleep. Actually, even
the fellow who coined the word “hypnosis,” Dr. James Braid, made
this same mistake when he began studying the subject. He named it
hypnosis after the Greek god Hypnos, the god of sleep. Years later,
Braid tried to change the name to “monoideism” because he then
understood that rather than sleep, it is focused attention. But by
then the term “hypnosis” had caught on, so the name stuck.

A person in hypnosis, no matter how deep, hears everything that is

going on around her. All her senses are active and usually (although
not always) she will remember everything that happens during a
session. This can sometimes work against the hypnotist because
often the subject emerges from hypnosis and says, “I’m not sure I
was hypnotized because I heard every word you said.” I will show
you a foolproof way to counter this in chapter 10.

Even today, many people believe hypnosis is some form of sleep. It’s
not, but don’t worry if others make this mistake. As a side note,
most people emerge from hypnosis feeling relaxed and refreshed
and will even tell you that they feel like they have just been
awakened from a wonderful nap. Many hypnotists will use this
phenomenon to their advantage and will set the expectation at the
beginning of the session or hypnosis show by saying, “After the
session/show, you will emerge feeling as if you have had eight hours
of restful sleep!” You would be surprised at how many people do not
sleep well and will readily volunteer to be hypnotized just so they
can feel rested.

Very rarely, a person in hypnotherapy or on stage will fall asleep.

Usually it happens with elderly people or people who are overly
tired. If this happens, just gently shake their shoulder and they will
wake up.

One final note on hypnosis and sleep: there is a way to hypnotize

someone who is sleeping already and it is known as “hypnosleep.”
Hypnosleep is beyond the scope of this book, but if you would like to
find out more about it, read Dave Elman’s Hypnotherapy .

It has been said that mothers are some of the best hypnotists in the
world. Remember when you were young and fell down and scraped
your knee? Didn’t your mother kiss it and make it better? How in the
world does that happen? You know intellectually that there is no
anesthesia in a mother’s kiss! A kiss does not have the ability to
provide even analgesia (reduction of pain), yet when the mother
says, “Let Mommy kiss it and make it better,” it gets better! This is
an excellent example of hypnosis because the mother bypasses the
critical faculty of the conscious mind (even though children do not
have a fully developed critical faculty to bypass) and she inserts
selective thinking, namely, that the pain will go away… and as if by
magic, it does!

There is a lesson here for hypnotists. If the mother says, “Come

here, dear, and let Mommy kiss it. It MIGHT make it feel a little
better,” do you think this would have the same effect on the child’s
injury? No, it wouldn’t. A very important factor is the congruence
and conviction in the mother’s voice when she says it will get better
when she kisses it. This is an example of waking hypnosis and will
be explained in detail in chapter 15.

So what is this critical faculty that we bypass in order to insert

selective thinking? Unlike children, who will accept what you tell
them without question (Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, etc.), an adult
has something we call a critical faculty. Sometimes you’ll hear it
called the critical factor. The critical faculty, which does not form
completely until puberty, is the part of your conscious mind that
evaluates the information that comes in and makes value judgments.
Prior to puberty most human beings are pretty gullible and will
accept what you tell them uncritically. After the formation of the
critical faculty, however, most adults will evaluate data coming in. If
you tell the average adult that a blizzard is coming, he will evaluate
this statement based on his past experience, whether or not he
believes you are a trustworthy person, the season of the year, the
likelihood that snowy weather could happen in this part of the
country, etc. He will then decide if your statement is believable.

In hypnosis, we bypass this critical faculty and in doing so, we make

the mind receptive to our suggestions because we’re talking directly
to the subconscious mind. The suggestions will not be evaluated
critically (and possibly rejected) because the critical faculty is no
longer in play.

What can you use hypnosis for?

Since hypnosis is extremely effective for a wide variety of issues, this
topic could easily be the focus of a whole other book! However, the
three issues that come up most in a typical hypnotherapy practice
are smoking cessation, weight loss, and stress reduction, often
called “the three S’s” (the “S” for weight loss being “slimming”).
These make up the vast majority, easily 70%, of the business in a
typical practice. The hypnotherapist who doesn’t treat these issues
will have a very hard time developing a thriving practice.

Smoking cessation is probably the most well-known application of

hypnotherapy, and research has shown that hypnosis is one of the
most effective ways to quit – even better than nicotine replacement
therapy. [9] The only caveat here is that the client has to truly want to
stop smoking. If he is only half-hearted about quitting, hypnosis
probably won’t work.

Weight loss is a little bit trickier – but think about it – you don’t have
to smoke in order to live, but you do have to eat. But all the same,
hypnosis can once again be very effective with helping clients to
make healthier food choices, eat less, and exercise more. In the case
of the morbidly obese, hypnosis can clear deep-seated limiting
beliefs that are causing the client to over-eat.

Reducing stress can of course alleviate many other issues, such as

trouble sleeping, anger issues, some forms of chronic pain such as
tension headaches – as well as wanting to smoke and over-eat, of
course!

Hypnosis can also greatly reduce or completely eliminate life-long

phobias, and has a wide variety of medical applications, notably in
the area of pain control, for both acute and chronic pain – yet
another fascinating subject in its own right. In fact, many hypnotists
specialize in pain control and have achieved some amazing results.

I teach two hypnosis pain management courses, one for

anesthesiologists and the other for nurse anesthetists. The first
group consists of medical doctors, while the second consists of
nurses who have earned a master’s degree in anesthesia. Both,
however, do pretty much the same thing: they use chemicals to
reduce or minimize pain during operations. Sometimes they reduce
or eliminate pain in one area of the body, and sometimes they put
the patient to sleep so that the whole body is anesthetized.

I used to do a quarterly project to experiment with different

techniques. Now that I have my office in Heidelberg, Germany, I can
experiment all the time. But years ago I was at our condo in Ocean
City, Maryland, thinking about my next project, and I decided it
would be on pain control. “Where could I demonstrate hypnotic pain
control?” I mused. “Where do people experience pain where they
can’t use anesthesia?” At first I thought about gyms and enabling
people to push through their limits to achieve greater lifts, but then
it occurred to me that in those cases pain is a good thing because it
keeps one from overdoing it and causing serious injury. So where
are people experiencing unneeded pain where there are no
anesthetics? Tattoos! I looked through the phone book and found a
tattoo parlor near our condo. Independent Tattoo in Selbyville,
Delaware, is well regarded. I did not know this at the time, but I was
about to learn a lot about tattoos from this project.

I called them up and told them I was a hypnotist who wanted to do

a pain project to prove that hypnosis could make the tattoo process
painless. They thought I was nuts. But they weren’t busy and
figured they could use a laugh, so they invited me over to talk.
When I arrived, I was met by Matthew Amey, the owner. I explained
how I use hypnosis to take away pain, and he explained the process
of tattooing. It was very eye-opening for me since I have never had
one. Basically they clean the artwork area with antiseptic just like
you would for taking a blood sample. They then use a sterilized
needle attached to an electric handpiece that injects dye to scratch
the ink into the skin. After a few seconds of scratching, they wipe
the area with a clean paper towel to get rid of the blood, and then
they continue scratching the ink in.

Another important point Matthew made is that although most people

tolerate the discomfort pretty well at first, as the process continues
the discomfort gets worse and worse until at some point the person
getting tattooed can’t bear it any longer. At that point the tattoo
artist has to stop. “What if you could keep going?” I asked. “Would
that be of benefit to you?” “Absolutely!” he said, “it would be really
great if we could finish the work in one sitting!”

One of the things that amazed me was when Matthew told me that
although bleeding is natural, too much bleeding is not good as it
pushes the ink back out of the skin. He was pleasantly surprised
when I told him that hypnotic suggestion can stem the flow of blood
from the capillaries. After we had talked for a while and they realized
that I wasn’t crazy, Matthew decided this project was worth a try. By
coincidence a man named George was scheduled to come in that
afternoon. Matthew described him as “a big baby,” whose wife, who
also has tattoos, would always accompany him. “There, there,
sweetheart!” she would say as she patted his hand during the
tattooing, “you’re fine!”

“George,” Matthew said when he entered the shop, “we have this
hypnotist guy here and he says he can fix it so you don’t feel any
pain today. Are you interested?” “YES!!!” was George’s reply. And so
we started. Although George was a “big baby,” he had a large
portion of his body tattooed. Today he was going to have some
dolphins (remember, we are at the beach) tattooed on the underside
of his arm, between the elbow and the underarm – a VERY sensitive
area. I hypnotized George using a Dave Elman Induction (see
chapter 8) and he went very deep. I told him that the area between
his elbow and his underarm would be numb as if he was wearing a
wetsuit. Nothing would bother him. The buzzing of the tattoo
equipment would calm and relax him. Then I suggested to him,
“Now I’m going to pick up your other arm and drop it and when I
do, you will be able to imagine yourself on the best vacation ever. Go
wherever you want to go, take whomever you want with you. Eat
whatever you want to eat, drink whatever you want to drink and… ”
I dropped his hand on the table and said, “Be there!” That was it!
George lay there smiling. His wife and Matthew were amazed! I also
gave George the suggestion that he would bleed only a little bit so
that he wouldn’t push the ink out of his skin. Matthew worked his
magic on George’s arm and George just continued to lay there and
smile.

When the tattoo was done, Matthew wrapped the arm in plastic
wrap (standard procedure) and reminded George how to care for the
area. When George had left, Matthew smiled and said, “That was
amazing!” He said, “That’s such a sensitive area of the arm! He
should have been crying, but NOTHING!” Guess who signed up for
my next hypnosis class? Matthew was written up in a major online
tattoo publication where they discussed his hypnotic tattoos. To my
knowledge, he was one of the first artists trained to give painless
tattoos!

Matthew told me during the class that although he thought it was

wonderful to be able to take away the pain sometimes, when a
person gets their very first tattoo, he thinks they should feel it.
That’s fine, of course. We had a good laugh during the class when
he told me about some people who seem to relish the pain! “It
goes both ways,” I told him. “You can minimize the pain or you can
turn it up if you want to!”
Chapter 3 – The Pre-brief – Laying
the Groundwork
Does hypnosis cause a loss of control?
Personal values are not thrown to the wind in hypnosis. You would
never do anything in hypnosis that is against your moral, religious or
personal values. This is probably the most common misconception
about hypnosis. Who could blame people for thinking this, though?
Anyone who has been to a hypnosis show has seen normal,
respectable people do wild and crazy things, right? But there are
several reasons for this. First of all, many of the people who
volunteer for a hypnosis show are giving themselves permission to
have fun and be wild and crazy. The stage hypnotist actually
encourages this and tells them to come up only if they want to have
a good time!

Then as soon as he has hypnotized his volunteers, also known as

the “committee,” he starts kicking members off the stage because
they are not acting wild or crazy enough. In my stage shows, I have
done this very thing. Why? Well, a profoundly hypnotized person
sitting quietly in a chair might look relaxing, but he/she will not be
entertaining to the audience.

So the volunteers will act nutty. But this does not mean the stage
hypnotist can make them do anything against their deeply held
beliefs. He can even have trouble making them to something that
they find silly. Case in point: when I was in an advanced hypnosis
class years ago, one of my fellow students hypnotized me during a
practice session. Once I was in trance, she said, “Sean, when I have
you open your eyes, you will believe your belly button is missing.
You will look everywhere for it and that fact that it is missing will
really annoy you!” Well, I just thought that suggestion was dumb, so
I rejected it. When I opened my eyes, I said, “My belly button is still
here.”

She hypnotized me again and told me that when I opened my eyes I

would believe I was the Easter Bunny and that she was a reporter
with the New York Times . She would interview me on how Easter
was going this year. I liked that suggestion, so it took.

I can still remember telling the group how the fur on my arms was
designed to protect me from all dangers… except a steel-belted
radial. I also shared my plan for putting food coloring into the
chicken feed so that the chickens would lay eggs that were already
dyed! Then I explained to them about the labor dispute I was
involved in because somebody was trying to unionize the chickens. It
was a hoot!

Telling secrets is a common misconception

about hypnosis – is it true?
Telling secrets is the second most common misconception about
hypnosis. Many people are afraid that once they go into hypnosis,
the hypnotist can ask them any question and they will without
hesitation spill their guts and tell their deepest, darkest secrets. This
is completely untrue. In the same way that a hypnotized person will
not do anything against his moral code, he will not divulge secrets
while hypnotized. This is an extremely widely held belief. In fact, up
until the 1970s, holders of security clearances in the U.S. were not
permitted to be hypnotized precisely because of this fear! Those
regulations are gone now, but the misconception remains strong.

Can one get stuck?

Office Space is one of my favorite comedy movies. It was first
released in 1999 and tells the tale of a young man who gets stuck in
hypnosis. Ron Livingston plays Peter Gibbons, a software
programmer who works at a company that fixes computer code
related to the Y2K glitch. Peter goes to see a hypnotist and asks him
to help him deal with stress. The hypnotist hypnotizes Peter and
suggests to him that nothing will bother him anymore. In the middle
of the session, the hypnotist has a heart attack and dies, leaving
Peter “stuck” in trance!

It’s one of my favorite movies and I love how everything seems to

go better for Peter while supposedly “stuck in trance” and not caring
about a thing in the world. Of course, we know that a person could
not become stuck in hypnosis, but some people wonder about it. In
fact, a well-known hypnotist actually did have a heart attack during
a hypnosis session several years before Office Space was released.
Do you suppose that was where they got the idea for the movie?
Just to complete the thought, when that hypnotist had his heart
attack, his client came out of hypnosis. She wondered why he had
stopped talking!

Anybody of normal intelligence can go into

hypnosis
Average intelligence is really all that is required for someone to go
into hypnosis. It has been suggested by some researchers that
people who are very intelligent are often better subjects than people
of average intelligence, but I have not found this to make much of a
difference. So long as the person is able to concentrate, she will
usually make a good subject. Another important factor is that the
subject should genuinely want to be hypnotized. If she feels coerced
or pushed into it, most of the time she probably will be resistant and
will therefore be a poor subject. I say most of the time because if
she is a somnambulist, even though she might not want to be
hypnotized, she might still go into hypnosis.

I have hypnotized people of less than average intelligence and

although I do not have a lot of experience in this, they tended to go
into hypnosis just like everybody else. They were able to understand
my suggestions and even did very well with the post-hypnotic
suggestions. One girl whose mother brought her to me for help in
school was classified as having subnormal intelligence, but she had
no trouble getting hypnotized and taking suggestions.

Another factor that sometimes comes up is gullibility. It was often

thought in years gone by that only the gullible or dim-witted could
be hypnotized. There is actually some truth to this, but it has
absolutely nothing to do with being weak-minded. I know several
gullible people who are very intelligent. Gullibility does not mean
that someone is not intelligent. It simply means that person is
trusting and does not critically evaluate information that is
presented. Does this sound familiar? Who else has no critical faculty
and is very trusting and is therefore easy to hypnotize? Children! So
yes, a gullible person can be an outstanding hypnotic subject. When
you work with a person like this, I think it’s important to stress to
everyone watching that the individual is not weak-minded.
Sometimes gullible people go through their whole lives being put
down and called dumb when this is really not the case. Don’t
contribute to what may already be a case of low self-esteem.

How long does it take to go into hypnosis?

Thirty minutes is a long time. But some hypnotists will take that long
– or longer – to hypnotize a person. James Braid in the early-mid
1800’s used a method called fixation. He would have a subject sit in
a chair and stare at a candle on a table. The subject would stare and
stare until finally her eyes would get tired and close. Sometimes she
would go into a trance.

Most hypnotists these days use another slow induction known as the
Progressive Muscle Relaxation induction. Here is an example of one:

“Allow your eyes to close and take a nice, easy breath in and now
exhale and allow your body to begin relaxing. That’s right. Feel how
relaxing it is to breathe in oxygen and exhale and feel so good as
your breathing becomes comfortable and rhythmic. And now I want
to draw your attention to the muscles in your scalp and as you
notice those muscles in your scalp, I want you to relax all tension in
those muscles. That’s right, relax all the tension in every muscle in
your scalp… every cell, every molecule, every nerve and every fiber
in your scalp. Relax them and feel how nice that feels. Now allow
that relaxation to move down to your temples. Feel how relaxing it is
to have all those muscles, nerves and fibers in your temples turn
loose… let go… relax. And now relax the muscles in your cheeks.
Feel how wonderful it feels to let all those muscles go loose, limp,
and totally relaxed… That’s right. And now allow that relaxation to
move down gently into your jaw… ” UGH! I can’t do it anymore! This
is slow, slow, SLOW! But you get the idea. In a progressive muscle
relaxation induction, you have a person relax all her muscles starting
with the top of the head and then moving gradually all the way
down to her toes, but it doesn’t necessarily stop there. Many
hypnotists will then begin moving back up the body, muscle group
by muscle group, until they reach the head and then some will even
start moving down again!

Does this induction work? Yes, for many people. Can you get a nice
deep trance by using this? Yes, you can, but it is very slow. I am not
saying that this is not an effective induction. It does have limitations,
though – it may not work well for a person who is very analytical.
Also, since there is no testing involved, you may not know if your
subject is truly hypnotized or is just being polite and keeping her
eyes closed. The main drawback to this type of induction is that it is
too slow to use in street hypnosis.

Street hypnosis is entertainment and you need to get your people

into hypnosis quickly. Nobody is going to stand around for half an
hour while you do this sort of induction. Most people can go into
hypnosis very quickly, so why wait?

What percentage of people can be hypnotized?

20%?
“Only 20% of the population can be hypnotized.” Perhaps you’ve
encountered this old chestnut in your hypnosis studies. This is a
common fallacy, and although it contains a kernel of truth, it is
extremely misleading. Here is where it originated. During the early
scientific study of hypnosis, researchers noted that some people
were easier to hypnotize than others. Some tended to be quite
resistant, while others went into hypnosis instantly and very deeply.
Being scientists, they found that there was a bell-curve of
susceptibility to hypnosis. About 20% of subjects were very easy to
hypnotize and about 20% were very difficult to hypnotize. We call
the easy 20% somnambulists, which comes from the Latin roots
somn- meaning sleep and ambul- or walk. So it means a
sleepwalker. Yes, hypnosis is not sleep, but the term still works very
nicely. (Note: If a person used to walk in her sleep as a child, or
even better, if she still does, she may be an excellent subject!)

So, 20% of people are natural somnambulists and are very easy to
hypnotize. This is the origin of the fallacy that only 20% of the
population can be hypnotized. In fact, almost anyone can be
hypnotized; it is just that some are exceedingly easy! I believe it was
Gil Boyne who once said, “Twenty percent of the population will go
into hypnosis in spite of how inept you are as a hypnotist!” So even
the worst, most poorly trained hypnotist will be successful with one
out of five subjects! If this was baseball it would mean that anyone
in the stands could walk onto the field and hit .200.

In fact, almost anyone can go into trance to some level. Research

has shown that a small percentage of people are simply incapable of
achieving trance. Some lack concentration, some are mentally
unstable or extremely paranoid, but almost everyone else can do this
to one extent or another. With very little practice, you should be able
to hypnotize 85-90 percent of the people you work with. With even
more practice you will reach the point that you almost never fail!

Takes just a minute

Some call it a pre-talk, and I call it a pre-brief. But no matter what
you call it, it is essential to your success because it explains hypnosis
and establishes the groundwork for everything else you do. Most
hypnotists and hypnotherapists take too long with this step. The goal
is to convince the subject to do hypnosis with you in the least
amount of time. During this period you need to establish that you
have permission to hypnotize her and quickly tell her what her part
of the instant induction will be. It should take no more than a
minute to accomplish. As a matter of fact, when I teach about the
pre-brief in classes or conferences I ask one of the attendees to time
me as I deliver the pre-brief. It’s funny how it usually comes out at
58 or 59 seconds!

Here is the pre-brief that I use in my therapy office, on the stage,

and on the street. Memorize this and you will have a far easier time
getting people into hypnosis. This is the stripped down version that I
use and, as I mentioned above, it takes about one minute to
deliver:

“There are three common misconceptions about hypnosis. The first

is that there is a loss of control. There is no loss of control in
hypnosis. You’d never do anything in hypnosis that you wouldn’t
normally do. You would never do anything that was against your
moral, religious, or personal values, or something that you just didn’t
feel like doing. When you are deep in hypnosis, if I were to ask you
to stand on your head, you would shake your head and say, ‘I don’t
think so!’ It’s just that simple.

“The second common misconception about hypnosis is that people

will tell secrets in hypnosis, and this isn’t true either. If there was a
secret that you would keep in your normal waking state, you would
keep it in hypnosis. You would not give the hypnotist the pin number
for your ATM card.

“And the third common misconception about hypnosis is that people

could get stuck in hypnosis. And this is impossible! In five thousand
years of people being hypnotized, nobody has ever gotten stuck! I
will tell you that when you’re deep in hypnosis you feel so good that
you’ll wish you could get stuck, but you can’t! So, do you have
any questions before I hypnotize you?”

My pre-brief is based on one used by a famous hypnotist named Don

Mottin. I just took out all the parts that I found not absolutely
necessary so that I could deliver it in 60 seconds. The importance of
the pre-brief cannot be overstated. This will make you an efficient
and effective hypnotist!

When I am doing street hypnosis and a volunteer has agreed to

work with me, I size her up as to whether or not she requires the
full pre-brief as given here. If she has been watching me work with
others and is eager to go, I’ll just do the safety check (more on this
later) and then go on to the hypnosis. But if she is my first subject,
or if she seems just the slightest bit tentative, I will give her the full
one-minute version. As I explain the common misconceptions about
hypnosis to her, I am also playing to the crowd. Most of my attention
is on her, but I speak loudly enough so that the people watching can
hear. I also occasionally look at the crowd just to keep them
interested.

Further thoughts on the pre-brief – advanced

concepts
Some people think that the purpose of the pre-brief is to educate a
volunteer about hypnosis, but that is not the case. Here is the secret
about the pre-brief: it is full of lies.

You may not read about this anywhere else, but I have found that
what I am about to share with you is true. There IS a possibility of
loss of control in hypnosis and people WILL do things in hypnosis
that they normally wouldn’t do. Here is a harmless example.

I was teaching a class in Toronto and I hypnotized a lady for a

demonstration. I gave her the post-hypnotic suggestion that every
time I showed her a packet of Stride “Tropical Trance” gum, which
has a hypnotic spiral on the pack, she would be compelled to say
Another random document with
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 I am not concerned
With trivial points.

The Stranger.

But if they point to truth

Beyond themselves, and through that change of colour
Reveal its cause, and knit your scheme in law;
Nay, as a single point of light will speak
To seamen of the land that they desire,
Transfiguring all the darkness with one spark,
Would this be trivial? Sir, a touch will do it.
Lend me your brush a moment. Had you drawn
Your rocks here in the foreground, thus and thus,
Following the ribbed lines of those beds of clay
As the sea laid them, and the fire upheaved
And cracked them, you’ll forgive me if I say
That they’d not only indicate the law
Of their creation; but they’d look like rocks
Instead of——

Giulio.

Pray don’t hesitate.

The Stranger.

I speak
As a spectator only; but to me—
Sponges or clouds perhaps——

Giulio.

We artists, sir,
Aim at this very effect. To us, the fact
Is nothing. There is a kingdom of the mind,
Where all things turn to dreams. Nothing is true
In that great kingdom; and our subtlest work
Is that which has no basis.

The Stranger.

Then I fear
My thoughts are all astray; for I believed
That kingdom to be more substantial far
Than anything we see; and that the road
Into that kingdom is the road of law
Which we discover here,—the Word made Flesh.

Giulio.

I do not understand you—quite. I fear

Yours is the popular view—that art requires
Purposes, meanings, even moralities
With which we artists, sir, are not concerned.

The Stranger.

O, no. I merely inquire. I wish to hear

From one who knows. I am a little puzzled.
You have dismissed so much—this outer world
And all its laws; and now this other, too.
I am no moralist; but I must confess
That, in the greatest Art, I have always found
A certain probity, a certain splendour
Of inner and outer constancy to law.

Giulio.

All genius is capricious. You’ll admit

That men who lived like beasts have painted well.

The Stranger.

Yes; but not greatly, except when their own souls

Have gripped the beast within them by the throat,
And risen again to reassert the law.

Giulio.

Art lives by its technique, a fact the herd

Will never understand. A noble soul
Is useless, if it cannot wield a brush.

The Stranger.

May not technique include control and judgment?

Alone, they are not enough; but, for the heights,
More is required, not less. I’d even add
Some factors you despise.

Giulio.

Your shells, for instance?

And that mysterious and invisible sea?

The Stranger.

The sea whence Beauty rose.

Giulio.

You have an eye

For Beauty, too. You are a lover of art
And you are rich. What opportunities
You throw away! Was it not you I saw
Yesterday, in the market-place at Florence,
Buying caged birds and tossing them into the air?

The Stranger.

It may have been. I like to see them fly.

The structure of the wing,—I think that men
Will fly one day.
 Giulio.

It was not pity, then?

The Stranger.

I’d not exclude it. As I said before,

I would include much.

Giulio.

You were speaking, sir,

Of Art. There are so few, so very few
Who understand what Art is.

The Stranger.

Fewer still
Who know the few to choose.

Giulio.

Perhaps you’d care

To see some work of mine. I do not live
In Florence; but I’d like to set your feet
On the right way. We are a little group
Known to the few that know. You’d find our works
Far better worth your buying than caged birds.
Pray let me know your name, sir.

The Stranger.

Leonardo.

II
AT FLORENCE
I saw the house at Florence, cool and white
With violet shadows, drowsing in the sun.
The fountain splashed and bubbled in the court.
Beside it, in a space of softened light,
Under a linen awning, ten feet high,
Roofing a half-enclosure, where three walls
Were tinted to a pine-wood’s blue-black shade,
I saw a woman seated on a throne,
And Leonardo, with his radiant eyes,
Glancing from his wet canvas to her face.

Her face was filled with music. Music swelled

Above them, from a gallery out of sight;
And as the soft pulsation of the strings
Died into infinite distances, he spoke.
His voice was more than music. It was thought
Ebbing and flowing, like a strange dark sea.

“Listen to me; for I have things to say

That I can only tell the world through you.
Were you not just a little afraid of me
At first? You know by popular report
I dabble in Black Arts, and so I would
To keep you here, an hour or two each day,
Until the mystery we have conjured up
Between us—there again, it came and went—
Smiles at the centuries in their masquerade
As you smiled, then, at me.
Not mockery—quite—
Not irony either; something we evoked
That seems to have caught the ironist off his guard,
And slyly observes the mocker’s naked heel.
So we’ll defend humanity, you and I,
Against the worst of tyrannies,—the blind sneer
Of intellectual pride. The subtle fool
And cunning sham at least shall meet one gaze
More subtle, more secure; not yours or mine,
But Nature’s own—that calm, inscrutable smile
Whereby each erring atomy is restored
To its true place, taught its true worth at last,
And heaven’s divine simplicity renewed.

Not yours or mine, Madonna. Could I trust

To brush and palette or my skill of hand
For this? Oh, no! We need Black Arts, I think,
Black Arts and incantations, or you’d grow
Weary of sitting here.
Last night I made
Five bubbles of glass—you blow them with a pipe
Over a flame,—and set them there to dance
Upon the fountain’s feathery crest of spray.
Piero thought it waste of time. He jeers
At these mechanical arts of mine. I watched
That dance and learned a little of the machine
We call the world. I left them leaping there
To catch your eyes this morning, and learned more.
So one thing leads to another. A device,
Mechanical as the spinning of the stars
In the Arch-Mechanic’s Cosmos, woke a gleam
Of wonder; and I lay these Black Arts bare
To make you wonder more.
Black Arts, Madonna;
For even such trifles may discover depths
Dark as the pit of death; as when I laid
Dice on a drum, and by their trembling showed
Where underneath our armoured city walls
The enemy dug his mines.
And now—you smile,
To think how wars are won.
Catgut and wood
Have served our wizardry. Yes; that’s why I set
Musicians in the gallery overhead,
To pluck their strings; and, while you listened, so
Painted the living spirit that they bound
With their bright spells before me, in your face.
Black Arts, Madonna, and cold-blooded, too.
O, sheer mechanical, playing upon your mind
And senses, as they too were instruments,
Or colours to be ground and mixed and used
For purposes that were not yours at all,
Until the living Power that uses me
Breathes on this fabric, also made by hands,
The inscrutable face that smiles all arts away.

How many tales I have told you sitting here

To make you see, according to my need,
The comedy of the world, its lights and shades:
The sensual feast; the mockery of renown;
Youth and his innocent boastings, unaware
How swiftly run the sands; Youth that believes
His own bright scorn for others’ aching faults
Has crowned him conqueror; Youth so nobly sure
That plans are all achievements; quite, quite sure
Of his own victory where all others failed;
Age, with blind eyes, or staring at defeat,
Dishonoured; Age, in honour, with a wreath
Of fading leaves in one old trembling hand,
And at his feet the dark all-gulfing grave;
Envy, the lean and wizened witch behind him,
Riding on death, like his own crooked shadow,
Snapping at heaven with one contemptuous hand,
As though she hated God; and, on her face,
A mask of fairness; Envy, with those barbs
Of wicked lightning darting from her flesh;
Envy, whose eyes the palm and olive wound;
Whose ears the laurel and myrtle pierce with pain;
A fiery serpent eating at her heart;
A quiver on her back with tongues for arrows.
Each of these pictures left its little shadow,
A little memory in your spellbound face,
And so your picture smiles at all of these,
And at one secret never breathed aloud,
Because I think we knew it all too well.

Once only, in a riddle, I made you smile

At our own secret also, when I said
‘If liberty be dear to you, Madonna,
Never discover that your painter’s face
Is Love’s dark prison.’
Sailing to the south
From our Cilicia, you and I have seen
Beautiful Cyprus, rising from the wave;
Cyprus, that island where Queen Venus reigned.
The blood of men was drawn to that rough coast
As tides, on other shores, obey the moon.
Glens of wild dittany, winding through the hills
From Paphos, her lost harbour, to the peak
Of old Olympus, where she tamed the gods,
Enticed how many a wanderer,
Odorous winds
Welcomed us, ruffling, crumpling the smooth brine
Into a sea of violets. We drew near.
We heard the muffled thunder of the surf!
What ships, what fleets, had broken among those rocks!
We saw a dreadful host of shattered hulls,
Great splintered masts, innumerable keels
With naked ribs, like skeletons of whales
All weltering there, half-buried in the sand.
The foam rushed through them. On their rotted prows
And weed-grown poops the sea-gulls perched and screamed;
And all around them with an eerie cry
An icy wind was blowing.
It would seem
Like the Last Judgment, should there ever be
A resurrection of the ships we saw
Lying there dead. These things we saw and live.
And now your picture smiles at all of these.
The secret still evades me everywhere;
And everywhere I feel it, close at hand.
Do you remember when Vesuvius flamed
And the earth shivered and cracked beneath our feet?
Ten villages were engulfed. I wandered out
Among the smoking fragments of earth’s crust
To see if, in that breaking-up of things,
Nature herself had now perhaps unsealed
Some of her hidden wonders.
On that day,
I found a monstrous cavern in the hills,
A rift so black and terrible that it dazed me.
I stood there, with my back bent to an arch,
My left hand clutching at my knee, my right
Shading contracted eyes. I strained to see
Into that blackness, till the strong desire
To know what marvellous thing might lurk within
Conquered my fear. I took a ball of thread
And tied one end to a lightning-blasted tree.
I made myself a torch of resinous pine
And entered, running the thread through my left hand,
On, on, into the entrails of the world.

O, not Odysseus, when his halting steps

Crept through that monstrous hollow to the dead,
Felt such a fearful loneliness as I;
For there were voices echoing through his night,
And shadows of lost friends to welcome him;
But my fierce road to knowledge clove its way
Into a silence deeper than the grave,
Into a darkness where not even a ghost
Could stretch its hands out, even in farewell.
And all that I could see around me there
Was my own smoking torchlight, walls of rock
And awful rifts where other caverns yawned.
And all that I could hear was my own steps
Echoing through endless darkness, on and on.

My thread ran out. My torch was burning low,

When, through the darkness, I became aware
Of something darker, looming up in front;
Solid as rock, and yet more strange and wild
Than any shadow. My flesh and blood turned cold
Before that awful Presence in the dark.
I left the thread behind me, and crept on;
Held up the guttering torch; and there, O there,
I saw it, and I live.
A monstrous thing
With jaws that might have crushed a ship, and bones
That might upheave a mountain; a Minotaur,
A dreadful god of beasts, now turned to stone,
Like a great smoke-bleared idol. The wild light
Smeared it with blood; a thing that once had lived;
A thing that once might turn the sea to mist
With its huge flounderings, and would make a spoil
For kingdoms with the ships it drove ashore.
The torchlight flared against it, and went out;
And I groped back, in darkness....
And you smile.
O, what a marvel of enginery was there!
What giant thews and sinews once controlled
The enormous hinges of the rock-bound bones
I saw in my dark cavern. Yet it perished,
And all its monstrous race has perished, too.
Was it all waste? Did it prepare the way
For lordlier races? Even, perhaps, for men?

Only one life to track these wonders home,

So many roads to follow. Never the light
Till all be travelled.
We will not despise
Mechanical arts, Madonna, while we use
These marvellous living instruments of ours.
Rather we’ll seek to master for ourselves
The Master’s own devices. Birds can fly,
And so shall men, when they have learned the law
Revealed in every wing. Far off, I have seen
Men flying like eagles over the highest clouds;
Men that in ships like long grey swordfish glide
Under the sea; men that in distant lands
Will speak to men in Italy; men that bring
The distant near, and bind all worlds in one.
And yet—I shall not see it. I have explored
This human instrument, traced its delicate tree
Of nerves, discovering how the life-blood flows
Out of the heart, through every branching vein;
And how, in age, the thickening arteries close
And the red streams no longer feed this frame,
And the parched body starves at last and dies.

I have built bridges. Armies tread them now.

The rains will come. The torrents will roll down
And sweep them headlong to the sea, one day.
I have painted pictures. Let cicalas chirrup
Of their brief immortality. I know
How soon these colours fade.
And yet, and yet,
I do not think the Master of us all
Would set us in His outer courts at night
As the Magnificent, once, in the flush of wine,
Set Angelo, to flatter an idle whim
And sculpture him a godhead out of snow.

The work’s not wasted. In my youth I thought

That I was learning how to live, and now
I see that I was learning how to die.
Then comes the crowning wonder. We strip off
The scaffolding; for the law is learned at last;
And our reality, Parian then, not snow,
Dares the full sun of morning, fronts the gaze
Of its divine Pygmalion; lives and breathes;
And knows, then, why it passed through all those pains.
Now—the last touch of all! And, as this face
Begins to breathe against those ancient rocks,
Let music breathe these arts of mine away.”

Music awoke. It throbbed like hidden wings

Above them. Then a minstrel’s golden voice,
As from a distance, on those wings arose
And poured the Master’s passion into song:

Burn, Phœnix, burn;

And, in thy burning, take
All that love taught me, all I strove to learn,
All that I made, and all I failed to make.

If it be true
That from the fire thou rise
In splendour, as men say dead worlds renew
Their light from their own embers in the skies,

In thy fierce nest

I’d share that death with thee,
To make one shining feather on thy breast
Of all I am, and all I strove to be.

The worthless bough

May kindle a rich coal;
And in our mingling ashes, how wilt thou
Know mine from thine, ere both reclothe thy soul?

Now—as thy wings

Arise from this proud fire,
My dust in thy assumption mounts and sings;
And, being a part of thee, I still aspire.
 V—IN FRANCE
Jean Guettard
I
THE ROCK OF THE GOOD VIRGIN
Who knows the name of Jean Guettard to-day?
I wrestled with oblivion all night long.
At times a curtain on a lighted stage
Would lift a moment, and fall back again.
Once, in the dark, a sunlit row of vines
Gleamed through grey mists on his invisible hill.
The mists rolled down. Then, like a miser, Night
Caught the brief glory in her blind cloak anew.
At dawn I heard the voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf
Breathing a quiet song. It seemed remote
And yet was near, as when the listener’s heart
Fills a cold shell with its remembered waves.

“When I was young,” said Jean Guettard,

“My comrades and myself would hide
Beneath a tall and shadowy Rock
In summer, on the mountain-side.
The wind and rain had sculptured it—
Such tricks the rain and wind will play,—
To likeness of a Mother and Child;
But wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard,
“Have worn the rocks for many a day.”

“The peasants in that quiet valley,

Among their vineyards bending there,
Called it the Rock of the Good Virgin,
 And breathed it many an evening prayer.
When I grew up I left my home
For dark Auvergne, to seek and know
How all this wondrous world was made;
And I have learned,” said Jean Guettard,
“How rains can beat, and winds can blow.”

“When I came home,” said Jean Guettard,

“Not fifty years had fleeted by.
I looked to see the Form I loved
With arms outstretched against the sky.
Flesh and blood as a wraith might go.
This, at least, was enduring stone.
I lifted heart and eyes aglow,
Over the vines,” said Jean Guettard....

“The rain had beaten, the wind had blown,

The hill was bare as the sky that day.
Mother and Child from the height had gone.
The wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard,
“Had crumbled even the Rock away.”

“Shadow-of-a-Leaf,” I whispered, for I saw

The crosier of a fern against the grey;
And, as the voice died, he stood dark before me.
“You sang as though you loved him. Let the mists
Unfold.”
He smiled. “See, first, that Rock,” he said,
“Dividing them.”
At once, through drifting wreaths
I saw a hill emerging, a green hill
Clothed with the dying rainbow of those tears
The mist had left there. From the rugged crest
Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away.
I saw the Rock upstanding on the height
So closely, and so near me, that I knew
Its kinship with the rocks of Fontainebleau;
The sandstone whose red grains for many an age
Had been laid down, under a vanished sea;
A Rock, upthrust from darkness into light,
By buried powers, as power upthrust it now
In the strong soul, with those remembering hills,
Till, graven by frost and beaten by wind and rain,
It slowly assumed the semblance of that Form
Of Love, the Mother, holding in her arms
The Child of Earth and Heaven; a shape of stone;
An image; but it was not made by hands.
Footsteps drew near. I heard an eager voice
Naming a flower in Latin.
Up they came—
Each with a bunch of wild flowers in his hand,—
A lean old man, with snowy wind-blown hair,
Panting a little; and, lightly at his side,
Offering a strong young arm, a sun-burnt boy,
Of eighteen years, with darkly shining eyes.
It was those eyes, deep, scornful, tender, gay,
Dark fires at which all falsehood must consume,
That told me who they were—the young Guettard,
And his old grandsire.
Under the Rock they stood.
“Good-bye. I’ll leave you here,” the old man said.
“We’ve had good luck. These are fine specimens.
The last, perhaps, that we shall find together;
For when you leave your home to-morrow, Jean,
I think you are going on a longer journey
Even than you know. Perhaps, when you are famous,
You will not be so proud as I should be,
Were I still living, to recall the days
When even I, the old apothecary,
Could teach you something.”
Jean caught a wrinkled hand,
Held it between his own, and laughed away
That shadow, but old Descurain looked at him,
Proudly and sadly. “It will not rest with you,
Or your affection, Jean. The world will see to it.
The world that knows as much of you and me,
As you and I of how that creeper grew
Around your bedroom window.”
As he spoke,
Along the lower slopes the mists began
To blow away like smoke. The patch of vines
Crept out again; and, far below I saw,
Sparkling with sun, the valley of the Juine,
The shining river, and the small clear town
Étampes, the grey old church, the clustering roofs,
The cobbled square, the gardens, wet and bright
With blots of colour.
“I have lived my life
Out of the world, down there,” Descurain said,
“Compounding simples out of herbs and flowers;
Reading my Virgil in the quiet evenings,
Alone, for all those years; and, then, with you.
O fortunatos—Do we ever know
Our happiness till we lose it? You’ll remember
Those Georgics—the great praise of Science, Jean!
And that immortal picture of the bees!
No doubt you have chosen rightly. For myself,
I know, at least, where healing dittany grows,
And where earth’s beauty hides in its dark heart
An anodyne, at last, for all our pain.
And one thing more I have learned, and see with awe
On every side, more clearly, that on earth
There’s not one stone, one leaf, one creeping thing,
No; nor one act or thought, but plays its part
In the universal drama.
You’ll look back
One day on this lost bee-like life of mine;
And find, perhaps, in its obscurest hour
And lowliest task, the moment when a light
Began to dawn upon a child’s dark mind.
The old pestle and mortar, and the shining jars,
The smell of the grey bunches of dried herbs,
The little bedroom over the market-square,
The thrifty little house where you were born,
The life that all earth’s great ones would despise—
All these, perhaps, were needed, as the hand
That led you, first, in childhood to the hills.
You’ll see strange links, threads of effect and cause,
In complicated patterns, growing clear
And binding all these memories, each to each,
And all in one; how one thing led to another,
My simples to your love of plants and flowers,
And this to your new interest in the haunts
That please them best—the kinds of earth, the rocks,
And minerals that determine where they grow,
Foster them, or reject them. You’ll discover
That all these indirections are not ruled
By chance, but by dark predetermined laws.
You’ll grope to find what Power, what Thought, what Will,
Determined them; till, after many a year,
At one swift clue, one new-found link, one touch,
They are flooded with a new transfiguring light,
Deep as the light our kneeling peasants know
When, dumbly, at the ringing of a bell
They adore the sacred elements; a light
That shows all Nature, of which your life is part,
Bound to that harmony which alone sets free;
And every grain of dust upon its way
As punctual to its purpose as a star.

This Rock has played its part in many a life.

We know it, for we see it every day.
No angelus ever rang, but some one’s eyes
Were lifted to it; and, returning home,
The wanderer strains to see it from the road.
What is it, then? It plays no greater part
Than any grain of dust beneath our feet,
Could we discern it. A dumb block of stone,
A shadow in the mind, a thought of God,
A little fragment of the eternal order,
That postulates the whole.
If we could see
The universal Temple in which it stands
We, too, should bow our heads; for if this Form
Were shaped by Chance, it was the selfsame Chance
That gave us love and death. In this the fool
Descries a reason for denying all
To which our peasants kneel. The years to come
(And you will speed them, Jean) will rather make
This dust the floor of heaven.”
The old man laid
His bunch of herbs and flowers below the Rock,
Smiled, nodded, and went his way.
“Was it by chance,”
Thought Jean Guettard, “that grandad laid them so;
Or by design; or by some vaster art
Transcending, yet including, all our thoughts,
And memories, with those flowers and that dumb stone,
As chords in its world-music? Why should flowers
Laid thus”—he laid his own at the feet of the Rock—
“Transfigure it with such beauty that it stood
Blessing him, from its arch of soft blue sky
Above him, like a Figure in a shrine?”

He touched its glistening grains. “I think that Ray

Was right,” he murmured. “This was surely made
Under the sea; sifted and drifted down
From vanished hills and spread in level beds,
Under deep waters; compressed by the sea’s weight;
Upheaved again by fire; and now, once more,
Wears down by way of the rain and brook and river,
Back to the sea; but all by roads of law.”
Then, looking round him furtively, to make sure
No one was near, he dropped upon his knees.
The mist closed over him. Rock and hill were lost
In greyness once again.

II
MALESHERBES AND THE BLACK MILESTONES
Moments were years,
Till, at the quiet whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
Those veils withdrew, and showed another scene.
I saw two dusty travellers, blithely walking
With staffs and knapsacks, on a straight white road
Lined with tall sentinel poplars as to await
A king’s return; but scarce a bird took heed
Of those two travel-stained wanderers—Jean Guettard
And Malesherbes, his old school-friend.
Larks might see
Two wingless dots that crept along the road.
The Duke rode by and saw two vagabonds
With keenly searching eyes, as they jogged on
To Moulins. Birds and Duke and horse could see,
Against the sky, that old square prison-tower,
The tall cathedral, the dark gabled roofs,
Thronging together behind its moated wall;
But not one eye in all that wide green land
Saw what those two could see; and not one soul
Espied the pilgrim thought upon its way
To change the world for man.
The pilgrim thought!
Say rather the swift hunter, tracking down
More subtly than an Indian the dark spoor
Of his gigantic prey.
I saw them halt
Where, at the white road’s edge, a milestone rose
Out of the long grass, like a strange black gnome,
A gnome that had been dragged from his dark cave
Under the mountains, and now stood there dumb,
Striving to speak. But what?
 “There! There! Again!”
Cried Jean Guettard. They stood and stared at it,
But not to read as other travellers use
How far themselves must journey.
They knelt down
And looked at it, and felt it with their hands.
A farmer passed, and wondered were they mad.
For, when they hailed him, and his tongue prepared
To talk of that short cut across the fields
Beside the mill-stream, they desired to know
Whence the black milestone came. It was the fourth
That they had passed since noon.
He grinned at them.
“Black stones?” he said, “you’ll find them all the way
To Volvic now!”
“To Volvic,” cried Guettard,
“Volcani vicus!”
They seized their staffs again;
Halted at Moulins, only to break a crust
Of bread and cheese, and drink one bottle of wine,
Then hastened on, following the giant trail,
Milestone by milestone, till the scent grew hot;
For now they saw, in the wayside cottages,
The black stone under the jasmine’s clustering stars;
And children, at the half-doors, wondered why
Those two strange travellers pushed the leaves away
And tapped upon their walls.
At last they saw,
Black as a thundercloud anchored to its hill,
Above the golden orchards of Limagne,
The town of Riom. All its walls were black.
Its turreted heights with leering gargoyles crawled
Above them, like that fortress of old Night
To which Childe Roland came.
No slughorn’s note
Challenged it, and they set no lance in rest,
But dusty and lame, with strangely burning eyes,