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Magick and Hypnosis

( Annotated 1999 by the Author.)

by Carroll “Poke” Runyon, M.A.

(Note: This article first appeared in Llewellyn Publication’s

GNOSTICA, vol 5, no. 9, whole no. 45)

In this article the author takes the position that hypnosis is the

operative technique of Ceremonial Magick. Visions of Spirits

appearing in the Triangle of Art are actually archetypes evoked from

the deep-mind via hypnotic induction. As a practicing magician

specializing in these methods, he gives an insider’s perspective on

how Magick really works.

I recently received a letter from a man who claimed to be an

investigator of paranormal phenomena. After a few introductory

remarks he came quickly to the point: “Can you demonstrate that the

techniques you practice and teach are authentic and effective, not

merely hypnotic and illusionary?”

My reply was somewhat blunt: “Ceremonial Magick is a valid

art, not a pseudo-science,” I wrote. “Certainly its visions are hypnotic

and they are no more illusionary than are Jungian Archetypes in the

Collective Unconscious – which, in fact, is what they actually are.

Their existence cannot be proved or disproved in a high-school physics

lab.”

I posted my answer with a sense of satisfaction, but in the

days that followed I began to realize there was a great deal more

involved in this question than could be answered in one clever

paragraph. The present occult revival has been underway for a decade,

but there are still only a few people who actually practice ceremonial

magick – and this situation persists in spite of hundreds of different

books on the subject in constant circulation. Why? The reason is that

many, if not most, of our modern occultists are just as naïve about the

true nature of magick as was my correspondent. Ceremonial Magick is

ritual hypnosis . As Dion Fortune put it: “Magick is the art of causing

changes in consciousness to occur in accordance with the will”

[emphasis mine]. The reason why so few people practice magick is not

that there are so few students of the art -- there are thousands – but that

only a few know the real secret. (1.)

Granted, there are a number of magicians who will grudgingly

concede this hypnotic definition, but in order to be a successful modern

magus, I feel you should embrace the concept! By taking such a plunge

you simultaneously improve your technique, confirm your results,

confound your critics and make an honest person of yourself. Don’t

worry about betraying some great tradition; magick was always

hypnotic. Don’t worry about being “scientific”, scientists don’t know

what hypnosis is, and most of them will admit that they don’t.

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The Basic Business of the Magician:

If magick was always hypnotic and if the kabbalah always taught that

the inner microcosom was the key to personal transformation, then

why, for the past hundred years , have we been skipping over, or

completely ignoring, the fundamental principles of magick? Lost in a

maze of quasi-masonic initiations, and quasi-Freudian sexual

speculations, we have forgotten that the basic business of the magician

is to command spirits (i.e. components of his personality). He summons

them to visible appearance and then compels them to perform tasks for

him – well, that’s what he used to do back in Renaissance times, but

our more recent Victorian forbears of The Golden Dawn were not able

to reconstruct the old method of magical evocation because they

refused to accept its hypnotic basis. Certainly there is more to magick

than evocation, but that is where it starts: in the magick mirror of Yesod

with the ritual of the Goetia of the Lemegeton. (2.) This hypnotic

system, if properly employed in the Jungian psychoanalytic process of

individuation, can be a cornerstone of successful lodge work.

Before we discuss the characteristics of magical hypnosis, we

need to look a little more deeply into the historical and philosophical

reasons why this essential principle of the art has been overlooked and

underrated.

The Victorian and Edwardian magicians were more

reactionary and superstitious (relatively speaking) than their

Renaissance counterparts. They bequeathed to us a legacy of quaint

and whimsical ideas about magick. We still find ourselves grappling

with their outdated conceptions of “secret chiefs” who come from an

“astral world” that might as well be another planet. Hypnosis was a

dirty word in this Victorian fairyland not because it was scientific, but

because it was subjective. In this case the tendency to objectify magical

phenomena is characteristic of philosophical dualism. It will be

recalled that the dualist believes God to be separate from his creations,

whereas the monist holds that God is present in all things. (For a more

lengthy discussion of these ideas see my Negative vs. Positive Gnosis

in Gnostica , No. 40 ) (3.)

The Kingdom of God is Within

At this point the romantic reader may be experiencing something of a

let-down. Am I saying that angels, demons, Goddesses and Gods of old

are only figments of the individual imagination? Certainly not! The

Gods are real and their power is awesome. Hypnosis is the key to

entering their kingdom, the Olam Yetzirah, or astral plane; but we must

realize that this other dimension begins within ourselves, in our

subconscious mind. If we go deep enough we venture beyond our own

personal dreams into what Carl Jung called the “collective

unconscious”, that vast realm where the archetypal Gods abide. (4.)

Make no mistake about it, the collective unconscious is a reality that

goes beyond anyone’s individual conception of it. It contains the entire

history of the human race and probably the destiny of mankind as well.

It is certainly linked to the Anima Mundi, the World-Soul-Earth-

Goddess of the Renaissance magicians. I hold that its sensitivities

extend throughout the solar system, and I suspect that it is intrinsically

related to the DNA code. These ideas are philosophically monistic in

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accordance with the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus and the

doctrines of the kabbalah. (5.)

When the student fully grasps the significance of the

collective unconscious in relation to the Hermetic kabbalah, he will not

need to ask such questions as Carlos Casteneda put to Don Juan: “Did I

really fly?” The objective vs. the subjective argument will no longer

involve a value judgment, but only a matter of relative perception. This

may be a difficult hurdle for some to leap, but the rewards are infinite.

The dualist seeking objective phenomenon – e.g. photographable

ghosts, apparitions formed from “ectoplasm” and the like – is

constantly in danger of disillusionment. The more he tries to justify his

beliefs, the more antirational he becomes. For him occultism is a long,

down-hill slide away from the intellectual position – whereas, if

properly pursued on monistic-subjective principles; the study and

practice of magick should expand and extend the consciousness,

thereby improving the intellect.

The reader might agree with most of what I have said, and yet

still raise the question: ‘what about Aleister Crowley?’ Wasn’t he

subjective in his approach to magick, and didn’t he practice the goetic

thaumaturgy of the Lemegeton?

Yes, but even though Crowley wrote an excellent

psychological introduction to Mathers’ translation of The Goetia,

showing that he understood the subjective nature of the system, neither

he or his mentor knew the operative technique. Crowley spent many

weary hours trying to conjure a spirit to visible appearance in smoke

over the Triangle of Art. Now smoke is probably the worst hypnotic

focal point anyone could imagine, but a pretty good medium for an

experiment in telekinesis; a totally objective process. (6.) If Crowley

had realized that the system was hypnotic, he probably would have

used a crystal or a dark mirror. With this proper equipment results

would have been achieved within fifteen or twenty minutes of work.

Why didn’t he realize this? Mathers’ ignorance of the hypnotic factor

is easier to understand. He was a Quixotic medievalist who insisted on

objectifying everything. He believed that the Key of Solomon was

actually written by the Biblical monarch himself! However Crowley

should have known better.. Even so, I think that three factors may have

combined to keep Crowley from discovering the real secret of

Renaissance ceremonial magick: first, the prevailing opinion of the

time in the area of phenomenology ran to objective, pseudo-scientific

causes such as the ectoplasm of the spiritualists; second, Crowley was a

philosophical dualist which thrust him toward objectified conceptions

even though he was less credulous than Mathers; and third, he was

deeply into drugs. Such agents tend to activate their own unique

effects, whereas ritual hypnosis is a more directed vehicle, through

which the magician can produce a desired effect in accordance with his

will.

What is Hypnosis?

What is hypnosis? Nobody really knows, but we do know several

things about it. One thing we know: it isn’t sleep . In the physical

(blood pressure, etc.) the hypnotic trance is more like the normal

“awake” condition. Putting together several modern definitions of

hypnosis, we can come up with something like this: hypnosis is a state

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of heightened suggestibility in which the mind is totally centered on

one idea to the exclusion of everything else, including sensory

perceptions that are unwanted or distracting.

By this definition anyone who is really concentrating on

something, like reading a book, or even watching television, may be

said to be in a hypnotic trance. They certainly are. Gurdjieff went so far

as to suggest that most people are hypnotized most of the time. To

achieve their potential they had to become “de-hypnotized”. The point

is that any routine task can become hypnotic. Here in southern

California, for instance, we are all familiar with the freeway driving

trance. There are also musical trances, dancing trances, etc. There may

even be a general everyday living trance – as Gurdjieff intimated.

These trances are different, and they have different levels of intensity,

and sensory selection. If a person is deeply engrossed in a book he may

not hear the phone ring, whereas if he is listening to the radio with

“one ear”, he will hear the phone. Hypnosis is a normal and common

condition. It is the unusual behavior associated with the deeper

cataleptic and somnambulistic trances that seem strange and

mysterious.

Hypnosis was known and used in ancient Egypt, where

magician-priests officiated at “sleep temples” in which sufferers of

various afflictions were cured by visitations of the Gods – most

probably while the patients were in a somnambulistic trance. Egyptian

magicians hypnotized animals such as lions and cobras. In India the

occult hypnotist first hypnotizes himself before operating on his

subject. This is a most magical approach and very effective. It seems

unknown outside of esoteric circles.

From ancient times up into the 1840’s the phenomenon was

thought to be the result of the manipulation and transmission of life

force: a subtle substance called “spirit”, or in the East, “kundalini.”

This concept is not as objective, or as simplistic, as it first appears.

The great Renaissance magus Marsilio Ficino, theorized that the flow

of spirit, by the rites of astrological magick, to improve the health and

intellectual capabilities of the operator. (7.) Ficino did not extend his

method to include the influencing of spirit in others – which would

have been a dangerous in his time – but such a capability is implicit in

his theory.

Many medieval and Renaissance magi solicited the

intercession of angels and demons in what Daniel Walker calls

“transitive operations” (for or against others), but before we assume

that this practice was entirely dualistic and objectified, we should

remember that these operators derived their philosophy from the

Hermetic Holy Book known as The Asclepius , which plainly taught

that angels, demons and gods of the earth sphere were originally

creations of man himself! The magicians of the Renaissance knew

very well that such entities were subjective. We might even call their

magical pantheism a proto-Jungian archetype theory in its own right.

They were also well aware of the powers of “fascination”, which they

attributed to rays of “spirit directed from the eyes of the enchanter.”

These magicians were monistic in their philosophy; subjective visions

were as important as objective phenomenon. They can perhaps be

criticized for not caring to differentiate between the two.

The crystal ball and the dark speculum (mirror) were their

most important items of ritual equipment. Their use was linked to

theories of celestial rays, planetary sympathies and the like, but the

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actual operations and the effects achieved were hypnotic. And yet, in

Victorian times, Arthur Edward Waite called such techniques “minor

hypnotic processes.” How little he understood. (8.)

Mesmerism

This “spirit theory” in magick and hypnosis was revived in a different

form 300 years after Ficino by the Viennese physician Franz Anton

Mesmer. He called it “animal magnetism.” In “The Age of Reason”

spirit could no longer be directed by the singing of Orphic hymns

under the influence of appropriate planets. The 1780’s demanded a

pseudo-scientific approach. Although Mesmer was a keen student of

the Renaissance alchemist Paracelsus, and a believer in astrology –

theorizing that the flow of magnetic fluid in the human body was

effected by planetary positions – he succumbed to the 18 th century’s

passion for toot-whistle tinkering by having his subjects sit with their

feet in tubs of water filled with iron filings and bundles of jointed iron

rods. With a flair for the dramatic and, according to his critics, a

penchant for hocus-pocus, Mesmer and his fellow magnetizers

beguiled Europe for the next 50 years with their miracle cures and

spectacular demonstrations of trance induction.

Mesmerism has been completely discredited by the medical

profession and the scientific community – in my opinion

undeservedly. Because of its importance in magick, we should pause in

our brief chronology to take note of how it differs from modern

concepts of hypnosis. The current popular notion , still hanging on

from medical propaganda predating World War I, is that the hypnotist

has no “power”. He guides a willing subject into a trance state and the

“suggests” that the subject use his own powers to achieve whatever

effect is wanted, providing that effect is also desired by the subject

himself.

According to this conception, a snake hypnotizes a bird by

first gaining the bird’s confidence. Next he asks the bird to relax

completely. He then suggests to the bird that it actually wants to

become the snake’s dinner. This ploy cannot possibly succeed because

deep down inside the bird knows that it wants to fly away from the

snake . . . And yet snakes have been hypnotizing and eating birds for a

good many years. The rejoinder that “animals are different from

humans” is not good enough. The point is that there is a big gray area

where some of Mesmer’s ideas may still be valid. It is important to

note that some psychologists who use hypnosis do not share such out-

dated views on its limitations. Men like Dr. Milton Erickson will

frankly admit that they don’t know what they do or how they do it.

Many of Erickson’s colleagues refuse to shake hands with him out of a

certain reluctance to experience his “hypnotic touch.”

I submit that there probably is a form of life energy that is

capable of manipulation and even transmission. To totally discount the

work of such sincere and qualified researchers as von Richenbach (odic

force), Reich (orgone energy) and, more recently, Thelma Moss

(Kirilian photography) and the bio-magneticists on this subtle form of

energy would be frankly reactionary (an anathema in politics but a

praiseworthy attitude in science).

The Mesmerists held that a magnetizer was a person of great

energy with a talent for influencing others. He could accumulate and

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