HYPNOTISING HYPNOTISTS IS EASY
The Search for Cosmic Consciousness – Ormond McGill, PhD, and Shelley Stockwell, PhD
Ormond McGill (1913-2005) was an American stage hypnotist, magician, and trainer who haunts the Cosmic Pancakes! blog with his prolific, and surprising, hypnotic omnipresence.
He’s been on my mind because I’ve been rather immersed in Victorian and Edwardian concepts of mesmerism/hypnotism recently. Back in this ‘golden age’ of mind-meddling, and particularly in Britain, women hypnotists, and women with ‘magnetic’ powers generally, were taboo. They were foul temptresses to be warded off; they were blasphemous harbingers of doom; they were danger-whores whose rightful fate was death… or, at least, vanishment.
Sometimes I get so into the forgotten women behind the fictional damsels of hypnotism that I force myself to imagine McGill’s wife, Delight, pushing me back through the painted veil – and into one of the couple’s, I’m sure legendary, 70s cocktail parties. I picture myself sipping a glass of rum punch and marvelling at the tripe and tinned veg artfully suspended in an aspic jelly, while Ormond’s eclectic, somewhat louche, American guests admire Delight’s seashell collection. It somehow psychically cleanses me of whatever unholy hangups god-fearing Victorian men had about women wielding such powers of manipulation here in my home country.
Indeed, McGill’s stage hypnotism and hypnotherapy seem wholly welcoming of women – no matter how overtly witchy or woo-woo his work gets. I guess that’s the appeal of US-spawned popular, inclusive hypnotism movements versus the solitary, static white male gatekeeping that has shaped UK and European memes. I went cruising for a dose of ‘OMG’ to remind myself, as we usher in the Earth year of 2025, that a woman ‘Svengali’ would simply be a zeitgeisty pop-culture moment; not the grim ‘irl’ destruction and doom promised by Fallen Angel situationships!
I could not help but wonder, as I scrolled online bookstores, if I should first be studying McGill’s How To Produce Miracles or The Secret World of Witchcraft..? Just to make sure? Alas, they are expensive and rare magic tomes that I shall someday need to steal someday. So instead I picked up The Search for Cosmic Consciousness – the hypnosis book that Albert Einstein himself would have “loved”, according to the sales strap-line! With passing yourself off as a bona fide atheist-psychologist all the rage among modern magicians, mentalists, and showman-hypnotists, I was intrigued to see that OMG had added a ‘PhD’ to his name* – and had teamed up with A Woman; Shelley Stockwell, also PhD.
Published in 2001 in McGill’s home state of California, this is a new-agey self-help guide, with suggestions and self-hypnosis(ish) scripts for achieving higher ‘cosmic consciousness’ of the fifth dimension. McGill, aged 86 at the time of writing, may be present more in spirit than in pages. Stockwell was an established hypnotherapist, trainer, and speaker, as well as a psychology PhD, who was (according to her bio) popular on US cable television and radio at the time. The back of the book features 28 pages of adverts for books, audios, and videos sold by Stockwell and McGill, as joint and individual products, spanning sex, sports performance, and past lives. It feels very much as if the pair were following the profitability and brand-building of neuro-linguistic programming, but mashed up with Stockwell’s search for magic and enlightenment.
Stockwell is a fun character. “She collects turtles and likes to laugh” is the key takeaway from her biography. There’s not much credibility or substance to the book; just plenty of butterfly photos and inspirational Einstein quotes. She seems, to me, to tap enlightenment-‘lite’; an accessible yet still capitalistic Americanisation of Eastern philosophies. For instance, following your “desires” can be a complex and nuanced journey. But, according to Stockwell’s bouncy, simplistic positivity, it’s more akin to New Thought’s take on ‘the law of attraction’.
Using the power of ‘The Hypnotist’ meme and ‘the law of attraction’ to sell hopes, dreams, miracles, and muff-scented candles for selling’s sake is what gives gurus – particularly female ones – a bad rep. But is Stockwell yet another unholy lady-hypnotist-business-magnate… or just a rogue, um, poet (!) sneaking her art into the world using hypnotism as a front?!
Stockwell remains an apparent pillar of the US hypnotism community as founder of the International Hypnosis Federation. So I’ll have to use the one Einstein-worthy hypnotic invention I found in her book – ‘parallel life’ hypnotic regression/progression – to wonder what literal biblical carnage her poems could have unleashed upon the US population in 2001 had Ormond McGill failed to intervene. Mercifully, he provided Shelley with effortless fame and fortune – and, I’m sure, flattery and perhaps a few sexual favours, etc – to prevent the ‘herstory’ poetic enlightenment from upsetting men to death, as has been The Magician’s sacred task since the ‘Big Wand Energy’ days of pointy hats and Fantasia.
Perhaps The Secrets of Hypnotizing Women, helpfully written by Shelley, might provide any Victorian-minded male hypnotists with some clues as to how he kept this naughty rotten rhymer in check..?
Do be sure to read The Secrets of Hypnotizing Men – also by Shelley – first though.
*Thanks to WordWeaver for sharing that McGill was awarded an honorary PhD in hypnotherapy by St John University of Louisiana in 1996. I hope I someday get awarded honorary degrees in hypnotherapy.
