SHIP OF THESEUS
Hypnotism and the Supernormal – Simeon Edmunds
Scientist and educator Carl Sagan famously said of books:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
But I have always found madly marked and annotated books to be an extra layer of magic – a wholly unclear and shouty trip inside the mind of a mysterious former reader…
Imagine my delight, then, when cruising our hypno-bookshelf for my next book, on noticing Kev had bought a duplicate, though different, copy of last week’s read – and then finding all manner of remarks inside it!
This is the 1967 reprint of Simeon Edmunds’ 1961 book Hypnotism and the Supernormal. There’s nothing of note from last time, aside from the groovier cover. No, what interests us is what was going on in the mind of the previous reader…
And, ooh..! It’s all very S inside. S is a book co-authored by JJ Abrams that is simultaneously a novel, Ship of Theseus, as well as a multi-layered, multi-coloured mystery puzzle being solved by two readers corresponding via ‘their’ library copy in in-book notes. Similarly, our reader had green and red biros, and a pencil to hand, often mixing them all, for an aesthetically pleasing if (to me) nonsensical marking system.
“They kept the ‘toy duck’. Some people are now trying to throw this away as well,” remarks the first page, in relation to “basic facts of hypnosis” being underlined.
Various lines and asterisks indicate an interest in Christ-like miracles, and a questioning of non-fantastical theories of hypnosis and parapsychology.
In response to a passage about someday reaching a “true understanding” of hypnotism, our reader gives us a glimpse of the scale of their ambition. “A better understanding. Could you get an ultimate understanding? If you could, you would no longer be limited to your present body and mind – this is possible according to some ideas.”
The page on drugs to induce hypnosis muses about a “very hard knock on the head with a hammer” as an alternative route to ‘relaxation’!
“I may mention that I do not possess a spirit brother,” is intriguingly underlined in red. Spiritualism and telepathy seem of especial interest – a Michael Faraday quote is, effectively, told off for not investigating ‘table tipping’ properly.
As a writer and editor, I particularly enjoyed the entirely subjective and stylistic ‘corrections’ throughout, as well as the questions on meaning for the author and quoted authors.
The conclusion is marked with four different thicknesses of red lines for reasons that will remain a mystery. As will what Christ-like and parapsychological miracles our intrepid amateur hypnotist performed – all, presumably, with the aid of their trusty hypno-hammer…
