EMPOWERED
Overpowered! The Science and Showbiz of Hypnosis – Christopher Green
It’s not my intention to write about many books by contemporary authors. But this book is special to me.
And, more importantly, if I’m to lure some of you down the hypno-history rabbit hole alongside me, then it’s helpful for me to point you towards my White Rabbit.
To cut a long story short, I’m a writer who went mad and thought they’d ‘invented’ hypnosis.
But I had neither language nor direction for ‘my discovery’; that is, until famous UK ‘psychological illusionist’ Derren Brown appeared as a surprise guest speaker at a philosophy conference I was attending way back in 2015.
Prior to that, like many people, I found hypnosis kind of icky.
Hypnosis, to me, was the Scooby Doo evil hypno-clown. Or Paul McKenna making men dance like ballerinas on Saturday night telly via some mysterious process too diabolical to show.
I didn’t watch, or pay heed to, Derren at the time of broadcast. And I doubt I’d even heard of ‘hypnotherapy’.
In short, there was a period in my journey towards hypnosis, mid-2015 to late 2016, where I was not drawn to it at all.
Instead, I gravitated towards the occult.
I was reading about Rasputin, Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff and All The Cult Leaders. I was attending cheese and wine soirees at The Atlantis Bookshop in London, where I rubbed shoulders with chaos magicians, witches and Druids, and resisted the recruitment efforts of various factions of the OTO. And I was quite, quite mad.
Serendipitously – probably through the power of Facebook’s ‘events you might be interested in’ algorithm – I got wind of a Fortean Times lecture on a new book by… a hypnotist.
The publicity pictures from Christopher’s retro-hypno-adventures in the British Library were precisely the kind of weird I’d been seeking, but hadn’t found, in my brushes with modern hypnotists and hypnotherapy.
The lecture – and my subsequently purchased copy of their book – detailed their time as artist-in-residence at the British Library, exploring the art and science of hypnotism.
I fell in love with the weird and wonderful past of this field there and then.
This book gave me permission to question – and laugh at – narratives and claims about hypnosis, past, present and future, and to explore this wonderland for myself.
Plus, in a field dominated by men, going down the hypno-history rabbit hole sure is empowering next time someone’s mansplaining an (inaccurate) popular potted history of Mesmer & Co!
If you’re curious about Christopher, I made a little YouTube playlist of their hypnosis-related stuff here and their 2014 ‘change | phenomena’ lecture is available to buy here.
I also wrote on our ‘About’ page how this lecture and book inspired Cosmic Pancakes! itself.
So: thank you, Christopher!
