BLACK SHEEP
The Law of Suggestion – Santanelli
I opened this book with relish. I’d been tipped off about Santanelli, aka James H Loryea, by a magician I’m in occasional correspondence with.
Hailing from a Jewish immigrant family who introduced the Turkish Hammam baths to the US and who have a notable connection to tattooing, Loryea seems to have been the black sheep of the family. After falling out with his stepmother and siblings, he jacked in his job as a clerk at the baths to travel late-1800s America demonstrating hypnosis as “Professor Santanelli”.
I was sent a colourful contemporary newspaper clipping where James Minnock, Santanelli’s hypnotic-‘horse’ (a stooge-assistant who travelled with the show), accused him of subjecting him to the classic pre-show hypnotic sleep spectacle in dangerous caged conditions. Minnock spent 120 hours feigning a hypnotic sleep, unable to eat, drink or relieve himself as per their usual subterfuge. This was not what Minnock had agreed to, and, feeling betrayed by his friend, he was set on vengeance and destroying Santanelli’s public image.
(Or in Minnock’s own words: “Santanelli, on the outside of that accursed cage, with throwing as beautiful a bluff as was ever seen. But while he did the scientific heavy on a full stomach I planned my little game. It was to do him up as brown as a butter-cake and then to take a fall out of every loud-mouthed fakir in the country. […] I’m simply living on vengeance, and I like the diet.” Newspaper quotes just ain’t what they used to be, hey.)
The magician noted that this book contained great pictures of Santanelli’s stage hypnosis feats and so I duly booped the button on my purchase. I was hopeful The Law of Suggestion would offer an insight into the highs and lows of life of a turn-of-the-century travelling hypnotist.
I screwed up from the get-go because this is a 1980s reprint of Santanelli’s 1902 publication, and so it’s devoid of any pictures aside from the portrait of our author. However, let’s take a moment to appreciate the weird child-flower cover art – the colour combination makes my eyes water and I like how lazily an artist has interpreted the ‘man-nature-suggestion’ theme.
This is a mad book. The publisher was moved to reprint Santanelli’s work because they apparently find his genius and insight comparable to the likes of Gurdjieff, and of a prescience that still won’t have caught up with him come the year 2000. I’m by no means an expert, but I’m not sure Gurdjieff would find this mash-up of stray philosophy, repetitive anecdotes, showbiz recollections, and adventures in amateur gynaecology, a favourable affiliation.
The book is divided into sections titled: ‘Hypnosis’, ‘Mind’, ‘Heredity’, ‘Suggestion’, and ‘Words’. But I can’t say this particularly helped me navigate Santanelli’s thoughts and ideas. It’s just sort of a litany of individual paragraphs entered under different sub-headers; sometimes stream of consciousness and linked; other times like a stray diary entry – all a tonal and thematic mess.
I think Santanelli’s central philosophy can be summarised as: ‘something-something-man-nature-suggestion-free-will-suggestion-something’. But perhaps me and 2022 still haven’t caught up with his wisdom. Admittedly, there are some novel insights – for instance, that “[m]an does not “think”, he realizes.” Or that suggestions are always in the positive: your hand is ‘down’, rather than ‘not up’. But tired and mad metaphors outweigh these novelties: man is like a phonograph; man is like a typewriter; “the eye blinks every time one gets a different or new thought”; man is a tube; you get two new pairs of eyes each year so don’t need glasses...
One of the ways in which Santanelli is very much in sync with the modern age, however, is his disdain for doctors and drugs. He’s a big fan of the sarcastic deployment of the parenthetical question-mark to undermine otherwise apparently factual and informational content: “doctors(?)”, “experts(?)”, “learned professionals(?)”, etc.
Vaccines are a particular source of ire. He cannot abide introducing “germs” and “bugs” into the body, claiming again and again that most conditions, from syphilis to smallpox, are all in the mind, and that those few cases that are real can invariably be easily solved via circumcision and/or eliminating pork from the diet. He states he’d happily murder anyone seeking to inoculate his family against smallpox.
In defending against things like the Minnock cage stunt or a scandal involving a young woman he recruited as a hypnotic subject, Santanelli gives us glimpses into the life of a turn-of-the-century travelling hypnotist. For example, the qualities and shelf-life of a ‘hypnotic horse’ is someone who: “generally possesses a good singing voice, the ability to make stump speeches, or with a humorous personality. Never of any use after a year, as he gets so at home in “hypnosis” that the public will no longer accept him as “hypnotized”.”
But it’s more sour grapes than showbizzy. Additionally, Santanelli exposes himself as a cruel and unusual person – his antidote to curing a child of a fear of dogs and bad infection following a bite is for their mother to give them a severe spanking. I suppose superseding a traumatic dog bite with, to the child, nonsensical parental abuse is, indeed, likely to dispel a dog phobia and provoke rapid healing of the bite wound – with lifelong human trauma of zero interest. Spanking children is a recurring theme. And the book is full of repetitive yet devilishly detailed nuances of suggestion that demonstrate this kind of thinking: Santanelli has thought long and hard about how to make something granular stick or work – but with a breathtaking disregard for the humanity in receipt of his fleeting and isolated ingenuity.
What is troubling is that Santanelli’s experiments were, according to him, not confined to the stage and mind. He states that he performs operations on hypnotised subjects of an ‘orifical’, gynaecological nature – he’s an exponent of male and female circumcision, and can attribute a whole heap of female mental afflictions to ‘scarring’ of a cervix in need of a good scraping. He holds abhorrent views on subduing the USA’s relatively newly freed Black people through such means.
All in all, Santanelli strikes me as rather ghastly. It is increasingly strange to me that we reference – and celebrate – the ‘Golden Age Magician’ archetype without questioning what views they held. Quaint and amusing references such as this reinforce the memes upon which that archetype is built and maintained – but reading Santanelli made me realise that fact is far worse than the fiction.
(Oh, and Santinelli also temporarily ruined pork products for me, which was impractical in my marriage to Kev – especially on car journeys where M&S pork pies and party eggs are a prerequisite. So I rehypnotised myself to accept pig snacks because I’ll be damned if a man comes between me and a bacon sandwich.)
