The boy in my lap had no idea who I was and didn’t know why he was in a strange house, naked under a light blanket, surrounded by candles, but—perhaps because he was still in a light trance—he wasn’t afraid. “Hi, Zack.” I said. “You don’t know me, yet, but you will in about ten years. My name’s Saul, and I’m a magician. I’ve brought you forward through time.”

I had just performed the most successful operation of my magical career, and for the next four hours my boyfriend’s body was inhabited by a teenager I had never met, a person whose body language, vocal affect and vocabulary had unmistakably changed, who reminded me of someone I loved but who was definitely—so long as my enchantment, that thirty minutes of hypnosis, held—no longer the same. The operation had been simple: After a short induction I invited PJ to imagine moving through a pillow fort, picking up objects from their past as they went. They put on a backpack and an old hoodie, picked up a sketchbook, and emerged from trance as a stranger. He didn’t know how to work the lightswitches in our house; he couldn’t open his own phone. PJ had been immensely stoned when we began, barely able to keep their eyes open; when Zach came back from the past he was sober, energetic and alert. The weed pen he found in his pocket—which I had to explain to him—made his eyes turn red, something I’d never seen happen to the current instantiation of my boyfriend. I showed him the music he would make, the drawings, his room, his olympic-white Jazzmaster. “This is who you’re going to be,” I told him, “The kind of person you’re already turning into. I wanted you to know it’s going to be OK.”

When he put his head back in my lap, I put an amulet around his neck and explained what was about to happen, that I would start counting backward from ten and he would sink back down, back to his own time. I said he might not remember what had happened, that it might be like waking up from a dream—but that even dreams we can’t remember have the power to change us, to change everything. “I’m going to miss you,” he said, and went to sleep.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Another deep, deep breath. And you’re back with me.

• ●●

What I want to emphasize here is that I am not a master hypnotist and PJ is not unusually susceptible to hypnosis; I am, in fact, a rank amateur. The result I obtained wasn’t dependent on surpassing magical or technical skill: This is the kind of thing any magically operant person can do with no tools and a few not-especially-sophisticated techniques you can learn in an afternoon. Although I am increasingly convinced that hypnosis is magic—and that many magical practices, from petitions to goetic invocations, operate by the same mechanisms as does hopelessly disenchanted clinical hypnotherapy—what I would like to do here is lay out a few hypnotic techniques from the perspective of a magical practitioner and provide enough material for you to attempt a few experiments of your own. I find that this stuff is a bit like astrology or Black Eyed Children: The more you think about it the more you will find, to your surprise, that you have evoked it into your instantiation ov Consensus.

Basic Hypnotic Techniques From a Magical Standpoint

The hypnotic operation is extremely simple and it is always the same. Hypnotists frequently express their surprise at how many things all seem to work, how little anything depends on the details but how much depends on the confidence of the practitioner; and I could rewrite this statement, of course, using the word “magical” and “magicians” instead. In fact, if you have made any advancement at all in the foundational techniques of magic—trance, the use of Names and barbarous words, sigilization, the writing of prayers and incantations, even the light flow-state we arrive at when working on craft projects or magical art—you have obtained, by other names, the essential skills of a hypnotist; even more excitingly, the hypnotist’s skillset is exceptionally appropriate to the magical practitioner in her role as healer and wonderworker. The practice of magic using hypnotic techniques is a technical approach that brings easy and immediate power to an active spiritual life; the practice of hypnosis as magic is a way to openly and confidently practice thaumaturgy on others’ behalf, since its techniques are the techniques of magic, wonderfully and cunningly disguised.

Induction. Every hypnotic operation begins with the breath, with altering consciousness through the slowing and regulation of breathing—this is the beginning of the ritual, immediately familiar to us. The client is invited to sit comfortably—which is a command, one of the first of many—and to breathe; the hypnotist begins to speak of relaxation, to direct the breath, to link the breath to certain sensations, and so on. The client expects that they will enter a trance, even not knowing what that means; so the hypnotist tells them that they will enter a trance. When something changes in the client’s body, they recognize this as a trance, whatever that is, and they know that the hypnotist’s voice will have a certain power over them in this condition. The Alexandrian who has sought the service of a hellenistic magician has very similar expectations: The practitioner will do certain things, they themself will experience certain sensations, and the magician’s voice will have a certain power in that space. “ΑΒΛΑΝΘΑΝΑΛΒΑ,” says the Hellenistic wonderworker. “Ten times deeper, twenty times deeper, entering a very warm, very comfortable trance,” says the hypnotist.

To perform a hypnotic induction, control the breath. Slow it; name it; use language to describe and thereby command the body’s relaxation, its change in state. Declare that these things mean that there is a change in consciousness, that a trance is coming. You are creating a charmed circle—the act of hypnosis begins as soon as the client has decided that you are going to hypnotize them. Everything you do contributes to this, in exactly the same way that candles and suffumigations, the use of lustral waters and the creation of magical circles contributes to the magical act in our paradigm. The client expects counting, so the hypnotist counts; they could as well be reciting a psalm or humming a bar of music—the result would be the same. For my part, I was furious to discover that it is actually very easy to enter a trance—that anyone can do it, often without meaning to—and that magical gnosis feels remarkably similar to being in a light hypnotic state. Worst of all: The recognizable, bodily trance that we induce this way may not even be necessary for hypnotic operations to work. The confidence of the practitioner is, somehow, enough.

Once the client has been inducted—and there are dozens of ways to do this, some as famously simple as a handshake[1]—she is ready to receive suggestions.

Hypnotic suggestion. It is immediately obvious that hypnotic suggestion only works because the subject has decided that the experience she is having means that some kind of change will occur; otherwise our dreams would program us, conversations overheard while dozing off on the couch would program us, we would be a mess of confused and conflicted internalized compulsions. The simplicity of delivering a suggestion teaches us something about magic: The hypnotist simply declares that something is so, or that it might be so, and—as if by magic—the client discovers that it is so, just as expected. There is absolutely no trick to this: It is artless. Advanced techniques involve embedding suggestions into shaggy dog stories, into analogies from the client’s experiences, into wordplay and homophones and so on. A cynical magician might begin to think that all this is just a way to bolster the hypnotist’s confidence in the same way that lengthy prayers and invocations are more for our benefit than for the sake of the angels or thoughtforms we address.

Here repetition is useful for its numbing effect, for its uncanny ability to convince by exhaustion, for the illusion of hard work to which contemporary humans are addicted. All of this is exactly analogous to declaring “By the burning of this candle I do destroy my enemies” or to deciding that an egg rolled over the body has removed an evil influence: Hypnotists and magicians alike believe in the fundamental, transformative power of language, of symbols, of the power to declare and decree a thing in full faith that reality will follow suit. During this process, the client passively accepts what she hears, following the language of the hypnotist in an unresisting, pleasant condition of belief; It seems clear to me that this is precisely the same kind of activity as we engage in when writing out a petition statement until the syllables become meaningless or holding a sigil in our minds without thinking about its significance—these are magicians’ tricks to engender the basic and powerful belief that our activities depend on. Hypnosis demonstrates that this belief can be created just by informing someone that they will, for a certain time, simply believe whatever they hear.

To deliver a hypnotic suggestion, assert that a thing is so. To coöpt the belief of the client and distract her psychic censor, couple these assertions with rich sensory detail; draw from memory, engage the client in active imagination, repeat yourself in many ways. As in the construction of sigils, avoid negative statements.^[2]

Returning to normal consciousness. In the same way that a practitioner needs to explicitly close a ritual and perform certain actions to return to normal consciousness—grounding and centering, by whatever name—the hypnotic operation needs to be closed and the client returned to a normal condition. Just as in magic, the close of the operation is significantly less elaborate than its beginnings; to simply count up from one to ten is enough. Again, direction of the breath is simple and effective: It became slower when she entered trance; in making it more rapid she is invigorated and returns to normal consciousness. These practices exist not because it is difficult to leave trance—god knows we’ve all had our magical trances ruined by a roommate or an unwelcome noise—but because humans find a lack of boundaries to be uncomfortable. By clearly demarcating the end of the hypnotic operation the client is able to participate in a transition from one state to another and is allowed to confirm, once more, that the hypnotist has exerted supernatural control over her experience of reality.

To comfortably end a trance, declare that the client will soon return from her trance state and return to normal consciousness feeling refreshed and alert. Then direct a change in the breath, describing the sensations of returning from trance as you do so. Counting upward is an easy way to provide a structured return to normal consciousness, but this, again, could be done any number of ways.

Posthypnotic triggers. The magical name, the word of power, the reality-warping gesture: These are the archetypical possessions of the magician, and hypnotic techniques can be used to give them an immediacy, a reality, that confirms and empowers our participation in an enchanted world. Although the hypnotist may choose to focus on the use of narrative and internal ritual to create long-term change, the design and arrangement of posthypnotic triggers—words or gestures that cause an immediate response in a client who is no longer in trance—create resources for deployment in particular situations such as relaxation in the face of anxiety, a burst of energy, or an erotic response. These look, from a magical perspective, exactly like charms and words of power—which they are.

To create posthypnotic triggers, describe them while the client is in trance. Declare that a particular thing means that another thing will occur. Play through it while the client is in trance; assert that this will be the case even once she has returned to normal consciousness. In my experience, posthypnotic triggers are most dramatic for five to twenty minutes; afterward their effects begin to fade.

Hypnosis for thee Practitioner

 Experiment one: Invoking trance states. If you are struggling to reliably enter trance states when your practice calls for it, here is a weird trick from the hypnotic repertoire: A standard hypnotist’s technique is to draw the subject’s attention toward the sensations in the body that happen to arise while she is experiencing an induction and to assert that these are both the signs of and gateways into trance. Notice that my wording is intentionally vague: Not sensations provoked by the induction but any sensations at all. This chicanery is the mechanism of the standard script: “You might notice certain sensations in your arms and legs, perhaps a lightness, perhaps a warmth on the skin; and as you experience these sensations you fall more deeply into a very comfortable, very deep trance . . . ” This is bog-standard chaos magic, very Alan Chapman, deciding that one thing means the same thing as another.^[3]

This becomes exceptionally useful once you have experienced trance on your own terms enough times to know what it feels like for you specifically, meaning that you can both recognize and remember those sensations. When they are present you can name them and thereby deepen them; when they aren’t, you can name them and thereby cause them to occur. Trance can be invoked—exactly like a spirit—in exactly this way; silently assert that you are experiencing in your body what you would experience if you were entering a trance and, lo, you will discover that you are soon experiencing them—and entering a trance. For me this looks something like this:

There is a lightness in my hands as I feel warmer and more liquid. As my hands and arms grow lighter and warmer I notice certain sensations in my body and I enter trance, going deeper into trance with every breath, breathing in as my hands feel lighter and warmer and as my legs begin to feel different than they did before, becoming very comfortable, very light, and as I enter a deeper state of trance I notice certain sensations in my body, a certain skewing of all things to the left, a certain warmth and displacement and lightness in my head . . . 

 . . .  and so on. You might observe that this is effectively a kind of patter, a babble that doesn’t need to be true in order to work; because it is so banal it requires no effort and its flatness, its artlessness, is itself effective in obtaining the result.

I find that using facts about my actual experience of trance, such as that sensation of skewedness, uses my memories of successful trance inductions to create more of the same in a very easy and productive feedback loop. If this feels offensively unaesthetic, that’s because it is—fortunately, with a little practice, I can knock off the verbal noise and accomplish the same goals by silent attention to the sensations themselves in the same way as I direct attention to my breath.^[4] This can absolutely be performed with much grander language: Behold, the breath ov Hoor-Pa-Kraat, or whatever, riseth up in my thews; open are the double doors of the horizon, unlocked are its gates, I am a very serious magician, abracablahblahblah . . .

Experiment two: Arm levitation. The fact of the matter is that I need to be constantly, emphatically reminded that magic works; the arm levitation induction is a standard part of the hypnotist’s repertoire because it provides a sledgehammer-to-the- head demonstration that something is happening. This sort of thing jingles keys in front of the practitioner loudly enough for magic to occur without our interference, which, I find, is the core mechanism of all our most arcane and thunderous techniques. This is one of those cheap tricks I mentioned: When you feel your body begin to behave strangely you will begin to believe that anything is possible—and then it will be.

This has been written up in a hundred ways by a hundred hypnotists so I will not exhaust you with instructions.^[5] In the standard version you will enter a light trance and talk to yourself about how there is a balloon tethered to your fingertip, asserting that you can feel it tugging upward, that your arm is becoming lighter and lighter etcetera; and then, to your great delight, all of this will happen. Similar techniques involve the hands joining as though there were magnets in the palms; and so on. Please feel free to imagine instead that VII The Chariot is tied to your fingers by the reins or that our friend Baphomet has you by the wrist—have fun with it.

I have recently been working on enchanting an Air tool, a banishing bell, using exactly this mechanism: As I work on it the bell becomes lighter and lighter, eventually seeming to levitate in my hands, pulling my arms into the air as I blast it with invoking pentagrams and what-have-you. I have found this especially rewarding because it will not do so unless I’m doing a good job: Whatever deeply-buried part of me actually knows when magic is happening has weaponized the cheap hypnotic trick to give me a reliable sense of my own progress. Interestingly, when I am not in a trance state I can still feel cool air swirling around the bell when I touch it, which strikes me as a nice illustration of the blurred boundary between posthypnotic suggestion and effective object-level enchantment.

Experiment three: Thee Cheapest Trick^[6], with corollaries. When the body enters trance the eyes have a tendency to roll back in the head. In a very similar vein to experiment one, this can be exploited in reverse: To rapidly enter trance, alter your breathing as you ordinarily do. For the sake of distraction, vividly imagine a scene, a tone, or some other sensory detail that you can sustain and use as a misdirection while your body does what it needs to do. On the inbreath, roll your eyes from left to right, strenuously enough that it’s a little uncomfortable. While at the top of the breath, roll them again. When releasing, roll them a third time. Then, as you take another breath, roll your eyes as far back as you can—enough to cause yourself fatigue—and hold them there through the top of the breath cycle, counting down from five to one. At one, give yourself whatever command you like—“Sleep!” for instance, or “Float!” or “ΕΙ ΙΕΟΥ ὙΠΝΕ”—exhale—and let your eyes relax. If you are already in a tranquil state this will reliably knock you into a light trance.

What aggravating nonsense like this demonstrates is, again, that bodily sensation is a useful tool when altering states of consciousness; but more interestingly it points toward use of voces magicae as hypnotic triggers—or vice versa—as shortcuts to mind control and metamorphosis in the sense of Pete Carroll.^[7] Setting up trigger phrases is immensely rewarding, and it’s hard to feel more like an actual pointy-hatted Wizard than when those hypnotic triggers are also magical words in their own right—verbal sigils, god-names or words of power. I absolutely decline to draw a distinction between hypnosis and magic here: I just encourage you to try hypnotic programming to the effect of “When I vibrate ARARITA I will notice certain sensations, and as those sensations intensify my hexagram will blaze with power . . . ” in order to supercharge your experience of magic—and therefore your ability to execute that magic.

Experiment four: Shaggy Dog Stories. Milton Erickson—a hypnotist who was primarily a wizard in exactly the way that Jung was a psychiatrist who was primarily a wizard—was known for telling meandering, symbolic stories at the beginning of client sessions; he would finish telling the story, the befuddled client would ask when the hypnotism would begin, Erickson would explain that the session was over and the client would walk out of the office cured. As practitioners, this behavior looks immediately and obviously familiar. In my opinion, having read demonstrations of this technique, it is obviously the case that this doesn’t work because of precious manipulation of the language into a kind of subtle code; no, the story itself is magic and draws its power from symbolic manipulation rather than cheap neurolinguistic tricks. These stories can be crude allegories or as cryptic and Borgesian as you like: It doesn’t seem to matter. This is, for us, an aesthetic jackpot—your opportunity to create a hypnotic experience that feels like magic, your magic. Mine are a bit cottagecore, a bit fairy-story, but you should absolutely go nuts: treat it like a sigil, start from this story means that I will receive a message from my HGA and go from there. One time in Seattle I watched a frog watch itself in the dewdrops on a watch-face . . .  The details don’t matter—you’ll know what you need to say in the same way you know how to set up an altar or what your daily card pull means.^[8]

Experiment five: Thee Voice. If you find yourself with a friend or partner that lets you experiment on them, you might eventually discover that you can give them suggestions simply by changing the tone of your voice. I absolutely have a Hypnotist Voice—distinct, that is, from my normal affect—which is a lot of fun in domestic situations. Why should “vibrating god names” be any different? Try cultivating a specific tone of voice that makes it clear that what appears to be a run-of-the-mill Thunderous Invocation is actually, in fact, self-hypnosis: Make a subject of yourself. The delight here is that, again, it doesn’t matter at all what is actually going on: Is it hypnosis? Is it “vibrating” the syllables of a prayer? Who cares! Nothing is true, everything is permitted—and it works. Do this with your magical practice for a little while, then try doing it for mundane things: I feel like getting started on my taxes, you say into your coffee, casually. It’d be very easy to get that done today. And look at you, off to the tax prep software. OK, so your hypnosis-magic is working—now what? Flip the context again. Apo pantos kakodaimonos, you roar, doing that thing with your throat that you do—and suddenly it hits different. Success!

On Trickery

The charlatan-magus spectrum, with Le Bateleur on one end and The Magician on the other, has recently^[9] been under reëxamination in the circles I move in—that mundane illusion and flimflam not only contributes to belief in the client but engenders power in the magician herself; that moreover high strangeness itself is attracted to trickery, that thaumaturgy might require fraud as the price of admission into a more magical world. In this spirit, let me exhort you toward the virtues of self-deception for the sake of Thee Great Work.

I am told that in New England spiritualist circles the most obvious and hackneyed parlor tricks are still deployed at the beginning of séances. These rituals are held and attended by true believers who have repeatedly experienced the visible manifestation of spirits. Notice that I say the beginning of the séance—because after the conclusion of these formalities comes the inexplicable. Objects are apported; ectoplasm spills from the mouth of the medium; impossible knowledge is transmitted. No, the charlatanry is not there in place of occult power—it is there to produce it. For some reason—ridiculously, insultingly—trickery is a ritual act. As such I invite you to consider hypnotic techniques as a means by which the practitioner may knowingly deceive herself in the pursuit of magical attainments.

I am increasingly convinced that a kind of insane, cretinous confidence is the necessary spiritual perfection that magic requires of us. When the practitioner exhausts her own desire to distinguish between magical result and coincidence she has created the charmed circle in which the power of consensus reality is broken; I speak, I suppose, less of a lack of judgment than a sustained and effortless yes, yes to magic, yes to the will, yes to the unseen world. So this, then, is my proposition: Accept that hypnosis is a set of ridiculous tricks, that it is a cheap and insipid exploit of the human hardware, that it bypasses the sick stupid demiurge-poisoned security system of the personality and produces result without attainment, magic without insight, behavior modification without wisdom—that it is rightly the purview of extremely divorced men with pinky-rings and a certain raw-scrubbed grindset earnestness. Yes, good—and it works, just as magic works so effortlessly when we stop applying our little notions about Truth to our experiences; and the most absurd trick of all is to allow magic to creep up behind you as you manipulate the brightly-colored trash on your conjurer’s table. Here, then, is trickery: Use it fortunately, friend.

Footnotes

^[1]        See, for example, Mark Carich and Mark Becker’s “A Brief Review of the Key Hypnotic Elements of Milton H. Erickson’s Handshake Technique.”

^[2]        Presented as the transcript of a seminar, Grinder’s Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis is out-of-print but regarded as an outstanding and comprehensive introduction to this material.

^[3]        My thinking about the core mechanism of magic is lifted more or less entirely from Alan Chapman’s Advanced Magick for Beginners.

^[4]        Relatedly, I don’t think that it’s clear to occidental magicians why, specifically, the Gyan mudra is so useful in meditation; since I haven’t seen this explained in the sort of media we consume, here’s a secret: The sensation of your fingertips pressing together is a point of focus, a distraction of the same sort as “return your attention to the breath.” If you meditate while seated in a chair you can do something similar by focusing on the point of contact between the soles of your feet and the floor.

^[5]        Detailed and useful instructions for techniques of this type are given in Anthony Jacquin’s charmingly amoral Reality is Plastic, which at the time of this writing can be easily found online.

^[6]        I learned this from the hypnotist Alan Nerenberg, who demonstrates his “Float Induction” on YouTube.

^[7]        As described in Peter J. Carroll’s Liber MMM.

^[8]        Once you have gotten into the habit of designing these stories for your own use or use on others, try entering a trance with your result in mind but no particular plans for the shaggy dog story: Begin telling yourself your stupid little yarn and let it just unroll however it likes. Passively allow yourself to carry the story to its turgid conclusion without judgment or intervention; see what you produce. Then, carry details of the story back with you and manifest them somehow—through art, for instance, or cunning arrangement of circumstances. Play with symbols. Symbolize symbols with other symbols. Consider all of this the content of your operation and, as they say, record your results.

^[9]        Uncle Ramsey, of course, anticipated the trend by about thirty-five years. Ramsey Dukes, “The Charlatan and the Magician,” (1984), the-philosophers-stone.com.

Works Cited

Carich, Mark and Mark Becker, “A Brief Review of the Key Hypnotic Elements of Milton H. Erickson’s Handshake Technique,” Erikson-foundation.org.

Carroll, Peter J., Liber MMM (1987).

Chapman, Alan, Advanced Magick for Beginners, (AEON Books, 2008).

Dukes, Ramsey, “The Charlatan and the Magician,” (1984),
The-philosophers-stone.com.

Grinder, John and Richard Bandler, Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis, (Real People Press, 1981).

Jacquin, Anthony, Reality is Plastic! The Art of Impromptu Hypnosis (Revised Edition, 2008).

Nerenberg, Alan, “Hypnotized in 10 Seconds. Float Induction. New Self-Hypnosis Technique,” Sept. 13 2020. Youtube.com.