Masks and Trance

1. George Devine

George Devine gave a Mask class to the Royal Court writers’ group in 1958. He arrived with a box full of dusty Masks that had last been used some years before at the Old Vic Theatre School. I didn’t like the look of them: they reminded me of surgical prostheses, and I didn’t like what he was saying either. Already I was feeling threatened. George talked to us for about forty minutes, and then gave us a demonstration. He retired to the far end of the long, shadowy room, put a Mask on, looked in a mirror, and turned to face us—or rather ‘it’, ‘the Mask’, turned to face us. We saw a ‘toad-god’ who laughed and laughed as if we were funny and despicable. I don’t know how long the ‘scene’ lasted, it was timeless. Then George removed the Mask and suggested that we try.

Next day he was despondent. He thought the class had been a failure and that this had been his fault. He said that none of the Masks had been ‘inhabited’, by which he meant that none of us had been possessed by the Masks. I tried to explain how amazed we’d been, but he insisted that the class had been a poor one, and that I was wrong to be so enthusiastic.

William Gaskill borrowed the Masks, and began to give Mask classes along the lines laid down by George. He collected some old clothes, and some props, and developed the theory that the actor should shock himself with the Mask’s reflection. The time at the mirror was to be kept short, and the student was to be pushed into acting on whatever impulse came to him. George’s ideas related to Oriental theatre (Noguchi had designed his King Lear) but we had seen the toad-god, and thought more in terms of voodoo than the Noh Theatre. Gaskill persuaded me to give Mask classes as well: ‘It shouldn’t all be left to me,’ he said, and we both gave classes to groups who visited the theatre.

It’s true that an actor can wear a Mask casually, and just pretend to be another person, but Gaskill and myself were absolutely clear that we were trying to induce trance states. The reason why one automatically talks and writes of Masks with a capital ‘M’ is that one really feels that the genuine Mask actor is inhabited by a spirit. Nonsense perhaps, but that’s what the experience is like, and has always been like. To understand the Mask it’s also necessary to understand the nature of trance itself.

One day Devine invited me to lunch, which he never did unless he wanted to discuss something. He was embarrassed (he was actually a shy man), and finally when we were almost through coffee and the restaurant was practically empty, he said that he thought Bill and I had misunderstood the nature of the Mask. At this time George was giving comedy classes at the Studio, so I suggested a swop: I would give his comedy classes, and he would give my Mask classes.

George allowed his students to work in a very casual way. Bill and I had tried to condition a response to the wearing of a Mask by insisting that whenever one was on the face, the actor should attempt to enter the ‘Mask state’. This led to Masks being handled as if sacred. George shocked me by allowing actors to talk as themselves while actually wearing the Masks. They’d choose clothes or wander about with the Masks on without any attempt to be in character. I think George was overreacting to the way we’d been teaching, because even in performance these Masks often spoke with the wearer’s voice, although George had explained that they’d need speech lessons before they could speak ‘as the Masks’. Eventually, George said that the students who had worked first with William Gaskill and myself were usually the better ones, so that our method must have something to recommend it. I think this was because we used to hurl the students into the work, whereas George was much gentler. He was very good at explaining exactly when a Mask was ‘inhabited’, but it was really up to the actors. Many of his students played safe, and kept to their preferred areas acting with Masks on, rather than being possessed. George’s attitude was really very different from mine, and possibly Gaskill’s; George was primarily interested in developing characters that could be used without the Mask when the actor was cast in plays. I saw the Masks as astounding performers, as offering a new form of theatre, and I didn’t care what Mask creatures arrived, so long as they were possessed. The Masks we were using covered the top half of the face, leaving the mouth and lower half of the cheeks exposed. George had learnt the technique from Michel Saint-Denis in the 1930s, and Michel had been taught by Jacques Copeau (his uncle). These half masks are usually called ‘comic masks’ but George called them ‘Character Masks’. He thought it important to hand on the tradition unchanged, and he was shocked when he found that I was mixing Character Masks with Tragic Masks (Tragic Masks work by a quite different technique—see page 184 [of Impro]). My students showed him one of the mixed scenes they had prepared with me, and they reported him as saying that it did work, but that he still didn’t like it! When I visited him during his last illness, almost the last thing he said to me was ‘I still don’t think that Mask work was right.’

George cited Chaplin’s Tramp as a Mask, since the character had come from the clothes and the make-up. Here’s Chaplin’s own account (from his autobiography).

‘On the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, and a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction; the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look young or old, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache which, I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression ….

‘… I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and make-up made me feel the kind of person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on the stage he was fully born. When I confronted Sennett I assumed the character and strutted about, swinging my cane and parading before him. Gags and comedy ideas went racing through my mind ….

‘… My character was different and unfamiliar to the Americans. But with the clothes on I felt he was a reality, a living person. In fact he ignited all sorts of crazy ideas that I would never have dreamt of until I was dressed and made-up as the Tramp.’

Elsewhere Chaplin has said, ‘I realised I would have to spend the rest of my life finding out about the creature. For me he was fixed, complete, the moment I looked in the mirror and saw him for the first time, yet even now I don’t know all the things that are to be known about him.’¹ (Isabel Quigly, Charlie Chaplin—Early Comedies, Studio Vista, 1968.)

2. Russians

At first I thought that Mask work was completely unlike Stanislavsky’s concept of actor training, but this isn’t true. Here’s Stanislavsky describing the Mask state in Building a Character. Kostya, a drama student, has been told to put on a character make-up, but nothing satisfies him. He creams his face to remove the greasepaint and then, unexpectedly …

‘All the other colours blurred. … It was difficult to distinguish where my nose was, or my eyes, or my lips. I smeared some of the same cream on my beard and moustache and then finally all over my wig. Some of the hair clotted into lumps …. and then, almost as if I were in some delirium, I trembled, my heart pounded, I did away with my eyebrows, powdered myself at random, smeared the back of my hands with a greenish colour and the palms with light pink. I did all this with a quick, sure touch, for this time I knew who I was representing, and what kind of fellow he was!’

He then paced the room feeling ‘how all the parts of my body, features, facial lines, fell into their proper places and established themselves. … I glanced in the mirror and did not recognise myself. Since I had looked into it the last time a fresh transformation had taken place in me. “It is he, it is he!” I exclaimed. …’

He presents himself to the director (Tortsov), introducing himself as ‘the critic’. He’s surprised to find his body doing things by itself, things he hadn’t intended.

‘Quite unexpectedly my twisted leg came out in advance of me and threw my body more to the right. I removed my top hat with careful exaggeration and executed a polite bow …’

He then played a scene with the director, having no difficulty in sustaining this weird character he had become, and knowing always exactly what to say. Later Kostya reflects: ‘Can I really say that this creature is not part of me? I derived him from my own nature. I divided myself, as it were, into two personalities. One continued as an actor, the other as an observer.’

At the time when Copeau was working with Masks in France, Stanislavsky’s favourite pupil Vakhtangov was working with them in Russia. Nikolai Gorchakov has left an account of those rehearsals. Vakhtangov set up a circus in which the Masks were to be auditioned as clowns. They were to do things that would make the spectators ‘… applaud wildly, rush on the stage and hug and kiss you! Or at least roll on the floor with laughter. Go ahead, start! …’

Vakhtangov threw an incredible number of instructions to the Masks until they were lost and confused. Someone played circus music and they had no choice but to perform. They tried imaginary gymnastics, and ice-skated, and pretended to juggle, and finally succeeded in getting warm applause from the onlookers. ‘Do you really think you’ve hit on the “grain” of the Masks merely by doing a few exercises in front of the audience?’ said Vakhtangov. ‘You haven’t even started to act as Masks! … You must vie with one another in captivating the audience by every possible means—talk, act, dance, sing, do acrobatics, do anything. Understand?’

Things got worse until finally Vakhtangov left, the Masks continuing without him. Suddenly two of them became genuine Masks in the characters of Tartaglia and Pantalone. Tartaglia was eating a cake, and Pantalone was starving. Tartaglia spoke with a stutter (which was unexpected) and said that Pantalone would have to earn it, but he ‘graciously allowed Pantalone to eat the crumbs remaining on his palm each time he swallowed a bit. This made Pantalone very happy, and it was fun watching him pick up these crumbs while Tartaglia lectured him on the necessity of work ….

‘The episode was fairly long, but we were so enchanted we did not notice it. We were not much interested in their chatter, but were fascinated by their naive seriousness, the kind one sees only in two children when one is sucking a toffee and the other cannot tear his eyes away from this sweet process, looking enviously at the happy owner ….

‘Tartaglia was so carried away that he began to tease Pantalone, passing the cake under his nose every time he nipped a bit off. Suddenly, Pantalone opened wide his mouth and snapped up about three-quarters of what remained. Tartaglia burst into tears while Pantalone, his mouth full, gestured that it served him right—he should not have teased him.’

Vakhtangov had been watching from a doorway. He immediately set up another scene with the same characters. Pantalone was to be a dentist, and Tartaglia his patient. Tartaglia panicked, stepped out of character and said he didn’t want to do it.

‘ “And what do the dentists say to that?” Vakhtangov turned gravely to his partners.

‘ “There have been many cases in history of medicine of patients refusing to be treated,” Kudryavtsev replies seriously, without forgetting that he was Pantalone, the learned secretary of King Altoum’s court. “Such refusal is a sure sign of illness. In this particular case I presume we’ll have to extract the aching teeth not only through the mouth, but also through other apertures, ears and nostrils included ….” ’

Afterwards Vakhtangov commented that they had at first tried to ‘think up’ what to do. ‘I don’t deny the importance of thinking, inventing or planning, but if you have to improvise on the spot (and that’s exactly what we have to do), you must act and not think. It’s action we must have—wise, foolish or naive, simple or complicated, but action.’ (Nikolai Gorchakov, The Vakhtangov School of Stage Art, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.)

Vakhtangov forced his students to act spontaneously. This produces a light trance state in which the actors feel as if something else is controlling them. They ‘know’ what to do, whereas normally they ‘choose’ what to do. The state is regressive, but they experience no self-consciousness.

3. Destroying the Mask

Masks seem exotic when you first learn about them, but to my mind Mask acting is no stranger than any other kind: no more weird than the fact that an actor can blush when his character is embarrassed, or turn white with fear, or that a cold will stop for the duration of the performance, and then start streaming again as soon as the curtain falls. ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’ asks Hamlet, and the mystery remains. Actors can be possessed by the character they play just as they can be possessed by Masks. Many actors have been unable to really ‘find’ a character until they put on the make-up, or until they try on the wig, or the costume. We find the Mask strange because we don’t understand how irrational our responses to the face are anyway, and we don’t realise that much of our lives is spent in some form of trance, i.e. absorbed. What we assume to be ‘normal consciousness’ is comparatively rare, it’s like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON but what’s happening when you don’t look in?

It’s difficult to understand the power of the Mask if you’ve only seen it in illustrations, or in museums. The Mask in the showcase may have been intended as an ornament on the top of a vibrating, swishing haystack. Exhibited without its costume, and without a film, or even photograph, of the Mask in use, we respond to it only as an aesthetic object. Many Masks are beautiful or striking, but that’s not the point. A Mask is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of it. A very beautiful Mask may be completely dead, while a piece of old sacking with a mouth and eye-holes torn in it may have tremendous vitality.

In its original culture nothing had more power than the Mask. It was used as an oracle, a judge, an arbitrator. Some were so sacred that any outsider who caught a glimpse of them was executed. They cured diseases, they made women sterile. Some tribes were so scared of their power that they carved the eye-holes so that the wearers could see only the ground. Some Masks were led on chains to keep them from attacking the onlookers. One African Mask had a staff, the touch of which was believed to cause leprosy. In some cultures dead people are reincarnated as Masks—the back of the skull is sliced off, a stick rammed in from ear to ear, and someone dances, gripping the stick with his teeth. It’s difficult to imagine the intensity of that experience.

Masks are surrounded by rituals that reinforce their power. A Tibetan Mask was taken out of its shrine once a year and set up overnight in a locked chapel. Two novice monks sat all night chanting prayers to prevent the spirit of the Mask from breaking loose. For miles around the villagers barred their doors at sunset and no one ventured out. Next day the Mask was lowered over the head of the dancer who was to incarnate the spirit at the centre of a great ceremony. What must it feel like to be that dancer, when the terrifying face becomes his own?

We don’t know much about Masks in this culture, partly because the church sees the Mask as pagan, and tries to suppress it wherever it has the power (the Vatican has a museum full of Masks confiscated from the ‘natives’), but also because this culture is usually hostile to trance states. We distrust spontaneity, and try to replace it by reason: the Mask was driven out of theatre in the same way that improvisation was driven out of music. Shakers have stopped shaking. Quakers don’t quake any more. Hypnotised people used to stagger about, and tremble. Victorian mediums used to rampage about the room. Education itself might be seen as primarily an anti-trance activity.²

The church struggled against the Mask for centuries, but what can’t be done by force is eventually done by the all-pervading influence of Western education. The US Army burned the voodoo temples in Haiti and the priests were sentenced to hard labour with little effect, but voodoo is now being suppressed in a more subtle way. The ceremonies are faked for tourists. The genuine ceremonies now last for a much shorter time.

I see the Mask as something that is continually flaring up in this culture, only to be almost immediately snuffed out. No sooner have I established a tradition of Mask work somewhere than the students start getting taught the ‘correct’ movements, just as they learn a phoney ‘Commedia dell’Arte’ technique. The manipulated Mask is hardly worth having, and is easy to drive out of the theatre. The Mask begins as a sacred object, and then becomes secular and is used in festivals and in the theatre. Finally it is remembered only in the feeble imitations of Masks sold in the tourist shops. The Mask dies when it is entirely subjected to the will of the performer.

4. Faces

We have instinctive responses to faces. Parental feelings seem to be triggered by flat faces and big foreheads. We try and be rational and assert that ‘people can’t help their appearance’, yet we feel we know all about Snow White and the Witch, or Laurel and Hardy, just by the look of them. The truth is that we learn to hold characteristic expressions as a way of maintaining our personalities, and we’re far more influenced by faces than we realise. When I was a child there were faces in books that were so terrible that I had to jam the books tight into the bookcase for fear they would somehow leak out into the house. Adults lose this vision in which the face is the person, but after their first Mask class students are amazed by passersby in the street—suddenly they see ‘evil’ people, and ‘innocent’ people, and people holding their faces in Masks of pain, or grief, or pride, or whatever. Our faces get ‘fixed’ with age as the muscles shorten, but even in very young people you can see that a decision has been taken to appear tough, or stupid, or defiant. (Why should anyone wish to look stupid? Because then your teachers expect less of you.) Sometimes in acting class a student will break out of his habitual facial expression and you won’t know who he is until you look at his clothes. I’ve seen this transformation several times, and each time the student is flooded with great joy and exhilaration.³

Even if you just alter the face with make-up, astounding effects can be produced. A journalist called Bill Richardson told me that he’d been asked to take part in a circus matinee as one of the clowns. It was when he was a cub reporter, and his editor had thought it might make an interesting story. Once the make-up was on he became ‘possessed’ and found himself able to tumble about, catch his feet in buckets, and so on, as if he’d been a clown in another incarnation. He stayed with the circus for some weeks, but he never got the same feeling without the make-up.

Another journalist, John Howard Griffin, disguised himself as a black man. He wrote:

‘The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence. I looked in the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin’s past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. Suddenly, almost with no mental preparation, no advance hint, it became clear and it permeated my whole being. My inclination was to fight against it. I had gone too far …. The completeness of the transformation appalled me. It was unlike anything I had imagined. I became two men, the observing one and the one who panicked, who felt negroid even into the depths of his entrails.’ (John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me, Panther, 1969.)

It’s not surprising then to find that Masks produce changes in the personality, or that the first sight of oneself wearing a Mask and reflected in a mirror should be so disturbing. A bad Mask will produce little effect, but a good Mask will give you the feeling that you know all about the creature in the mirror. You feel that the Mask is about to take over. It is at this moment of crisis that the Mask teacher will urge you to continue. In most social situations you are expected to maintain a consistent personality. In a Mask class you are encouraged to ‘let go’, and allow yourself to become possessed.

5. Trance

Many actors report ‘split’ states of consciousness, or amnesias; they speak of their body acting automatically, or as being inhabited by the character they are playing.

Fanny Kemble: ‘The curious part of acting, to me, is the sort of double process which the mind carries on at once, the combined operation of one’s faculties, so to speak, in diametrically opposite directions; for instance, in that very last scene of Mrs Beverley, while I was half dead with crying in the midst of real grief, created by an entirely unreal cause, I perceived that my tears were falling like rain all over my silk dress, and spoiling it; and I calculated and measured most accurately the space that my father would require to fall in, and moved myself and my train accordingly in the midst of the anguish I was to feign, and absolutely did endure.’ (William Archer, Masks and Faces, 1888.)

Sybil Thorndike: ‘When you’re an actor you cease to be male and female, you’re a person, and you’re a person with all the other persons inside you.’ (Great Acting, BBC Publications, 1967.)

Edith Evans: ‘… I seem to have an awful lot of people inside me. Do you know what I mean? If I understand them I feel terribly like them when I’m doing them …. by thinking you turn into the person, if you think strongly enough. It’s quite odd sometimes, you know. You are it, for quite a bit, and then you’re not ….’ (Great Acting.)

In another kind of culture I think it’s clear that such actors could easily talk of being ‘possessed’ by the character. It’s true that some actors will maintain that they always remain ‘themselves’ when they’re acting, but how do they know? Improvisers who maintain that they’re in a normal state of consciousness when they improvise often have unsuspected gaps in their memories which only emerge when you question them closely.

It’s the same with Mask actors. I remember Roddy Maude-Roxby in a Mask that got angry during a show at Expo 67. He, or ‘it’, started throwing chairs about, so I walked on stage to stop the scene. ‘S’ goin’ to be all right’, said the Mask, waving me aside. Afterwards Roddy remembered the chairs, but not that I’d entered the scene and tried to stop him. If he’d been in a deeper trance he’d have forgotten everything. The same kind of amnesias can be detected in any spontaneous work. An improviser writes: ‘If a scene goes badly I remember it. If it goes well I forget very quickly.’ Orgasms are the same.

Normally we only know of our trance states by the time jumps. When an improviser feels that two hours have passed in twenty minutes, we’re entitled to ask where was he for the missing hour and forty minutes.

Many people think that to be awake is the same as to be conscious, but they can be deeply hypnotised while believing that they are in ‘everyday consciousness’. A student assured me that he’d spent two hours on stage fooling a hypnotist, which is unlikely. Then he said that funnily enough he’d been singled out to tell the audience that he’d really just been pretending, and that he hadn’t minded when they laughed, because it did—by coincidence—happen to be true!

I knew a hypnotist’s assistant who used to be left in store windows as an advert for the show.

‘Of course he doesn’t really hypnotise me,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘No, he used to push needles through me and it hurt, so finally I told him and now he doesn’t push them through me any more.’

‘But why do you agree to sit motionless in shop windows all day?’

‘Well, I like him.’

I can’t imagine anyone in a normal state of consciousness sitting motionless in shop windows day after day and doing the evening show. How much then are we to trust what anyone tells us about their state of mind?

We don’t think of ourselves as moving in and out of trance because we’re trained not to. It’s impossible to be ‘in control’ all the time, but we convince ourselves that we are. Other people help to stop us drifting. They will laugh if we don’t seem immediately in possession of ourselves, and we’ll laugh too in acknowledgement of our inappropriate behaviour.

In ‘normal consciousness’ I am aware of myself as ‘thinking verbally’. In sports which leave no time for verbalisation, trance states are common. If you think: ‘The ball’s coming at that angle but it’s spinning so that I’ll anticipate the direction of the bounce by …’ you miss! You don’t know you’re in a trance state because whenever you check up, there you are, playing table tennis, but you may have been in just as deep a trance as the bobsleigh rider who didn’t know he’d lost a thumb until he shook hands.

Most people only recognise ‘trance’ when the subject looks confused—out of touch with the reality around him. We even think of hypnosis as ‘sleep’. In many trance states people are more in touch, more observant. I remember an experiment in which deep trance subjects were first asked how many objects there had been in the waiting-room. When they were put into trance and asked again, it was found that they had actually observed more than ten times the number of objects than they consciously remembered. Zen Masters, and sorcerers, are notoriously difficult to creep up on (Castaneda’s Don Juan, for example). In Mask work people report that perceptions are more intense, and that although they see differently, they see and sense more.

I see the ‘personality’ as a public-relations department for the real mind, which remains unknown. My personality always seems to be functioning, at some level, in terms of what other people think. If I am alone in a room and someone knocks on the door, then I ‘come back to myself’. I do this in order to check up that my social image is presentable: are my flies done up? Is my social face properly assembled? If someone enters, and I decide that I don’t have to guard myself, then I can get ‘lost in the conversation’. Normal consciousness is related to transactions, real or imagined, with other people. That’s how I experience it, and I note widespread reports of people in isolation, or totally rejected by other people, who experience ‘personality disintegration’.

When you’re worried about what other people might think, the personality is always present. In life-or-death situations something else takes over. A friend scalded himself and his mind split immediately into two parts, one of which was a child screaming with pain, while the other was cold and detached and told him exactly what to do (he was alone at the time). If a cobra dropped out of the air vent into the middle of an acting class, the students might find themselves on the piano, or outside the door, with no memory of how they got there. In extremity the body takes over for us, pushing the personality aside as an unnecessary encumbrance.

6. Induction

How do we enter trance states? I would prefer to ask ‘How do we stay out of them?’ In the middle of a dark night I wake up, how do I know I’m awake? I test for consciousness by moving a muscle. If I block this impulse to move I feel a tremendous anxiety. The control I exercise over the musculature reassures me that ‘I’m me’. By tensing muscles, by shifting position, by scratching, sighing, yawning, blinking, and so on, we maintain ‘normal consciousness’. Entranced subjects will sit quite motionless for hours. An audience ‘held’ by a theatrical performance suddenly find a need to move, to shift position, to cough, as the spell breaks.

If you lie down and make your body relax, going through it from feet to head, and loosening any points of tension that you find, then you easily float away into fantasy. The substance and shape of your body seem to change. You feel as if the air is breathing you, rather than you breathing the air, and the rhythm is slow and smooth like a great tide. It’s very easy to lose yourself, but if you feel the presence of a hostile person in the room you break this trance, seizing hold of the musculature, and becoming ‘yourself’ once more.

Meditators use stillness as a means of inducing trance. So do present-day hypnotists. The subject doesn’t have to be told to be still, he knows intuitively not to assert control of his body by picking his nose or tapping his feet.

When you are ‘absorbed’ you no longer control the musculature. You can drive for miles, or play a movement from a sonata while your personality pays no attention at all. Nor is your performance necessarily worse. When a hypnotist takes over the function normally exercised by the personality, there’s no need to leave the trance. Mask teachers, priests in possession cults, and hypnotists all play high status in voice and movement. A high-status person whom you accept as dominant can easily propel you into unusual states of being. You’re likely to respond to his suggestions, and see, like Polonius, the cloud looking like a whale. If the Queen knocked unexpectedly on your door and said ‘I wonder if I might use your lavatory?’ then you’d probably be in a very odd state indeed.

Eysenck tells the seemingly improbable story of a hypnotist who worked for a total of three hundred hours on one subject with no apparent result. When the frustrated hypnotist finally snarled, ‘Go to sleep, you *****!’ the subject went straight into deep trance. I would interpret such an incident as the subject yielding to the status attack of the hypnotist.

I once asked a girl to close her eyes while I put a coin under one of three cups. Secretly I put a coin under each cup. When I asked her to guess which cup the coin was under, she was, of course, correct. After she’d made a correct choice about six times, she was convinced I was somehow controlling her thoughts, and moved into a rather disassociated state, so I explained, and she ‘snapped out of it’. I would suggest this as a possible means of inducing hypnosis. Alan Mitchell describes a technique of ‘confusion’ used by the American hypnotist, Erickson. He writes:

‘Erickson made a number of conflicting suggestions to a patient: “Lift your left arm, now your right. Up with the left, down with the right. Swing the left arm out and the left arm follows.” Eventually the subject became so confused by these directions, which were woolly and conflicting, that he was glad to clutch at any straw, so long as it was given to him firmly enough and in a loud voice. Then, while he was so confused, if he were told: “Go to sleep”, apparently he would drop off immediately into a deep sleep.’ (Harley Street Hypnotist, Harrap, 1959.)

Again we see that the subject is made to feel that his body is out of control, and becomes subject to a high-status person. Some hypnotists sit you down, ask you to stare upwards into their eyes and suggest that your eyelids are wanting to close—which works because looking upwards is tiring, and because staring up into a high-status person’s eyes makes you feel inferior. Another method involves getting you to hold your arm out sideways while suggesting that it’s getting heavier. If you think the hypnotist is responsible for the heaviness rather than gravity, then you are likely to accept his control. Hypnotists don’t, as sometimes claimed, ask you to put your hands together and then tell you that you can’t part them, but they do ask you to link them in such a way that it’s awkward to part them. If you believe the hypnotist responsible for such awkwardness, then you may abandon the attempt to separate them. If you squeeze your index finger hard, and then wait, you’ll feel it starting to swell—I imagine this is an illusion caused by the weakening of the muscles of the compressing hand. This too can be a way of inducing trance so long as the subject doesn’t realise that the ‘swelling’ would be experienced anyway, even without the hypnotist’s suggestion.⁴

Once you understand that you’re no longer held responsible for your actions, then there’s no need to maintain a ‘personality’. Student improvisers asked to pretend to be hypnotised, show a sudden improvement. Students asked to pretend to be hypnotists show no such improvement.

Many ways of entering trance involve interfering with verbalisation. Repetitive singing or chanting are effective, or holding the mind on to single words; such techniques are often thought of as ‘Oriental’, but they’re universal.⁵

One dramatic way of entering trance is by ‘trumping’. This was used in a West Indian play at the Royal Court, with the unwanted result that actors kept going into real trance, and not just acting it. It works partly by the ‘crowd effect’, everyone repeating the same action and sound, but also by over-oxygenating the blood. It looks like a ‘forward-moving two-step stomp’.

‘With the step forward the body is bent forwards from the waist so sharply as to seem propelled by force. At the same time the breath exhaled, or inhaled, with great effort and sound. The forcefulness of the action gives justification to the term “labouring” … When the spirit possession does take place … an individual’s legs may seem riveted to the ground … or he may be thrown to the ground.’ (S. E. Simpson, Religious Cults of Caribbean: Trinidad, Jamaica and Haiti, Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico, 1970.)

Crowds are trance-inducing because the anonymity imposed by the crowd absolves you of the need to maintain your identity.

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1. There are other accounts of Chaplin’s discovery of Charlie, and I’ve seen an early film in which Chaplin plays ‘Charlie’ without the moustache, but there’s no doubt that Chaplin experienced the character as stemming from the change in his appearance, rather than from a more intellectual process.↩︎

2. Nina Epton met a Balinese who told her that before he left to be educated in Europe he could ‘leap into the other world’ of trance in twenty seconds, but that even if he can succeed these days it takes at least half an hour. (Wavell, Butt and Epton, Trances, Allen and Unwin, 1967.)↩︎

3. The psychologist Wilhelm Reich developed the idea of ‘character armour’, which he said was ‘A protection of the ego against external and internal dangers. As a protective mechanism which has become chronic it can rightly be called armour … in unpleasurable situations the armouring increases, in pleasurable situations it decreases. The degree of character mobility, the ability to open up to a situation or to close up against it, constitutes the difference between the healthy and the neurotic character structure.’ (Character Analysis, translated by V. R. Carfagno, Vision Press, 1973.)

   He might have been talking about good and bad acting. Drama students who are ‘tight’ and ‘inflexible’ and ‘alone’ are able to receive and transmit only a very narrow range of feeling. They experience muscle tension as ‘acting’. In The Function of the Orgasm (translated by T. P. Wolfe, Panther, 1968), Reich says:

   ‘The facial expression as a whole—independent of the individual parts—has to be observed carefully. We know the depressed face of the melancholic patient. It is peculiar how the expression of flaccidity can be associated with a severe chronic tension of the musculature. There are people with an always artificially beaming face; there are “stiff” and “sagging” cheeks. Usually, the patients are able to find the corresponding expression themselves, if the attitude is repeatedly pointed out and described to them, or shown to them by imitating it. One patient with “stiff” cheeks said: “My cheeks are as if heavy with tears.” Suppressed crying easily leads to a masklike stiffness of the facial musculature. At an early age, children develop a fear of “faces” which they used to delight in making; they are afraid because they are told that if they make a face it’ll stay that way, and because the very impulses they express in their grimaces are impulses for which they are likely to be reprimanded or punished. Thus they check these impulses and hold their faces “rigidly under control”.’

   I remember my own friends ‘changing’ during their adolescence. One grew an RAF moustache and spoke with a phoney officer-type voice—in adult life he actually became an Air Force officer and got a medal in the Suez fiasco. Other friends modelled themselves on sportsmen, or film stars, or adults they admired. Props like a walking-stick, a pipe, or an individual choice of clothing help to support an identity. If you shave off a beard you ‘feel’ different. A bride in her regalia is supposed to ‘become a bride’. Oscar Wilde dressed as a convict on Clapham Junction was defenceless in a way that he would never have been in his own clothes. The appearance, and especially the face fixes the personality. This is why plastic surgery has been suggested as a way of reforming criminals—the opposite approach to outdated nose-slicing. In Vietnam, terrible burns to the body are reported to produce relatively little change in the personality. Relatively minor facial burns have severe consequences.↩︎

4. Here is a description by Melvin Powers of how he introduces the ‘eye test’. It shows the nature of the transaction very clearly.

   ‘It is suggested to the subject that at the count of three he will be unable to open his eyes. Let’s say that you had done this, and that the subject, in spite of this suggestion, has opened his eyes. What is to be done?… He may feel that he is not a good subject, or worse still, that you are not a good hypnotist, since he had so easily opened his eyes, when he had been challenged to do so. It is at this point … that so many hypnotists lose their subjects …. To avoid this: after the subject has closed his eyes, continue to give him suggestions that he is in a deep state of relaxation, and that as you (the hypnotist) complete a count of three, he, the subject, will move deeper and deeper into the ease of the hypnotic state. Begin your procedure. Take a great deal of time before you finally use the “eye test”…. At this point, give the subject the following suggestions: “When I complete the count of three you will open your eyes, and look at the crystal ball. Then after I give you the suggestion and when I complete the count of three again, you will fall into a very deep, sound hypnotic sleep.” ’

   If this doesn’t work Powers says: ‘Should the test fail the first time, or even the second, be certain not to show the least sign of annoyance. After a pause proceed again in a matter-of-fact and businesslike manner so as to ensure the fullest co-operation on the part of the subject. It is very important that the subject be made to understand that the failure to close the eyes was not an actual test but merely a part of the induction procedure …. The subject feels that the difficulty lies in the fact that he has not as yet been adequately conditioned. This conviction is a much healthier one than the recognition that the hypnosis has been a failure, since he isn’t aware that he has been exposed to hypnosis at all …. Tell him that at the next attempt he will be more responsive.’ (Advanced Self-Hypnosis, Thorsons, 1962.)↩︎

5. Here’s a fourteenth-century English meditation teacher describing the ‘one word’ technique. He says: ‘A naked intention directed to God, and himself alone, is wholly sufficient … The shorter the word the better, being more like the working of the Spirit. A word like “God” or “Love”. Choose which you like, or perhaps some other, so long as it is of one syllable. And fix this word fast to your heart, so that it is always there come what may. It will be your shield and spear in peace and war alike. With this word you will hammer the cloud and the darkness about you. With this word you will suppress all thought under the cloud of forgetting. So much so that if ever you are tempted to think of what it is you are seeking, this one word will be sufficient answer. And if you would go on to think learnedly about the significance and analysis of that same word, tell yourself that you would have it whole, and not in bits and pieces.’ (The Cloud of Unknowing, translated by Clifton Wolters, Penguin, 1961.)

   Naming everything that you are doing also interferes with the ‘voice in the head’: ‘I am breathing. I am thinking about breathing. I am noticing a bird. I am feeling the weight of my arm on the chair ….’ This doesn’t suppress verbalisation, but it diverts it.

   Dancing to repetitive rhythms is trance-inducing. People report that the body seems to be moving by itself as they move into the trance state. Drummers at possession cults drum louder and with more syncopation in order to ‘throw people over the edge’.

   Other methods involve weakening the ego by drugs, by increasing the excitement so that the subject is emotionally exhausted, by spinning the person round and round and inducing giddiness. One method reported from the West Indies involves smashing people on the head with a sacred brick. When Professor Eysenck says that only such-and-such a percentage of the population can enter trance, one wonders if he has really tried all the methods.↩︎