John Mongiovi, Board Certified Hypnotist

07/13/2025

July 13 – Birth of Gérard Encausse (Papus)

Gérard Encausse (1865-1916), better known by his pseudonym Papus, was a Spanish-born physician who became one of the leading figures in esoteric and medical circles in France. Papus was also a magnetist. In the late 1880s he began working under Dr. Jules Bernard Luys at the Hôpital de la Charité, where he rose quickly, becoming editor of the R***e d’Hypnologie in 1888 and head of the hospital’s laboratory of hypnosis in 1890, as Luys’s health declined.

Papus and Luys became known for sensational hypnotic experiments that drew fascinated crowds and press attention. Their method of “transfer cures” was especially controversial. In these procedures, a hypnotized subject would absorb the symptoms of a patient's illness—physical, emotional, or mental—through contact and guided magnetic passes with iron bars. The ailment would then be drawn from the patient into the subject, often causing the subject to temporarily display the illness themselves before being healed via imperative suggestion. These vicarious agents often emerged from the process not only unharmed but improved.

One claim made by Luys and Papus was that iron crowns could absorb and store biomagnetic effluvia, which could then be transferred to other individuals, even inducing specific mental or emotional conditions. Luys once called such a crown “a tank for the storage of temperament.”

They also noted that hypnotized subjects could see radiant auras or “effluvia” from magnets and human bodies. They observed that healthy people emitted blue light from their right side and red from the left, a duality they believed revealed a fundamental “human polarity.”

Luys and Papus demonstrated action-at-a-distance medicine, where subjects would physically react to drugs sealed in glass vials. Luys documented these phenomena in his 1890 publication The Emotions in the Hypnotic State, and the Action-at-a-Distance of Medical and Toxic Substances.

Together, Papus and Luys occupied a strange but revealing intersection of modern psychiatry, where the boundaries between faith, medicine, and magic often blurred.

07/10/2025

July 10 – Birth of Jean-Baptiste Willermoz

Jean-Baptiste Willermoz is known as perhaps the most important esotericist of his time, a prominent French Freemason, and founder of the Knights Beneficent of the Holy City. He was also an important magnetist. Willermoz joined the mesmerist society La Concorde in Lyon, soon after it was established. This group, heavily populated by initiates of the Knights Beneficent, saw Mesmer’s techniques not as a scientific breakthrough but as a popularized form of the practices of trance, divination, and spiritual healing long held within their own mystical traditions.

The Lyon spiritists used Mesmerism to explore the soul’s original condition before the Fall. They believed healing came not from magnetic fluids, as Mesmer claimed, but through will, faith, and divine grace. This process, which they called Reintegration, temporarily restored the soul to its original divine condition. Healing depended on the magnetizer's inner preparation and spiritual purity.

The practices of Willermoz and the Lyon spiritists included trance-induced visions by “crisiacs” or “lucids,” often women who acted as spiritual mediums. In one common method, known as "doubling," the magnetizer felt the patient’s symptoms within their own body, while the entranced patient could perform intuitive diagnoses. In 1784, this technique was demonstrated at the Lyon Veterinary College when two Barberinist initiates accurately diagnosed an ailing horse’s internal conditions with specificity, later confirmed by autopsy.

Despite the overlap in interests, Franz Anton Mesmer was disappointed with the Lyon circle. Although he drew on esoteric themes and Masonic symbolism, Mesmer aimed for scientific legitimacy. He distanced himself from the spiritual interpretations of Willermoz, Saint-Martin, and Barberin, maintaining a materialistic view of animal magnetism based on invisible fluids and mechanical principles.

06/19/2025

June 19 – Birth of James Braid (1795–1860), Scottish surgeon and pioneer in the study of hypnosis. He was also an important pioneer in the adoption of anesthesia.

Sometimes referred to as the “Father of Modern Hypnotism”, Braid observed that having a subject fix their gaze steadily on a bright or shiny object could induce a trance. The effort to keep the eyes fixed led to eye fatigue, which helped produce both a state of focused attention and relaxation. Braid believed that the phenomena of hypnosis are produced by the concentration of the patient’s vital powers attention in a particular direction, whereby a greater supply of nervous influence, blood, and vital action is drawn to the part from the physical and mental resources of the patient.

Braid described hypnosis as “nervous sleep” (neuro-hypnotism), which popularized the terms “hypnotism” and “hypnosis”. He later tried to replace “hypnotism” with “monoideism” to emphasize the single-minded focus of his method.

🧠🌀

06/17/2025

https://johnmongiovi.com/blog/2016/02/09/hypnosis-and-the-eight-limbs-of-yoga

06/15/2025

This weekend I taught 3 classes on hypnosis at the Berkshire Yoga Festival:

- Essential Self-Hypnosis: Trance, Suggestion, and Imagery

- Mesmerism and Magnetism: An Introduction to Nonverbal Hypnosis

- Hypnosis and the Western Esoteric Tradition

Read the descriptions here:

https://berkshireyogafesitval2025.sched.com/speaker/john3061

Many thanks to Andrew, Scott, and the excellent staff for a fantastic weekend!

06/04/2025

Break patterns of worry and repetitive thoughts

3 Easy Ways to Let Go of a Thought:
1. Put it to the corner of the mental frame.
2. Stop!
3. Non-verbal gesture

Use these ***with repetition*** to interrupt the thought pattern.

Eye movements and nonverbal gestures are effective in communicating with the unconscious.

05/24/2025

May 24 - Birth of William Gilbert

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, magnetism was a central topic of philosophy, science, and medicine. The English scientist and physician William Gilbert (1544-1603) was one of the most prominent authors on magnetic phenomena. In 1600, the same year he became court physician to Queen Elizabeth I, Gilbert published _De magnete, magnetisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure_ (On the magnet, magnetic bodies, and the great magnet Earth). Before Gilbert, the study of magnetism had been dormant for 2000 years. Gilbert described the Earth’s magnetic poles, and stated that the lodestone (magnetic rock) could be “beneficial in many diseases of the human system”. Gilbert’s work brought new awareness to magnetism as a physical force, and also created widespread interest in healing with magnetism. This set the stage for the magnetic healing of Maximilian Hell in the 1770s, which led to Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism and the practice of mesmerism.

05/23/2025

May 23 (1734) – Birth of Mesmer

“The great thing of the eighteenth century is not the Encyclopedia…it is the sympathetic and miraculous physics of Mesmer.” - Alphonse Louis Constant

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was a medical doctor in Austria around the time of the French Revolution. He advanced the idea that “everything in nature communicates by a universal, vital fluid ('fluidum'), that nerves are conductors for this fluid in the body (animal magnetism) and that some people with high amounts of animal magnetism can affect the nerves of other persons to bring about a radical cure and a positive state of mind. Today we call this practice 'Mesmerism'. Mesmerism is the forerunner of ‘energy healing’ in the modern era.

Mesmer became famous for his many cures, which attracted the attention of the authorities of his time. A Royal Commission set out to investigate him declared wrongly that Mesmer’s cures were due only to the power of suggestion. Their finding was incorrect, but this view has prevailed in the field of hypnotism. Notwithstanding, Mesmerism endures.

https://johnmongiovi.com/mesmer-institute

05/20/2025

05/15/2025

March 15 – Birth of Maximilian Hell (1720-1792), Royal Astronomer in Vienna and an important figure in the history of hypnotism. Hell became famous for healing with steel magnets and attracted the attention of the Austrian physician Franz Mesmer (from whose name the words “mesmerism” and “mesmerize” are derived). Mesmer discovered that he could heal without the magnets and concluded that the healing must be mediated by an invisible ‘fluid’ that occupied space.

05/10/2025

The will is a creative force and is the key to all ‘manifestation’ (which is another word for magic). Magic is, at its core, the science of directing and concentrating will power. Without a strong and focused will, affirmations and visualization are powerless. One who is hoping to ‘manifest’ must first master their thoughts, emotions, and desires (the three parts of the soul, located in the head, chest, and stomach, respectively). Furthermore, to really manifest an outcome, a person must distinguish between desire (which enslaves) and will (which liberates). In this respect, 'manifesting' means exercising a disciplined, enlightened will over the forces of nature and the self.

05/06/2025

Plato’s theory of the soul, the first to describe human behavior, divides the soul into three parts, located in different parts of the body:

The logos is located in the head and is related to logic and reason. It thinks, loves the truth, and seeks to learn it.

The thymos is located near the chest and is related to spirit and temper. It should obey the logos (mind), while defending the self.

The eros is located in the stomach and is related to desires and appetite. Its function is to produce and seek pleasure.

Plato believed that these three parts of the soul can be developed by education and philosophy, music and the arts, and physical training.