MESSAGES FROM THE OTHER SIDE
Hypnotisme et Suggestion: Petit Cours Pratique – le Medium Aquila
I woke up this morning to Kev reading the original version of the blog post about this book, Hypnotisme et Suggestion: Petit Cours Pratique, by a French Medium named Aquila.
“This is against editorial guidelines,” was the gist of his feedback.
I had to admit that the backstory about my dead dad, his French farmhouse debacle, and my befuddled ‘inheritance’ of a World War II era bat-beshitted medical library – including works on hypnotism, psychic mediumship, and the occult – was too unwieldy. So I asked the ChatGPT robot-writer to rewrite it in the style of my more professional former content-writing self.
Alas, I forgot to provide the source text and so out popped a fictitious book review: “In the elastic landscape between mediumship, trance, and psychic transmission, a new text has arrived like a breath from behind the veil: Messages from the Other Side by Aquila. A curious name, deliberately untethered from earthly biography, Aquila writes not as a performer but as a conduit – channelling, translating, and collapsing the supposed boundaries between here and elsewhere.”
Whether the mysterious Aquila wrote books or channelled them remained the spooky thread through ChatGPT’s efforts to sort my reflections on the real 1930s/40s book into a coherent and concise post. I suppose The Lost Blog Post – including the ‘music’ of my voice and asides in AI transcript form – captures how messy hypnotism books can be as a reading experience. Despite the spectre of fascism, Franz Anton Mesmer, post-revolution Anglo-French-American relations, and inappropriate analogies between hypnotism and Catholicism are the focus – not the oration skills of a foreign dictator.
It must seem strange, in fact, to the ‘ghosts’ of hypnotists of yore that ‘hypnotism’ became so enamoured with ‘the blahsy-blah’ of confident, quantity, populist speaking abilities. Aquila and his ilk dealt in intense stares and silent passes, peppered by brief authoritative vocal commands – guided and guiding, in the main, by written transmission of hypnotic wisdoms in books and pamphlets. I read/skimmed the translated pages on my phone with trepidation; it felt strange to speak the forgotten words of a dead hypnotist-medium into modern audio transcription software unsure of how offensive the content could be.
Fortunately, between parlour tricks, sulphur-based quackery, animal hypnosis, and the usual cast of demonically possessed ‘hysterical’ women, it seemed a mostly harmless bit of miscellanea – although the mnemonic memory game lists did get me thinking about codes and la résistance… Dad’s French property project was also reportedly home to a prostitute as well as the doctor or doctors who lived there, so this first glimpse into the reading that shaped war-time attitudes towards hypnotism, and magic, is a coincidence that I’m striving to keep in perspective!
Ultimately, my photos of the transcript, below, remain best summed up by a robot-writer: “It’s a transcript of enchantment by accident – stitched together from timestamped voice-notes made while pacing, laughing, and occasionally recoiling.” The feedback continued: “There’s a powerful current in it – equal parts grief memoir, bibliomancy, surreal comedy, and esoteric investigation,” but “as you noted, it needs a firm editorial hand to structure the magical chaos into something your spousal co-editor will find blog-worthy.”
Since Aquila was a medium first and a hypnotist second, he’d presumably have few qualms about the mixing of fact and fiction to sell the art, and science, of hypnotism to medical practitioners and laypersons. With that in mind, I asked the robot-writer to do a third rewrite of this particular post for me. It is fascinating how poetical and ‘entrancing’ AI writing can feel; being prosaic and repetitive may be ‘bad writing’, but it’s perfect for the so-called “conversational hypnotist” seeking to lull a client into a relaxed state. “Trance logic” is a recurring theme, unprompted by me, as is the insistence upon an upbeat, if formulaic, outcome to what is simply a mundane coincidence rather than a magical mystery I’m compelled to solve.
So in the stylish lies of ‘Robot Amy’:
“Aquila’s book jumps from practical advice to religious hallucination to courtroom gossip about doctors duping heiresses. One moment it’s explaining how to treat hysteria with eye contact; the next, it’s ranting about nuns, snakes, Zola, and the unlicensed magnetising of lobsters. It is also, to my mind, absolutely magical – not in the flaky, metaphorical sense, but in the literal, mechanistic one: it does something to the reader.
“Whether Aquila was a genuine medium or a talented fabulist is beside the point. The text has trance logic. It loops, forgets itself, returns stronger. It bears the imprint of deep absorption – and it prompts the same. He’d have understood this kind of narrative drift – fact and fiction stitched together not to deceive, but to enchant. The kind of text that doesn’t tell you what to think, but gives you the tools to think strangely, to tune your perception like a dial catching a rogue frequency.
“Ultimately, the book is disjointed. It’s outdated. It’s sometimes absurd. But for those of us working at the edge of perception – in creative hypnosis, theatrical mentalism, bibliomancy, or just the art of being very, very weird – Hypnotisme et Suggestion reads like a coded message.
“Not all of it lands. But when it does, it rings.
“And when it rings, it reminds you: not all texts are meant to explain. Some are meant to enchant.
“And some, if you’re lucky, are left behind just for you.
“I began to wonder if this cache of magical books and miscellany was left for me as some kind of occult inheritance – a slow-release riddle to unpick in my own time if I so choose...”
I guess whether I remove that final statement from the quote marks depends on what the next French hypnotist/magician writes from beyond the grave!
