MIND OVER PLATTER
…I assume this means that ‘Zolar’ is a cynical syndicated-content construct of the US press, designed to flog cheap pop-psychology and occult clap-trap to members of the public. My mum used to send off for (*shudder*) British right-wing tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail’s New Year horoscopes for us back in the early 2000s, and I can certainly say there is no personal Jonathan Cainer touch to Zolar’s cosmic insights, him being, erm, entirely absent from it himself..?
Instead, the book begins with a reproduced excerpt of a Melvin Powers book we’ve yet to acquire, Hypnotism Revealed. I found a kindred spirit in Melvin back with this 2021 blog post, and I am ever-impressed with his salesmanship; this ‘book’ really is just a copy-paste trilogy of second-hand hypnotic content only loosely connected to the promises on the cover. The second section is from Mental Telepathy Explained, by a Hereward Carrington; and the final section is from Sex and Hypnosis by LT Woodward, which we’ve covered before, so I skipped it.
Melvin – a trusty source, I’m sure – was a Hollywood hypnotist, and so it’s always a pleasure to read of his philosophy and showy approach. His excerpt includes plenty of encouragement for establishing oneself as a successful hypnotist. His use of props in inductions has a theatricality as well as a therapeutic logic; choose from the Power’s own-brand of hypnotic crystal gazing ball for fatiguing a subject’s eyes, or try a swinging locket or metronome hypnotic record.
There’s a beautiful blackboard-based induction, where the subject draws letters of the alphabet in a chalk circle that they have only imagined drawing. The distinctions between drawing and imagining drawing the subsequent letters start to slip from the subject’s mind as they slide deeper and deeper ‘into hypnosis’. It struck me as a nice start to some mentalism or mental magic routine; Melvin reportedly had a TV show, so I suppose his therapy style was holistic and camera-ready.
A key question for the amateur hypnotist is what kinds of people make the best hypnotic subjects. I’ve come across a few such lists, but Melvin’s is by far my favourite:
“It has already been pointed out that people with good imaginations enter into the hypnotic state with greater ease that others, and that, invariably, artists, musicians, writers, and those in other creative fields, having more fertile imaginations, make the best hypnotic subjects. […] Inspiration comes to them through their very pores, as it were, because of their highly attuned sensibilities and their ability to withdraw to the inner places of their being.”
So, artists – along with children and soldiers! – are who Melvin finds most reliably susceptible to the powers (Powers™️, ha!) of suggestion. It’s solid but predictable content from a hypnotist of Melvin’s professionalism, but it’s not particularly… mystical? While philosophising on artists’ minds, he cites a famous composer acquaintance who ‘dreams’ “his most inspirational themes during the night while he is fast asleep”, and simply puts the melody on paper the next morning while fresh in mind. For an ‘Everything You Want To Know About’ series with a back-cover touting Rosicrucian secrets, that’s as ‘magical’ as Melvin’s mesmerism gets.
Apropos of nothing, we begin the second excerpt: on telepathy and extrasensory perception, aka ESP, as authored by Hereward Carrington. Hypnotism isn’t the focus of this section; Carrington (1880-1958) was an American investigator of psychic phenomena, drawing on the formation and leadership of the British Society for Psychical Research and figures such as parapsychologist JB Rhine to draw the credulous into the incredible.
Claims of thought transference among psychic prophets and “primitive peoples” (apologies; I just try to capture this stuff) are unconvincing. Carrington sprinkles his writing with anecdotes of African, Indian, and far-flung miracles, but the inclusion of pseudo-psychic parlour tricks/experiments, plus JB Rhine’s ‘research’ on ESP and barbiturates, rather undermine any metaphysical expertise.
It’s all a bit clunky, clueless – and, of course, vastly outdated, given Carrington died in 1958 and the book was published in 1973! “It is true that African witch doctors claim to be able to employ telepathy at will,” he writes, “but their ideas as to how it really operates seem as hazy as our own.” This short, scattered ‘field-notes’ style continues with a closing mention of Peter Ibbetson – a fictional character created in 1891 by George du Maurier, author of Victorian hypnotic-musical-novel sensation Trilby – which tells the story of two childhood soulmates separated in reality, but reunited in the ‘astral realm’ by ‘lucid dreams’.
The final Sex and Hypnosis segment was unpleasant to skim; the blend of titillation and trauma in these US vintage hypnosis works is a strange form of ‘infotainment’… I was glad to reach the back-matter containing the usual array of ads: for handwriting analysis; for a book of “forbidden knowledge”; or for a high-tech horoscope prepared by an IBM computer based on “25 million pieces of information” for just $10 and 60¢.
So, despite the auspicious cover design, the content of this book is a jarring and often irrelevant sham. And thus the enigmatic Zolar continued to tempt bored, lonely, credulous US ‘seekers’ with this psychical publishing pulp – and Melvin Powers got another cheque in the post.
It’s all gravy for us hypnotists..!
