“Hypnosis has been used for thousands of years.” You will find that sentence on countless websites, usually followed by references to the sleep temples of ancient Egypt and Greece, where priests are said to have put the sick into trances and healed them by suggestion.
It is a good story. Most of it is wishful thinking.
What the sleep temples were
The best documented are the Greek sanctuaries of Asclepius, god of healing. The most famous was at Epidaurus; others stood at Kos, Pergamon and Athens. They flourished from around the sixth century BC well into the Roman period, and thousands of people visited them.
The practice was called incubation, from the Latin for lying down. It worked like this.
- Purification. The visitor bathed, fasted or followed a restricted diet, and made offerings.
- Entering the sacred dormitory, a hall called the abaton.
- Sleeping there overnight.
- Dreaming. The hope was that Asclepius would appear in a dream, sometimes with his daughters or his sacred snakes, and either cure the sufferer on the spot or prescribe a treatment.
- Reporting the dream to the priests in the morning, who interpreted it and advised on what to do.
Grateful patients left inscriptions describing their cures. Many of these survive at Epidaurus, and they make vivid reading: the blind who saw, the lame who walked, a man whose lost child was found.
The sanctuaries also offered baths, exercise, diet, drama and, in time, medical and surgical treatment. They were something between a shrine, a spa and a hospital.
Similar practices are described for Egypt, in temples associated with gods such as Imhotep and Serapis, though the evidence is thinner and much of it comes from the later Greek and Roman period.
Why it was not hypnosis
Compare what happened with what hypnosis involves.
| Temple incubation | Hypnosis | |
|---|---|---|
| State | Ordinary sleep and dreaming | Awake, with focused attention |
| Who acts | A god, in a dream | The person, responding to suggestion |
| Induction | None; you go to sleep | A deliberate procedure |
| Suggestions | None given during the state | Central |
| Framework | Religious | Psychological |
Nobody guided the sleeper into a state of focused attention and made suggestions. People went to sleep and dreamed. The priests’ role came afterwards.
The claim that priests whispered suggestions to sleeping patients, or put them into trances, appears in popular histories but is not supported by the ancient sources.
What it did have in common
That is not to say nothing psychological was going on. Several ingredients that matter in hypnosis were present.
- Expectation. Pilgrims had travelled far, heard the stories and read the inscriptions on the way in. They expected to be healed.
- Ritual. Bathing, fasting, offerings and a sacred setting all raised the sense that something powerful was about to happen.
- Authority. Priests and a god.
- Suggestion before the event. Everything the visitor saw and heard told them what kind of dream to have.
- Rest, diet and removal from daily life.
In modern terms, these temples were finely tuned to produce placebo effects. Mesmer’s dim rooms and music, and for that matter a calm consulting room today, work on the same principle. But a placebo effect is not hypnosis.
Other claimed ancestors
The Ebers Papyrus. This Egyptian medical text of around 1550 BC is often said to describe hypnosis. It contains remedies and incantations. Reading hypnosis into it requires a good deal of imagination.
Shamans and trance rituals. Many cultures have healing practices involving drumming, chanting and altered states. They share features with hypnosis, such as absorption and expectation, but they are embedded in religious systems and are not the same procedure.
Yoga and meditation. Ancient, and concerned with focused attention, but with different aims.
The laying on of hands and the royal touch. For centuries people believed a king’s touch could cure scrofula. Again: expectation, authority and ritual.
Exorcism. In the 1770s the priest Johann Gassner drew crowds with dramatic exorcisms. Mesmer was asked to investigate and said the effects were real but due to animal magnetism, not demons. Historians sometimes mark this as the moment such healing passed from religion to would-be science.
Where hypnosis actually begins
A reasonable history starts in the late eighteenth century.
- 1770s: Mesmer and animal magnetism
- 1784: the French royal commission attributes the effects to imagination; Puységur describes a calm, talking “magnetic sleep”
- 1810s: the Abbé Faria says the cause is in the subject
- 1840s: James Braid coins “hypnotism” and explains it by attention
- 1880s: the Nancy school establishes suggestion as the mechanism
That is around 250 years, not 4,000.
Why the myth persists
- A long pedigree sounds impressive. Ancient wisdom sells.
- It is repeated from one website and textbook to the next without checking.
- The word “sleep” in “sleep temple” and in “hypnosis” (from the Greek for sleep) invites confusion. Hypnosis is not sleep.
- There is a grain of truth: people have always used expectation and ritual in healing.
Does it matter?
A little. A field that wants to be taken seriously should get its own history right. And the inflated version hides the interesting truth: that it took until the 1780s for anyone to test these effects with a blindfold and conclude that the cause lay in the patient’s imagination.
The bottom line
People slept in the temples of Asclepius hoping to dream of a god. It was a religious practice that made powerful use of expectation, and it deserves respect for what it was. It was not hypnosis. Hypnosis is a modern discovery, and none the worse for that.
Next in the series: Stage Hypnosis and the Law: The Hypnotism Act 1952
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.