Once upon a time, the names of Anatoly Kashpirovsky and Alan Chumak thundered in all the republics of the former USSR, and their sessions of hypnosis were very popular. Since then, the number of people who master the technique of hypnosis has increased several thousand times, and many are learning this skill on their own, thanks to specialized literature.
But not everyone knows that the history of hypnosis goes back several thousand years. Cuneiform tablets of the ancient Sumerians, made four thousand years BC. tell that the priests of the city of Erech used an interesting method of treatment, in which patients were immersed in sleep, and then they used the technique of suggestion. It is known that modern hypnosis specialists divide the trance state into three phases: light, medium and deep. It seems incredible, but the healers of ancient times, no worse than our doctors, were well aware of this.
Another fact confirming that people have owned hypnosis since time immemorial is contained in papyrus, which was found during excavations of the ancient Egyptian city of Ebers. The age of the find is approximately the 1st millennium BC. This ancient document describes the methods of immersing a person in a hypnotic state, and these methods have come down to our time almost unchanged. To put a person to sleep, the priests swung a shining disc of metal in front of his eyes with pendulum movements, or, at a small amplitude, they swayed the patient himself.
In the ancient Egyptian papyri found in the famous temple of Isis, it is also said that the priests conducted clairvoyance sessions, during which they used hand passes, similar to those used in modern hypnosis techniques. So once again we have to make sure that everything new is just a long forgotten old.