On Being, or Not Being, A Wizard

Everyone should read @h-sleepingirl's excellent essay You Are A Wizard, So Pour Over The Tomes. In it, they argue that hypnosis is magic, and respecting the discipline means studying the historical texts of hypnosis like books of magic. Not uncritically, but looking to integrate historical knowledge and use it to inform your practice.

I really like this, and I think it speaks very well to my own path. I like to read.  

Pictured: Me pondering my tomes

I think I, and especially @khatsha, have read more than average, especially when it comes to books. I'm going to be first in line for @h-sleepingirl's analyzing Erickson class.

I think this describes one road to developing as a hypnotist, one skill tree. It's the scholarly road, and there are many riches to be obtained there. I don't think it's the only road though, and it might not resonate with everyone. I think of hypnosis as an artform, far more than a science, in that it is rooted in expression of your inner life and tastes and relationships as much as hard skills and knowledge, but all artists can potentially benefit from diligent study and analysis of what came before. 

But I think of telling someone learning to play rock guitar: you ought to master music theory, and classic Blues, and flamenco guitar, if you really want to be a virtuoso. Or a painter, you should study the dutch masters, and spend a couple years on colour theory, and at least a year on anatomy. No doubt all those things could help, to broaden and deepen someone's practice, and open new doors, but they might not be a particular person's path. For example, maybe what they need is to spend 1000 hours bashing on that guitar or that sketchbook in a basement somewhere, until they break through to what they really mean to say.

I have met "hedge wizards", who have developed amazing, and, importantly, very original hypnosis technique via almost pure intuition and feedback, or alternately, person-to-person observation and teaching. The space of hypnosis is laughably underexplored, especially in what's been published, and creativity can come from anywhere. I feel the next big breakthrough is just as likely to come from a 20 year old My Little Pony transformation fetishist, who primarily reads AO3.

I'm also reminded of the witches and wizards in Discworld, both with their own powerful, vastly different ways of accumulating knowledge.

 

The wizards with their vast library, with their pride in deep study, building cathedrals of theory and dispute over many years and generations of painstaking work.

 

And then there's the witches, whose magic is mostly from apprenticeship, experience and intuition, from being hands-on solving people's problems and from developing their own intensely individual, to the point of bloody-minded, personality. Interestingly, like some hypnotic techniques, the wizards are careful to credit the lineage ("Collatrap's Instant Pickling Stick", "Spold's Unstirring Divisor") whereas that might be inconceivable to witches - rarely categorizing and analyzing techniques, they might not even choose to see atomic divisions between them.

I'm sure most people will grow in both ways, and I firmly believe in the power of finding an idea in an old book that blows your socks off and changes the whole course of your practice (for me that would definitely be Erickson's Hypnotic Realities!) Curiosity about the roots of what you do is always a good thing.

But if you do hypnosis and you don't feel like a wizard: that's ok too.