Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (358 page)

follower of Mesmer's methods, he used it to house people in search of a cure. The afflux of patients was enormous: people were bursting out of the castle rooms. What could be done? The Marquis had a bright idea. He magnetized a stately elm tree in the village! 'suffering humanity from both sides of the Rhine flocked to this magnetic tree as if to a wonder-working sacred image'.

No comment. But reliquaries, mummified saints and miracle-working statues of saints are not always necessary to effect miraculous cures. Old elm trees can do it too so long as the cure seekers 'believe' in them.

Suggestion and hypnosis (as a form of suggestion) are always present when miraculous cures take place at pilgrimage shrines, whether the Church admits it or not (and this applies equally to the

'genuine' miracles attested). Suggestion, to define it more accurately, is an influencing of the processes of thought, feeling and will, which 'leads to the uncritical acceptance of convictions, the suggestion of values and patterns of behaviour'. In the case of affective sympathy 'man involuntarily opens himself to

... phenomenal forms and ideas .... Mass situations, as well as states of heightened excitement of the aftects, have a strengthening effect. ... Autosuggestion is self influencing by emotional hope and wishful thinking.' What can hypnosis do? It can 'easily summon up illusions and hallucinations.

Memory is released. Most people can be hypnotized if they are inwardly prepared.'

These definitions are diagnoses of pilgrims at pilgrimage shrines.

What does the Church say about this?

It claims that 'the fact of the major miracle in the Catholic Church (must) be established beyond doubt to the unprejudiced investigator' [29]. I find this assessment by the Church to be inept, to say the least.

If in our age that is so overloaded with neurotic organic diseases and physically harmful states of depression, only 100 cures (even if they are not 'miracles') effected by suggestion, autosuggestion and mass hypnosis are reported annually from all the places of pilgrimage, the church's media - Madonnas, relics, springs, etc. - fulfil a useful miraculous purpose.

Miraculous cures have been known since time immemorial. Professor D. Langen [30] writes: Hypnosis as a psychic treatment of disease is extremely ancient and can be found both in the medicine of the ethnic cultures (shamans) and in the lofty civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome .... The trial was lost in the Middle Ages. ... Franz Anton Mesmer marked the beginning of a new period that led to the still valid suggestion theory of hypnosis by way of the theory of fluidum and magnetismus ani-malis. ... Thought is concentrated on a narrowly defined point so that a relation between a hyper-awake core of consciousness and the remaining lowered states of consciousness arises. While this state is maintained, thought is ordered to direct itself to a point or a complex of ideas and remain there. ...

Consequently meditation is thought concentrated on a point in a sub-waking state of consciousness.

By all the 12,000 saints! Cannot you see that all the masses at places of pilgrimage concentrate their gaze on a 'point' say a statue of the Madonna? How they fall into a hypnotic trance by autosuggestion?

Do you not feel in your bones how the general layer of consciousness sinks and simultaneously dwells on the miracle in a hyperactive state? Nearly every pilgrim has fallen into the power of mass