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trance

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Gerbert, by the window, shuddered; his mouth contorted. The witch began to twist faster and faster while her twin was talking to Gisela, mumbling to her, marching old holy words straight through the child__ ear into her skull, where they entered the bloodstream and looked for the enemy. The monk__ fingers twitched in the same rhythm and he found himself falling into a trance. He knew it would be dangerous to witness the witches brewing and dancing but there was an energy in it that he__ missed badly since he__ been asked to educate the young princess. Gerbert didn__ even notice when the hags stopped, tucked the girl in, rubbed the concoction on her lips and left for the unseen place from which they had come. Gisela healed quickly thereafter: The fever fell that same night and she asked for solid food the next morning. She had no memory of what had happened, but when she bounced on one leg across the meadow in the castle yard, she chanted a little melody that had not been heard in church, an odd melody that made Gerbert__ ears prick up because he sensed the uncanny in it.

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Lovers of God possess intense concentration. In prayer their attention rivets itself so completely onto God that nothing can tear it away. Even a suggestion of the divine may draw them into a higher state of consciousness. Occasionally this can be somewhat inconvenient. Sri Ramakrishna once went to see a religious drama produced by his disciple. The curtain went up and a character started singing the praises of the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna immediately began to enter the supreme state of consciousness. The stage faded; the actors and actresses faded. As only a great mystic can, he uttered a protest: "I come here, Lord, to see a play staged by my disciple, and you send me into ecstasy. I won't let it happen!" And he started saying over and over, "Money... money...money," so as to keep some awareness of the temporal world.

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Eknath Easwaran

Passage Meditation: Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart into Daily Life

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The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well _ in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics...""The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head...""One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle _ and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse.She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

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Michelle Stacey

The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery

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Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.

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Michelle Stacey

The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery

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Escape from reality. In some instances, dissociation induces people to imagine that they have some kind of mastery over intractable environmental difficulties. Dissociation is often implicated in magical thinking or self-induced trance states. This aspect of dissociation is frequently found in abuse survivors. It is not uncommon for abused children to engage in magical thinking to retain an illusion of control over the situation (e.g., believing that they "cause" the perpetrator to act out).