Across very different cultures and centuries, people have described a strikingly similar experience: a state of altered awareness, heightened suggestibility, sometimes a sense of acting without full ordinary control. A clinical hypnotherapist calls it a trance state. A shaman or medium in many traditional societies calls it spirit possession. An accusation of black magic often describes the same outward signs — but frames them as something being done to a person, by an outside malevolent force, rather than a state a person enters. This is a companion piece to our earlier look at what clinical hypnosis can and can’t actually do — this one is about why the same underlying phenomenon gets described so differently depending on who’s doing the describing.
The historical throughline is real, and it’s old
Trance induction has been a central feature of healing and religious practice for thousands of years, long before anything resembling clinical psychology existed. In Ancient Egypt, so-called “sleep temples” had priests induce trance-like states to interpret dreams and deliver therapeutic suggestions. Ancient Greek healing temples dedicated to Asclepius used a similar practice called incubation, where the sick would sleep in the temple hoping for a divine cure delivered in a dream. Shamanic traditions across Central Asia, Africa, and the Americas independently developed trance-induction techniques — rhythmic chanting, drumming, sensory overload — to reach altered states used for healing and divination. These practices developed independently across unconnected cultures, which is itself notable: it suggests the underlying capacity for trance is a basic feature of human neurology, not something invented by one tradition and copied by others.
What actually changed with clinical psychology
The shift toward a medical framing began seriously in the 18th century, with Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” — a since-discredited idea about a universal fluid moving through living beings, but one whose practical technique (induced trance for therapeutic suggestion) is recognizably an ancestor of modern clinical hypnosis. What actually changed over the following two centuries wasn’t the phenomenon itself so much as the explanatory model: instead of an external spirit or force acting on a person, researchers began treating trance as an internally generated state of focused attention and altered self-monitoring, measurable with modern brain imaging and explainable through ordinary neuroscience rather than an outside supernatural agent.
Where possession and “black magic” framing still overlaps with the clinical picture
This is the part worth being precise about, because it’s easy to either dismiss possession-belief entirely or overclaim that it’s identical to clinical hypnosis — neither is quite right. Modern cross-cultural psychiatric research treats dissociative trance and spirit possession as real, observable altered states of consciousness, with genuine neurophysiological correlates, while also being clear that possession is not simply synonymous with trance — the trance state is closer to a precondition, and the specific cultural meaning layered on top of it (a spirit, an ancestor, a curse) is a separate, socially shaped interpretation of that state, not a hallucination invented from nothing. Research has also found real neurological differences between trance experienced as a voluntary religious practice and trance-like symptoms associated with epilepsy or other neurological conditions — the label “possession” gets applied to genuinely different underlying states depending on context, which is exactly why cross-cultural psychiatry treats this as a genuinely complicated area rather than a simple case of superstition versus science.
Why the same state gets three different explanations
The honest answer is that the neurological substrate — focused attention, altered self-monitoring, heightened suggestibility — appears to be common ground across clinical hypnosis, religious trance, and the states described in possession or black-magic accusations. What differs is the interpretive layer built on top of it, and that layer is doing real cultural work in each case: a clinical framing treats the state as a tool the person controls and can use therapeutically; a religious or shamanic framing treats it as contact with something beyond the individual, often carrying social and spiritual significance a purely clinical description strips away; an accusation of black magic treats the same signs as evidence of harm being done to a person by another party, often functioning as a social explanation for otherwise unexplained illness or misfortune within a community. None of these framings is simply “wrong” about the raw neurological event — they disagree about what it means, who’s responsible for it, and what should be done about it, which is a different and more interesting disagreement than science versus superstition.
For more on what clinical hypnosis specifically can and can’t do under controlled research conditions — including where popular claims about it clearly overreach — see our companion piece: Hypnosis Is Real. Here’s What It Can and Can’t Actually Do.
