I have a real attraction to shady professions that exist in two (or more) spaces simultaneously.
Hypnosis has a long history, a good chunk of which is a legacy as being a scam, snake oil. This history is where all the style comes from, though. All the aesthetics that make it feel dangerous and salacious, come from this period of conmen and literal parlor tricks. The whole thing was kind of adjacent to the spiritualist movement, the occult, and there was a zeitgeist arc that made clear we were very interested in these borderline-magic interests.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Psychosexual Dictator to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.