Frightening Crying Children into Silence by Suggestion

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 5 pages

Five pages, from the twelfth volume of the Collected Writings under the heading "Black Magic in Science", and among the most immediately practical things in the series. Its target is the public hypnotic exhibition, then a popular entertainment, and the casual use of suggestion on children — a domestic habit rather than an occult practice, which is precisely the point being made.

Karma, Blavatsky writes — the terrible but just retributive law — will visit all those who develop the most awful results in the future, generated at public exhibitions staged for the amusement of the profane. She asks the reader to consider the dangers bred, and the new forms of mental and physical disease begotten by such insane handling of psychic will, and sets the practice alongside the introduction of animal matter into human blood by the Brown-Séquard method as its equivalent on the physical plane. They laugh at the occult sciences and deride mesmerism, she notes — while doing this. It is a short document with a long reach, and the clearest example in the series of black magic located not in a temple but in a nursery.

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