As far back as ancient Egypt, when King Nectanebus used magic and wax figurines to control the outcome of an upcoming battle, military leaders and heads of state have used virtually every magic trick in the occult book to influence the course of international relations.

Bizarre as it may seem to those impatient with such things, the practice continues to the present day, with even the Pentagon and the CIA trying a hand at metaphysical warfare.

In this work spanning 5,000 years, Mandelbaum--a former U.S. intelligence agent who claims to be a psychic--recounts the means by which various nations have pressed the supernatural world into military service. Some sections, such as that on the mystic Rasputin, mostly recount what has already been told many times over. Elsewhere, the material intrigues, if only by showing the extent to which government agencies have placed their faith in psychic phenomena.

In one episode, Mandelbaum recounts that in the 1970s a U.S. government-employed psychic warned that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would be attacked by Libyan assassins in Saudi Arabia, and that Kissinger's wife, Nancy, would be killed. The warning came while Kissinger was actually en route to Riyadh; the psychic was part of the secret Project Bluebird, which sought to read the mind of Libya's Moammar Khadafy.

In response to the psychic's prediction, U.S. authorities had Kissinger whisked away immediately upon landing. Mandelbaum's forthright belief in the occult ("The Force does exist--within us") will raise eyebrows and even a few guffaws among skeptics, but his material is both informative and entertaining, and will find a readership among military history buffs and believers in the paranormal. (Feb.) - Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cults and Secret Societies have used simple brainwashing techniques for as long as anyone can remember.

The word "assassin," for instance, is Arabic for "user of hashish." The original assassins were an 11th Century Islamic cult of killers called the Nizari, who were promised the glories of martydom (not unlike their modern equivalents). Their leader offered a preview of the paradise to come, visions allegedly delivered via large doses of hash. In India, highly secretive cults flourished for centuries in the names of some of the more violent deities such as Kali.

The Knights (and their brethren, the Freemasons) quickly discovered the power of cult techniques such as isolation, hypnagogic rituals, arcane initiations and oaths of secrecy, which they very successfully applied among their ranks. Despite being victimized by the skilled torturers of the Inquisition (themselves masters of "thought reform"), none of the loyal thousands of Knights ever spilled any of the group's deepest secrets.

Mind Control

1493 - Paracelsus is born. He is the first person who scientifically describes and defines unethical hypnosis. He calls the phenomena of hypnotism magic (a word then used to describe any incomprehensible science). He calls hypnosis, used benevolently for medical purposes white magic. Hypnotism used harmfully, for exploitative control, he calls black magic.

Ancient Mind Control

I recently found an excellent Internet source on the history of mind control, located at The Addiction Web Site of Terence T. Gorski. It fills in many gaps of early mind control history and includes many excellent illustrations not found elsewhere. That site is the source of the following information.

Lecture by Dr. Alan Scheflin
This was given in 1995 in Dallas, Texas

In the Stone Age evil spirits were thought to reside in the head. A crude surgical procedure was devised in order to release the evil spirits and relieve the suffering of the possessed victims. A circular portion of the skull was cut using a trephine (from Greek trupanon, border). Apparently, some victims survived the trephination procedure. Recently, historians have suggested that trephination was not an exorcism practice. Rather, trephination was used to remove bone splinters and blood clots.

Prehistoric Treatments

The earliest historical evidence of mind control techniques can be traced to a practice known as trephining, found to have existed among the Incas and Aztecs.

This practice involves cutting a hole in the skull of a person who is suspected of being possessed by evil spirits.  The hole in the skull was believed to release the evil spirits.

In some forms of trephining, an instrument was inserted into the skull to scare out the spirit.  This procedure was literally an early form of lobotomy.

Trephining may be the first historically known treatment for severe mental illness and one of the first psychosurgery procedures designed to change socially unacceptable behaviors.  Many trephined skulls have been recovered from civilizations throughout the world giving evidence that trephining was widely practiced by many ancient civilizations.

The possession idea carried through well into the Middle Ages, when possession theories of mental illness were prevalent, and cures based on them were equally as prevalent and indeed necessary. 

There was also a phenomenon known as Moon Madness, which included frenzied dancing episodes that went throughout the Middle Ages. The treatment of choice was exorcism. This was, of course, the early equivalent of Multiple Personality Disorder and the notion of possession theory, the body being inhabited by other beings, is an important aspect of dissociation. The theory may have changed somewhat, but there is certainly a direct history from the possession ideas to the dissociation ideas that we experience today.

[NOTE: Recent research has found that the cause of this Moon Madness and frenzied dancing (also known as St. Vitus Dance) may have been the presence of a mold or fungus in rye or wheat grain that led to hallucinations.-JM]

The first real treatise in mind control, which brought together possession ideas in to a textbook, is THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM, which is written in 1484, it's called THE WITCH'S HAMMER, and I was interested to note that in the latest issue of, I think, NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE, with the cover story on the brain, there is a one-page description of THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM by a novelist who wrote a woman's novel based on its terms. 

THE MALLEUS was used as a bible for witch-hunting, and it tells you how to identify witches and how especially to interrogate them, and how to cure them--the cure usually being killing them.  

The value of THE MALLEUS, I think, is two-fold. It is probably the second known text book in history on cross-examination techniques, the first one being THE PLATONIC DIALOGUES. And so, we get in THE MALLEUS, a systemization of the knowledge of how to do interrogations to lead people to give confessions that you want them to give, and so in the history of mind control it plays a very important role, because this is the work that was used by the inquisitors throughout the Middle Ages and thereafter to obtain confessions and indeed false confessions. 

THE MALLEUS itself then was read by police departments centuries later and used as the beginning of the development of police manual. Let me jump ahead a couple of centuries until last century, the 1800's, with the birth of psychiatry, and it perhaps is no surprise that there is a common link to possession theories and the birth of psychiatry, in that most psychiatric treatments had the same elements of violence that we see in THE MALLEUS and that we see in the exorcism, and beyond that. It's the cast-the-demons-out [approach].

History of Mind Control

Psychiatric Treatments Based
On Possession Paradigms

It was beliefs that these people were inhabited by demons, and that in order to get those demons out exorcism was replaced either with violence or with severe restraint.   I'm going to run through a series of slides here, all taken from psychiatric text books, on the way in which people were treated. 

This one is an individual who was chained to a wall, and this is a form of a straitjacket as you can see, where a person is tied directly to a drain pipe in the wall. 

Here are pictures of an early version of the straightjacket itself, a chair incorporating a straightjacket restraint, and another commonly used psychiatric restraint.

Shock Treatments

A century ago they also had something that we tend to consider as modern but is not -- shock treatment. The shock done, however, was usually a different form than electricity since they had not yet invented electricity. This is a water shock treatment, and another version of it appears here, where an individual is left blind-folded on the platform, suddenly the platform falls from beneath him and he's dumped into a bucket of ice cold water. This was intended to be shocking.

With the decline of rational and scientific thought, supernatural and superstitious interpretations to abnormal behavior flourished. Good and evil struggled for mortal souls. By 1252, the intense fear of demonic possession set the wheels of the inquisition in motion. The Witchcraft manual, Malleus Maleficarum (Pope Innocent VIII, 1484), described the signs of demonic possessions. One such sign was a sudden loss of reason. Inquisitors did not distinguish among heretics, eccentrics, and the mentally disturbed. Burning, torture, and exorcism were common methods of ejecting the devil from the possessed victim.

Middle Ages Treatments

© 2007 by The Phoenix Foundation

Body text

© 2007 by The Phoenix Foundation

Body text