ABSTRACT
I was in Recife at the Centro Espírita Dr. Adolph Fritz again—not physically, but, with the help of my videotapes, field notes, memory, and whatever written material I could find, reconstructing what took place prior to the ubiquitous German spirit directing a scalpel, scissors, or needles at the first patient. I wanted to know if, as I now suspected, the patients could have been in a hypnotic trance or ASC. Dr. Fritz had argued vociferously that his patients were neither mesmerized nor hypnotized, and I had not detected anything like a formal induction process when he and other healer-mediums worked. But could something else have produced the same result? Or had sufficient time elapsed so that those waiting to see him had gone through at least one 90 to 120 minute ultradian cycle, during which they spontaneously nodded off? I wanted to know if relevant information about Kardecism’s alternative reality, comparable to suggestions given by a hypnotherapist in a clinical setting, could have been transduced culturalbiologically to turn on immediate-early genes and activate endorphins and the immune and other physiological systems before the invasion of the body by the spirit with his scalpel had taken place.
