CHAPTER 8

Among the Aissawa: Music, Hypnosis, and Disruptions of Attention

Céline Frigau Manning

In Les Aïssâoua à Tlemcen (1900), the French sociologist Edmond Doutté describes how a young initiate of the Aissawa, a mystical Muslim order, endured hefty saber blows on his arms and stomach without apparent pain. Later, this same young man

returns and places himself in the midst of the music which redoubles in vigor: it is a terrible racket. There, he begins to dance. . . . His eyes seem to pop out of their sockets, he reaches the pinnacle of exaltation and falls like a lifeless mass, limbs stiffened.1

Doutté concludes, “There may be some pretense in this; but there is also sincerity and certainly a great deal of the phenomena of hypnosis.” For him, both the multisensory stimulation and the powerful violence associated with Aissawa ritual are linked to a trance-like state that the sociologist can only compare to behaviors familiar to him from the (European) realms of hypnosis and ecstasy.2

The Aissawa brotherhood3 was founded in late fifteenth-century Morocco by Sheikh al-Kamil al-Hadi ben Issa and spread throughout Northern Africa in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the group had ­notable branches in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. During their religious ceremonies, disciples famously performed physical ordeals that European observers interpreted as self-inflicted tortures. These trials, performed to ritual music, were inspired by the legend of their founder Sheikh al-Kamil, who was reputed to have tamed ferocious beasts and venomous snakes. Colonial accounts—by settlers, explorers, and tourists—often described Aissawa ceremonies viewed either in the desert or during street processions celebrating the birth of the prophet Muhammed (the Mawlid). Such testimonies, tending toward Orientalism, focused primarily on the Aissawa of Algeria, who formed part of a recent and restive French colony.4 But beyond enjoying the exotic frisson associated with foreign religious demonstrations, French writers were astounded at being unable to ascertain what was actually going on. How could the Aissawa be apparently insensitive to poison, iron, and fire? By what means did they achieve such profound states of trance? Were their rituals simply a performance involving music, dance, and acting—a staged deception, not unlike the marvels one might experience at a bourgeois hypnosis show in France?

Among those who attempted to answer these questions was Hippolyte Bernheim, founder of the “Nancy school” of hypnosis, the main rival of Charcot’s Salpêtrière school. In his 1891 study Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie, he described the power of Aissawa music and the multisensory environment of their trancing ritual:

The Aissawa . . . plunge into an ecstatic and anesthetic hypnosis. . . . To the sounds of the Arabian drum and iron castanets, intoxicated by the scent of aromatics whose vapors drift beneath their noses, they prepare themselves by rhythmic movements of the head and of the torso, by guttural sounds modulated according to the musical rhythm, and by violent and disordered contortions. They thus become insensible, swallow crushed glass, pierce their cheeks with sharp blades, walk on red-hot bars, etc.5

For Bernheim, the rhythmic sounds and motions of the ritual were gateways to hypnosis, which produced (among other results) a physical insensibility akin to anesthesia. His appeal to hypnosis to explain Aissawa ritual was unsurprising given the importance of the practice in European medical and popular discourses during the long nineteenth century.6 Hypnosis—as scholars including Clara Gallini and Jacqueline Carroy have shown—was a powerful culture in itself.7 Often associated with music and widely popular across all social classes, it was invoked within the context of medical research but also had strong ties to magic, charlatanism, and entertainment. All of these resonances are present in European discussions of the Aissawa.8

Here I am particularly interested in the role of attention in nineteenth-century accounts of hypnosis. As we shall see, fixed forms of focus were considered key to anesthetized or hypnotic states, especially the self-hypnosis associated with European religious ecstasy. In Christian contexts, ecstatic experience could be marked as divine, conceived as a deep form of prayer with revelatory potential. However, when associated with non-Western traditions, attentional absorption was generally not understood to be uplifting or ennobling but instead regarded as problematic, a “morbid state of the attention” as Théodule Ribot put it, or a form of “mystical degeneracy” in Emmanuel Régis’s formulation.9 These assessments are particularly important in the context of French reports on Aissawa religious trance, many of which rely strongly on the trope of the animalistic other in order to make sense of the participants’ evident lack of pain in the face of gruesome self-mutilation. Rather than a sacred attention, in other words, Muslim forms of religious focus were linked with an involuntary cessation of mental activity and thus a degradation of the human into quasi-mechanical or nonvolitional states.

Authenticity and Simulation

In colonial accounts of Aissawa rituals, emotional contagion is key and is almost always linked to a specific and totalizing soundscape that dominates the attention of participants and observers alike. The generation of this sound environment followed prescribed stages: After several hours of prayers recited by the disciples and the audience, the mystics then began to chant alone, swaying back and forth and from one side to the other, repeating at first various phrases and finally only the name Allah. Musicians then initiated a rhythmic, repetitive song accompanied on wooden instruments and tambourines that lasted until the conclusion of the ceremony. The final preparation corresponded to the moment when the Aissawa themselves would get up, partially disrobe, and lean over stoves that gave forth odorous vapors. Then they undertook a series of ordeals frequently involving fire, poison, or iron, ranging from touching hot coals or licking scalding iron rods to swallowing cactus leaves, snakes, or scorpions and even piercing their faces with needles or their bodies with knives.10 We can get a sense of what this might have involved from a drawing that the traveling illustrator Adrien Marie published in Le Monde illustré in 1889 (Figure 8.2): The central image, framed by the geometric decoration of an Oriental salon, shows seven drummers seated around a man who dances in front of an incense burner; this spectacle, visually dominated by the drums, is surrounded by vignettes representing different practices of self-harm, as in a gallery of curiosities.

For nineteenth-century Europeans, the apparently supernatural physical insensitivity of the Assaiwa was a point of great concern. Historical reports on the group’s rituals frequently presented the participants as nonhuman, their minds fixed in such an intense state of irrational attentive absorption that they were deprived of their reason and of any restraint imposed by social rules. In his 1904 account of an Aissawa spirit possession ceremony, for example, the career diplomat Eugène Aubin observed that

the venerable person who is performing [the initiation] first spits in [the initiate’s] mouth, and then, in certain cases, dubs him with the name of an animal to which he considers him to possess a resemblance. The lions, tigers, panthers, and jackals will have to demonstrate the ability of the Aissawa to eat raw sheep . . . others will be content to be modest gzouliyin [gazelles], whose contortions and howlings are performed to the accompaniment of tambourines, big drums, and bagpipes.11

Here we have something akin to the relationship between magnetizer and magnetized: The initiator induces the initiate to act according to his command. A similar depiction of Aissawa ritual as a form of animal possession can be found in the writings of the military doctor Auguste Warnier, who reported seeing hordes of Aissawa “rush like hungry beasts on a living sheep, still with its fleece, and devour it whole, except for the bones, as hyenas or jackals might do, eating wool, skin, flesh, fat, intestines with everything they contain.”12 Warnier emphasized his feeling of humiliation in seeing “men, my fellow men, making such great efforts to get as close to the brute as possible.”13 This repertoire of dehumanizing graphic images—a kind of lexicon of radical otherness—distanced North-African bodies from European ones by drawing on obvious racial stereotypes.

Indeed, French observers took pains to clarify that the Aissawa’s altered states were related to degraded conditions familiar from the bourgeois European salon. Their accounts link the violent trancing of the brotherhood to intimations of pathology or mental alienation that had woven through medical texts on ecstasy since the early nineteenth century. Frédéric Bérard, for instance, in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1812–22), had described ecstasy as a pathological state “consist[ing] in a lively exaltation of certain ideas, which absorb the attention so much that the external sensations are suspended, the voluntary movements stopped.”14 A decade later, Alexandre Bertrand identified the deep link that unites ecstasy with religious beliefs, but emphasized that the state did not necessarily entail any mystical content, arguing that ecstasy occurred more often among women or in strongly religious societies because imagination in such cases prevailed over reason; the progress of civilization therefore tended to reverse this relationship.15 In contrast, when associated with celebrated intellects, such as Archimedes, Newton, or Pascal, or with enlightened Christian mystics such as St. Teresa, Théodule Ribot claimed that states of “intellectual rapture” and exaltation could be ennobling and even transcendent.16 However, as the case of the Aissawa indicates, these forms of uplift and noble concentration were rarely afforded to other religious traditions.

Colonial writers typically ascribed the apparent state of absorption ­characteristic of the Aissawa as involving trickery or training, rather than pure mental concentration. French diplomat Eugène Aubin, in his travelogue Morocco of To-day, argued that demonstrations such as those made by the Aissawa should be understood not as spiritual activities but as empty displays meant to exploit “popular credulity” in order to “live in idleness on the alms brought by the poor to the Koubba of their ancestor.”17 And Baudel, the author of Un an à Alger, excursions et souvenirs (1887) had made much the same point, cautioning that the Aissawa were “fanatical sectarians and vulgar magicians, whose trickery and violent acts the Arabs love and admire with a superstitious terror.”18 According to Baudel, such ritual could interest Europeans only as a test of their critical faculties: To believe in such phenomena would be to allow oneself to be fooled, and hence to become more like the local population. The physician Jules Davasse similarly urged: “Scholars and travelers who have the fortune to attend such spectacles, please remove all our doubts, if possible. Beware the mirages of credulity.”19

These references to credulity invoke a broader nineteenth-century debate presented by the English philosopher William Clifford in an influential article entitle “The Ethics of Belief” (1877) and developed in a subsequent exchange with the American philosopher William James. Clifford argued that it was not only “wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, or to nourish belief by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation,” but that credulity itself created lies and deceit, rendering society “credulous, [so that it will] lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery,” ultimately resulting in a “sin against mankind.”20

This is the position adopted by the aforementioned Warnier in his report on the Aissawa at the 1867 Universal Exhibition. Warnier writes:

Algerian displays, whose international theater gives an exhibition to astonished Parisians, passes in the Muslim world of North Africa for real miracles, and, by special privilege of the Prophet Mohammed—may the blessing of God be upon him!—these miracles can only be performed by members of the religious brotherhood of Aissawa, which is today widespread throughout Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.21

By pastiching the eulogy that pious Muslims pronounce at each occurrence of the name of Mohammad or of any prophet, the doctor expressed irony with regard to the feats of the Aissawa. Yet Warnier also takes note of the clear-cut facts presented by his own senses: “It is indisputable,” he admits, that “they crunch scorpions between their teeth; that they lick white-hot iron blades with their tongues; that they bite into thorny cactuses.”22 The odor of burning flesh, he continues, is unambiguous: “One can feel the warmth of the red plates and the smell soon warns those present that a scent of burnt flesh or horn has spread throughout the room. So there is burning, but burning without pain. Ordinarily it is either the tongue or the sole of the foot that is subjected to this ordeal.”23 He goes on, however, to explain these ordeals as resulting from mere physical conditioning (rather than any spiritual preparation), noting that “the Aissawa never approach their miraculous exercises without having prepared for them with a sort of bewilderment and daze which makes them look more like animals than humans.”24 Warnier thus suggests that the experience of pain could be largely overcome through training and practice.25

Training to Become a Machine

The question of veracity versus mere performance runs strongly through nineteenth-century European debates on hypnosis. These practices involved subjects coached by magnetizers whose bodies would then testify to the reality of mesmeric or hypnotic power. Whether hypnotic phenomena really took place or were instances of charlatanism often remained unclear; indeed, rather than pitting one against the other, hypnotic displays involved a curious entanglement of simulation and reality. Simulation often occurred after the induction of authentic altered states and was intended to offer to an audience the spectacle of a learned “magnetic” performance.26

Some European writers mapped this same complexity onto their interpretation of Aissawa rituals. Doutté emphasized that these partly simulated practices, when combined with dance and music, made it possible to “bring those who apply themselves into states more or less close to hypnotic sleep,” allowing for the performance of spectacular feats of pain resistance or endurance for the benefit of audiences. As in mesmeric displays, a suspension of awareness could paradoxically be created from the states of intense focus that occur during preparations for the rituals. As Doutté points out, Aissawa practices “are thus called idjdzâb in Arabic, that is to say ‘trainings in ecstasy.’”27

Warnier, still striving to distinguish the true from the false, also focused on the training involved in attaining these absorbed states. In his account, musical stimulation, combined with the lack of air and water, provoked and prolonged states of unconsciousness. The disciples spent “hours at a time, in a narrow and airless room”:

Soon . . . we can no longer breathe, all lungs are panting, the audience is overwhelmed by thirst; the moment is coming when man will become an unconscious machine, obeying the orders of the drum and the voice. . . . Only those who have mounted an assault or charged with a bayonet, driven by the sound of hundreds of throbbing drums beating the pace of the charge, will understand the effect that two hours of iron cymbals and drums, combined with a generalized howling, can produce on the brains of such unfortunates.28

It might seem ironic for Warnier to compare the trance of colonized Algerian subjects to the experiences of members of the French military at the front. And yet European military training was comparable to the ritualized preparation of the Aissawa, in that it too involved a complete submission of the subject’s consciousness and the absorption of the individual moral and physical body into a collective.29

Warnier also appeals to the notion of “ivresse,” or intoxication, which he disambiguates from the consumption of alcohol: “Drunk with thirst, with movement, with sounds—especially with sounds—[the Aissawa] do not know what they are doing, they do not feel anything.”30 The notion that states of trance led to the suspension of conscious actions and perceptions, and were thus a form of “ivresse,” also appears in other accounts of Aissawa sessions.31 In 1883, the science journalist G. Kerlus reported that the Aissawa relied upon “a kind of hypnosis, what might be called a mechanical intoxication . . . to support their trials.” He concluded, “The dances and songs that precede [their trials] merely aim at bringing the patient to a state of cerebral arousal, a dizziness, a real drunkenness that removes the perception of pain from the brain.”32 Those individuals undergoing trance, whom Kerlus deems “voluntary torture victims,” are thus able to induce altered states in themselves as a result of these focused preparations, a kind of self-hypnosis.33

In addition to accounting for the onset of the trance and outlining the necessary preparations for the subject’s altered mental and physical state, European theories of hypnosis also provided a framework within which medical writers could comprehend the absorptive experience of the trance ritual itself. This is evident in Dr. Crouigneau’s report in Promenades d’un médecin à travers l’Exposition (1889). Crouigneau emphasized the repetitive, industrialized character of the performance and the consequent link between physical and musical forms of repetition leading to loss of individual subjectivity:

Before beginning their exercises, all the Khouans [initiates, here of the Aissawa Brotherhood] sit on the ground, legs crossed, in a semi-circle, their chorfâ, or descendant of the Prophet, placed in their midst. They recite or rather chant their prayer taken from the Quran, sometimes spreading their arms, sometimes hiding their faces in their hands. Then they accompany themselves on bendios or large tambourines, whose skin they stretch from time to time by turning them over a stove of hot coals. They strike with a rhythmic and monotonous movement, rather similar to that of a thresher, alternately with the tip of the fingers in the center of the drum and with the palm of the hand on the peripheral region.34

Comparing the movement of musicians to mechanical threshing—a process invented at the end of the eighteenth century, which produced an immense increase in agricultural productivity—renders these Aissawa, in a sense, laborers of performance.35

An Aissawa advances, Crouigneau continues, “according to the measure of the battery of seven or eight tambourines which surround him; he jumps upwards with both feet in the air and at the same time swings his head back and forth, at full speed.”36 Timing the duration of this portion of the ritual, the doctor estimates it at seven or eight minutes. As it comes to a close, the accompanying music accelerates, activating then deactivating the performers by shifting them from a state of entranced attention/action to a condition of insensibility:

When each of them has finished their work, the songs accelerate, the beat of the drums quickens more and more. The Khouan [initiate] resumes jumping frantically and bobbing his head until he finally falls to the ground lifeless. Immediately one of the assistants throws himself on him, sits him up and bends him in two until his head has reached down between his knees, then, straightening him, he lifts him up under his arms and puts him on his feet. The hypnotic sleep is then dissipated. . . . These strange sessions leave one wondering about the real state of the nervous system of these fanatics, who almost every day indulge in similar practices.37

Crouigneau expresses fears about the toll of repeated hypnotic performance on the Aissawa, declaring himself perplexed by the health of these men, at the mercy of the mechanical repetition of “hypnotic” processes.38

A similar concern, couched in Western medical terms, was voiced by the writer Théophile Gautier. In his 1851 article on the brotherhood for La Revue de Paris, Gautier remarked on an Aissawa member who responded to the sound of the drums by “start[ing] and ris[ing] to galvanic jolts like a dead frog, at the shock of the Volta battery.”39 This comparison associates the automatic nature of the mystic’s submission to music to that of an amphibian’s corpse reacting to an electric current. It recurs when Gautier describes how another Aissawa’s “nostrils quivered, his lips were blue, his eyes popped out of his head, the muscles tensed on his thin neck like violin strings on their bridge; nervous tremors shook his whole body up and down.”40 As a result of the violent convulsions of his trance state, Gautier continues, “his arms moved like the springs of a broken machine, with movements which no longer started from a common center and in which the will had no part.”41 Here, the Aissawa appears not just as an involuntary actor but as a broken machine. Gautier’s clinical vocabulary both feeds on stereotyped images familiar from discourses on hypnosis—where hypnotized subjects were compared to dysfunctional machines or automata—but also exaggerates it.42 For him, Muslim mystics are dehumanized as victims of bestial spasms.

The relationship between French medical description and reports on the Aissawa went further, however. Gautier also used the example of the stages of a nervous crisis, widely known at this time from the work of Charcot and his circle, to portray the brotherhood’s rituals. He made notable recourse to coded phrases that would have reminded his French readers of medical terms and behaviors already familiar from reports on mental asylums. Thus, in his staging of the ritual’s climax, Gautier writes:

The fervor of prayer was increasing; the faces of the Khouans were beginning to become distorted. . . . Foam was coming to their lips; their eyes were becoming bloodshot, their upturned pupils fled beneath their eyelid, showing only the cornea beneath. . . . The rhythm of the drums became more and more compelling. . . . The nodding, which had at first been performed by only a few, was now generalized; the oscillations however had taken on such violence that occiputs struck against shoulders and forehead against chests. Soon even this was not enough. The swinging began from the waist up, and the body arced out a frightening semicircle; it was seizures, epilepsy.43

This description culminates in the figures of a circle’s arc, typical of the first, “epileptoid,” stage of hysteria; then proceeding to the violent movements of the second, “clonic,” stage, and finally the melancholy or ecstasy of the third, “terminal” stage. By employing the imagery of the body bent into a semi­circle, Gautier obliquely announces what is to come. The descent into a convulsive crisis makes it possible to exhibit the unspeakable, to turn the religious narrative into one of horror. This culminates in the ultimate act, involving a living sheep:

The Aissawa threw themselves on the poor animal, knocked it down, and, while some held its legs, in spite of its tremors and its weak kicks of agony, the others tore at its belly with their teeth, chewing its entrails among the tufts of wool. Some drew towards them, as carnivorous birds do with carrion, a long thread of gut, which they swallowed as they went; others plunged their heads into the collapsed carcass, biting the heart, the liver or the lungs.—The sheep was soon nothing more than bloody mud, a shapeless shred that these ferocious beasts fought over among themselves, with a fury greater than that of hyenas and wolves.44

Gautier here highlights the Aissawa’s animalian state and the deep repulsion they arouse in the viewer. His sensationalist narrative follows the fashion of contemporary French horror writing, known as “frenetic” literature, which combined Gothic tropes with melodramatic scenes of shocking violence.45

Gautier’s account further implies that observing the Aissawa entailed a risk of contagion, even to Western audiences:

My eye clouded over and my reason was confounded before this dizzying scene. The singular imitative sympathy which makes your jaws relax when you yawn caused me involuntary jolts on my carpet; I shook my head mechanically and I, too, felt mad urges to scream. A horseman from the Maghzen, seated not far from me, could resist it no longer and rolled in the dust with laughter and nervous sobs, heaving himself to the hurried, jerky rhythm, panting in time to the snoring tarboukas in an ever-increasing fury of percussion.46

The effects of this contagion—not an emotional response, but rather a mechanical sympathy relating to the phenomena of hypnosis—even induces mild symptoms in the narrator himself. And while he manages to withstand the power of the scene, a North African near him is unable to resist and submits by joining the fray. Soon, Gautier reports,

Through the persistence of singing, drumming and oscillation, the Aissawa had reached the degree of climax necessary for the celebration of their rites; delirium, catalepsy, magnetic ecstasy, cerebral congestion, all the nervous disorders translated into sobs, contortions, tetanic stiffness which convulsed these dislocated limbs and faces which no longer had anything human about them.47

Here the phenomenon of imitation produces a deep malaise of reason. As Gautier’s story climaxes, it features an accumulation of medical terms alongside a dehumanization of the participants into a mere assemblage of body parts.

Gautier’s portrayal invokes a familiar trope that the contemporary anthropologist Johannes Fabian has critiqued in his book Out of Our Minds (2000): the figure of the European explorer as an intrepid emissary of science, presented as the polar opposite of the native who is chronically intoxicated by alcohol or drugs.48 As Fabian notes, European travelers to exotic lands were often found “out of their minds,” overwhelmed by “extreme fatigue, fear, delusions of grandeur, and feelings ranging from anger to contempt, under the influence of tropical diseases, alcohol, opiates, and other ingredients from the expedition’s medicine chest.”49 The forms of reason attached to Western colonizers was revealed as a sham; indeed, the altered physical and mental states these figures associated with the Aissawa could easily become their own. Reports of the Aissawa, then, can be seen as attempts to grapple with the liminal state of ecstasy itself and the attentional extreme it represented, which promised both to deliver metaphysical revelation and catapult its practitioners into states of exotic degradation.

* * *

The accounts of the Aissawsa I have analyzed in this essay describe fixed attention as a state that simultaneously enables supernatural abilities and leads to self-automation, violence, and degradation. European Orientalizing reports are not just tools in the imperialist arsenal, forms of degradation and subjugation that justify the colonial endeavor, but also evidence of discomfort with mysticism itself, especially the forms of radical absorption it entailed. As an escape from the rigid bounds of reason, hypnotic states were enticing, and even (in some accounts) compatible with religious transcendence. But they were also a threat to order and to the sharp distinctions between colonizer and colonized, and thus the site of an irreconcilable tension. Even firsthand accounts of the Aissawa were dangerous, liable to draw reasoned observers into states of attentional transfixion at odds with rational volition and virile forms of control. Music and sound played an inescapable role in this cognitive slippage, raising old fears around its dissociative power—its ability to shut down or hypnotize the mind, acting solely on the body and therefore reducing the individual to mere physicality. Attention (auditory, religious, journalistic) was key to familiar forms of European transcendence and yet when taken to excess could also undo that power. Where was the boundary? And where did “proof” become involuntary “participation”? These were among the questions that galvanized French discourse on the Aissawa, and which raised as-yet unanswered historical questions around attention, audition, power, and the limits of reason.

Notes

A previous version of this chapter was published in French as Ce que la musique fait à l’hypnose. Une relation spectaculaire au XIX^e siècle (Paris: les presses du réel, 2021), 99–174.

1. 1.  Edmond Doutté, Les Aïssâoua à Tlemcen (Châlons-sur-Marne: Imprimerie de Martin frères, 1900), 11. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2. 2.  Ibid. I translate the French word “extase” as the English “ecstasy,” in spite of the critique raised by Ian Hacking, who observes that “the French medical name for trance was extase—which in that context did not strictly mean ‘ecstasy,’ as some translators of old medical texts have supposed. But of course it still connotes a more exalted state than the comparatively neutral English word ‘trance.’” Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 142.
3. 3.  Both Aissawa (`Isawa) and Aissawiyya (`Isawiyya) come from the name of the order’s original founder; the former refers to the disciples, the latter to the order itself.
4. 4.  Such accounts supported the colonizing ideology of France at the time; indeed, many justified their texts from this perspective. An 1845 account of the religious orders of Algeria by the career soldier Édouard de Neveu, for example, underlined the danger of Muslim brotherhoods and illustrated their supposed political activities. In a dedication to the Duc d’Aumale, Neveu declared that “to expose the beliefs of the populations of Algeria . . . shows the civilizing task that France has taken on, and perhaps, in some cases, will help to dominate them.” Édouard de Neveu, Les Khouan, ordres religieux chez les musulmans de l’Algérie (Paris: Imprimerie de A. Guyot, 1846), 8; for the section of this study dedicated to the Aissawa in particular, see pp. 67–110. See also Saaïdia Oissila, “Islam et ordre colonial dans les empires britannique et français: entre collaboration et contestation,” Histoire, monde et cultures religieuses, 1, no. 25 (2013), 75–105.
5. 5.  Hippolyte Bernheim, Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie: études nouvelles (Paris: Octave Doin, 1891), 64–65.
6. 6.  See also Dr. Georges Crouigneau’s report on Aissawa performances given in a wider account of the 1899 Exposition universelle, which framed North African mystical ritual in more familiar European terms: “We are forced to recognize that some [practices] are not possible except under the influence of a quite particular modification of the nervous system, rather similar to that which we observe in certain states of hypnotism.” Georges Crouigneau, “Une visite chez les Aïssaoua,” in Promenades d’un médecin à travers l’Exposition (souvenirs de 1889) (Paris: Société d’éditions scientifiques, 1890), 19–23.
7. 7.  Jacqueline Carroy, Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie. L’invention de sujets (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), 19. See also Clara Gallini, La sonnambula meravigliosa. Magnetismo e ipnotismo nell’Ottocento italiano (Rome: Feltrinelli, 1983, republished by L’Asino d’oro, 2003); Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). In English, the word “mesmerism” remained a generic term over the course of the nineteenth century, applied to various practices associated with animal magnetism and hypnotism.
8. 8.  See Céline Frigau Manning, Ce que la musique fait à l’hypnose, 99–174.
9. 9.  Théodule Ribot, Psychologie de l’attention, trans. J. Fitzgerald as The Psychology of Attention (New York: Humboldt Publishing Company, 1889), 72–103; Emmanuel Régis, Des Hallucinations oniriques des dégénérés mystiques (Paris: C. R. du Congrès des méd. aliénistes, etc., 1895), 260.
10. 10.  See, e.g., Théophile Gautier, “Les Aïssaoua,” Loin de Paris (Paris: M. Levy Frères, 1865), 78–106, at 96–106; Émile Masqueray, Souvenirs et visions d’Afrique (Paris: E. Dentu, 1894), 154–159; Émile Laurent, “Les Aïssaouas,” Annales de la santé 2 (February 1909), 18–19.
11. 11.  Eugène Aubin, Morocco of To-Day (London: J. M. Dent & Company, 1906), 347. The French original travelogue was published two years earlier; see Eugène Aubin, Le Maroc d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Armand Colin, 1904), 435–436.
12. 12.  The description is reminiscent of the scenes of divine possession in Euripides’s Bacchae. See, for example, Auguste Warnier, “Les Arabes ou les Aïssaoua au théâtre international,” L’Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée (26 August 1867), 37–39. Warnier was the author of L’Algérie devant l’Empereur (Paris: Challamel aîné, 1865). His functions are listed on the title page: “officer of the Legion of Honor, retired military doctor, member of the Scientific Commission of Algeria, former director of civil affairs of the province of Oran, former member of the Council of the Government of Algeria.” On Warnier, see Vincent Wright, Les Préfets de Gambetta (Paris: Presses Paris Sorbonne, 2007), 420–421.
13. 13.  Auguste Warnier, “Les Arabes ou les Aïssaoua,” 38.
14. 14.  Frédéric Bérard, “Extase,” in Marie Joseph Louis Alard, Jean-Louis Alibert et al., eds., Dictionnaire des sciences médicales par une société de médecins et de chirurgiens vol. 14 (Paris: Panckoucke, 1812), 294–298, at 296.
15. 15.  Alexandre Bertrand, Du magnétisme animal en France et des jugements qu’en ont porté les sociétés savantes, suivi de Considérations sur l’apparition de l’extase dans les traitements magnétiques (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1826, then Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004, Serge Nicolas, ed.), 473–474. As Jan Goldstein observes, “The term ‘ecstasy’ as used by Bertrand had an entirely idiosyncratic meaning and . . . included both the extreme religious experience usually associated with it and altered states of consciousness utterly lacking in religious content.” See Goldstein, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 70. Goldstein refers to Bertrand’s Du magnétisme animal en France as well as to his articles published in Le Globe from 1824 until his death in 1831.
16. 16.  Ribot, The Psychology of Attention, 93–100.
17. 17.  Aubin, Morocco of To-day, 363; Aubin, Le Maroc d’aujourd’hui, 433–434.
18. 18.  [M.-J.] Baudel, Un an à Alger, excursions et souvenirs. Illustrations de Fromentin, Guillaume, Gérard, etc. (Paris: Ch. Delagrave, 1887), 130.
19. 19.  Jules Davasse, Les Aïssaoua ou les Charmeurs de serpents (Nouvelle édition revue, corrigée et augmentée) (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862), 83.
20. 20.  William K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” Contemporary Review (January 1877); reprinted in William K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886), 169, 174–75.
21. 21.  Auguste Warnier, “Les Arabes ou les Aïssaoua,” 37.
22. 22.  Ibid., 38.
23. 23.  Ibid., 38.
24. 24.  Ibid., 39.
25. 25.  Warnier’s explanation of the Aissawa’s insensibility is reminiscent of French accounts of the so-called “needle test,” a contemporaneous method of ensuring that a hypnotic state had been achieved that involved pricking the subject and demonstrating the lack of apparent reaction. Indeed, an apparent muting of pain receptors was one of the most commonly identified effects of hypnosis, a phenomenon that had raised hopes in the field of surgery since at least the 1830s, especially in the absence of safe anesthetic substances. See Charles Ozanam, L’anesthésie. Histoire de la douleur, excerpt from Le Correspondant (Paris: Douniol, 1857), 1–5. Tracing recent efforts to Anton Mesmer, Ozanam bemoans their scientific instability: “Mesmer and animal magnetism, in 1776, revived the hope of overcoming pain; but all these attempts were so surrounded by mystery and bravura that serious minds gave up trying to unravel what was indeed true.” On the wider history of anesthesia in nineteenth-century France, see Marguerite Zimmer, Histoire de l’anesthésie: méthodes et techniques au XIXe siècle (Les Ulis, EDP sciences, 2008), and the special issue, Pioneers in Academic Anesthesiology: Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France in Anesthesiology 117, no. 6 (Dec. 2012).
26. 26.  The question of simulation is key in hypnosis and constitutes a crucial point of debates until the end of the nineteenth century. See for instance Henri Bergson, “De la simulation inconsciente dans l’état d’hypnotisme,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 22 (1886), 525–531; and Carroy, Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie. L’invention de sujets, 18: “Unlike sleep, the altered state of consciousness created by hypnosis remains largely a biological enigma. It has a contradictory character. Indeed, the subject relives original or archaic associations in the mode of an intense game. The duplication which is created evokes both a state of complete unconsciousness and the theatrical stage. The hypnotized person is an actor automaton, a paradox with which the scientists of the nineteenth century were confronted, and with which we are still confronted today. . . . even in the eyes of an experienced hypnotist, a truly hypnotized subject and a simulating subject are almost indistinguishable.”
27. 27.  Doutté, Les Aïssâoua à Tlemcen, 9.
28. 28.  Warnier, “Les Arabes ou les Aïssaoua,” 39.
29. 29.  See Eugène Azam, Hypnotisme et double conscience: Origine de leur étude et divers travaux sur des sujets analogues (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillière et Cie., 1893), 327: “Certain conditions favor and excite courage, especially that of men of lively character: the drums, military music, good weather, the honor of the flag, the uniform, the self-esteem of the body in which the soldier serves, patriotic songs.” To this list are added, “among peoples who are little or not at all civilized, the cries of war.” See also Marie-Léon Coste, L’Inconscient: étude sur l’hypnotisme (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1889), 46–47: the conscious being is “suppressed, as during hypnosis,” it is unable to react, “exhausted, annihilated; the unconscious being remains alone, being able to undergo the various impressions. The phenomenon reminds many observers of the whirling dervishes of Turkey.”
30. 30.  Warnier, “Les Arabes ou les Aïssaoua,” 37.
31. 31.  See notably Laurent, “Les Aïssaouas,” 18–19, at 19, and Davasse, Les Aïssaoua ou les Charmeurs de serpents, 52.
32. 32.  [G.] Kerlus, “Les anesthésiques des jongleurs,” La Nature 11 (6 Nov. 1883), 245–248.
33. 33.  Ibid., 245.
34. 34.  Crouigneau, “Une visite chez les Aïssaoua,” 19–23, at 20–21.
35. 35.  As Emmanuel Reibel has shown, the technologies resulting from the Industrial Revolution—from the metronome to the gramophone, or the first telephone broadcasts of music—affected performers, listeners, and composers, and changed thinking about the nature of music itself. See Emmanuel Reibel, Du métronome au gramophone. Musique et révolution industrielle (Paris, Fayard, 2023).
36. 36.  Crouigneau, “Une visite chez les Aïssaoua,” 21.
37. 37.  Ibid., 22.
38. 38.  Ibid., 22. The Algerian poet Qaddūr bin ‘Umar bin Banīnah, similarly reflected on the misadventures of the Aissawa in Paris, deploring their conditions of travel and housing and critiquing their exploitation, which he blamed on the composer Francisco Salvador-Daniel, who organized the Aissawas’ trip and stay in Paris. See Qaddūr bin ‘Umar bin Banīnah, “Les Aïssaoua à Paris,” in Chants arabes du Maghreb: étude sur le dialecte et la poésie populaire de l’Afrique du Nord, ed. Constantin Sonneck (Paris: E. Guilmoto, 1904), 310–319, at 310.
39. 39.  Gautier, “Les Aïssaoua,” 78–106, at 98.
40. 40.  Ibid., 98.
41. 41.  Ibid., 98–99.
42. 42.  See, e.g., Albert de Rochas, Les Sentiments, la musique et le geste (Grenoble: Librairie Dauphine, 1900), 13 (in the first stage of hypnosis occurs a “suspension of all personal will in the subject, who becomes a true automaton”); see also ibid., 49, 112, and 197. On the automaticity of the mind under hypnosis see Carroy, Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie, op. cit., 8–18, in particular, p. 18: “The hypnotized subject is an acting automaton, a paradox that nineteenth-century scholars struggled with and that we continue to grapple with today.”
43. 43.  Gautier, “les Aïssaoua,” 97–98.
44. 44.  Ibid., 104–105.
45. 45.  Gautier’s depiction is reminiscent of the frenetic visions authored by authors such as Charles Nodier, Pétrus Borel, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Baudelaire, and J. K. Huysmans; see, e.g., the anthology of French texts published in The Dedalus Book of French Horror: The 19th Century, edited by Terry Hale, translated by Terry Hale and Liz Heron (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1998). On frenetic literature, see Anthony Glinoer, La Littérature frénétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).
46. 46.  Ibid., 99–100.
47. 47.  Ibid., 100.
48. 48.  Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1–6, at 3.
49. 49.  Ibid.