Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/383

Rh may be able to exert. The person to be possessed, on the other hand, enters his trance under the firm conviction that he is about to become the god or the devil, or whatever else the possessing spirit is to be.

Now each of these ideas proves exponent of what happens in their respective trances. In the one trance, the subject acts like a mind-mechanism worked at the will of the operator; in the other, he acts, as the community considers, like a god.

That this is due to the dominant idea rising first to potential possibility, is more or less demonstrable phenomenally. In the possession trance we can actually see the increasing effect of this rise. The statuesque immovability preceding the trance is eventually shaken by a slight quiver, and gains till it culminates in the throe of possession. In the hypnotic subject, the rise is not directly evident. The character of the dominant idea accounts for this. The hypnotic subject is possessed by a purely passive idea, the idea of the eventual influence over him of the operator, which, as yet, is latent, and passes into action only on command. His dominant idea never thus quite