Daily Inspiration Quote by Havelock Ellis

Ellis is poking at a boundary his era treated as sacred: the idea that religious experience arrives from “above,” insulated from the messy mechanics of the mind. By linking religion to “hypnotic phenomena,” he reframes faith not as a metaphysical visitation but as a human susceptibility - to suggestion, to ritualized attention, to social contagion. “Very intimate connection” is doing heavy work here: not a casual resemblance, but a claim of shared circuitry. He’s inviting the reader to entertain a deflationary possibility that the awe of the sanctuary and the trance of the stage belong to the same psychological family.

The intent sits squarely in late-Victorian/early modern psychology, when hypnosis was both scientific curiosity and cultural scandal, and when figures like Ellis were trying to pull sex, mysticism, and “abnormal” states into respectable study. In that context, hypnosis becomes a wedge: if you can induce ecstasy, conviction, even visions through technique, then religious certainty looks less like proof and more like effect.

The subtext is sharper than a neutral comparison. Ellis is implying that religion’s power may depend on controlled environments that narrow consciousness: repetitive language, authoritative voices, synchronized bodies, heightened emotion. Those are classic tools of suggestion. He’s also quietly stripping moral judgment from the analysis. Hypnosis isn’t automatically fraud; it’s a lever in the human brain. By pairing the two, Ellis both demystifies religion and explains its persistence: it works because it recruits the same deep capacities that make trance possible - attention, trust, surrender, belonging.