Ormond McGill

Ormond Dale McGill (1913–2005) was an American stage hypnotist, magician, and author known across the field as “the Dean of American Hypnotists.” Active in hypnotism from 1927 and acclaimed from the 1940s onward, he combined a magician’s stagecraft with a lifelong study of suggestion, also exploring the meeting of hypnotism, meditation, and Indian esoteric practice in works such as Hypnotism and Mysticism of India (1979).

His central reference work, The New Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism, was published in 1996 when he was 83, gathering decades of performance method into a single comprehensive manual. Over his long career he wrote dozens of books on hypnosis, magic, and the mind.

McGill matters to the mind-power lineage as the great cataloguer of suggestion as craft. Where clinicians refined hypnosis for therapy, McGill documented the full performative repertoire — inductions, deepeners, tests, and routines — preserving the practical knowledge of how belief and expectation can be marshaled to produce dramatic, visible effects.

His encyclopedic work transmitted the technical lore of suggestion to generations of practitioners, keeping the showman’s understanding of the suggestible mind alive alongside the therapist’s.