There's a near-future SF novel called ‘The Armageddon Crazy’, by Mick Farren, which at one point describes a sermon given by a rabble-rousing preacher with the aid of high-tech holographic special effects.

During the sermon the preacher quotes a lot of doom-laden fire and brimstone and plagues and demons and bottomless pit stuff from Revelation, while the holographic special effects conjure illusions of demons from the Pit running among the audience (since this is in a rock-concert type venue I hesitate to say ‘congregation’) and the soundtrack produces screams and moans and the like. Then, very suddenly, the preacher shifts to quoting from the Gospels – ‘I bring you tidings of great joy that shall be to all people’ – and simultaneously all the scary special effects evaporate, the preacher is enveloped in pure white light, and a choir sounds in the background with hallelujahs. The effect, in both directions, is enhanced by subliminal hypnotics; so the audience is made to feel a great surge of relief and gladness and euphoria when Jesus makes his appearance in the sermon, which is presumably intended to reinforce their faith.

This is a shabby trick, of course, and (in the novel) only really works if you fail to realise it's being done to you. The preacher in question was preaching to a lowest-common-denominator audience for the most part, so it worked for him. But one of the main characters is alert enough to realise what's going on, and immediately the effect of the hypnotics reverses and he just feels exceptionally irritated.

The reason I mention this is that when I read the Bible from cover to cover earlier this month, an actually startlingly similar thing happened to me when I hit the boundary between the Old and New Testaments.

The end of the Old Testament is full of minor prophets who are mostly relaying God's words around the time of the Babylonian exile, and therefore a lot of those words tend to be along the lines of ‘you've all been very naughty and I'm very cross and I'm going to punish you severely’. Then suddenly you cut from the unrelenting wrath of God straight to the redemption offered by Jesus, who might not be entirely a nice guy at all times but by comparison to what came before is as close to sweetness and light as makes no odds. But it's not just the storyline; the very quality of the text has a reinforcing effect. The minor prophets are all rather similar and tedious and just sit there repeating the same things over and over, whereas the Gospels tell a story with a plot that moves forward. Additionally, the minor prophets are often cryptic and difficult to parse, and are written in more flowery language, whereas the Gospels are clear and straightforward. (I wonder if that might be partially a consequence of them being translated from Greek rather than Hebrew; perhaps ancient Hebrew lends itself less well to sensible translation into modern English.)

The combined effect of all this was that when reading the minor prophets I felt (with hindsight) a lot of pressure on my brain, due to the difficulty of parsing meaning out of the text at both the grammatical and semantic levels, the tedious nature of the meaning when I got it, and the depressing message of the Wrath of God once I got through the tedium. Rather like watching a TV programme full of static, in a way, and trying very hard to see through the static to find out what's going on. Then the sudden transition to the Gospels removed all these various kinds of pressure and mental static, and the result was that I felt a strong subconscious sense of relief and gladness at exactly the moment I was reading about the birth of Christ.

Unlike the incident in the novel I describe above, I don't think this was done deliberately; it doesn't seem to me that the Bible was really designed to be read from cover to cover in order. But it happened to me nonetheless, and it took me a day or two to recognise exactly what had happened to me and how. And, just like the preacher's special-effects trick, it's counterproductive if noticed: once I realised what had been done to me I mostly felt irritated by it.

On the other hand, I also felt dreadfully impressed that it's even possible to achieve this sort of effect without using any expensive special effects or subliminal hypnotics, using nothing but words written down in a book. I wouldn't have guessed it could be done at all.