Mesmerism

In 1779, Franz Anton Mesmer wrote an 88-page book, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, to which he appended his famous 27 Propositions. While undertaking research, G.F. Frankau obtained, on loan from a private library, an original edition of Mesmer's Mémoire sur la découverte de Magnétism Animal. Realising its medico-historical importance and tempted by a layman's vanity to undertake the translation himself, he eventually decided that the task could only be accomplished by an expert; He secured the services of Captain V. R. Myers of the Berlitz School of Languages. Myer's rendering of the eighteenth-century French is highly praiseworthy. The adjective "mesmeric", the substantive "mesmerism", and the verb to "mesmerise" have not changed their meanings since they first became current-posterity's unique tribute to a unique man.

From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.

Magnetism is the intangible Spirit and ultimate essence of every atom, whether pertaining to animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic substance. It is invisible to all but the eyes of another immortal Spirit. Mesmerism is a lesser branch of Magic, and as old as man. Magic is indissolubly blended with the religion of every country and is inseparable from its origin. Magnetism is the key to the mystery of man’s nature and to Occultism or Eastern Magic. It prolongs life and heals the sick much better than modern medicine can ever do. The Magnetiser’s Vital Force, intensely concentrated by the his will, pours out of his system into the patient’s. Afterward, he can then use the sun to make good of the loss of vitality and rebalance his prana. Magnetism has been studied in the temples of ancient Egypt and Greece, and mastered as it may never hope to be mastered in our age of profound idiocy. Full health is only possible when there is a perfect magnetic equilibrium in one’s system. The therapist heals simply by restoring magnetic balance in his patient by the force of his benevolent desire and will. The chief agent in any therapeutic operation is the Human Will plus dominion over the Elemental Spirits. But the will of a selfish operator is more likely to injure rather than heal. Though Christians practice Mesmerism by another name, Christian law and societies with their boasted civilization become with every day more like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones and befoulment. Mesmerism is key to the world’s psychological sciences, from the remotest antiquity down to our time. In Mesmerism, the curative agency is the animal aura, force, or fluid in one person, by means of which a peculiar action is set up in the physical system of another. The power of the mantram is occult sound through which the adept commands the elemental forces of nature. But mantram ignorantly employed can be a treacherous weapon, whose mystical power has caused it to turn and stab the user. Astrology, Mesmerism, and Homeopathy are far more scientific and true than the scientists of gross matter could ever imagine. The magnetic fluid projected by a living human body is Life itself. Indeed, it is the same life-atoms that a man in a blind passion throws off unconsciously, though he does it quite as effectively as a Mesmeriser who transfers them from himself to any object consciously and under the guidance of his will. The process of Hypnotism is a purely mechanical one, i.e., the fixing of the eyes on some bright spot, a metal or a crystal. The eye serves as a medium between that bit of metal or crystal and the brain, and attunes the molecular vibrations of the nervous centres of the latter into unison with the vibrations of the bright object held. It is this unison that produces the hypnotic state. In Mesmerism, i.e., the hypnotization by preliminary passes, it is the will of the operator himself that acts upon the nervous system of the patient. And it is again through the vibrations — only atomic, not molecular — produced by that act of energy called will in the ether of space (therefore, on quite a different plane) that the super-hypnotic state (i.e., “suggestion,” etc.) is induced. The source of the vital essence of Mesmerism or Animal Magnetism was located by the ancients between the earth and the starry sky. It is the Akasha-tattva of the Indians personified by the breath of Cybele, the Anatolian mother goddess, adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor. Between Mesmerism and Hypnotism there is an abyss: the one is beneficent, the other maleficent. Hypnotism is produced by the withdrawal of the nervous fluid from the capillary nerves which, being like the sentries that keep the doors of our senses opened, are anaesthetized and get closed.

Victorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing. Drawing on recent trends in interdisciplinary literary scholarship the essays collected here investigate the complex connections between scientific mesmerism, its manifestations in the Victorian social and cultural world, and the literary imagination. Here, for the first time, the varied themes and contexts shaped by mesmeric practices are brought together in one volume. Mesmerism’s influence on phrenology, medicine and mental health; its interaction with the occult and with communication technologies; the effects of mesmeric principles on gender and sexuality, as well as on criminal behaviour, are all set within the context of literary texts that interrogate and critique mesmerism’s influence on the Victorians. This volume will be of interest, therefore, to scholars of Victorian literature and the history of science, as well as to those interested in cultural history with a focus on gender, sexuality, and sciences of the mind.