Altered States of Consciousness || Magnetic Mockeries

Magnetic MockeriesAuthor(s): JONATHAN MILLERSource: Social Research, Vol. 68, No. 3, Altered States of Consciousness (FALL 2001), pp. 717-740Published by: The New SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971908 .

Accessed: 07/12/2014 15:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The New School is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Research.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.230.243.252 on Sun, 7 Dec 2014 15:56:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=newschool

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971908?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Magnetic Mockeries / BY JONATHAN MILLER, M.D.

V>/N a short visit to France in 1784, the Scottish novelist Henry MacKenzie recorded in his diary that "all Paris at present is mad about a Monsieur Mesmer, who pretends to cure all illnesses by magnetism." The "man of feeling" goes on to report that the patients receive this treatment in an elegant and highly decorated apartment equipped with an impressive pianoforte and a harmonica. What MacKenzie 's amused entry does not convey is the extent and intensity of the mesmeric mania. Nor does he refer to the official anxiety that was already in evidence, not only among the orthodox medical profession, but among the political authorities, who had recognized a dangerously subversive strain in the mesmeric movement. In fact, from the general tone of this report one can see that MacKenzie regarded what he had seen and heard as a trivial French fad - something that might monopolize conversation in the fashionable cafes and salons of an over- excitable foreign city. He was apparently unaware of the elaborate theoretical notions upon which the practice was based and he overlooks that this theory was taken seriously enough to excite the establishment of an official commission to investigate its intellectual claims.

MacKenzie might have written more carefully about the subject if he had suspected that less than a year later mesmerism would establish itself on the other side of the English Channel, and that by the middle of the next century it would preoccupy many emi- nent Victorians and become a consistent theme in British intellectual life. However, even today it is easy to overlook the significance of these events, since it is hard to find more than a

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall 2001)



718 SOCIAL RESEARCH

passing mention of mesmerism in the writings of those we now regard as representative men and women of the age. In the nov- els, essays, poems, or letters of any one great Victorian writer it is difficult to find more than an occasional reference to the subject. But the fact that nearly all of them refer to it, even if scathingly, suggests that it was more than just a passing fad. In any case, many authorities regard mesmerism as an unrepresentative concern, and it is only by going back to the manuscript sources that one can recognize the extent to which animal magnetism gripped the early-nineteenth-century imagination. The topic springs into even sharper relief as soon as one turns to the unofficial sources - to the literally hundreds of pamphlets and broadsheets that are hid- den away in British libraries under the disreputable heading of "occult" subjects. Mesmerism looms even larger when one plunges into the vast undergrowth of nineteenth-century periodical literature. The problem is that tendencies such as this one, at odds with the line of development of what we regard as the best and most fruitful aspects of our own cultural life, may be overlooked altogether or unhelpfully labeled as quaint fads or fallacies.

It is much more profitable to analyze what such a subject meant at the time and to leave aside, or at least postpone, any analysis of the way in which the interest in animal magnetism has- tened or held up the development of more acceptable beliefs. Animal magnetism deserves study not because it is a quirk in the course of early-nineteenth-century history, and still less because one may or may not be able to identify in it the origins of modern psychoanalysis, but simply because it preoccupied many of our predecessors and presumably had a significant part to play in the way in which they understood the world around them. In the overall context of early-nineteenth-century thought, it will help us to understand how the mind was visualized: the scope of the will, and the range of the senses. And from the way in which the members of the various scientific and medical professions lined up on the subject, it is possible to gain a valuable insight into the way in which the profession of science began to consolidate itself



MAGNETIC MOCKERIES 7 1 9

between 1800 and 1860. It is necessary to analyze who took the

subject seriously and who regarded it as a foolish fad and how consistent an individual was in his or her attitude. It soon becomes apparent, for example, that anyone with a favorable attitude to mesmerism tended to underwrite various reform movements and many of those who voted in favor of animal magnetism also cast their lot with feminism, abolition of slavery, and with anything that promoted the spread of useful knowledge. One can also see that mesmerism was a vehicle for conveying the

mystical Rosicrucian ideas of the Renaissance into the brightly lit

uplands of the nineteenth century and that occult traditions that were thought to have been extinguished by the end of the seventeenth century regained their hold on the imagination of the

Enlightenment. The analysis I have in mind is admirably exemplified by a Vic-

torian author who shrewdly identified the rise of what he called "physical Puritanism." Writing in the Westminster Review in 1852, the Scottish chemist Samuel Brown recognized that it was indeed "the age of the physiological reformers" and that "a new sort of Puritanism has arisen in our times and its influence is as extensive as its origin is various." "This physical Puritanism comes before the world in many names, but the common purpose of all its man- ifestations is the healing, cleansing and restoration of the animal man." Brown points out that homeopathy and vegetarianism are the most notable representations of this multiheaded new Puri- tanism. But he goes on to insist that mesmerism, animal magnetism, and hypnotism must also be considered as one of the puritanical movements of the century. What makes Brown's analysis so admirable and such a suggestive model of our own inquiry is that he refuses to consider mesmerism as a quackish peculiarity, and that by identifying one of the underlying needs that is satisfied he succeeds in locating it in a larger context of social and moral ideas. But it is just as important that Brown himself is partly converted to the topic he describes; in an article in the North British Review less than a year earlier he had halfheartedly under-



720 SOCIAL RESEARCH

written the controversial theory upon which the practice of mesmerism was based. Such inconsistencies are part of our subject since they throw considerable light on the way in which belief systems are reconciled to one another, or even entertained without any embarrassment at their mutual contradiction.

*

Which brings me to Franz Anton Mesmer himself, and what he believed. I do not want to get bogged down in the details of Mes- mer's own career since these have already been admirably described by Henri Ellenberger (1970) and more recently, of course, by Robert Darnton (1968). However, a brief outline is unavoidable. Mesmer was born in 1734 in Constance and was edu- cated as a physician in Vienna, where he published a doctoral thesis on the influence of the sun, the moon, and the planets on human illness. According to Mesmer, the heavenly bodies exerted their influence through the medium of an impalpable fluid that pervaded the universe and served as the medium for transmitting the effects of light, gravity, and magnetism. It has been convinc- ingly shown that the immediate inspiration for this idea came from Mesmer's reading of Richard Mead's De Imperio Solis, and that Mead in turn was inspired by Isaac Newton.

Far from being as isolated peculiarity of the man from whom Mesmer plagiarized the idea, the notion of an imponderable fluid was widely discussed among European scientists at the time when Mesmer published his thesis. It is reasonable to suppose that his readiness to make it known was encouraged by the knowledge that the concept was such a respected idiom in the European science of the 1760s that it would remove any taint of astrological thought with which the notion of planetary influence had been previously associated.

As early as 1693 Newton had begun to express an interest in the existence of an ethereal substance, although the letter to Robert



MAGNETIC MOCKERIES 721

Boyle in which he mentioned the theory remained unpublished and unknown until 1744. In 1713, however, in the now famous General Scholium to the third book of the Principia, Newton pub- licly referred to "a subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit the particles of bodies attract one another." And in the 1717 edition of his more widely read Optics, Newton amplified this theme when he introduced his well-known queries about the role of such an imponderable fluid in the propagation of magnetism, gravity, and light.

Robert Schofield (1970) and other recent historians of eighteenth-century science have shown that this idea soon underwent an intellectual eclipse, and that in the first half of the eighteenth century the generation of Newtonian physicists who publicized and explained the master's work tended to overlook this inter- mediate substance and emphasized instead the mechanical cor- puscularity of matter.

However, by the time Mesmer was reading Mead, experimental work in electricity had encouraged scientists to reconsider New- ton's somewhat hesitant hypothesis, and by 1744, when his letter to Boyle was published and made known to the scientific com- munity, the doctrine of a universal fluid or ether was reinstated as a respectable scientific concept - so much so that of the five scientists who were invited to examine Mesmer's claims in 1 784, two at least were recognized as enthusiastic sponsors of its existence.

This can only mean that it was the use to which Mesmer put the concept of the imponderable fluid that proved objectionable, not the concept itself. In any case the theory he had stolen from Mead was merely an account of the way in which things happened; it was not yet a prescription for the way in which things could be made to happen. In other words, there were no practical implications of the theory. But when he encountered the magnetic experiments of the Austrian Jesuit priest Maximillian Hell, Mesmer recognized that he could use metallic magnets to produce physiological effects analogous to those uncontrollably wielded by the planets.



722 SOCIAL RESEARCH

He also realized that if the imponderable fluid could mediate tidal influences from afar, the comparable force of magnetism could be manipulated as and when the physician chose.

As often happens with unorthodox healers, the two men quar- reled over questions of priority and in the effort to establish himself as an unrivaled originator Mesmer abandoned the use of

magnets and concentrated henceforth on the therapeutic influence he claimed to be able to transmit from one person to another. In justifying this claim Mesmer took advantage of yet another well-known theory about the role of the imponderable fluids. This of course was the ancient theory of animals' spirits, which had been introduced into European medicine by the physiologists of late antiquity in their efforts to explain the functions of the nervous systems. Philosophers had traditionally recognized the awkward transitional problems of perception and action. How could the physical world leave mental impressions on the immaterial mind? Conversely, how could the spiritual initiatives of the will bring about the effective movements of the muscles? For

nearly 2,000 years, philosophers and physiologists had tried to overcome this gap by postulating the existence of a paradoxically immaterial substance that could interact between mind and matter, transmitting sensory impressions in one direction and physical actions in the other. The substance, which was said to exercise this function, was called animal spirits. It was, according to Galen's account, derived in the first instance from food in the stomach, after which it underwent a series of successive refine- ments or "concoctions," first in the liver, then in the heart, and

finally in the ventricles of the brain, where it underwent the final distillation so that it could act as a nervous mediator between mind and matter. By the sixteenth century, nervous or animal

spirits were a widely accepted part of European medical theory. The idea played a significant role in Vesalius's theory of nervous action and it was eloquently described by Francis Bacon as "a cor-

poreal substance, attenuated and made invisible by heat conflated out of flame-like and airy natures, endowed with the softness of




air for receiving impressions and with the vigour of fire for launching actions." In his Optical Queries, Newton makes use of the same substance, postulating the existence of an insubstantial material analogous to if not identical with the subtle ether that filled the wide spaces of the universe.

Mesmer presumably recognized the therapeutic implications of this identity. If the human physique was immersed in a substance indistinguishable from the one that transmitted the will of its owner to his muscles, there was no theoretical obstacle to the will's passing beyond the physique of any individual to encounter and vibrate the nervous fluid of his neighbor. In other words, magnets were unnecessary since each person was a reservoir of animal magnetism; if the will of an individual could be concentrated and correctly focused, he would inevitably bring about physiological changes in the biological condition of the patient, or so Mesmer argued.

In the early 1770s Mesmer used these principles to establish himself as a healer and he almost immediately created a controversial reputation in Vienna, where his activities left such a strong impression on the mind of the young Mozart that the composer made a mocking reference to animal magnetism in an opera written in the last year of his life.

The success of Mesmer's unorthodox procedure aroused the hostility of the Austrian medical establishment and he was soon asked to seek his fortunes elsewhere. In 1778 he went to Paris, where he instituted the magnetic salon referred to in the quota- tion from Henry MacKenzie. He soon attracted a huge clientele among the wealthy and the fashionable, and by exploiting the confused enthusiasm for popular science he was able to earn an enormous income.



724 SOCIAL RESEARCH

By 1784 Mesmer had successfully established a large number of provincial subsidiaries and the exponents of animal magnetism began to incorporate themselves into Societies of Harmony. This name suggests that the implications of mesmerism already extended beyond the originally intended medical function so that it was now recognized as a millennial enterprise that held out redemptive possibilities even more important that the remedial. In the trances or so-called crises that seemed to play such an important and emblematic part of the magnetic experience, the patients or clients foresaw unlimited possibilities of spiritual revival. Although many of those who attended the clinics were there in the first place expecting a medical improvement, it was for many the "internal millennium"1 of the trance that became the main attraction. For obvious reasons, Mesmer's ideas inevitably struck a chord among those who were seeking a political transformation of prerevolutionary society, and it was these implications as much as the medical ones that eventually prompted the authorities to investigate Mesmer's activities in 1784.

Several commissions were set up, the most important of which was that headed by the aging Benjamin Franklin and including the distinguished chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. After a painstaking series of experiments in which it was shown that the fits and trances were produced only when the patient was fully aware that he or she was about to be induced, the commissioners concluded that there was no evidence to show that anything comparable to magnetism was at work, and that all the effects could be attributed to what they called the "imagination."

This did not imply that the effects were imaginary - even the most skeptical observer was unable to overlook the spectacular effects of Mesmer's manipulations. As far as the commissioners were concerned, all the effects were to be attributed to the patients' hopeful expectation. In those experiments in which the patient was carefully secluded from anything that would lead him




or her to anticipate dramatic results, no results could be observed.

From the way in which they wrote up their findings, some historians have concluded that the commissioners objected to the very concept of the imponderable fluid. There is widespread evidence to show that by the end of the eighteenth century and in the first years of the next, the concept of the ether was undergoing a second eclipse. The Scottish scientists, for example, were almost unanimous in their opposition to the idea since it offended their standards of "common sense" to introduce a hypo- thetical substance that had no demonstrable physical properties. When the young Henry Brougham reviewed Thomas Young's 1801 Bakerian lecture on the wave theory of light in the Edinburgh Review in 1803, he expressed profound suspicion about the whole idea of an imponderable fluid and pointed out that since Newton had put forward the proposal only as a hesitant query, it was rash of Young to base his theory of the propagation of light on it. The chemist Humphrey Davy also expressed his contempt, referring to it as "a vulgar idea - like that of a peasant for whom everything is done by a spring; so everything must be done by a fluid. The aether was the ancient fluid: then there was a phlogistic fluid, we have had a magnetic fluid, the vitrious fluid and the resinous fluid." Yet it would be a mistake to assume that this was the reason the commissioners criticized Mesmer's findings. Franklin was still an enthusiastic exponent of such an idea and used it as an explanation for the behavior of electricity. Less than a year before he had published his report he had written a letter to the noted sur- veyor David Rittenhouse in Philadelphia in which he composed "some loose thoughts on the existence of a Universal Fluid." In fact, it was his reference to an "atmosphere" of electrical fluid that inspired some of the British mesmerists in the next century. For example, the Scottish mesmerist J. C. Colquhoun insisted

that we may assume a very subtle and attenuated aetherial fluid probably secreted by the brain acting under the com-



726 SOCIAL RESEARCH

mand of the will. The existence of a nervous circulation seems to render probable the external expansion of this fluid, an expansion supposed to take place with such energy as to form an atmosphere of activity like those of electrical bodies.

Lavoisier also accepted its existence and used it to explain the propagation and accumulation of heat. This can only mean that the commissioners had no objection to the fluid as such and that they drew the line when it came to using the fluid as an explanation for the effect of mind on matter. And yet this explanation does not quite appear adequate since scientists like Thomas Young were prepared to accept the ether as a physical medium. They were also prepared to accept it as a physical medium and as a psychophysical link. In his 1802 lectures on natural philosophy, Young wrote that "nothing can be more fit to constitute a con- necting link between material and immaterial things than some modification of a fluid which appears to differ in its essential properties from the common gross matter of the universe and to possess a subtlety and an activity which entitles it to a superior rank in the order of created substances." Of course, that Young was prepared to accept its psychophysical status does not necessarily mean that Franklin and Lavoisier were, and it is always possible that this was the sticking point as far as the French commissioners were concerned. As I have pointed out, there was such widespread acceptance of its capacity to link mind and matter inside the nervous system that it is hard to know why these scientists refused to accept it in the context where Mesmer had applied it.

Perhaps I should restate the problem to emphasize the apparent inconsistency of the commissioners' report. Even though some scientists objected to the fundamental concept of the imponderable fluid, both Franklin and Lavoisier unquestioningly accepted its universal presence. On the other hand, physiologists were widely prepared to accept its psychophysical function within




the nervous system. Why did they draw the line at the propagation of psychophysical effects from person to person and for no apparent reason introduce the almost equally unhelpful concept of the imagination to supply the missing link? The problem is sharp- ened even more when one recalls that the imponderable fluid was often imputed to explain the effects of the "imagination." In the article "monster" for example, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for 1797, imagination was imputed as a cause of fetal abnormality and the fluid reappeared as an explanation.

The entire subject appears to be fraught with inconsistency, the result of recognizing an unacceptably occult strain in Mesmer's thought. Parallel to what one might call the scientific tradition of the imponderable fluid (that is, the one that took its origin from Newton), there was another, much older tradition that had its roots in magic, alchemy, and even theology. The tradition I am referring to is, of course, the concept of the "world soul." This tradition, which partly owes its origin to Plato, postulated the existence of an insubstantial material that mediated occult influences between the stars and men. The same substance, by analogy, was invoked as an investment to the immaterial soul.

Although this concept overlapped and to some extent coin- cided with the scientific tradition, it had mystical implications for the theory of knowledge, which would have grated on the ratio- nal scruples of enlightened scientists. In fact, in one of the appen- dices to the report of the French commission, a French physician who tried to identify the source of Mesmer's ideas refers to Paracelsus, Maxwell, and Robert Fludd, rather than to Mead or Newton. One can only suppose that Franklin and Lavoisier had recognized the same hermetic strain, and realized that by con- ceding the operation of an imponderable fluid - although this had respectable Newtonian antecedents - they were opening a



728 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Pandora's box of mystical implications inconsistent with the principles of the eighteenth-century enlightenment.

Franklin's suspicions would have been reinforced by his knowledge that Mesmer's activities had excited an enthusiastic following among the Rosicrucian Lodges that were then flourishing throughout France. Franklin and the rest of his colleagues on the commission were members of a Masonic Lodge in Paris called the Neuf Soeurs, and although the members of this particular group prided themselves on the highest principles of rationalism - their educational schemes were so ambitious that one modern historian has referred to the Neuf Soeurs as the UNESCO of the eighteenth century - the membership overlapped with a much more occult institution called the Phi- lalethes, a schismatic lodge of a group calling itself the Amis Reunis. Within this lodge the transcendental implications of mesmerism had caused a huge turmoil, and in the very month that Franklin and his colleagues were meeting to consider Mes- mer's scientific claims, the grand master of the Philalethes, Savalette de Langes, had convened a huge international confer- ence to consider the metaphysical implications.

It would be wise, therefore, to visualize the findings of the commission against the background of this occult enthusiasm and to regard the commission's findings not simply as a criticism of Mes- mer's medical claims but as an objection to the idea that the trance was a way of opening the mind to a form of knowledge more piercing and more comprehensive than the knowledge that could be obtained through the five physical senses. Yet it was that particular aspect of mesmerism that continued to excite the great- est enthusiasm among European intellectuals in the following century. For such Rosicrucian enthusiasts the medical aspect of mesmerism was little more than a Trojan horse, under the dis- guise of which an assault was to be made on the empirical principles that were inherited from Locke, Condillac, and others.

The medical implications of mesmerism were thus negligible by comparison to the transcendental, and although Mesmer may




have started his career as a healer, many of his followers extended the implications of his idea to include the cure of souls, and from Mesmer's own behavior in his ornamental salon in the Place Ven- dome one can see that this aspect was beginning to replace the one with which he had started his career. For example, the seances were invariably accompanied by music played on a glass harmonica, thus reviving some of the magical practices of the Flo- rentine neoplatonists for whom the soul was an immaterial substance halfway between spirit and matter, peculiarly susceptible to the magical effects of harmony. In the 1780s Mesmer dressed himself for these sessions in a purple robe embroidered with occult symbols.

Something comparable had happened a little more than a hundred years earlier when the Irish healer Valentine Greatrakes was adopted by the neoplatonist circle surrounding Viscountess Conway. Greatrakes started his healing mission without making any references to an imponderable fluid but when he encountered the Conway circle the idea of an elixir was invoked and his mission graduated imperceptibly to that of a Rosicrucian magi- cian encouraged by hermetic neoplatonists such as Henry More and Francis Mercurius van Helmont, who were exponents of a metaphysical ether. It has recently been suggested that it was from the members of this circle, many of whom were his friends, that Newton was inspired by the idea of the "subtle substance which lies hid in all material bodies."

It was this strain that was reinstated by many of the English intellectuals who became famous for their sponsorship of mesmerism in the middle of the nineteenth century. I have already mentioned the Scottish writer J. C. Colquhoun, who published the first major work of mesmerism, his Revelata, in 1833. In a work that makes overwhelmingly tedious reading, the Scottish advocate willfully overlooks the objections raised to an imponderable fluid by his friends and colleagues on the Edinburgh Review and goes on to suggest that from the medium of this fluid the subject can achieve a mystical clairvoyant perception of the universe.



730 SOCIAL RESEARCH

This idea was elaborated 10 years later by the Reverend Chauncy Townshend. In his influential book Facts in Mesmerism (1841), Townshend exploits the fluid doctrine to advertise a thoroughgoing Platonism. According to Townshend, the mesmeric trance, mediated though the magnetic fluid of the universe, released the subject from the blindfold of the senses. "It appears that the apparatus of the senses are contrivances for blunting, not for heightening the sensibility. They are masks and careful coverings to instruments of too exquisite delicacy to be bared or exposed to the outer world."

Also, "there are evidently but two ways of perceiving objects: the one by being presented them in their essential verity, the other by communication with them through the intervention of types or shadows." This is little more than a summary of Plato's image of the cave - where prisoners are condemned to view reality in the form of shadows cast from behind. According to Townshend, mesmerism offers the chance of escape from Plato's cave: "Separated from the usual action of the senses" - by the mesmeric trance - "the mind appears to gain juster notions, to have quite a new sense of spiritual things" and, as Plato suggested, the mind thus released from its prison of sense also gains a more accurate moral insight.

"The great indication of this elevated state of feeling," Town- shend wrote, "is a horror of falsehood, which I have found common to all sleepwalkers. Sincerity is their special characteristic. They cannot feign or flatter. They seem to be taken out of common life, with all its heartless forms and plausible conventions." We will find this moral strain in mystical mesmerism taken up by other authors to exploit the radical social possibilities of animal magnetism.

A more extreme example of the same strain is found in the little-known work of Mary Anne South. Born in 1817, she spent most of her life sharing the mystical seclusion of her clergyman father. She devoted herself explicitly to the study of alchemy, astrology, and the Hermetic mysteries. In 1846 she published a




short pamphlet on what she called Early Magnetism, explicitly identifying the universal fluid with the fundamental essences of alchemy. She saw alchemy, as its sixteenth-century practitioners did, as an experiment with the primal stuff of existence. The transformation of gold was simply a metaphor for the purification experienced in ecstasy and in particular during the mesmeric trance. In Early Magnetism she speaks of the magnetic trance: "It conjoins the mind to its lost universality and allows consciousness to pass regressively through its many phases to that long-forgotten life in reality, passing beyond the murky media of sense and fan- tasy to behold reflections in the brightened mirror of our own intelligence."

What we have here is a sort of indoor pantheism. With its emphasis on higher forms of perception, achieved by laying the five senses to sleep, the transcendental mesmerism of Townshend and Mary Anne South sounds remarkably like Wordsworth:

we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

In view of his well-known reference to a spirit that rolled through all things, a phrase that sounds remarkably like the universal fluid, it is surprising to discover that Wordsworth was not only indifferent to mesmerism but actually hostile to it, whereas his friend Coleridge, who had a comparable need to immerse himself in the "vast," spent many years researching the magnetic literature in an effort to find some technique with a comparable effect to that of opium. For Wordsworth, however, it was not only unnecessary but objectionable to put the senses to sleep in the effort to achieve an immediate experience of the sublime. Unlike Townshend, for whom the physical senses were an obstacle to perception, Wordsworth regarded the eye and the ear as



732 SOCIAL RESEARCH

the only routes through which it was possible to enter into com- munion with nature. For him, the sense of the sublime was to be achieved by yielding to the metaphysical influence of her intelli- gible presence:

By influence habitual to the mind The mountains outline and its steady form Gives a pure grandeur, and its presence shapes The measure and the prospect of the soul To majesty. . .

As far as Wordsworth was concerned, transcendental knowledge may result in an experience that lies beyond the reach of the physical senses but can be initiated only by the use of physical optics as opposed to the faculty, which Carlyle referred to as spiritual optics.

For the transcendental mesmerist - in other words, for the mesmerist who encouraged the trance as an escape from the prison of the five physical senses - the promises of animal magnetism were redemptive rather than remedial, and at the earliest stage of its establishment in the British Isles mesmerism found a clientele not only among the sick and suffering but among those who sought a spiritual resurrection and the reawakening of an inner world.

The arrival of animal magnetism in Great Britain was marked by the first of several advertisements in the London newspapers of 1785 announcing "The newly discovered method of ascertaining and curing almost every malady has at length made its way to Lon- don." The announcement went on to make the reassuring claim that since the new method was "performed without touching the patient, without using any drug or medicine. . .without anything except the power known to the operator himself, no evil conse- quences can be apprehended from it." The next day another advertisement appeared, signed by a man with the intriguing




name of De Mainaduc, who announced that he was now ready to begin a course of instruction in the healing art.

From these two advertisements it is possible to recognize two of the factors that might help to explain the success of animal magnetism. One was the fact that its practitioners abstained from the use of drugs and surgery, thus appealing to the physical Puri- tanism that was so accurately identified by Samuel Brown 60 years later. The other was the fact that one of its professors was ready not only to heal his patients but to instruct them in the art whereby they could heal others, which underlines the essentially democratic impulse of the movement.

A month later De Mainaduc published another advertisement in which he admitted that he was "apprehensive of being classed in the public opinion with Mr. Mesmer" and that he therefore begged leave to acquaint the public with his formal credentials. He listed the London hospitals he had attended as a student and emphasized that he had received his training from men such as John and William Hunter, the physician Fordyce, and the male midwife Leake. He went on to inform his prospective clients that he had visited France, where he spent a year and a half "making experimental enquiries and improvements in the science of animal magnetism." Apparently it was these improvements that had enabled him to put aside the principles of Mr. Mesmer and allowed him to bring the science to an unprecedented peak of perfection.

De Mainaduc 's reluctance to be identified with Mesmer is understandable in view of the unfavorable publicity created by the report of Franklin's commission. And since this report was now available in English, it would have been imprudent to make too much of the widely ridiculed theory of a magnetic fluid. It was presumably for the same reason that De Mainaduc abandoned the use of magnetic apparatus and relied instead on the unmedi- ated power and sensitivity of the human hand. In the advertisements that followed, De Mainaduc elaborated this theme and in February 1786 he announced an introductory lecture in which he



734 SOCIAL RESEARCH

promised to elucidate "the science erroneously called animal magnetism." He also promised to show "the errors in which it was enveloped whilst in the hands of Robert Fludd, Kircher, Maxwell and several others."

From these quotations it is possible to see that De Mainaduc was anxious to dissociate himself not only from Mesmer but from the occult tradition itself, although, as we shall see in a moment, it was the occult hermetic implications of the craft that represented the main attraction for many of the clients who subscribed to these lectures. Fortunately, De Mainaduc wrote down his addresses, and since they were published after his death in 1796 it is possible to gain an accurate reading of his own theory. Until recently there were no known copies of the lectures and the only available record of De Mainaduc 's opinion was the long summary Robert Southey gave in his "Letters from England." However, I was lucky enough to find what seems to be the only existing copy in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and since the author introduces these with a short autobiography, we now have a picture of the man and his theory. In spite of his unusual name, which led earlier historians of this subject to assume that he was a fly-by-night foreign visitor, De Mainaduc was a native of the British Isles whose Huguenot family had settled in Cork in the early years of the eighteenth century. He came to England in the late 1770s and after taking medical instruction under the various authorities I have already mentioned, be became a surgeon-apothecary.

In late Hanoverian England, the healing profession was divided into three social estates, the most privileged of which was the rank of physician. To enjoy the rights and privileges of this rank it was necessary to be licensed by the Royal College of Physicians, and this in turn depended on having a university degree - preferably from Oxford or Cambridge. In other words, the image of the physician was carefully shaped so that it would conform to that of the gentleman, for this was the only sort of person who was thought fit to exercise full medical authority. By contrast, the sur-




geon was regarded as a craftsman, and the apothecary as nothing more than a tradesman. This hierarchy understandably created an abrasive class distinction within the profession and many of those in the lower estates felt an acute sense of economic and social frustration.

It was this frustration that almost certainly motivated De Maina- duc's exploitation of mesmerism. The unsuccessful attempts he made to obtain the diploma of physician indicate that De Maina- duc was humiliated and frustrated by the comparatively lowly rank fortune and education had condemned him to, and one gets the impression that he longed for the wealth and privilege from which his comparatively poor qualifications excluded him. As a result, after failing to obtain an M.D. from the University of Aberdeen, he went to France, where he seems to have purchased a more or less useless degree from the University of Rheims. Dur- ing his stay in France he became acquainted with Mesmer's schismatic associate, Deslon, and presumably recognized that this fashionable novelty would win him the prosperous clientele for which he had previously yearned. He returned to England in 1785 and started to mount the advertising campaign I have already mentioned. It is easy to see that this campaign was man- aged to obtain the best of both worlds. On the one hand there was the unorthodox novelty that earned him the sort of clientele a surgeon-apothecary had little reason to expect, and on the other hand he was not embarrassed to exploit his more orthodox credentials in the effort to give his more adventurous claims much needed respectability.

By 1786 De Mainaduc had won himself the kind of clientele he had always longed for and the London newspapers made scathing comments about this new charlatan in their midst. If one looks at the letters of some of the more fashionable aristocracy, especially from the Whigs, one begins to get the picture of a man whose main appeal was made to the wealthy and the self-indulgent and to anyone who had enough money to pay for the privilege of having their hypochondria taken seriously. But that is only one side



736 SOCIAL RESEARCH

of the story and it would be a mistake to dismiss De Mainaduc's clientele as a group of frivolous sensation seekers with more money than sense. As a result of one of those rare strokes of good luck, it is now possible to recognize a much more significant pat- tern and to see that De Mainaduc's clientele reproduce some of the Rosicrucian interests that clustered around Mesmer and that the medical rewards were much less important than the spiritual ones. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that De Mainaduc was a spiritual Baptist who christened his clients so that they were reborn and regenerated, or so they thought. Some years ago I turned up a handwritten list of the clients who subscribed to his lectures and seances and although many of the people are impossible to identify, the names that can be traced indicate that De Mainaduc, like Mesmer, had tapped a peculiar susceptibility among a group of late-eighteenth-century Londoners. Apart from the aristocrats I have already mentioned, many of whom belonged to the Whig persuasion and some of whom played a significant part in the election campaign of Charles James Fox, one group stands out with remarkable vividness.

In 1783 a small number of people came together at the request of a clergyman named Hindmarsh for the express purpose of reading, translating, and publishing the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. This is obviously not the place to trace the origins of Hindmarsh 's Theosophical Society, but for our purposes it is enough to point out that they overlap with people who had been reading the works of William Law earlier in the century and were experiencing a spiritual hunger that was not to be satisfied by the dry regulations of formal Anglicanism. In the view of one of their more prominent members, "they foresaw and expected an internal millennium and huddled around anything which seemed to hold out the promise of some spiritual influx - some enlargement of the inner self." For those who were seeking such a rebirth, traditional Christianity was not the only enemy. They also objected to the slavery of the physical senses and, like Blake, who flirted with Swedenborgianism as well, they were




repelled by the dry mechanical world of Lockean empiricism. For people of this persuasion there was an elective affinity between Swedenborgian mysticism and the strange transcendental influx that was encouraged and introduced during the mesmeric trance.

In 1786, therefore, we find a strong association between Hind- marsh's Theosophical Society and De Mainaduc's subscription list. The most prominent name on both lists is that of Philip James De Loutherbourg, the romantic landscape painter who con- structed the melodramatic panoramas for the Drury Lane The- atre. Loutherbourg also tinkered with other Rosicrucian subjects such as alchemy and through his association with the notorious Cagliostro he established important links between the London Swedenborgian mesmerists and their counterparts in Paris and in Strasburg. In 1789 Loutherbourg established himself as a mesmeric healer in his own right; at one point his house was besieged by a crowd of 3,000.

Through Loutherbourg we can also establish links with an alchemical underground that was beginning to flourish at the end of the eighteenth century. (Loutherbourg was a close friend of two eccentric chemists named Wolfe and Price, who were famous among the London mystics for their experiments in metallic transmutation.) In this one man it is possible to identify the revival of Paracelsian themes through which neoplatonist ideas were reintroduced into late Hanoverian London. Louther- bourg's friend and associate Richard Cosway was also an exponent of the same Rosicrucian enthusiasm and both he and his wife are to be found on Hindmarsh and De Mainaduc's lists. The Cosways, who were accomplished portrait painters, acted as a link between the Whig aristocrats and the huge underground of minor artists and craftsmen who proved so susceptible to the radical, not to say millennial, implications of mesmerism.



738 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Cosway's close association with De Mainaduc is further shown by the fact that it was Cosway who painted the miniature portrait of the Huguenot magnetist that is reproduced on the frontispiece of his posthumous lectures. As a further point of interest, Cosway occupied Schomberg House in Pall Mall, which had previously been the premises of the notorious Dr. Graham, who had established a popular establishment in which cures were offered on a principle that closely resembled the magnetic fluid of Mesmer. Graham also had Swedenborgian connections and the matter was made even more complicated since his medical activities were inspired in the first place by the electrical teachings of Franklin, with whom he had become acquainted in Philadelphia during the 1770s.

It was at Schomberg House that Cosway and his wife amused and amazed their fashionable friends with parties and seances at which the fashionable mingled with the radical. A frequent visitor to the Cosway establishment was Philippe Egalite, who played a prominent part not only in the revolutionary politics of '89-92 but was an ardent supporter of masonic Rosicrucianism. It was at Schomberg House, too, that Lunardi the balloonist was lionized. Indeed, there seems to be a strange elusive association between the flights of the new aeronauts and the spiritual levitation of the magnetists. One can already see a puzzling mishmash of emblematic alliances in which the interests of social and spiritual millen- nia overlapped and metaphorically represented one another.

Another prominent member of both parties was the mysterious and almost absurd figure of Major General Rainsford, a soldier who had already shown an exorbitant interest in the higher orders of Illuminated Masonry and had for many years expressed the wish to found a universal society that would bring together all the Rosicrucian themes of Hermes, Plotinus, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Jacob Boehme, and William Law. During the great international "convent" of 1784 and 1785, General Rainsford acted as a courier between the Paris Philalethes and the Swedenborgian mesmerists in London. It was through his friend William Bousie,




who is also found on De Mainaduc's list of subscribers, that a link was established with the Illumines of Avignon, and through this group in turn we reintroduce the theme of millennial radical- ism, since it was to Avignon in 1789 that the two workingmen Wright and Bryan made their mystical pilgrimage after having undergone spiritual instruction among the London Swedenbor- gian Masons. Rainsford was also a friend of the occultist book- seller Manoah Sibly and it is through him that we can trace a link to someone whose Rosicrucian interests are even more explicit. Manoah Sibly's brother Ebenezer was an astrologer and mystic whose book on occult physic contains not only lengthy sections on animal magnetism but also an engraved preface whose repre- sentation of the burial place of Christian Rosenkrutz indicates the close affinity between mesmerism and the Rosicrucian themes of the seventeenth century.

The listings and linkages of this and many other names could continue, but it should be clear from the foregoing that mesmerism in London at the end of he eighteenth century was little more than the tip of a vast iceberg of associations, all of which expressed the spiritual, radical, and millennial longings of an age that was undergoing massive intellectual change and that in a period traditionally represented as one broadly illuminated by the light of reason, mesmerism was just one expression of a metaphysical pathos that was also represented in a renewed and apparently inextinguishable interest in astrology, alchemy, and the Hebrew Kabala.

The revolutionary events in France dispersed and demoralized the groups to which I have just referred and after the sedition tri- als of 1794 many were reluctant to continue their association with mesmerism; by 1800 animal magnetism more or less vanished from the English scene, although the occult interests with which it was associated survived in isolated cells throughout London and the provinces. Until 1829 it was almost impossible to find any mention of someone practicing animal magnetism, although a painstaking analysis of some of the more obscure manuscripts will



740 SOCIAL RESEARCH

show that the associated subjects of astrology and alchemy were still pursued in private. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, when mesmerism reappeared it was reintroduced by someone who is usually discussed as a chemist but whose interest in the rare metals indicates, though perhaps it does not necessarily prove, that the metaphorical association between alchemy and mesmerism was as strong as ever.

Notes *Used to refer to cults that look forward to some indefinitely delayed

Utopian future.

References

Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evo- lution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books [1970].

Schofield, Robert E. Mechanism and Materialism; British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason. Princeton.: Princeton University Press, 1970 [cl969].

Townshend, Chauncy Hare. Facts in Mesmerism with Reasons for a Dispas- sionate Inquiry into It. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841.



Documents

Altered States of Consciousness || Magnetic Mockeries