Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (19 page)

In the years immediately following de Puységur's 1784 and 1785 publications, a number of French writers such as Jean François Fournel explored the state of magnetic sleep, without adding substantially to de Puységur's findings or speculations, while others such as A.A. Tardy de Montravel tried to reconcile Mesmer and de Puységur. According to de Montravel, whose somnambulist claimed to be able to see the magnetic fluid leaving the magnetizer and entering her, magnetic sleep was just one form of crisis, a cataleptic form as opposed to the more violent convulsions.

Soon more and more magnetizers found their subjects going into magnetic sleep rather than crisis. Before long, enthusiastic experimenters had come to recognize most of the major hypnotic phenomena acknowledged today: catalepsy, amnesia, anaesthesia, positive and negative hallucinations, post-hypnotic suggestion, individual differences in susceptibility. But the claims for paranormal abilities – especially clairvoyance, somnambulistic medical diagnosis and prophecy – also persisted and grew. Ironically, for all Mesmer's stubborn materialism, he had opened the floodgates of occultism in the provincial societies.

The reality of magnetic sleep was no longer in doubt, but its interpretation was controversial. Gradually, two main schools or lines of thinking emerged. The fluidists, following Mesmer's belief in magnetic fluid, attributed mesmeric phenomena to the fact that all nature is akin, and that everything is imbued with this fluid; this means that we are all unconsciously in contact with the universe, and they speculated that in a trance we wake up to this fact. The animists had no time for magnetic fluid and attributed the trance phenomena to the separation of a higher spiritual part from the physical body. Fluidists thought that magnetism involved the transfer of magnetic fluid from the operator to the subject, while animists thought either that will alone was sufficient to explain the induction of trance, or, as among others Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817)
argued, that will plus prayer did the trick. Finally, fluidists perpetuated the old mass methods of mesmerism, since for them it was a mechanical process which
baquets
and magnetized trees could transmit, while animists focused more on one-to-one treatments. However, despite these differences, there was one vital similarity: both schools still emphasized the role of the magnetist himself. For the fluidists, he was the channel for healthy magnetic energy; for the animists, it was his will and his prayers that were effective. The days were still a long way off when the consensual participation of the subject could be seen to be critical.

With interest in mesmerism waning in Paris following the 1784 reports, the spotlight fell on the provincial societies. The most energetic of these were in Lyons and Strasbourg. Both of them were founded with the help of local Masonic lodges, and de Puységur himself was a Mason (as were Mesmer, the Marquis de Lafayette, Court de Gébelin and other prominent mesmerists). There are a number of reasons for the connection between magnetic societies and Masonic lodges, but they don't amount to anything very sinister. At the most mundane level, the members of Masonic lodges were generally aristocrats, who were precisely the educated men of leisure who had an interest in the latest scientific discoveries such as mesmerism, and through their lodges had an already existing infrastructure for spreading the mesmeric gospel. Secondly, there was considerable interest in many Masonic lodges in occultism, and since magnetic sleep seemed to give its subjects paranormal abilities, it was a topic the Freemasons wanted to pursue.

The founders of the Lyons school started as strict followers of Mesmer, but soon added their own techniques, particularly the diagnostic method of ‘doubling', whereby the magnetizer felt in his own body the ailment of the patient, and so was enabled to come up with an accurate diagnosis. They even practised this method on animals. They developed a unique magnetic cosmology which stressed the importance of the will of the healer in effecting cures. Before long the Lyons school gave itself over almost entirely to mysticism and paranormal phenomena rather than curing patients. It was run by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, who was heavily influenced by his friend Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the most important Martinist in France. Martinism was a spiritual way – a combination of Kabbalah
and Catholicism – founded by Martines de Pasqually. Saint-Martin was an early member of Mesmer's Paris Society of Harmony, and acted as a kind of consultant to several of the provincial societies, to guide their understanding and propagation of the paranormal phenomena their subjects were manifesting. One of the best ways to get a sense of the kind of work in which the Lyons society was involved is to read Edward Bulwer-Lytton's wonderful 1861 novel
A Strange Story
, in which magnetism is one of the tools of the evil magician Margrave. I don't mean to imply that Willermoz and the others were evil magicians, but the novel does give a contemporary sense of how magnetism and magic were bound together by some nineteenth-century researchers.

Or again, and to keep the scene in France, in 1891, in
Là-bas
, one of Joris Karl Huysmans's decadent novels, the astrologer Gévingey recounts how he was threatened by a notorious satanist, who used hypnotism to send his curses and poisons through the astral realms. Gévingey turned to a magical exorcist, Dr Johannes, whose first step was to call in a clairvoyant.

He hypnotized her and she, at his injunction, explained the nature of the sorcery of which I was the victim. She reconstructed the scene. She literally saw me being poisoned by food and drink mixed with menstrual fluid that had been reinforced with macerated sacramental wafers and drugs skilfully dosed. That sort of spell is so terrible that aside from Dr Johannes no thaumaturge in France dare try to cure it.

This is the kind of way in which, in the nineteenth century, hypnosis and magic were bound together.

In 1785, de Puységur was posted to Strasbourg and while he was there he founded, along with a certain Dr Ostertag, a Society of Harmony whose express aim was to experiment with magnetic sleep in order to gain more understanding of it. Unlike their animist peers in Lyons, they remained fluidists for a long time. Ostertag used to mesmerize his subjects by getting them to stare at a glass ball, a remarkable anticipation of the fixation techniques which were developed later. The success of the Strasbourg society led de Puységur to set up two more, at Metz and Nancy. His brother Count Jacques-Maxime founded one at Bayonne, and his other brother,
Antoine-Hyacinthe-Anne, founded one in the colony of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic); after the slaves revolted and established their own republic on the island, mesmerism died out or became absorbed into the local voodoo religion. Back in Strasbourg, the society gradually became more and more animist and mystical, and eventually combined mesmerism with Swedenborgism. A parallel may be found in the society at Ostend, founded by Chevalier de Barbarin. De Barbarin, a Martinist, attributed cures to God. Healing, he taught, was a result of the magnetizer's will – of his willed channelling of divine energy – and the patient's faith.

While they were relatively uncontaminated by mysticism and retained the traditional focus on therapy, both the Strasbourg and Lyons schools published a large number of case histories. It is the same story we have met before. Time after time, where conventional medicine had failed for years, the magnetists achieved cures, and did so rapidly. Although there was some discussion within their own ranks as to which ailments magnetism could and could not treat, there was a strong tendency to regard magnetism as a kind of panacea, and its practitioners boldly approached the most appalling cases. For instance, there was a lady who had for many years been in a terrible state: she had a prolapsed womb and an enlarged abdomen, suffered from dizziness and awful migraines and rheumatic pain, and had no more than irregular menstrual periods. Through magnetism and self-diagnosis she attained an almost complete recovery. The same story – and the reasons remain the same: the inadequacy of what passed for medicine at the time, and the undeniable power of faith healing.

Magnetism came early to Germany, and found many gullible recipients. The King of Prussia in the 1780s, Friedrich Wilhelm II, a weak king, handed out honours and contrived policies according to the dictates of a hunchbacked somnambulist who was supposed to be in
touch with higher realms. In actual fact, the only realms she was in touch with were the minds of the devious courtiers who had introduced her to the king to further their aims and gain them honours. The hunchback only fell from grace when the messages communicated to her began to conflict with the desires of the Countess Lichtenau, the king's mistress.
Omnia vincit amor
.

The chief evangelist for mesmerism in the German-speaking countries was a priest from Zurich called Johann Kasper Lavater. The first centres of Strasbourgian mesmerism in Germany were Baden and Bremen, while the chief centre of rationalist opposition was Berlin. Contrary to the mysticism of the French schools, the German schools at first tried to give magnetism an aura of scientific respectability. For instance, Luigi Galvani's experiments in Italy (‘galvanizing' frogs' legs) were taken to indicate the presence in all living creatures of ‘animal electricity'; this obviously supported the theory and practice of the magnetists. This respectable cloaking of mesmerism, and the fact that so far its German practitioners, such as Eberhard Gmelin (1751–1808) and Arnold Wienholt (1749–1804), had focused on therapy rather than paranormalism, led to its introduction into the rationalist stronghold of Berlin. In Berlin we meet some more of those remarkable personalities who litter the early history of hypnotism, Christoph von Hufeland, Karl Kluge and Karl Wolfart. Wolfart was the evangelist, Kluge the chronicler and theorist. Kluge's main book,
Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus als Heilmittel
(
An Attempt to Present Animal Magnetism as Therapy
, 1811), is one of the most important works in the history of hypnosis. It systematized and summarized everything that was known about the theory and practice of mesmerism at the time.

Most German mesmerists totally ignored Mesmer himself: they assumed he was dead, and in any case were inclined to dismiss him as a charlatan. But Wolfart was in personal touch with Mesmer, and his clinic, constructed along the lines of Mesmer's old rooms in Paris, became the centre for mesmerism in Europe. Wolfart attracted powerful friends from high society, but the reintroduction of Mesmer into the frame led to a Berlin commission being set up to investigate the claims of mesmerism. This report was not published until 1816, because it was interrupted by war. Despite the continued opposition of the majority of the professional medical community in Berlin, the
report of this commission was favourable. The same was happening at much the same time elsewhere in Europe: in Denmark, Prussia, Russia and certain areas of Italy cautious approval was given to mesmerism, provided it was in the safe hands of reputable physicians.

But it was not long before the supernatural phenomena of magnetic sleep began to fascinate the minds of German mesmerists. Early in the nineteenth century, Romanticism was on the rise, with its desire to understand the mystical forces and laws that govern the universe, and humanity's place in the world. It isn't hard to see how Romanticism and mesmerism were made to reinforce each other. The Romantics believed, for instance, in the existence of a world soul, which pervades the universe – just as Mesmer's magnetic fluid did. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) postulated the existence of two distinct sets of sense organs, one attuned to external events, the other to the inner world of the spirit; the mesmerists pounced on this to explain their paranormal phenomena. Then the main Romantic philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), saw the whole world as a set of polarities such as light and gravity, positive and negative electricity, the north and south poles of magnetism and so on. Further down the scale of these polarities, at the level of humankind, one of the most important polarities was sleep and waking, the difference being that while awake we work and strive towards individuation, but while asleep we merge with the common essence of humankind. By the beginning of the 1810s this idea had been developed until it was thought that we have two sets of nervous systems, one functioning during our waking hours, the other when we are asleep. According to Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, writing in 1814, it is the nervous system centred on the solar plexus which gives us the ability to transcend the boundaries of time and space. Romantic philosophy developed independently of mesmerism, but German thinkers were quick to see the possibilities in magnetic sleep: the use to which they put somnambules was less for therapy and more to confirm their high-flown metaphysics.

Theoreticians abounded in Germany, but disappointingly few of them were doing original work, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence. Explanations of somnambulistic paranormal phenomena tended to follow the lines already established in France. Some were
fluidists, others animists. Scepticism also made an early mark. In 1787 Privy Councillor C.L. Hoffmann of Mainz offered a reward of 100 ducats for any somnambule who could detect which of a set of randomly shuffled glasses of water had been magnetized. No one came forward to take up the offer.

From Germany, interest in magnetism spread to Russia, Holland and the Scandinavian countries, but made scarcely any impression on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From France it had already spread to Belgium. Roman Catholic countries such as the Italian states were suspicious of magnetism, though they eventually had to give way to popular interest. However, there were few native developments: the work in these places was very derivative on the Franco-German forms of magnetism. Mesmerism went into rapid decline in Germany after about 1850, when positivism and rationalism became the dominant modes of thought.