Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (24 page)

Edgar Allan Poe's story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' (published in 1845 and originally entitled ‘Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis') provoked huge controversy. Poe plays with the idea that a dying person may be so imbued with magnetic fluid by a mesmerist that he can remain, though dead, in a kind of suspended death for months, until released by the mesmerist – at which point his body immediately turns into a pile of stinking, putrid slime. Taking it to be factual, people seriously debated whether such a horrifying use of mesmerism was possible, and condemned it on the assumption that it was. Poe's macabre imagination had already led him to write two other short stories about mesmerism, both published in 1844 – ‘Mesmeric Revelation' and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains'. ‘Mesmeric Revelation' is simply premissed on the idea that a magnetized person may act as a medium or channel, revealing metaphysical truths, while ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains' tells how a frequently mesmerized man glimpses in a dream-like state details of a previous incarnation.

But all publicity is good publicity. These negative reports and fears gave mesmerists like La Roy Sunderland the opportunity to set the record straight. In response to
Confessions of a Magnetizer
, which had named him in person, he stressed the many diseases for which mesmerism had proved to be effective, from blindness to coffee addiction, and the important insights it gave into the capabilities of the human mind, which seemed to have latent clairvoyant abilities. The mesmerists argued that their detractors were focusing on the superficial degrees of mesmerism, the kind of state achieved in the electro-biologists' stage shows, and ignoring the obvious interest and
importance of the deeper states. To this kind of argument, learned men replied that these ‘facts' about paranormal powers were subjective and unverifiable, merely the experiences of mesmerized subjects.

A couple of fictional treatments of stage hypnotism in America of the nineteenth century conveniently illustrate the opposing views. In Hawthorne's
The Blithedale Romance
(1852) there is a scene in which Priscilla, as the ‘Veiled Lady', performs on stage ‘in communion with the spiritual world' and in touch with ‘the Absolute'. She is in a cataleptic state, her will totally under the control of the unscrupulous Professor Westervelt. Hawthorne seems to believe that such people are genuinely in a trance (although Priscilla's trance is broken by her love for Hollingsworth, an attraction stronger than the magnetism of the charismatic but flawed Westervelt). In
Alias Grace
, however, Margaret Atwood's 1996 novel, the whole thing is portrayed as a sham – effective, and harmless, but still fraudulent.

When mesmerism first became all the rage in America, the rash of books stressed both the medical and the paranormal potential. By 1850, however, the latter was of far more interest than the former. Physicalist theories were abandoned in favour of various adaptations of traditional lore about the soul and the spirit, or in favour of Swedenborgism, since the Scandinavian prophet was immensely popular in the States, and mesmerists were supposed to prove the reality of Swedenborg's visions. In
Mesmer and Swedenborg
, for instance, written in 1847, George Bush reckoned that although Swedenborg had communicated with angels on his own, Mesmer had introduced a method by which others could be vouchsafed glimpses of the same realms. Bush accepted all the so-called ‘higher phenomena' of mesmerism, from clairvoyance to the ability to see auras, because these were just the kinds of phenomena one would expect to find in the spiritual world if Swedenborg's teachings were true. Mesmerism, in fact, had been given to the world to prepare the
way for the final acceptance of Swedenborgism. For whatever reasons, peculiar to the cultural history of the developing nation, mesmerism predisposed Americans to think not only of a lower unconscious, but also of a mystical higher unconscious, and to abandon scripturally based Christianity in favour of the psychological and experiential attempt to align oneself with higher or natural forces.

It was, in a sense, Poyen's fault once again. He was the missionary who started the whole thing off by his direct influence on a couple of significant figures, Dr James Stanley Grimes (1807–1903) and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802– 66) and, through them, by his indirect influence on even more significant figures. By the time of this third generation, it is fair to say that mesmerism no longer played a major part in the lives or work of any of the major American prophets, but it was the original impetus that initiated the whole fascinating movement.

Quimby, a thoughtful, respectable-looking man, met Poyen on tour in Belfast, Maine, in either 1836 or 1838, and was bowled over by his demonstration and lecture. He pestered Poyen with questions afterwards, and Poyen told him that he too could become a mesmerist if he applied himself. This was all Quimby needed to hear; he left his job as a clock-maker and followed Poyen around until he felt he had learnt enough from him and could set up as a magnetizer himself. With seventeen-year-old Lucius Burkmar as his somnambulist diagnostician, he rapidly became the most famous mesmerist in America. His services were in demand wherever he went.

After a while, however, a niggling doubt began to surface: was this somnambulistic clairvoyance, or telepathy with the patients themselves? If the latter, Lucius was simply confirming what the patients already believed, and the reason the cures worked was not necessarily any particular efficacy in the herbal remedies Quimby prescribed as a result of Lucius's diagnoses, but the trust and confidence of the patient. In 1859 he moved to Portland, Maine, and set himself up in consulting rooms large enough to accommodate the hundreds of patients who came to see him. He found that he didn't need Lucius, but could cure patients himself, by putting them at their ease, sitting opposite them and staring at them until he went into a trance state. He then used psychic force to transmit healing
energy from himself to the patient, and backed this up with herbal drugs.

But the doubts would not go away, and seemed to be confirmed by a discovery Quimby made. His poorer patients could not afford many of the drugs Quimby used to prescribe, and so he would recommend to them drugs which, while less expensive, were also less strong. To his surprise, he found that they were cured just as effectively, if they were cured at all. He realized it was his patients' confidence in him as a healer that was doing the trick, and so he gave up using drugs – and magnetism – and became a faith healer. He claimed not that the cause of cure was confidence, but, more radically, that illness was caused in the first place by bad beliefs. Disease, he said, was ‘a deranged state of mind'. Eradication of these negative beliefs would not only cure disease, but keep one free from illness; in trying to cure the disease, doctors were taking an effect for a cause. It was important to Quimby, then, that his patients understood what the sources of illness and cure were; he would explain things to them, rather than imposing anything on them, and with this use of speech resembled a modern psychotherapist rather than one of the silent mesmerists of Victorian Britain. Magnetism could bring temporary relief, but only the right attitude could really cure. Like Coué after him, he stressed optimism (and putting the mind on higher things) as a shield against illness.

Poyen influenced not only Quimby but also Dr Grimes in Poughkeepsie. Grimes was an itinerant lecturer and demonstrator, of the same generation as Sunderland and Dods, but not quite of their stature. A tailor, William Levingston, left one of his shows with a burning desire to test his own mesmeric powers, and found that he was highly successful with a young man called Andrew Jackson Davis, who had moved to Poughkeepsie not long before, in 1839, from Blooming Grove, New York, where he had been born in 1826. Davis soon demonstrated that he had extraordinary clairvoyant powers, and Levingston toured with him around the country. In addition to the usual run of medical diagnoses and foretelling the future, the ‘Poughkeepsie Seer', as he became known, was famous for channelling (to use the modern term) a vision of the divine powers and workings of the universe as a whole, which he came to see as the beginning of a new revelation for humankind. As his fame
grew, he left Levingston and moved to New York to spread his gospel more effectively, and took Dr Lyon as his magnetizer and the Reverend Fishbaugh as his scribe. Before long he came to prefer a self-induced trance to one that was externally imposed, at any rate for the dictation of the vast, rambling book in 800 pages, on science, love, religion and the spiritual world, which he called
The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind
. ‘The poverty of blood which marked poor Andrew Jackson's childhood was reflected in his spiritual life. Surely to few other seers has been granted so limited and so purblind a vision of things celestial. He was almost wholly lacking in passion, human or Divine. His ideal of conduct was an emasculated stoicism, his highest virtue a milk and watery benevolence, his God a progressive nebula.' But for all these shortcomings, the book was an enormous success, and ran to thirty-five editions in the thirty years following its publication in 1847. Davis's intelligence and enthusiasm shine from his eyes in contemporary portraits, and his personal magnetism helped to convince thousands of the truth of his visions.

Andrew Jackson Davis was only the first of the American prophets. Others soon followed, of whom the most significant and interesting was Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906). But they made no particularly significant use of mesmerism. In Davis's case it was mesmerism that first clearly revealed his clairvoyant faculty and triggered his later career; for Harris it was more that mesmerism had primed the American public to receive his message. Nevertheless, the history of mesmerism in the United States does have this peculiar twist. In Europe, when hypnotized subjects were used as seers, they were literally ‘mediums': they were intermediaries, no more than mouthpieces for higher intelligences. In America some of these seers, like Davis and Harris, claimed religious status themselves, as prophets, dispensers of a new revelation.

By far the most famous of the native American prophets was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Mesmerism certainly left its mark on her life and work. In the first place, although she later denied it (but then she was somewhat given to lying, especially about her childhood), she was a disciple of Quimby, who in fact coined the term ‘Christian Science', as well as giving her the principles. Eddy's life displays a pattern of attaching herself to men (often younger) and then turning on them later and accusing them of malevolence towards her. For instance, after the foundation of Christian Science, she relied on a man called Richard Kennedy to do most of the healing, while she took charge of the lecturing. Kennedy later took her to court for not paying him fairly, and he won both the court case and her lifelong enmity. Her vehement denials that she owed anything to Quimby, whose writings she undoubtedly plundered for her
Science and Health
(1875), are simply part of this pattern. In the second place, in her later, somewhat paranoid years, Eddy was convinced that her illnesses – and indeed anything that went wrong – were due to a force she called ‘malignant animal magnetism' (or sometimes the ‘red dragon') being directed towards her by her enemies, so she clearly remained a believer in the efficacy of magnetism. (Even today Christian Scientists persist in calling hypnotism ‘animal magnetism', and they are some of the foremost denouncers of hypnotism as unremittingly evil.) In fact, she used to keep a rotating staff of students in residence at her Brookline mansion whose major responsibility was to ward off the malicious animal magnetism generated by her enemies and to look after her household. They were not particularly successful, because Eddy was plagued by a string of court cases from patients who claimed she had overcharged them. In the third place, with their Quimby-like faith in the power of affirmative thinking, some of the practices of Christian Scientists resemble self-hypnosis.

Mary Baker Eddy was born Mary A. Morse Baker in July 1821, the daughter of a poor New Hampshire farmer, and the youngest of six children. She married a bricklayer called George Washington Glover, and moved to South Carolina, where Glover died. Mary Glover, then aged twenty-three, gave their son away to neighbours to bring up and didn't see him again for twenty-three years. Not long afterwards, she married Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist,
but this marriage quickly broke down. In 1862, suffering from back pain, she consulted Quimby, and was cured. Quimby, as we have seen, was concerned to educate his patients, not just to cure them, and so Mary Patterson learnt all she could from the great man. In 1866 the pain returned as a result of a fall, but she healed herself, and went on to found Christian Science, beginning by advertising a course teaching people how to heal themselves without drugs, electricity and so on.

The principles of Christian Science are encapsulated in the following quotation from
Science and Health
, and the reader will immediately notice the resemblance to Quimby's teachings: ‘You say a boil is painful; but that is impossible, for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests through inflammation and swelling a belief in pain; and this belief is called a boil.' In 1870 she moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, and established a practice. In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy, who died in 1882. She herself lived on until 1910, by which time there were already some 90,000 Christian Scientists in the States alone. In her later years she had delusions of divinity and in 1938 the board of directors of the Christian Science Church confirmed that she was the spiritual idea of God typified by the woman in the Apocalypse and now come to life. This belief in the near divinity of Mary Baker Eddy is reflected in some of the Christian Science practices, which include, for instance, self-healing by focusing on her teachings, which are the carriers of positive wholesome beliefs.