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Franz Mesmer, a visionary 18th-century physician, was the father of the psycho-electromagnetic unconscious. He is known alternately as the kookiest charlatan of all time or the man who in many ways kick-started psychoanalysis. He was born in 1732 earned his doctorate degree in Vienna, where he wrote his dissertation on the astrological influence of the planets. In order to explain this influence---and again people were already working under the influence of Enlightenment materialism---he posited an ether-like substance that he calls the "fluidium". This is that substance that allows the moon to tug the tides and allows planets to influence human beings. The scientific side of the question, which goes back to Newton, is how can we account for action at a distance on a cosmic scale. Rationalist scientists at this time, they couldn't imagine how such forces would propagate through a vacuum. So they posited the existence of the ether, an invisible, etheric medium of communication. Mesmer simply attached astrological influence to this fluid. He taught cures could be effected by having patients do things such as sit with their feet in a fountain of magnetized water while holding cables attached to magnetized trees. Mesmer wavered about what he was going to call the aspect of ourselves which responds to this etheric field, and he settled on the term "animal magnetism," a term he took from the works of a hermetic Jesuit a century earlier. Mesmer wrote: "All bodies are a magnet, capable of communicating this magnetic principle. This fluid permeates everything and can be stored up and concentrated like the electric fluid and it acts at a distance." While Mesmer never identified animal magnetism with the mineral magnetism which we've know about for millennia, we can see the way that he used the reality of magnetism as a way to get across a lot of occult ideas. Not that he wasn't adverse to messing around with magnets in his healing practice, an idea he took from a priest with the unusual name of Father Maximillian Hell, who used steel magnets to heal people. This was not a new practice. In the ruins of ancient Sumer there are found magnetic healing charms inscribed with the symbol of Marduke. Marduke, among other things, is "he who causes action at a distance". Again, it was that question of how are things influenced across empty space. Soon Mesmer discovered that he didn't really need magnets. He realized that he could magnetize people simply by passing his hands over them. In English we frequently use the word "mesmerize" to describe something that hypnotically seduces us. Mesmer was not putting people into a hypnotic trance, but he was creating a convulsive climax, a la Wilhelm Reich, that he thought would lead to healing. He thought that this would re-align the body. His basic conceptual model is not much different from the one that lies behind, say, acupuncture in Chinese medicine. In acupuncture, the body is described as a field of energies. When they get off balance, you get ill. The trick of the healing is not to kill the bug, but to re-produce a resilient moving balance in the fields of the body. In any case, Mesmer pioneered a style of "wild" healing we can recognize in some of today's alternative healers, an exuberant attempt to bring back the animist body surpressed by mechanism. For these reasons, he very quickly he became identified as a quack, a charlatan, and was hounded out of Vienna by the medical establishment. He then goes to pre-Revolution Paris, where he is the talk of the town and things get even crazier. He starts wearing lilac magician's robes and such. In Paris, he was very popular, and once again he was hounded down by the medical establishment. Here is where we take the story into the question of the unconscious. His therapies had real effects. They produced real changes in people and the medical establishment could not deny the evidence of healing. So the Paris commission which lambasted him was given the problem, "How do I explain what is going on? Obviously, he is producing effects that actually heal people. But we can't fit his paradigm into ours, so how do we explain it?" Along with telepathy,19th century mesmerists discovered a variety of altered states. Some start getting cosmic waves of energy, or states that resembled the kinds of plateaus that hardcore meditators or serious mystics describe. But the mesmerists were operating under the aegis of rationalism, doing psychoanalysis before the name. In a sense, their work became less about healing the body, and more about exploring the strange dimensions of mind. Mesmerism thus introduced a hands-on craft of introspection, pragmatic tactics of generating altered states of consciousness that could be reframed in a language divorced from mysticism. The mesmerists said, "This is not mysticism. It is scientific." For
Mesmer and Hell, the influence in question was about healing, and so
they used magnets in their healing practices. The idea was that body was
a magnetic form and that by using magnets, you could re-align the living
field of the body. |
