TechGnosis
Page 8
Not that Mesmer was above goofing around with actual magnets. In his early therapies, Mesmer would “charge” chunks of iron by passing his hands over them, and then move these metals in the general vicinity of his patients’ bodies. Over time, Mesmer abandoned the notion that magnets alone could hold healing charge, and he started magnetizing everything but the kitchen sink—bread, china cups, wood, dogs. Some patients wore magnetized clothes and read magnetized books, while others took their cures from the baquet: a bucket filled with water, iron shavings, and glass shards, whose iron handles allowed a number of patients to become magnetized simultaneously. Eventually, Mesmer realized that he himself was the magnet, and that he could put patients into trance just by staring into their eyes or having them gaze at his fingers. Though we now associate the verb mesmerize with the induction of a stoned-out trance, Mesmer’s magic fingers apparently catalyzed rip-roaring hysterical fits that had a lot more to do with primal scream therapy than with the placid nod of hypnotic regression.
Mesmer did not attempt to explain fully the energies he trafficked in or to justify them in the scientific terminology of the day. He regarded animal magnetism as a sixth sense that, like all senses, cannot be described but only experienced. But though he was fond of wizard capes and magic wands, Mesmer remained in his own mind a figure of the Enlightenment; he insisted that his powers were in no way mystical and that animal magnetism was a real force in the world. Nonetheless the Viennese medical establishment was not impressed with Mesmer’s magnetic razzle-dazzle, and the adoration the public lavished on the charismatic fellow only made the situation worse. The good doctor was hounded out of Vienna and fled to prerevolutionary Paris, where he promptly became the toast of a town flush with new ideas and revolutionary energies. Hundreds of patients whose maladies could not be leeched from their veins found substantial cures with Mesmer’s techniques. But despite his impressive record, a commission of doctors and scientists appointed by the French government, including Benjamin Franklin, proclaimed Mesmer a fraud. To explain away his successes, the Paris commission invoked a force that the skeptical crusaders of scientific reductionism continue to roll out to this day: the “imagination.” Mesmer himself acknowledged that a “rapport” had to exist between himself and the patient, and that strictly organic complaints were not always treatable. But though Mesmer had clearly tapped into the tremendous healing energies of the human bodymind, such ambiguous power—erotic, mercurial, almost revolutionary—was too convulsive to admit within the increasingly rationalistic framework of medical thought as it attempted to remake itself into a modern science.
Luckily, Mesmer’s students had no such qualms, and in pursuing magnetic experiments, they laid the groundwork for psychotherapy. The Marquis de Puységur, in particular, placed increasing emphasis on the role of the magnetizer’s “will” in the whole operation, and he began to uncover the enormous power of what psychologists call suggestion and transference. Working with peasants far from the bustle of Paris, Puységur guided his patients toward the somnambulant haze we now associate with being “mesmerized.” Once satisfactorily zapped, these unlettered manual laborers would take on entirely new and seemingly autonomous personalities, diagnose their own cures, and spontaneously perform apparent feats of clairvoyance and telepathy. As the historian Robert Fuller points out, “Puységur found himself the Columbus of a strange, new world—the human unconscious.”10
A few decades later, the British doctor James Braid came up with the term hypnotism to describe such magnetic procedures, and researches into the hypnotic state would eventually lead a young Sigmund Freud to develop his early theories of the unconscious. Though little was left of Mesmer’s original tactics at that point, Freud did resemble the old magnetizer in attempting to heal the nervous conditions of his patients by exploring altered states of consciousness in a “scientific” manner, all the while exploiting the almost magical rapport between patient and doctor. Freud also used electrical metaphors in his description of the psyche. But though psychoanalysis considerably refined Mesmer’s models of the mind, it paid a steep price for abandoning the image of a real medium that plugged the mind into the vital matrix of the cosmos. Cut off from the transpersonal interactions of Mesmer’s fluidium, psychic life became imprisoned inside the skull, a solitary fluctuation stuck inside an electro-thermodynamic machine.
As mesmerism lost its popularity in nineteenth-century Europe, it became a fad in the United States. Thousands submitted to the magnetizing hands of wandering mesmerists for their rheumatism, menstrual aches, migraines, and melancholia. In a very American turn, mesmerism also became something of a sideshow, and many magnetizers built careers out of the same sorts of titillating stunts that hypnotists perform in nightclubs today. At the same time, more serious mesmerists were penetrating the myriad dimensions of human consciousness, and they exploited quasi-electromagnetic language every step of the way. Ascending through a Neoplatonic high-rise of altered states, mesmerized subjects reported feeling “tingling sensations” of “vibrations” flowing through them. Some experienced “waves of energy” and saw auras of light. In the deepest trances, something like cosmic consciousness kicked in, as the subject’s mind, it was said, achieved identity with the force of animal magnetism itself. Clairvoyance, telepathy, and other parapsychological oddities emerged—phenomena that the mesmerist J. Stanley Grimes chalked up to the ethereum, a “material substance occupying space, which connects the planets and the earth, and which communicates light, heat, electricity, gravitation, and mental emanations from one body to another and from one mind to another.”11 Notice that, along with physical forces, Grimes’s ethereum also communicates “mental emanations”—i. e., information.
While the mesmerists were uncovering the ethereum through their patients’ netherminds, measurable electromagnetism was also beginning to radically reconfigure the official scientific picture of the cosmos. In the 1830s, the great British experimental scientist Michael Faraday made a phenomenal discovery: changing the electrical current in a wire coil somehow induced an energetic fluctuation in a nearby coil. This decidedly bizarre action at a distance, which came to be called electromagnetic induction, is the driving force behind electrical power plants to this day—and the inspiration as well for any number of pseudoscientific explanations for occult phenomena. For his part, Faraday explained the rather mysterious force connecting the two coils as a “wave of electricity.” Pointing to the strange patterns that iron filings create around the end of a magnet, Faraday also suggested that electromagnetic “fields” consisted of “lines of force,” vibrating patterns that spread throughout space.
Faraday initially considered these images of fields and lines of force as nothing more than useful fictions, but he gradually accepted them as basic descriptions of reality. This was no small step for the self-proclaimed “natural philosopher,” who, as a profoundly religious man, believed deeply in the underlying unity of nature and God. Electromagnetic induction gave him a demonstration of such invisible unity, and these undulating waves and fields eventually led Faraday to reject the reigning materialist dogma that held that the atoms of the cosmos were little blobs of stuff. Humbly, Faraday suggested a new vision of the cosmos: corporeal reality was in essence an immense sea of vibrations and insubstantial forces.
In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell translated Faraday’s experimental findings into the language of mathematics, synthesizing optical, magnetic, and electrical phenomena into four magnificent equations that governed the whole of electromagnetic reality. In doing so, Maxell predicted the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum whose waves we now exploit for everything from broadcasting Miley Cyrus hits to reheating meat loaf to analyzing the chemical composition of Alpha Centauri. Maxwell showed that light—the ultimate symbolic manifestation of divinity—was itself only a certain range of frequencies that happened to stimulate the two photosensitive orbs lodged in the human skull. Certain advanced solutions of his equations also suggested the existence of a pa
rallel cosmos, a mirrored universe where electromagnetic waves move backward in time.
Faraday’s and Maxwell’s discoveries were major paradigm busters, with Einstein calling their work the “greatest alteration in the axiomatic basis of physics—in our conception of the structure of reality.”12 The electromagnetic universe set the stage for the final deconstruction of atomic materialism: the dissolution of the ether, the emergence of Einsteinian space-time, and ultimately the arrival of quantum mechanics and its colossal oddities. In terms of the scientific imagination, Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction was the tincture that catalyzed the transmutation of atomic materialism, a tough-minded alchemy that revealed the physical universe to be an enormous vibrating matrix of potent nothings.
Such a powerful cosmological shift could not help but impact the esoteric imagination as well. By the late nineteenth century, when electromagnetic science began seeping into the popular mind, mesmerism had largely packed it in. But a far more influential occult science arose, one that fleshed out the electromagnetic universe with a rich brew of esoteric lore. The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a pudgy, crafty, cigar-smoking trickster from Russia. The movement combined the pulp appeal of popular magic with headier mystic thought; Blavatsky’s endless books are cut-and-paste collages of Freemasonry, Hermeticism, potted “Eastern” metaphysics, and her own science-fiction tales of telepathic Tibetan masters and Atlantean cataclysms. But as the historian Joscelyn Godwin argues, Blavatsky’s group also represented Enlightenment values that had nothing to do with Buddha’s claim to fame and everything to do with the freethinking spirit of progress. The Theosophists loathed conventional Christianity, embraced emancipatory social movements, and called for a new global politics of “universal brotherhood.” They were the gnostics of modernism.
As such, the Theosophists mixed and matched their mysticism with the new evolutionary and electromagnetic worldviews of science. As monists, the Theosophists set themselves a double task: to fit the so-called “gross” world of matter into an incorporeal universe of spirit, and to weave the higher realms into an evolutionary and lawful description of the cosmos. Mind and matter thus became the same cosmic substance at different stages of evolution, “stepped down,” as Hinduism Today noted in an article about Theosophical Hindus, “somewhat as a transformer steps down the mighty power of electricity.”13 Given their debt to Indian Vedanta and hermetic Neoplatonism, Theosophists rejected materialism out of hand; they put mind well before matter and embraced the notion that our “thought-currents” had the power to create reality itself. But they reframed this ancient view by latching onto the language of etheric waves, vibrations, cosmic frequencies, and fields of force. The Theosophical cosmos was a giant hum, whose lowest and most coarse “vibrations” made up the material world and whose “higher planes” were carried on “higher” frequencies, all of which interpenetrated simultaneously and invisibly in the here and now, just like Maxwell’s spectral waves.
The Theosophical attempt to inject spiritual qualities into a universe colonized by physics was also accompanied by the West’s first great spiritual turn to the East. While a vibrating cosmos of incorporeal forces and radiating waves left little room for a God skilled at molding clay or constructing clocks, it was rather more accommodating to impersonal conceptions of the absolute that the Theosophists snatched from Buddhism and the loftier strains of Hinduism. Theosophy’s use of electromagnetic Vedanta to build a bridge between mind and matter continues to percolate through New Age physics and pop Hinduism to this day. The language that William Irwin Thompson once used to describe the worldview of yoga has a deeper source than he probably suspected: “Consciousness is like an FM radio band: as long as one is locked into one station, all he receives is the information of one reality; but if … he is able to move his consciousness to a different station on the FM band, then he discovers universes beyond matter in the cosmic reaches of spirit.”14
Thompson’s analogy is apt, for along with electrifying the occult universe, Theosophy also unveiled an image of an interactive body that could actively explore these vibrating planes. Reconfiguring the mystical “sheaths” of Hindu anatomy, the Theosophists argued that the body contains a Petrushka doll of spirit vehicles. Immediately up the stepladder from the flesh is the etheric body, which is basically analogous to the vital soul we have been tracking through this section. Vibrating at a slightly higher frequency than the etheric body is the famous astral body, which, in the proper circumstances, can temporarily abandon the mortal coil to surf through the astral plane, a dreamlike collective realm of fleshless and hyperreal “thought-forms”—the Theosophical version of a virtual world.
Theosophy thus represents an esoteric drift away from the body, a dematerializing tendency that in the next section we will link with the rise of new technologies that “outer” the self. In his poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” Walt Whitman gave voice to the opposite tendency in the electromagnetic imagination. For Whitman, electric life meant the erotic life, and his love of bodies, his desire to “charge them full with the charge of the soul,” only led him to embrace the most exuberant of heresies: that the body was the soul. Unlike the mesmerists, who pointed to the new technology of photography as proof that the physical world was really made up of the mental vibrations of light, Whitman recognized that the vital spirit of electromagnetism—with its lightning strikes of charge, its dynamic polarities and visceral attractions—was more a language of Eros than a mantra of transcendence. After all, Mesmer’s original magnetic techniques had nothing to do with the inner planes and everything to do with stoking the convulsive life of desire in order to heal real bodies.
For many magnetic researchers and “alternative” healers in the nineteenth century, the force of electricity offered a key to the vital energy of the body. By the close of the century, electricity had become thoroughly identified in the popular mind with healing—especially in America’s popular mind, which is more popular than most. Electricity was accepted as the active therapeutic agent in pills, soaps, teas, and lotions, and a host of electrical and magnetic devices were used to treat every remedy under the sun. U.S. Congressmen even “took” electricity in a specially outfitted basement room in the Capitol. But in 1909, wary of all the free-form healing this electromania encouraged, the government issued the Flexner Report, which sought to upgrade and standardize medical education and health care throughout the country. Besides condemning the popular and efficacious practice of homeopathy and institutionalizing the American Medical Association’s arrogant reign of allopathic medicine, the report declared that electrical potentials and magnetic energies played no vital role in physiology or biomedicine. The animal soul, which had long surfed the waves of the electromagnetic imaginary, was repressed by mainstream American medicine.
The Flexner Report was also an attempt to control the meaning of new technologies of the body. By the early twentieth century, diagnostic machines were replacing the sensitive “instrument” of a doctor’s own sensations and perceptions, while the previously invisible domains of disease were being probed with microscopes and X-ray radiation technology. But while the use of medical technology to gather information was considered acceptable, the notion that technologies could detect, channel, or amplify the energies of life itself became anathema. The report not only outlawed the whole bizarre array of electrical and electromagnetic contrivances, but ensured that even tough-minded doctors researching bioenergy and the possibility of “energetic” healing technologies would find themselves clutching a one-way ticket to the gulags of quackdom. The only exception to this rule was, strangely enough, research into the healing powers of radiation, one of the twentieth century’s most lethal invisible obsessions.
Bioenergy proved a powerful siren, however, and its song has enchanted much of the gadgetry of alternative medicine in the twentieth century. Just as Kirlian photographers unveiled a “secret life of plants,” so
too did heretical healers jury-rig a secret life of machines. In the 1940s, Albert Abrams, a professor of pathology at Stanford University, came up with the theory of radionics, which held that each organ, tissue, or agent of disease has a unique vibrational rate, or resonance—an idea Abrams partially developed from watching the great tenor Enrico Caruso shatter a glass with his voice. Abrams applied his theory to the construction of a healing technology: black boxes that basically consisted of a series of dials that could rotate a tiny bar magnet. This magnet in turn was suspended near a small well that held the “witness,” or tissue from the patient. The practitioner would tweak the dials until she got a positive “reading” from the witness. Spiffed up to Tom Mix standards by Abrams’s rather enthusiastic followers, this simple gadget allegedly not only diagnosed disease but could also “broadcast” healing vibrations from the healer to the patient. As you might expect, Abrams’s black boxes were officially condemned as magical fetishes, and the Food and Drug Administration imprisoned the Los Angeles chiropractor Ruth Drown, a radionics zealot who claimed she could derive photographs of diseased organs and tissues from nothing more than a patient’s drop of blood. For his part, Abrams maintained that the radionic talent lay more in the practitioner than in the instrument; the black box thus functioned rather like a twentieth-century version of the rods and pendulums that dowsers still use to intuitively find water, cure disease, and geomantically read the invisible information of the landscape.