Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  1. Tertium Organum, Chapter 14.

  1. Quoted in my Beyond the Occult, p. 187, and in Phantasms of the Living, by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Volume 2, p. 461.

  1. Yeats: Essays and Introductions, p. 37.

  2

  The Powers of the Hidden Self

  SIX YEARS BEFORE the publication of Pamela, the wife of a gamekeeper on the shores of Lake Constance, in Austria, gave birth to a male child whose influence would be as tremendous and far-reaching as that of Samuel Richardson. Unfortunately for Franz Anton Mesmer, he was not a novelist but a scientist and a philosopher—I say unfortunately because everybody loves a good story, but few people like being asked to think. Even clever people are inclined to react to original ideas with indifference or hostility. So Mesmer’s amazing contribution brought him little but trouble, and when he died in 1815, he was virtually forgotten. Yet his ideas, as we shall see, are virtually the intellectual cornerstone of modern psychology.

  Mesmer grew up amidst peaceful mountain scenery, and it left its mark on him for a lifetime. His naturally religious temperament inclined him towards the priesthood, but after attending a Jesuit university at Dillingen, he came to realise that his immense curiosity pointed to a career in science and philosophy. So he studied philosophy, then law, and ended up at the age of 32 with a medical degree as well. Interestingly enough, his doctoral thesis was called ‘The Influence of the Planets Upon the Human Body’. But its thesis was less absurd than it sounds. Mesmer believed that nature is pervaded by invisible energies—the force of gravitation is an example—and that when we are in tune with these energies, we are healthy. When the energies are blocked, either by physical problems or negative mental attitudes, we become unhealthy. If the energies can become unblocked, we become healthy again.

  This cheerful attitude brought him success, and within two years he had married one of his wealthy patients, a widow von Posch, and moved into a magnificent house in Vienna, where he counted the Mozarts among his many friends. It looked as if nothing could stand in the way of a lifetime of good fortune and respectability.

  But how can the ‘vital energies’ be unblocked? One obvious way is to induce a crisis—we recognise this when we take aspirin to get rid of a cold by making us perspire. In Mesmer’s day, most doctors tried to induce a crisis by bleeding the patient, which, amazingly enough, often seemed to work. But there should surely be easier ways? In 1773, he thought he might have stumbled on the solution. His friend Father Maximilian Hell, the Professor of Astronomy at Vienna University, had been experimenting with magnets, and was inclined to believe that they could unblock the vital fluids—he even designed specially shaped magnets that would fit over various parts of the body. Mesmer tried it out on a patient in 1773, taking with him his friend Leopold Mozart. 29-year-old Franziska Oesterlein lay in bed suffering from general debilitation. Mesmer tried applying some of Hell’s powerful magnets, moving them from her stomach down to her feet. After an hour or so, Frau Oesterlein reported strange currents moving around her body. These built up to a crisis, and she ended by feeling much better. Repeated doses of the magnetic treatment soon cured her.

  Father Hell was naturally inclined to claim the credit, and at first Mesmer was inclined to give it generously. Then he noticed something rather odd. One day when he was bleeding a patient, he noticed that the flow of blood increased when he moved close, and decreased when he moved away. It looked as if his own body was producing the same effect as the magnets. Instead of using magnets, he began passing his hands lightly over the patient. This seemed to work just as well. And as he tried the method on more patients, Mesmer decided that he had discovered the basic principle of healing: not ordinary ‘magnetic’ magnetism, but animal magnetism. In 1779 he published a pamphlet on his discovery. To his astonishment, it aroused general hositility instead of the acclaim he had expected from his colleagues in the medical profession. They insisted that Mesmer was a charlatan who cured his patients by mere suggestion—a notion in which there was obviously a certain amount of truth. They also suggested that Mesmer’s motives in passing his hands over the bodies of female patients were not as pure as they should be.

  As rich patients talked about spectacular cures, the hostility grew. Mesmer spent a week at the estate of Baron Haresky de Horka, who suffered from unaccountable ‘spasms’ and fits, and he persisted throughout a disappointing week when it looked as though the baron was failing to respond to treatment. It took six days before the baron began to shudder with asthmatic paroxysms. When Mesmer held the baron’s foot, they stopped; when he held his hand, they started again. Clearly, Mesmer was controlling the baron’s vital fluids and making them flow at will. With enough of this, he reasoned, all the blockages should be cleared away, like masses of twigs and leaves in a stream, and the energies should flow unimpeded. So they did; when Mesmer returned to Vienna, the baron was cured.

  Undeterred by mounting hostility, Mesmer thought of new ways of distributing the magnetic fluid: he ‘magnetised’ jars of water, connected up the jars with metal bands, and placed the apparatus in a large wooden tub half-filled with iron filings and water. Patients sat with their feet in the water, or sat with their backs against magnetised trees. The results were remarkable—but his colleagues pointed out that leaving scantily clad men and women in close contact with one another would probably stimulate their vital fluids anyway . . .

  Mesmer’s good angel was off-duty on the day he agreed to treat a blind young pianist named Maria Theresa Paradies, a protégée of the Empress. He was unaware that her blindness was due to a detached retina. Oddly enough, after a few weeks of treatment in Mesmer’s house, the girl became convinced she could see dimly. A Profesor Barth was sent to examine her, and he admitted privately to Mesmer that she seemed to have improved. But his report stated that she was still blind—which was undoubtedly true. The girl had be be dragged away from Mesmer’s house by force. And Mesmer, tired of insults and threats, decided to move to Paris in 1778.

  Here he met with the same mixture of acclaim and vilification. Dr Charles D’Eslon, personal physician to the king’s brother, became an ardent admirer, and lectured on Mesmer’s ideas to the Society of Medicine on September 18, 1790. Mesmer’s mixed-group cures continued to attract dozens of wealthy patients, who would sit with their feet in the wooden tub or baquet, and form a chain and press their bodies together to facilitate the flow of vital fluid. One patient, Major Charles du Hussay, was cured of the after-effects of typhus, which had turned him into a trembling wreck, by a ‘crisis’ that made his teeth chatter for a month, but which left him perfectly restored. Cases like this so impressed the king that he offered Mesmer a lifelong pension to remain in France; Mesmer demanded half a million francs for research. When the king refused, he left France—on the same day that D’Eslon was lecturing to the medical faculty—and returned only when his patients contributed 350,000 gold louis, many times more than what he had asked for. But Mesmer had made an enemy of the king, who appointed a ‘commission’ of scientists to look into Mesmer’s ideas. It included the great American Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Lavoisier (who was to lose his head in the Revolution) and the inventor of a new decapitation machine, a certain Dr Guillotin. It is an episode that reflects discredit on Franklin, who was much prejudiced against Mesmer. He was also ill, so that he did not actually attend any of the ‘experiments’. But he signed the report which dismissed ‘animal magnetism’ as mere imagination. Mesmer was actually absent from France at the time (1794) and was not even consulted. He returned, but nothing could restore his fortunes. A hostile doctor introduced himself as a patient, allowed Mesmer to ‘cure’ him, then wrote a report denouncing him as a quack. This kind of thing was unanswerable. After the Revolution (during which he lost all his money) Mesmer fled. The Austrian police prevented him from returning to Vienna. He spent his last quarter of a century living quietly in Constance, not far from his birthplace.

  Now it may seem to many open-minded readers that Mesmer’s critics we
re by no means incorrect: that his theories were absurd, and that his cures were, indeed, due to ‘suggestion’. Yet this is really to miss the point. We must remember, to begin with, that medicine in the time of Mesmer was completely ‘materialistic’, in the sense that it was firmly believed that all medical problems are physical in origin, (to which they added as a corollary: ‘and can be cured by bleeding’.) Even if we take the least sympathetic view of Mesmer, we have to recognise that he had stumbled on a recognition of tremendous importance: that the mind plays as much a part in illness as the body. If his sceptical colleagues had been open-minded enough to study his cures, instead of attacking them as quackery, they would have found themselves asking questions that would have created a science of psychology a century before Freud.

  Second, our conviction that Mesmer’s ideas about magnetism and ‘animal magnetism’ are based on pure ignorance may well be incorrect. Well into the late 19th century, many doctors were still conducting serious experiments with magnets, and producing some extremely interesting results—for example, causing paralysis to move from one side of the body to the other. We have forgotten all this, and our descendants may well shake their heads at our complacency.

  Moreover, in the 20th century, another remarkable rebel, Wilhelm Reich, came independently to the conclusion that health is governed by ‘tides’ of vital fluid; he called this ‘orgone energy’. Reich was, in many ways, a crank; he was more Freudian than Freud, and believed that all illness can be explained in terms of sexual neurosis. Yet his indifference to current scientific dogmas led him to some interesting discoveries which may well be one day considered as an important contribution to modern science.

  It may also be mentioned in passing that it has now been scientifically established that the human body possesses an ‘aura’ or ‘life-field’, which seems to be electrical in nature. A young biologist named Hans Driesch divided a sea urchin’s egg into two and killed off one half; the other half did not turn into half a sea urchin embryo; to his surprise, it turned into a perfect but smaller embryo. When he pressed two embryos together they turned into a double-size embryo. Driesch realised that there must be a kind of invisible blueprint, like a magnetic field, which ‘shapes’ living things, just as a magnet can shape iron filings on a sheet of paper. A later experimenter, Harold Saxton Burr, discovered that he could measure this ‘life-field’ with a voltmeter, and diagnose illness from its fluctuations. In effect, he has placed what occultists call ‘the human aura’ on a scientific basis. This is almost certainly what Mesmer was affecting with his magnetic fields.

  But Mesmer is the father of modern psychology in a far more important sense.

  One of his wealthier disciples in Paris was a marquis named Armand Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, surnamed Puységur, and he and his two younger brothers had paid Mesmer the vast sum of 400 louis for training in his techniques. He then proceeded to apply them with enthusiasm to the servants and tenants on his estate at Buzancy, near Soissons, his first step being to ‘magnetise’ a lime tree in the park. One of the servants was a 20-year-old shepherd named Victor Race, and Puységur proceeded to tie him to the lime tree, and to make ‘magnetic’ gestures in front of his face. After a few ‘passes’, Victor closed his eyes and fell asleep. The marquis ordered him to wake up and untie himself. To his surprise, Victor untied himself without opening his eyes. Then he went wandering off across the park. Puységur was baffled; he knew he had induced some kind of a trance, but had no idea of its nature. More than 2 centuries later, science is still in roughly the same position.

  What Puységur had done, of course, was to stumble upon hypnosis—a technique that later came to be called (incorrectly) ‘mesmerism’. (Mesmer himself preferred to call it somnambulism—the word hypnotism was invented in 1843 by James Braid.) And as he continued to practise on Victor, Puységur made some baffling discoveries—for example, that he could give Victor mental orders, and the shepherd would respond just as if they were spoken aloud. Moreover, Puységur could hold conversations with Victor in which his own part was unspoken, and Victor would reply just as if he had spoken aloud. Victor could even be made to stop speaking in the middle of a word. Puységur describes in his Memoirs in Aid of a History of Animal Magnetism (1809) how he even got Victor to repeat the words of a song which he—the marquis—was singing mentally. What was equally interesting was that Victor was normally a rather stupid young man, but that when hypnotised, he became far more intelligent and perceptive.

  That this was no fluke was proved in experiments with another subject named Madeleine. In front of an audience, Puységur would place her in a trance, give her various mental orders—which she would carry out—then invite members of the audience to transmit to her their own mental orders—for example, asking her to pick up a certain object. Again and again, without hesitation, Madeleine went straight to the object and picked it up. To demonstrate that Madeleine was not simply wide-awake and peeping (in spite of having her eyes closed), he would blindfold her with a thick piece of cloth; it made no difference to her immediate response to mental suggestions. One sceptic—a baron—suspected that Puységur had some code by which he communicated with Madeleine, and asked for the experiment to be conducted in the home of a mutual friend, M. Mitonard. Puységur agreed, and in Mitonard’s home, lost no time in hypnotising Madeleine and placing her ‘in rapport’ with Mitonard. Mitonard when gave her various mental orders, and watched her carry them out. Suddenly, Mitonard stood as if lost in thought. After a moment, Madeleine reached into his pocket, and brought out three small screws she found there; Mitonard admitted that he had put them there for that purpose, and that now he was totally convinced. So was another sceptic called Fournel, who had stated that nine-tenths of these strange ‘magnetic’ phenomena were due to fraud; but when Fournel himself was able to ‘mentally’ order a hypnotised subject—with blindfolded eyes—to go to a table, select a hat from a number of other objects, and put it on his head, he had to admit that fraud had to be ruled out.

  Now quite clearly these experiments were among the most important ever conducted in the history of scientific research. It obviously makes no difference if Fournel was correct in saying that nine-tenths of the people who performed such tricks in public were frauds; it is the other tenth that matters. What Puységur had demonstrated beyond all doubt was that telepathy exists (although the word would not be invented for another century). He, of course, thought it was ‘magnetism’—that his own magnetic current was influencing the hypnotised subject just as a magnet influences a compass needle. Perhaps he was not entirely wrong. Whatever the explanation, Puységur had virtually demonstrated ‘magic’ in public. He had also totally undermined the kind of materialism that was becoming so fashionable at the time, and which asserted that man is a machine, and that the mind is a mere product of the body, just as heat and light are products of burning coal. Puységur had proved that mind is in some way independent of the body and higher than the body.

  His demonstrations should have caused the greatest sensation since the invention of the wheel. Why did they not? Because of the unfortunate accident of being associated with the highly suspect name of Mesmer. Mesmer was a fraud. ‘Magnetism’ was really due to suggestion. Therefore hypnotism was also a fraud, and all the demonstrations in the world failed to prove otherwise. The hostility was so tremendous that ‘mesmerism’ was made illegal in France (and much the same in Austria), and a doctor who even expressed his support for the ideas of Mesmer—let alone practised them—could lose his license. The medical profession was in a state of near-hysteria, determined to stamp it out, if necessary, with fire and sword. Mesmerism remained—scientifically speaking—a pariah throughout most of the 19th century, and any doctor who became interested in it did well to keep silent.

  The storm had still not blown itself out by 1809, when Puységur published his first book on hypnotism. Anything to do with Mesmer was still regarded with the deepest hostility. But many doctors took to heart Jussieu’s comment that the phen
omena deserved further investigation, and conducted their own experiments. D’Eslon—Mesmer’s original French advocate—recorded a case of a man who could play cards with his eyes closed. A Dutch experimenter described a case of a hypnotised boy who could read with his fingertips and a girl who could read his mind and describe people and places he knew (but she didn’t). A German experimenter described an epileptic boy who could distinguish colours with the soles of his feet, even when he had stockings on. In Baden, a hypnotised girl correctly read a message in a sealed envelope—even though the hypnotist himself did not know what it was. In Sweden, a professor described a girl who was able to read a book when it was placed open on her stomach, while her eyes were blindfolded. This particular phenomenon was observed again and again with ‘sensitives’. In England, a young schoolteacher named Alfred Russel Wallace—who was later to share with Darwin the honour of ‘discovering’ evolution—found that one of his pupils, under hypnosis, could share his own sense of taste and smell; when Wallace tasted salt, he grimaced; when Wallace tasted sugar, he made delighted sucking motions. When Wallace stuck a pin in himself, the boy jumped and rubbed the appropriate part of his body.

  What all this clearly demonstrated was that human beings have ‘unknown powers’ which are not generally recognised. But since they are so easy to demonstrate in the laboratory, they obviously ought to be recognised. Then why were they ignored? Let us not be too harsh on those doctors and scientists who denounced Mesmer. It was not pure stupidity and wickedness. Science was simply not ready for these discoveries. It was plodding along at its own slow pace, discovering electricity, atoms, meteorites. (In 1768, the great chemist Lavoisier—who reported unfavourably on Mesmer—was asked by the French Academy of Sciences to go and investigate a great ‘stone’ that had fallen from the sky at a place called Luce. His report stated that all the witnesses had to be mistaken, for ‘stones’ did not and could not fall out of the sky; it was not until the following century that the existence of meteorites was acknowledged by science.) If science had rushed on much faster, it might have been led into all kinds of untrue assumptions—as Mesmer was.