Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis
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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.
Mesmerism in Germany
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 cautiou
s 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.
Mesmerism in France After the Revolution
Not unnaturally, the French had rather a lot on their minds in the last dozen or so years of the eighteenth century, and the centre of mesmeric activity moved to Germany. Mob rule and riots in Paris in 1789 (including the momentous destruction of the Bastille prison on 14 July) soon spread to the provinces. France was effectively split for a while into small provincial governments, with no central focus except a common resentment of the aristocracy, whose excesses and feudalism were often outrageous. All the old political, civic and ecclesiastical structures were discarded, and 1791 was optimistically renamed ‘Year One’, the start of a new order for humankind. But the bloodshed (not just the execution of nobles and the royal family, but the elimination of political rivals), the frequent changes of government, and constant warfare against an alliance of most of the other European countries, brought the Revolution into disrepute, and people welcomed the relative stability offered by Napoléon's consulate, which started in 1799.
The Revolution almost put paid to animal magnetism. The societies of Universal Harmony were dissolved and many of their members were among the emigrés. Others earned ridicule by attaching themselves to Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo, 1743–95), a conman who travelled around Europe peddling a supposed alchemical elixir of immortal youth and gaining recruits for freemasonry. The flood of books up to 1788 died down to the merest trickle for about twenty years, and animal magnetism survived, if it survived at all, as a result of work quietly carried on in secret. When interest began again, Mesmer himself was forgotten, presumed dead, and it was to de Puységur that the new generation of researchers looked for inspiration and theoretical framework. He was practising quietly in Soissons, as before, having kept his head on his shoulders. He had been a military commander in the revolutionary army, but the mindless slaughter sickened him and he resigned his commission. This act earned him a couple of years in prison, but after that he was able to retire to his estate and pick up his private life, including his mesmeric practice, where he had left it. He was even working again with Victor Race, and discovered that, when mesmerized again, he could remember everything from his trances twenty years earlier.
The revival of magnetism in France owes a great deal to the publication of his Du magnétisme animal in 1807, and to further works in subsequent years. His doubts about the existence of magnetic fluid, or any material basis for mesmerism, had by now taken deep root. He emphasized will to the exclusion of everything else, and began to show even more of an interest in the paranormal abilities of somnambules.
Another survivor was Joseph Deleuze (1753–1835), an enthusiastic pre-war magnetizer who became one of the chief spokesmen and writers in the early nineteenth century, especially after 1820, when de Puységur began to take a back seat (he died in 1825). Deleuze had been introduced to animal magnetism in 1785 when he attended a demonstration given by a young woman and, although he was not the subject, he found himself going into a trance. He was a prolific and pellucid author, who closely followed the theories of de Puységur, but was far clearer and more organized than his mentor, and was more scientific in that, for example, he rejected anecdotal evidence, laid down criteria for assessing the validity of claims made on behalf of magnetism, and followed them himself by conducting careful experiments. He also prefigured a number of later developments in hypnotism, by suggesting, for instance, that those who could achieve the deep state of somnambulism could well undergo surgery while in this state. He warned magnetizers against getting too excited by the appearance of paranormal phenomena. Throughout, his work is scholarly and sceptical. His two most important books are his famous Histoire critique du magnétisme animal (1813), an invaluable sourcebook for the early history of mesmerism, and a practical manual written in 1825. One of his most important contributions was to try to improve the moral reputation of mesmerism. He knew from his own experience with the young woman who had introduced him to the subject that it was possible for sexual energy to build up between operator and subject, and so, to preserve decorum, he recommended that husbands and wives should work together, and that a young female subject should be mesmerized by another woman.
In order to put things on a more formal footing, de Puységur and Deleuze became, respectively, the president and vice-president of the Magnetic Society, founded in 1813 with the help of a certain Joseph du Commun, whom we will meet again in the next chapter. Apart from arranging lectures and general publicity and public relations for the cause of mesmerism, in their brief history (up to 1820) they ran one of three contemporary French journals devoted to the subject. The journal was Bibliothèque de magnétisme animal (1817–19). The other two were Annales du magnétisme animal, which ran from 1814 to 1816, and Archives du magnétisme animal (1820–23), edited by Baron E.F. d'Hénin de Cuvillers (1755–1841). On the whole the standard of writing is not very good in these journals (they were mainly amateurs, not medical men), varying between inadequate reporting of case histories and well-meaning but waffly publicity articles. All this did nothing to win over the medical professionals, who remained either hostile or uninterested, and t
ended to attribute magnetic cures to other causes. However, certain future developments in hypnotism are prefigured in the pages of these journals: ‘self-magnetization’ (i.e. self-hypnosis); the use of suggestion to produce blisters; the first steps in painless surgery.
But there was also a new generation of mesmerists. One of the most important was a colourful character – too flamboyant for the likes of sober Deleuze – called the Abbé José Custodio di Faria (1753–1816), a Portuguese priest who came to France in 1813 from India, where he claimed to have been initiated as a Brahmin. He used to dress up as an Indian magician and put on displays of magnetic cures, making him the forerunner of all the mesmeric entertainers of later years. The importance of this rather vulgar showman lies in his technique: he had his subjects or patients sit in a comfortable chair and gaze fixedly at his raised hand while he simply commanded them, in a loud voice, to sleep. This practice was backed up by theory. He totally rejected Mesmer's magnetic fluid and had little time for clairvoyance and telepathy. He said that the reason mesmerism worked therapeutically was the impressionability of the subject to the operator's will (an impressionability which, more bizarrely, he seems to attribute to anaemia); the subject has expectations of what will happen, and is in a state of heightened suggestibility. In a sense, then, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Faria was the first to make suggestion occupy the centre of the theoretical stage. If Faria's name is familiar, by the way, that is because Alexandre Dumas borrowed it (and certain traits of the original) for the old imprisoned abbéin The Count of Monte Cristo.