Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  Dr Johann C. Valentin of Cassel worked with Caroline Ramer, who seems to have had genuine clairvoyant abilities. She saw the fall of a farm worker in Breitenbach bei Hof, four hours’ journey from Cassel. They were investigated by a committee which acquitted them both of fraud.

  The most famous clairvoyant of them all in Germany was the Seeress of Prevorst, Friederike Hauffe. She was born in 1801 in the remote Swabian village of Prevorst, near Löwenstein. She came to Justinus Kerner (1786–1862) on the point of death through hysterical depression and starvation. Before long, he had discovered that in magnetic sleep she displayed remarkable gifts – not just telepathy and clairvoyance, but her forte was conversing with the dead, who appeared to her (and occasionally to others around her) as ghostly figures. She predicted the future, healed the sick, spoke in a language that she claimed was the original language of humankind, and ‘channelled’ (as we would say now) a whole complex cosmology and theology, which accommodated magnetism. The Seeress aroused immense interest throughout Germany, and her bedside was visited by many cultured and learned men – doctors, philosophers, theologians – who discussed her revelations in all seriousness. Kerner was a notable doctor, the first, for instance, to describe food poisoning by botulism. But there is a dark side to his relationship with her. He was so bound up in his experiments with her that he found ways to keep her in an almost permanent trance for years, and even fed her laurel berries to aid her hallucinations. With hindsight, he probably hastened her death in 1829 – on a day she had accurately predicted.

  Visions of ghosts became common among somnambules once the fame of the Prevorst Seeress spread. It was largely a German phenomenon, but in France there was Alphonse Cahagnet with his somnambule Bruno, who had Swedenborgian visions of heaven and angels, and Adèle Maginot, who began as a clairvoyant diagnostician of others’ ills, but soon had visions of heaven and conversations with the dead. Even Deleuze, let alone Dupotet, was converted to spiritism in the end.

  From Russia stories emerged later in the century of one of the most remarkable mesmeric clairvoyants of them all. Although she was practising and being studied in the 1880s and 1890s, her stories belong here, because Russia was typically thirty or so years behind the rest of Europe. She was a thirty-year-old schoolteacher, known simply as ‘Miss M.’, who came to the attention of Dr A.N. Khovrin of Tambov. She was magnetized for her nervous attacks, and in magnetic sleep soon manifested clairvoyance. She was tested in an impressively methodical manner. Once, for instance, nine scientists in St Petersburg each wrote a sentence on a piece of paper. All the pieces of paper were then sealed into envelopes and put into a hat. One envelope was removed without being opened and the rest were burnt. The chosen envelope was put inside another thick envelope and glued to it inside in two places. The flaps of the outer envelope were glued and stapled down, and closed with a seal surrounded by pinpricks which were visible only under a magnifying glass, and a tiny piece of hair was placed under the seal. The package was sent in a box to Khovrin in Tambov. Miss M. read the text as ‘I'm convinced that you will read my letter easily and without trouble and that afterwards you will feel magnificent. Petersburg, L.G. Korchagin.’ Khovrin sent the unopened package back to St Petersburg along with Miss M.’s solution. The Society of Experimental Psychology – the original scientists – verified that the seal had not been tampered with. The envelopes were opened, and the original text compared with Miss M.’s version, which was identical.

  Later that year (1893) Miss M. performed the same feat under even more strict controls. She read ‘There are things in this world the wisest men did not dream of’ as ‘There are things in this world we never dreamt of.’ On another occasion, she didn't get the words, but a picture of what the words described: a burning building. On another occasion she accurately described a drawing which had been sealed inside envelopes under similar conditions. She also proved very accurate at psychometry – the psychic ‘reading’ of the history of places and objects – and at transposition of the senses. She was tested many times for this latter ability, and was invariably successful. In one such experiment, conducted under very tight controls by Dr Nikolski of Kiev, various solutions, including sugar, cooking salt, quinine and zinc sulphide, were poured into identical glass containers. Blotting paper was soaked in each of the solutions in turn and applied to the inside of Miss M.’s right arm. Each time she identified the taste accurately.

  If I calculate the proportion of frauds to genuine psychics in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, I might count it as misleading to end this chapter with Miss M.’s stories, since she is the exception rather than the rule. But throughout the world, people in trance states have been thought to have divinatory and other talents and, as we have seen, the same belief became attached to animal magnetism early in its history, as soon as the Marquis de Puységur discovered magnetic sleep. I for one am certainly not inclined to say that there is nothing to it.

  5

  Crusaders and Prophets in the United States

  France was the original home of mesmerism, but there were close political links between France and the United States – links that were forged in what they saw as their shared revolutionary fervour and tempered by the freemasonry of all or most of the major players on both sides of the Atlantic. The consummate symbol of the close relationship between the two countries, old and new, was the subsequent gift by France to America of the Statue of Liberty, which stands proudly in the bay at New York. Liberty Enlightening the World (to use her full name) was designed and built in France by the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi and the engineer Gustave Eiffel (rather well known for his tower), and formally presented to America on Independence Day 1884, an exact century after the critical year of Mesmer's stay in Paris, and 108 years after America's declaration of independence.

  It is not surprising, then, to find that mesmerism tried early to find a foothold in the new country. We have already seen how the first pioneer, the Marquis de Lafayette, attempted to import it. He wrote enthusiastically about Mesmer to George Washington from Paris on 14 May 1784, and Mesmer himself followed this letter up with one of his own to Washington, written a month later on 16 June. Washington replied to Mesmer five months later, after he had met de Lafayette in the States, saying cautiously and with impeccable politeness that if mesmerism was as beneficial as it was supposed to be, it would certainly do people good and bring fame to its founder. In the meantime, in the course of his visit, the marquis had given one or two lectures on the subject, had visited the Shaker community, since he saw similarities between the trance state into which the Shakers worked themselves up and the crisis inspired by mesmerism, and had gone to see some Native American rituals, because he was not convinced that mesmerism was just a new European phenomenon, rather than a rediscovery of something older and more primitive.

  But despite these speculations by de Lafayette, what attracted most of the American mesmerists was precisely its newness. They felt they were pioneers, participants in the creation of a new country, one with enormous potential; and many of them felt that mesmerism would be a useful tool in making America spiritually the most advanced nation on earth.

  Perkinism

  After de Lafayette, there are no further recorded visits from French missionaries of mesmerism for some thirty years, while France went through the turmoil of the Revolution, Napoléon's tyranny and constant warfare. But meanwhile, perhaps as a result of de Lafayette's visit, there was a home-grown development, in the form of what became known as ‘Perkinism’.

  Some time in the 1790s Elisha Perkins, a founding member of the Connecticut Medical Society, invented a ‘tractor’ with which he achieved some remarkable cures. His ‘tractor’ was made of two pieces of different metals about 2½ inches long, of secret composition, one coloured silver, one gold; when brought together they formed the shape of half a cone, split lengthwise. He claimed that this device, when waved over and around the site of an illness, could draw or extract the illness from the patient's
body – hence the name ‘tractor’, which means ‘an instrument for drawing’. He was so successful that before long he expanded his business interests to Europe, sending his son Benjamin to set up shop in London, where the tractors sold for an astonishing 5 guineas a pair. His business was no doubt helped by the publication in 1799 by J.D. Herholdt and C.G. Rafn of their Experiments with the Metallic Tractors, in which the authors had nothing but good to speak of Perkins's invention, which they had found to be particularly effective on horses.

  The craze was short-lived, however. The tractors were not well received either by the mesmeric community or by orthodox doctors – and even the general public enjoyed the sarcasm of, for instance, the satirical verse by John Corry:

  Arm'd with twin skewers, see Perkins, by main force Drag the foul fiend from Christian and from horse.

  In Paris Deleuze took issue with Perkins, as not being a true magnetist, while in England the reaction from the scientific community may be gauged by a book published in 1801, in which a Fellow of the Royal Society called J. Haygarth reported that he had found that a pair of fake wooden tractors, painted to look like the real things, were just as effective as the expensive model. In his book On the Imagination, as a Cause and Cure of Disorders in the Human Body he suggested that it was all down to the imagination of humans and the faith of horses in their masters. Perkins was expelled from the Connecticut Medical Society as a quack, and died in the New York yellow fever epidemic of 1799, valiantly trying to cure the ill with his tractors.

  Three Foreign Pioneers

  The next mesmeric visitor from France was Joseph du Commun, whom we met briefly in the last chapter. He settled in the States in 1815, but seems not to have undertaken much in the way of proselytizing about the new miracle treatment until 1829, when he travelled from his base at the US Military Academy at West Point, where he was a teacher, to give lectures on mesmerism in New York. Despite these lectures (which were also published in book form) he seems not to have made much of an impression. Perhaps the hostility of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson prevented American high society from taking the matter seriously.

  The breakthrough came with Charles Poyen St Sauveur, who wrote, taught and practised mesmerism in Massachusetts, where he arrived in 1834 after a short stay in the French West Indies. Poyen had come across mesmerism as a medical student in Paris in 1832. He was a sickly man, and was overwhelmed when a hypnotized clairvoyant gave him a complete list of his symptoms. It was another case of the flash of enlightenment. Poyen was a convert, and spent the rest of his short life as a crusader for the cause.

  At first, though, his enthusiasm may have done the cause more harm than good. New England, and Boston in particular, was seething with reforming zeal, open to new ideas. Having witnessed slavery in the West Indies, Poyen was an ardent abolitionist, and must have seen New England as his spiritual home. But these former Puritans did not prove very receptive to Poyen's brand of showmanship. Although he came across as serious and thoughtful, his strong French accent can't have helped (not to mention the strawberry birthmark that disfigured half his face), and his notion that through mesmerism the new country could become a paradise on earth fell on deaf ears. New Englanders were more convinced that they would carve out their paradise by hard work and moral virtue.

  Fed up with the relative lack of interest, and finding himself low on funds, Poyen was contemplating returning to France when he accepted an invitation to visit Rhode Island. This was the turning-point: not only were his lectures better received there than elsewhere, but he came across an excellent subject, Cynthia Ann Gleason, who was deeply hypnotizable and displayed remarkable feats of clairvoyance. He saw that she could make his lectures stand out and reach a wider audience, and so he took her on the road with him on a tour of New England, again starting in Boston, with a demonstration at the Harvard Medical School.

  His shows were well received, but with some lingering scepticism: reviewers thought that he might be conning his audiences through collusion with Miss Gleason. Ever flexible, Poyen rose to the bait, and began to include in his demonstrations not only Miss Gleason's feats, but also the magnetizing of volunteers from the audience. Just like modern stage hypnotists, he would show that his subjects were impervious to pain, could sniff ammonia straight from the bottle without flinching, and were unresponsive to loud noises. Following a short introductory lecture on the history and theory of mesmerism, he would launch into these demonstrations, and sometimes even cure people of their sickness then and there on stage. Paranormal phenomena played a certain part in his performances too, though he maintained that so-called clairvoyance was actually the transference to the subject of thoughts from the operator, with whom she was in sympathetic harmony.

  This new style of show was a great success in New England, and by 1837 Poyen could boast that he knew of some forty people who had experimented with the art. One of them, another Frenchman called B.F. Bugard, performed a painless tooth extraction in 1836, which caused quite a stir. After Poyen's success, there was no stopping mesmerism. This is probably due as much to a comparative lack of professional bodies to resist and denounce it, as to any independence endemic in the American mind. Poyen himself left the States in 1839 and never returned; he was actually on the point of embarking for a return trip from France in 1844 when he was overtaken by death. But his legacy lived on: one of the early American books on the topic (The History and Philosophy of Animal Magnetism with Practical Instructions for the Exercise of its Power by A Practical Magnetizer), published in Boston in 1843, claimed that there were already 200 practitioners in Boston alone. It had also spread to New York and Philadelphia, where it had attracted the attention of the anonymous ‘Gentleman of Philadelphia’ who wrote The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism in 1837. This book is famous not just as a very early American book on mesmerism, but because many scholars believe that the author was Edgar Allan Poe, whose fictional forays into mesmerism we will look at in a moment.

  Another pioneer from abroad was the Englishman Robert Collyer, who came in 1839 originally to lecture on phrenology, which was generally a more acceptable subject. He was appalled by what he saw, especially in the field of medicine, where quackery was more prominent than anything resembling scientific medicine. ‘Daily some poor unfortunate falls a victim to these murderous quacks,’ he intoned. ‘Their deeds of darkness and iniquity fairly outherod Herod.’ He found a ready audience not only for phrenology, but mesmerism too, which he had studied in England with John Elliotson, whose career will occupy us in the next chapter. He lectured on mesmerism to great acclaim up and down the eastern seaboard, in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Three months of nightly lectures and demonstrations in Boston led to an investigation by the city council. While falling short of actually endorsing mesmerism, they found Collyer to be sincere and not a danger, and freely admitted that something mysterious was going on, which was not fraud. This was presumably also the reaction of the majority of the audiences: puzzlement combined with awe.

  Early American Practice and Ideology

  As a result of the pioneering work of du Commun, Poyen and Collyer, mesmerism became a vogue, and indigenous lecturers and demonstrators arose to fulfil the demand. The two most famous were John Bovee Dods (1795–1872), who was such a popular lecturer that 2,000 people attended his six-lecture course, and La Roy Sunder-land (1804–85), who could win the same size of audience for a single demonstration. Later, in 1850, Sunderland was even invited to lecture on the topic to the US Senate.

  Neither Dods nor Sunderland were fluidists. It is rather hard at times to say exactly to which category they belong, fluidism or animism, and Sunderland called what he did by various names at various times, but the one which lasted longest was ‘pathetism’. For a time he had worked New England as a revivalist preacher, and he was clearly a good enough speaker to be able to hold a large audience. He came across mesmerism in 1839 and swiftly made the transition from one form of entrancement to another. His technique as a performing
‘pathetist’ was amazingly downbeat. He would take the stage at a meeting and begin to talk about pathetism, explaining how an operator and his subject could build up sufficient rapport between them to lay the subject open to the operator's will. ‘I use this term [pathetism] to signify not only the agency by which one person by manipulation, is enabled to produce emotion, feeling, passion, or any physical or mental effects, in the system of another, but also that susceptibility of emotion or feeling, of any kind, from manipulation, in the subject operated upon, by the use of which these effects are produced.’ At some point he would simply declare that some members of the audience were in the ‘pathematic’ state. They would announce themselves by walking up to the speaker's platform, perhaps in imitation of one of his old revivalist meetings. He would then use them as subjects for the usual round of showmanlike and entertaining phenomena, including, occasionally, minor operations.

  In 1843 Sunderland was publishing a magazine, The Magnet, out of offices in New York. The magazine's scope was comprehensive: it was ‘Devoted to the investigation of Human Physiology, embracing Vitality, Pathetism, Psychology, Phrenopathy, Phrenology, Neurology, Physiognomy and Magnetism’. It is worth lingering briefly over the short-lived journal's contents, because it is typical of many of the publications (in book or journal form) that sprung up in the nineteenth century in Europe and elsewhere. In his introductory editorial Sunderland compared the misguided abuse of William Harvey (who discovered the circulation of the blood) and Galileo to what was happening to magnetism; this comparison was already a commonplace in mesmeric literature. Magnetism, Sunderland claims, is a complete philosophy of mind and matter, and especially illuminating for the light it casts on the mind, dreaming and forms of insanity. He takes some pains to distance himself from mesmeric entertainers and other popular lecturers, on the grounds that what he is offering is hard science. The body is covered in magnetic poles, manipulation of which cures diseases, calms hysteria, causes somnambulism, etc. Insanity is derangement of the poles; death is their destruction. It is easy to see the attractions of grand, all-encompassing schemes like this.