THE MAGIC OF MESMERISM
Animal Magnetism is not really hypnosis! Honestly, let me explain… (Ed: A 25-minute read)
His diagnosis wasn’t good; this was a serious illness and its treatment would require all of his skills and knowledge. Mesmer reached into his bag, as he had done a hundred times before, to retrieve his medical magnets. As a doctor, Mesmer was well-versed in all of the contemporary treatment methods: leeches, bleeding, blistering and so forth. But as a forward-looking physician, he favoured the latest and greatest technique of magnetism.
To him, the other treatments seemed so foolish and old-fashioned – quackery, even. To think that cutting or blistering made any sense, or the attachment of leeches? No, Mesmer thought to himself, this was just the current-day version of witchcraft, especially since the modern medical world had examined and embraced the application of magnets to treat the widest range of sickness. Mesmer wasn’t stuck in the past, he was a man of science!
A ‘baquet’ drawing room scene, with perfectly wholesome mesmeric experiments in progress, 1780. Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain, WikiCommons.
As he reached for his magnets, a worrying, draining feeling came over him. They weren’t there – they were missing! Stolen? Surely not, but… lost, dropped, misplaced? Maybe. As his hand fumbled in his bag, his mind fumbled through his recent memories. “Disaster!”, he thought, as he recalled them sitting on his desk. He had left in a hurry, within moments of hearing that his services were required.
The magnets normally lived in his bag, from where he would retrieve them, and replace them when he was done. But today, they were on his desk; he’d taken them out to treat Mademoiselle Madeup in his surgery, but the call for his services had come before she’d left. He’d finished her treatment and was seeing her out when he got the message. He remembered it clearly now – he’d grabbed his bag and left in haste. The magnets were on his desk. What was he to do?
With his hand in his bag, Mesmer realised it wasn’t entirely empty, however. Inside, his hand felt the couple of blocks of wood that were normally used in conjunction with the magnets. Feeling like there was nothing to lose, and secretly thinking that he could get away with a sham treatment right now and then return with his magnets for a proper consultation later, Mesmer grabbed the blocks and told his patient he was going to apply the magnets.
Mesmer applied the blocks as he would magnets; he placed them and moved them as if they were made of magnetised iron, and he kept his cool while he did so. He acted entirely convincingly to not give away that he was using ineffective blocks of wood, and proceeded exactly as he would have done, had they been magnets. To his surprise, towards the end of the session the patient actually recovered! The blocks of wood had miraculously worked!
Mesmer concealed his surprise, but on his way home he thought deeply about what had just occurred. The wooden blocks were not magnets; and only magnets could have caused the healing effects he had witnessed. The only conclusion was that he, the doctor, must be magnetic!
And so ‘Animal Magnetism’, also known as ‘mesmerism’, was born. Or so I was taught…
The Illuminati-themed (!) grave of Franz Anton Mesmer at Meersberg, Germany. Credit: Stefan-Xp, CC BY-SA 3.0, WikiCommons.
If hypnotism is wonderful, then mesmerism is fascinating. When I first learned about hypnotism, I was told stories of how Franz Anton Mesmer discovered or invented hypnotism back in the late 18th Century, and that Scottish surgeon James Braid simply renamed it in the middle of the 19th Century. Unfortunately, this is all some hypnotists know about mesmerism. Others, like myself, were told further stories, like the one above, that are truly fantastic; but these aren’t the truth either. In fact, I have completely fabricated the above story based on the snippets I can remember being taught in trainings and from what I read on the Internet when I was first learning hypnotism.
The truth is far more interesting, and is, in my opinion, magical in three senses of the word. There’s the magic akin to witchcraft that led to the creation of animal magnetism and mesmerism in Austria and France; there’s the magic in the form of trickery and illusions, employed by 19th Century mesmerists in Britain; and then there’s the magic in the sense of disbelief and fascination, that out of all of this nonsense came the beginnings of the field of hypnotism, which is still studied and practiced today.
Let me describe and explain these three forms of magic that make mesmerism the truly fascinating subject that it is.
The Beginnings of Animal Magnetism
To properly understand mesmerism, and therefore its influence on hypnotism, we really need to understand Mesmer himself – his story is far from the fictitious account I opened this post with. The first thing to establish is that Mesmer was not really a magnetist. He was a medical doctor trained at the famous Vienna Faculty of Medicine – part of the prestigious University of Vienna – and, in practice, was relatively traditional in his choice and application of medical techniques. He did, however, make his first splash with his attempts to further science, when he penned his PhD thesis.
In 1766, Mesmer published his doctoral dissertation entitled, ‘Physical-Medical Treatise on the Influence of the Planets’. Mesmer was a scientist, one who had studied Newtonian physics, and he was fascinated by the concept of gravity – for his thesis he pondered how it affected people, animals, and objects on Earth. It was essentially astronomy meeting medicine, and was a very big, and original, idea. Mesmer was convinced he was dealing in physics alone, and opened with a statement that he was not suggesting astrology, acknowledging that it had already been previously discredited. It was not the positions of the planets, he claimed, but the effects of their gravity that had previously unknown effects on people.
A Mesmerist using ‘Animal Magnetism’ on a woman who responds with convulsions, 1734-1815. Credit: CC by 4.0, WikiCommons.
Mesmer focused on Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which states that all matter is mutually attractive; that the attraction changes in proportion to the quantities of matter involved, and also changes in proportion to the square of the distance between the bodies. By theorising around the effects of the moon on the oceans and weather systems of Earth, Mesmer made the case for gravitational effects influencing the physical human body directly:
“When we have taken all of these things into consideration, the paradox will seem less if we assert that a tide takes place also in the human body, thanks to the same forces which cause the expansion of the sea and also the atmosphere, and that our humors are agitated in diverse ways in their ducts [vessels], being perturbed, raised and carried more copiously towards the head. In plants, there is a very obvious ascension of the sap at the time of the full moon.
“These things coincide with what we have been taught by various causes of sickness. The symptoms of epileptics tend to reappear at the new moon and especially at the full moon, resulting in their being called lunatics [lunaticus] here are there. Galien says, “the moon governs the cycles of epileptics.””
Physical-Medical Treatise on the Influence of the Planets, 1766, taken from Mesmerism – A Translation of the Original Medical and Scientific Writings of F. A. Mesmer, M.D., compiled and translated by George J Bloch, PhD. Italics and emphasis in original.
Earlier in his thesis, he gave a name to the mechanism of this influence:
“There is a force which is the cause of universal gravitation and which is, very probably, the foundation of all corporal properties; a force which actually strains, relaxes and agitates the cohesion, elasticity, irritability, magnetism, and electricity in the smallest fluid and solid particles of our machine, a force which can, in this report, be called ANIMAL GRAVITY.”
As before.
Vincent Buranelli describes in his book, The Wizard From Vienna (1975), that while Mesmer might have invented a grand theory in his PhD thesis, once he had graduated and become a doctor in 1767, he was relatively traditional in his approaches to medicine. He practiced from home where he had his own laboratory for investigating the emerging methods of the day. Buranelli claims he became an expert in the case history method of recording the effects of techniques and medicines on his patients.
The invention of animal magnetism (later to be called ‘mesmerism’ by others) appears to have happened in 1774, while a woman named Francisca Oesterlin was living with him and his wife. Oesterlin suffered terribly from illnesses that periodically threatened her life, only to dissipate weeks later, before resurfacing, again and again. Mesmer described her symptoms in a letter to Johann Christoph Unzer:
“She had an hysterical fever to which was joined, periodically, persistent vomiting, inflammation of various visceral organs, retention of urine, excessive toothaches, earaches, melancholic deliriums, opisthotonos, lypothymia, blindness, suffocation, and several days of paralysis and other irregularities.”
Letter from M Mesmer, Doctor of Medicine at Vienna, to A M Unzer, Doctor of Medicine, on the Medicinal Usage of the Magnet, 1775, taken from Mesmerism – A Translation of the Original Medical and Scientific Writings of F. A. Mesmer, M.D., compiled and translated by George J Bloch, PhD. Italics and emphasis in original.
Maximilian Hell dressed in Sami clothing during his stay at Vardø in 1769 to observe the Venus transit. Credit: Galerie illustrée de la Compagnie de Jésus, 4, Paris, Public Domain, WikiCommons.
Mesmer tried all the standard treatments but none of them worked. Magnetism – the placement of magnets on the body – was a new and controversial treatment; it wasn’t accepted by mainstream science or medicine. Mesmer’s friend, Professor Maximilian Hell, was a strong proponent, so when Mesmer asked him to make him some magnets, Hell happily obliged. Mesmer used the magnets to treat Oesterlin and, remarkably, provided her with some temporary relief.
Over time, he experimented with the magnets in his treatment of Oesterlin, moving them to different parts of her body, and noting meticulously the effects they were having. Rather than accept that the magnets themselves were causing the magical treatment phenomena, Mesmer saw the magnets as simply tools to manipulate a magnetic tide within her body. It was the difference between placing the magnets strategically and waiting for their effects to occur (the standard approach to magnetism), versus Mesmer moving the magnets to shepherd or usher a magnetic fluid inside the body.
Remember Mesmer’s PhD thesis from eight years prior? In that he discussed the effects of planetary gravitation on the human body, especially in the cause and treatment of illness. He called these effects ‘animal gravitation’. Now, in his letter to Unzer, he renames the effect ‘animal magnetism’ and ties his thesis on gravitational effects to his localised magnetic effects. This appears to be a confabulation between the ideas Mesmer remembered having when we wrote his thesis, and his recent experiences with magnets; the only physical link between gravitation and magnetism is that they both cause an attractive force via their own unseen medium or mechanism – distortion of time-space in the case of gravity, and magnetic fields in the case of magnetism.
It isn’t difficult for us, with our 20th Century perspectives and knowledge, to forgive Mesmer this mistake, given how little was known about the physical world in the 18th Century. We also need to forgive him another mistake, also exposed in his letter to Unzer. Mesmer wrote:
“Steel is not the only substance that attracts the magnet; I have magnetised paper, bread, wool, silk, leather, stones, glass, water, different metals, wood, men, dogs – in one word all that I touched – to the point that these substances produced the same effects on the patient as does the magnet.”
As before.
I’ll gloss over the second point – the effects on the patient – and focus on the mistake I think we need to forgive. Static electricity is caused by rubbing two dissimilar materials together such that electrical charge is transferred from one to the other. We can demonstrate the effect today by rubbing a balloon on your jumper and then ‘sticking’ it to a wall. The rubbing transfers the electrical charge and results in an attractive force between the balloon and the wall, causing it to stick to it, assuming enough charge is present. In the 18th Century, the distinction between static electricity and magnetism was not well understood, unfortunately.
When Mesmer stated that he had magnetised a whole raft of materials, I think we have to believe he was unknowingly witnessing the effects of static electricity (unless, of course, you really do want to believe that he magnetised wool, stones and a dog!). In his Discourse on Magnetism in 1782, he specifically referred to the rubbing that would have generated static electricity:
“Spanish beeswax, ambergris, and other similar materials, become magnetic when dried out or made more harsh by rubbing. Why couldn’t we have this property?”
Discourse by Mesmer on Magnetism, 1784, taken from Mesmerism – A Translation of the Original Medical and Scientific Writings of F. A. Mesmer, M.D., compiled and translated by George J Bloch, PhD. Italics and emphasis in original.
Unfortunately, by mistaking static electricity for magnetism, Mesmer concludes that all sorts of things can be made magnetic, including people, further solidifying his belief in animal magnetism, which, as we now know, had already been confused with planetary gravitation. This may all seem academic, but there is a significant point to be made.
A caricature of a physician prescribing more leeches for an ailing woman; a common medical intervention that was challenged by Mesmer and animal magnetism. Credit: See page for author, CC BY 2.0, Wellcome Collection, WikiCommons.
Mesmer started out in 1766 discussing the potential effects of planetary gravitation on the human body – a strong attractive force made weak by the distance it has to travel. By the time of his Discourse in 1782, he is equating this – essentially claiming they are the same – with the very weak attractive force produced by static electricity; and also with the moderate attractive force produced by magnets. Three forces, of three different magnitudes, produced by three different mechanisms, all under the same name of animal magnetism. As I say, we can forgive Mesmer these errors, because the science of the day had not sufficiently examined these phenomena.
The Witchcraft of Mesmerism
Where Mesmer started to deviate from documenting effects he had witnessed, and into the territory of explanation, is where we should be more critical, although, in fairness, some of the things he claimed to witness show a lack of scepticism expected of scientists, even in the 18th Century. Let’s start with his explanations, as through this lens we can better understand why he took his observations at face value.
In 1779 (prior to his Discourse), Mesmer wrote his Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism and, within it, fully nailed his colours to the mast. Even in Mesmer’s day, science was a process of open-minded enquiry, recording objective observations, and seeking consensus on what they reveal. Mesmer, by contrast, was strident, demanding, unwavering, and arrogant in the way he presented his ideas. He consistently and repeatedly mixed his observations with his conclusions, and damned anyone who didn’t agree.
His very first public clash was with his friend, Maximilian Hell, who provided him with the magnets to treat Oesterlin, from which everything else flowed. Hell, a proponent of magnetism, took Mesmer’s successes as evidence that magnetism worked. Hell was suffering from a rigorous scientific criticism of magnetism that had found no positive effects. It’s true – all those magnetic bracelets, rings, necklaces, etc, that you can buy on Amazon or from your favourite New Age guru, have no measurable effect on your health. They actually knew this in the 18th Century, and Hell – a professor of astronomy and also a Jesuit priest – welcomed any successes.
He seized on Mesmer’s results and widely publicised them as direct evidence for the benefits of magnetism. Mesmer was furious; their friendship dissolved and Mesmer took their dispute public. He claimed that Hell not only stole his results, but that he was believed over Mesmer because Hell was more famous. This was a classic example of a pseudo-scientific feud. Real scientists didn’t get involved, believing – quite reasonably – that neither magnetism, nor animal magnetism, was supported by evidence. As far as they were concerned, the fight was between a priest and a charlatan, and it was playing out in the press.
Undeterred, or possibly emboldened, Mesmer fully committed to his theory, and this may well have trapped him psychologically for the rest of his life. By being so sure, and claiming so vehemently that his theory was based entirely in physics, and that it was categorically true, it was very hard, if not impossible, for him to change his mind or modify his position later. In his 1779 Dissertation he stated 27 propositions; these included that there was a universal fluid throughout the universe, that caused or treated illness in humans.
Benjamin Franklin, luminary of the American Enlightenment, friend of France, and a Founding Father of the United States of America, looking thoroughly disillusioned in his 1785 portrait. He’d led The Royal Commission of Animal Magnetism in France the year previously, by order of King Louis XVI, and had hoped he’d stomped out charlatans and credulity, but apparently not. Credit: WikiCommons.
Clearly, this fluid was based in planetary gravitation, made real locally by magnetism and static electricity. It’s not that Mesmer was wrong that is the problem; it’s that he was so committed to his idea that he couldn’t entertain the prospect of being wrong. Mesmer only had one way to explain his theory and observations – that there was an invisible fluid everywhere in the universe, and that he had found a way to manipulate it. First with magnets, and then with anything he magnetised, and then with just himself – the ultimate magnet.
Even before the Royal Commissions that assessed his claims scientifically and medically he had his detractors. Obviously there was Hell, who pushed the theory that Mesmer was just a magnetist, using the magnets to cure illness and that the rest of his ideas were nonsense. It feels like Mesmer hated him the most, even though, or maybe because, at heart Hell was a materialist as much as Mesmer.
In the 18th Century, it was possible to separate such theories into at least three categories. First were the materialists, including Mesmer and Hell – they believed in physics and a physical explanation. For Hell, the magnets caused an effect in the patient; for Mesmer, he redirected the universal fluid to realign the tide inside the patient’s body. But these were physical things as far as their proponents were concerned; no different to leeches, bleeding or blistering.
Second were the spiritualists, which would have included Hell had he not been such a materialist. Spiritualists believed that God and the spirit world caused and cured illness. Some high-profile spiritualists claimed that Mesmer was one, too, and that for all his talk of fluids and science, he was simply praying to God and God was healing his patients! Not only did Mesmer disregard this out of hand, but he also argued publicly with them and found himself in a long-running feud with prominent spiritualist, Father Johann Gassner.
[For reference, I’ve been an atheist since I was nine. I use the word ‘God’ in the sense that the proponents I write about would have used it.]
Thirdly, there were the mentalists, and not the ones that Alan Partridge talked about; nor the kind that Derren Brown is. Mentalists, in the 18th Century, were those who believed, correctly as it turned out, that suggestion and the placebo effect could help cure illness. Had Mesmer been a mentalist, he could almost certainly have been regarded as the non-gender-specific parent of hypnotism. As it was, Mesmer was convinced – all the way to his death – that his cures were entirely physical in nature.
One of the reasons Mesmer was convinced of this was because of the presence of the ‘crisis’ that occurred during his treatments. His patients would spend hours being mesmerised – sitting or laying next to a ‘baquet’ (typically a metal tub containing water, but later could have been a tree or any other object that had been ‘magnetised’ by the practitioner), while Mesmer directed the magnetic fluid into and around them. At some point they would wail, flail around and apparently lose control of themselves; this was the mesmeric crisis taking effect, and was intrinsically linked with the process working, and marked the start of their recovery.
Irresistable dreamboat and 18th Century mesmerist Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis of Puységur, who was fond of tying poor people to trees in the name of social and ‘scientific’ progress. Credit: WikiCommons.
The crisis could continue for hours, and was noisy and alarming for onlookers, as well as concerning for medical doctors. While it could not be doubted that these crises happened, and that in numerous cases the patients were relieved of their symptoms, the scientific community and the medical establishment – and with it the vast majority of doctors – simply did not believe that animal magnetism was the active agent. Whether through their prejudices to believe their own favoured (equally sham) techniques, or whether it was a simple lack of evidence, is not clear.
What did become clear, at least in retrospect, is that the crisis didn’t need to be noisy and disturbing; it didn’t necessarily need to be a crisis at all. The Marquis de Puységur, a student of Mesmer, noted that a farmhand he was mesmerising fell silent and catatonic instead of having the typical crisis. According to Professor Steven Jay Lynn and Professor Irving Kirsch (writing in their 2006 book, Essentials of Clinical Hypnosis) this was due to the farmhand not being aware of how mesmerised people usually acted, and therefore he did nothing. Lynn and Kirsch’s conjecture was that those who had seen people being mesmerised before knew what to expect, and therefore behaved as they imagined they would. But the farmhand, not being aware of mesmerism, and not having an expectation of how to behave, simply did nothing as a result.
To put that into context, hundreds, if not thousands, of people had previously been mesmerised by Mesmer and his students, and (barring the few sceptics that failed to experience anything from mesmerism) they all had a crisis; a noisy, animated, extended crisis. This farmhand, not knowing anything of mesmerism or how it proceeded, did not, and therefore was especially unusual.
The really interesting part, and the one that deserves particular attention, was that everyone Puységur mesmerised after this incident experienced the same catatonia instead of a crisis. Puységur named this ‘state’ somnambulism, and claimed his place in the history of hypnosis. Even though Mesmer and Puységur remained committed materialists, they both should have realised that somehow the effects of mesmerism were determined by the expectations of the subjects, and that therefore there was a strong mentalist nature to it.
Mesmer was so convinced that animal magnetism was a physical phenomenon that he requested repeatedly that his methods and results be investigated by men of science and medicine. Eventually, in 1784, he got his wish; not one but two Royal Commissions were enacted in Paris to investigate whether there was any evidence to support animal magnetism: the first was by the Academy of Sciences and the second by the Royal Society of Medicine.
Both commissions concluded the same – animal magnetism did not involve a universal fluid, and neither were any of the subjects magnetised. The Academy of Sciences stated in their report:
“the violent effects that one observes in group treatment come from touching, from imagination provoked into action, and from mechanical imitation that makes us in spite of ourselves repeat that which strikes our senses.”
The Wizard From Vienna, 1975, Vincent Buranelli
The Royal Society of Medicine reported:
“the primary cause was the stroking, which excited the patient’s nerves and emotions. The secondary causes were such things as imagination, suggestion, and imitation.”
As before.
No doubt the conclusions of these commissions did not surprise Mesmer as he had been feuding with numerous members of the establishments for many years by this point. He was probably upset that he himself didn’t get to demonstrate his animal magnetism, nor direct the investigation such that it could be seen in the same light that he saw it. In short, Mesmer was a pseudo-scientist, deluded by his own dogma, who failed to apply due scepticism to the theories he dreamed up. He was not a charlatan or conman, in the sense that he did not knowingly deceive (at least up to the time of the Royal Commissions), but he was no scientist either.
Mesmer stuck with his theories and claims, and made his demonstrations all the more impressive and entertaining, quite possibly incorporating knowing falsehoods towards the end of his life, by which point he had accepted a certain level of occultism or spirituality into his explanations.
The Future of Mesmerism
Mesmer died in 1815, but mesmerism itself lived on. Alison Winter wrote extensively on the subsequent explosion of amateur and performing mesmerists in her book, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998). By the time mesmerism had reached Britain, the controversies, and the scientific and medical investigations, had largely been forgotten. Amateur enthusiasts sprung up all over, with some taking to genuine and dedicated – albeit misguided – investigations, and others taking to the stage.
The idea that mesmerism was something to be understood through experience was yet another pseudo-scientific approach that would lead only to misunderstandings and misdirection. Mesmerists would hold ‘seances’ where, rather than attempting to contact the dead, they would explore and demonstrate the effects of animal magnetism. While this may have started out with good intentions, unfortunately it ended up elsewhere.
A group of mesmerised French patients, 1778/1784. The metal poles touching their heads aren’t straws sucking out their brains; that hypnotic innovation is still in development. Credit: WikiCommons.
One of the problems with demonstrating mesmerism in a seance capacity – a drawing room, perhaps, with an audience of onlookers – was that there was an expectation that something amazing, and undeniable, will occur. Given that the healing quality was limited, by its very nature, to psychosomatic conditions, and even then, to those that the patient was ready to be rid of, it was quite difficult to reliably show its therapeutic effects. What was left was the crisis.
The crisis formed a significant part of the earlier demonstrations, but that in itself isn’t a spectacle with longevity – audiences aren’t going to keep coming back to see the same thing over and again, especially when that element could have been down to the theatrical nature of the subject. No, mesmerists needed to build outwards, they needed to widen their repertoire. While some built on Mesmer’s own demonstrations – mesmerising through walls and magnetising trees – others turned to trickery and illusion.
Rather than condemn Victorian mesmerists for the sake of it, there is an important point I’d like to make. If we are to accept the conjecture that Mesmer, and mesmerists after his death, influenced the discovery of hypnotism, then we have to understand the claims that were being made. And unlike in Mesmer’s day – where the claims were being honestly made and demonstrated as part of investigations into the power of animal magnetism – the claims being made in Victorian Britain were the fanciful stories of part-time magicians.
When James Braid and others picked up on mesmerism and translated it into the beginnings of what we now call hypnotism, their contemporaries were recording the effects of magic tricks being ascribed to animal magnetism. Subjects were being made to speak languages that they had no knowledge of… and neither did the audience! They were locating items hidden in rooms without their knowledge! And they were reading the minds of their mesmerists! Today we would regard these feats as stage hypnotism or mental magic, or mentalism in the Derren Brown sense of the word.
But back in Victorian Britain, the claim that a subject was speaking a far-flung foreign language wasn’t being played for laughs, and nor was it being presented as an act of imagination and creativity on the part of the subject. It was being presented that they had literally been bestowed the power to speak a foreign language through the power of mesmerism. Had a native speaker been present, I’m sure they would have discounted the presentation as nonsense; and I’m sure the mesmerist would have explained that the subject had chosen to speak the language of a different country instead.
Today, we know that this kind of feat is impossible, unless trickery, illusion, or comedy is at play. On stage, a hypnotist might command a subject to speak (through casual and regrettable racism) ‘Chinese’, ‘Japanese’ or even Martian; and they will make noises that sound to them as if that were the case. But we know they are making it all up; we know it is a joke (albeit a racist one). In Victorian Britain, this was being presented as fact, and a fact that slipped from mesmerism to hypnotism as the field developed.
If the seances were bad enough – and let’s face it, they ultimately developed into clairvoyance and spiritualist ‘conversations’ with the dead – then the travelling mesmerists were worse. They didn’t have sets of friends to keep onside, nor societal positions they might lose; they had audiences and money to be made. They were literally the forerunners to stage hypnotists and, while their shows may have been more sombre, they were certainly played for theatrics.
Today, the stage hypnotism and stage magic traditions have largely separated, so that we generally don’t expect to see magic trickery and illusion within a hypnotism show, and equally we don’t really expect to see hypnotism within a magic show (although it can exist). But in Victorian Britain the separation hadn’t been made, and audiences couldn’t immediately recognise whether an effect was more likely magic than mesmerism.
Out of financial necessity, and the development of a novel performance art, we can forgive these mesmerists for mixing magic in with their displays of animal magnetism, but we can’t ignore the effects they had. As hypnotism evolved out of the seances and playhouses of mesmerism – largely as a shift from the materialist to the mentalist (in the psychological sense) explanation – it unfortunately brought with it many fantastical claims of what was possible.
It would be fair today to say that hypnotism still hasn’t quite shed all of these magical claims or illusionary shackles. However, it is worth acknowledging that mesmerism still exists in the world today; all over the world, but especially in Britain and the USA, you can still find mesmerists making materialist claims about their abilities.
Given that Royal Commissions refuted animal magnetism as the result of touching and the subjects’ imaginations in 1784, it is simply amazing that mesmerism grew into the monster that it did. Rather than considering Mesmer to be the (non-gender-specific!) ‘parent’ of hypnotism, we might instead, given how he stuck to his physical explanation, see him as the parent of energy healing, reiki, Emotional Freedom Technique, Thought Freedom Technique, Havening, crystals, magnetic bracelets, and all sorts of New-Age therapies, none of which have stood up to any sort of scientific scrutiny.
On the flip side, if we are to believe that Mesmer was indeed the root of all things hypnotic, and accept that mesmerism was a precursor to hypnotism that worked on suggestion alone, then we should perhaps also consider that all of these energy healing techniques are also forms of hypnotism and suggestion, and relinquish any belief that they are physical in nature. Then, as with mesmerism, maybe we should retire them to the history books and focus on the explanations that make more sense, that of hypnotism and suggestion.
Otherwise it would seem ridiculous that three centuries have passed and we are still ignoring the scientists on these matters.