NONE THE WISER
Your Mesmeric Forces and How to Develop Them – Frank H Randall
My freelance work has been picking up and so I naturally celebrated the arrival of my latest pay-check with a pricey 1910 manual on mesmerism. Who needs a pension anyway?!
The cover of Frank H Randall’s how-to guide features a fab gold debossed illustration of a textbook intensive mesmeric stare-off. You really can judge this book by its cover: it is mostly all about intensively staring your subject down.
Randall’s preface promises, not a philosophy of mesmerism, but simple, practical instructions. I’m stoked to get started zapping people with my vintage mesmeric powers!
We’re informed that mesmerism is, essentially, power of character and will over persons of less capable and strong mentality. We’re striving for the natural form, as per page 15:
“The natural form is where the ascendency of mind proceeds from an innate excellence, intuition, and inner stability productive of positiveness; artificial, where the power is simply supported and maintained by assumption, pretension, arrogance, and deception.”
Many people wonder about becoming a mesmerist, but few believe they can hack it – this is because of the “strange marvellousness which the peculiar results of the science present”, as Frank beautifully puts it.
While perfect character is desirable in a mesmerist, it’s no barrier to getting started – which is great news for me.
However, mesmerism was a gentleman’s sport, and so the first few chapters reflect contemporary, wider Victorian concerns about the ideal gentleman.
Randall lays out our spiritual, mental, moral and physical qualifications.
A mesmerist should be a natural leader of men. He should not have an excited mind. And he should have purity, chastity, temperance and self-control in all things.
Basically he’s got to keep his mind and soul spick-and-span: “The motive held in the mind of an operator will mould the influence he imparts to his subject. It should be projected only when prompted by a well-considered intention.”
Physically, a “healthy, robust, and vital constitution will greatly assist”. He needs a “firm and energetic nervous system”, and “every muscle and nerve should be regularly exercised without overtaxation”.
Randall also covers instructions on “vigorous bathing, cold or warm” (“followed by brisk towelling”), phrenology, musings on ideal age (23), dietary advice, and selecting the ideal mesmeric sensitives.
As we get into ‘mesmeric forces’, it’s all still quite mysterious – and still dependent on a man’s “spiritual, mental, and moral organisation”. But, fear not! Anyone can become a mesmerist, provided we give “certain organs a specially prescribed exercise, by which the vital force has avenues opened up for it so as to facilitate a free radiation from the system.”
In summary these are:
Train your eyes – ie, staring at people, staring at yourself in a mirror, and staring at things. Ideally til rays ‘zap’ out of your eyeballs.
Prepare your hands and fingers – ie, get a manicure.
Condition your feet. Students need to be aware that “the nerves of the feet are always acting as channels through which the vital forces of the body proceed”. Randall’s even magnetised someone with his feet! Oh, and avoid tight shoes.
Breathe.
Concentrate.
Next up, we’re finally getting into the practicalities of mesmerising someone.
We start with the ‘throw off’ movement, which is the dramatic ‘zapping at’ or ‘shaking off’ movements you do with your hands that we associate with The Mesmerist. If you get a tingling sensation from your fingers through your arm and moist fingers you must be doing it right.
Oh, but then it’s all so boring! There’s stuff about the mesmeric flow… And passes – LOTS of passes. Short ones, long ones. The relief pass. The focussed pass. More on magnetism. Phases. Physical, mental and psychic control. Yet more preamble about selecting subjects and the use of the mesmeric state…
FINALLY we get to how to put someone into a mesmeric coma. Which is a good job because I’m about to slip into one myself.
What follows is three methods, built on various combos of passes and throws and STARES and such. Then how to remove the state.
The saving grace is the chapter on experimenting. It’s tame by modern standards – catalepsy and observations on breathing and eyeballs ain’t gonna cut it these days! The main point of interest is page 126-8 on ‘mental illusion’. As Randall describes:
“Hand your subject a pocket-knife (or any other article), saying, “Would you like a cigar?” Make the magnetic contact, and press your communication with the intention of conveying to his mind the image of a cigar. Here he will pause for a time as if considering whether it really is so, and half-conscious of the unreality of your communication. You must, however, concentrate all the more at this stage, and intensify the mental impression by saying, “Are you not going to smoke it” to which, in most cases, your subject will reply, “Yes, certainly!” or to that effect, thanking you for so welcome a present.”
So, asking a subject to smoke a pocket-knife as if a cigar or believe an umbrella is a snake was an experiment in telepathy or “semi-suggestion” – the important thing is the operator is projecting the cigar or snake. Not, as we’d now understand it, that the subject is responding to the suggested reality or hallucinating or playing along.
We conclude with a chapter on the “inner and higher mesmeric powers”. This covers clairvoyance, prevision, psychometry, theories of the eye and psychic sensitives. I’m staggered at how little of interest or silliness I found therein.
As a bookshelf curio, the best bit of the book is the adverts at the back. There are works on spiritualism, phrenology, self-reliance and health. “How to Make a Man” by Alfred T Story and “Seeing the Invisible” by James Coates sound infinitely more amusing than this book.
