NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
The Power of Mesmerism: A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies – Anonymous
Whatever your life’s calling, vocation, passion or hobby, there comes a point when you ask yourself: what kind of niche porn caters for me?
The problem, however, with ‘hypnosis’ as a porn theme – particularly if you’re a feminist, or simply crave a bit of variety and surprise – is ‘man uses power and influence to seduce or “sexy-rape” woman’ is 99.9% of all porn. (Substitute whichever gender and power dynamics tickle your fancy: dominatrix, cucking, hentai monsters, etc...)
The presence of ‘hypnosis’ or ‘mind control’ is as important to this basic, universal plotline as to whether the man at the door has come to fix the washing machine or the cable TV. So it’s all much of a muchness.
And, while I’m sure Pornhub, Amazon self-publishing and the like harbour some contemporary hypno-porn gems, public perceptions of a hypnotist’s sex appeal generally remain at ‘Kenny Craig’ levels.
In summary, I’m doubtful ‘hypnosis’ will reach the Pornhub Year in Review anytime soon.
But during ‘The Golden Age of Mesmerism’, ‘hypnosis’ was powerful and sexy. Many Victorians were concerned that mesmeric experiments and seances were a ruse for Gentlemen Scientists to check out ladies’ calves and bosoms in the name of Progress.
For instance, the whiff of sex surrounds the collapse of medical pioneer John Elliotson’s experiments on the O’Key sisters: Elliotson was stigmatised as a weak and credulous man, and the elder sister, Elizabeth, portrayed as a seductive fraud. George du Maurier, author of Trilby – the most popular and sensational novel of the Victorian age, featuring infamous hypnotist Svengali – had to reassure the public of Trilby’s ‘purity’ post-publication.
So. Welcome to a lazy Sunday morning in bed with me and Kev! In order to get back from my ponderings on the gender and sexual politics of mesmerism to ‘porn’, Kev wondered whether Victorian mesmeric porn was A Thing. And – great news, fap-fans! – it is.
The Power of Mesmerism: A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies was written in 1891 by an unknown author. Kev duly purchased a cheap reprint from Amazon, but I didn’t get around to reading it for a while. I realised when I finally plucked it from the bookshelf in the name of this noble blog project that one of the Amazon reviews we read at the time had stuck in my head: “Not for the faint of heart”.
Imagine: you’re a fine English fellow, 18 years old, returning to your family home from your German boarding school – where you picked up the dark art of mesmerism. How would you wield such power? Well in Frank’s case, you – SPOILER ALERT! – fuck your 17-year-old sister, Ethel. And your mum. And your dad. And your chum and the stable-hand. And several servants. Oh, and a parson. And your mum and your dad and your sister and the parson and his two nieces. And some livestock. Etc.
Frank’s specialism is placing his mesmerised family and friends into elaborate, incestual, orgy-tastic scenarios and then bringing them back to consciousness, mid-frig, with his magical mesmeric passes. Fortunately, they all find they’re having such a splendid time, they just go with it. Or, in the happy words of the parson as he’s brought out of his trance: “Oh, it must be a dream of my old college days, by Jove, how we fucked and buggered at Oxford!”.
The author also obliges us with some top-notch lesbian action courtesy of Ethel and a servant, plus recollections of her Parisian school days. There are poetry interludes, too.
Reading this book is akin to a visit to the Amsterdam Sex Museum: hilarious, jarring, weird, disturbing – and sometimes actually erotic…
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You will, alas, learn absolutely nothing about ‘the power of mesmerism’ by reading this book – aside from it being a novel insight into its place in the popular consciousness of the time. A school chum explains “the theory and practice” of mesmerism to Frank, after which he “soon found that he could also experimentalize successfully”. Then it’s magic hand passes all the way; no breadcrumbs for those of us curious about early memes.
