There is something subtle, secret, that once understood can change your life.

There is an unconscious uncontrollable element in every human communication

An exemple

Have you ever met someone and you felt “something”?

Your body changed and you did not know why.

Normally rational people think: communication begins with words and they worry about what they say.

There are speakers that can enter a room and catch the attention without even beginning to speak.

There are people that some people say “he makes me feel better” and this even in case of illnesses

Relationship begins before communication.

We are philogenetically relationship animals – words were invented after

The hidden secret of Animal Magnetism starts exactly here: something real happens in a relationship. If you know this force we can direct it.

Animal Magnetism appears mysterious. You can see its effects and feel it in yourself, while your conscious mind cannot grasp it. Yet you know this person in front is affecting you.

There is even a public magnetism. A person enters a room. Several heads turn toward him. He has not “used a technique.” but there probably an unconscious method. Still, something has already happened. A person looks at a woman in the street and his attention is caught. What happened?

Stronger obviously with the gaze. The gaze is even able to tame lions.

Some people develop this naturally, their gaze holds attention and their presence give a direction to the encounter.

Animal Magnetism can change your life. Is it inborn or can it be developed?

It can developed because it is linked with your vitality. This is the key point. What appears naturally in some people can be trained and developed with the right method.

Animal Magnetism is more subtle of something that you learn just through posture, breathing, it entails also a specific mindset and attitude and obviously “energy”, vital energy. This attitude is one of the secrets.

True Animal Magnetism is a subtle and powerful force that we learn to feel, develop and use ethically and consciously.

WE ARE THE INSTRUMENT

Dont look far for the secret. Look near and inside you.

Here is one of the first big differences with much of modern hypnosis, historically one of the daughters of animal magnetism — another field that already contains its own mysteries.

In hypnosis we often think first about the technique: words, induction, suggestion, sequence.

For example, two hypnotists can read exactly the same induction.

One produces a deep response.

The other produces almost nothing.

Why?

The script is the same.

The person using it is not. Animal Magnetism goes to this core. Reconnecting to it we reconnect to an inner force .

In reality we never met somebody that learnt to hypnotize just reading books or looking at some videos. Everybody even with verbal hypnosis learnt from somebody else or in a course. Something else is necessary that is profoundly human.

The operator is the living instrument living the technique. We could say that a little of animal magnetism is always necessary.

You are the instrument.

Imagine that you are nervous and trying to calm another person. You first tool will be yourself.

With a little change in your gaze, you will get it.

The other person feels this, consciously or not.

This is why this training begins with you.

So you can affect your environment.

WHAT CHANGES FIRST

Let’s do an example.

Someone looks at you.

His gaze affects you.

You gaze at him.

And before you understand a sentence, your breathing may already have changed.

You are affected before your rational mind can understand why.

This is one of the most fascinating points of non-verbal work: something can begin in the body before the rational mind knows why.

The body reacts first.

Then the conscious mind tries to explain.

This is rooted in our non verbal Nature. Some monkeys just look themselves one the other into the eyes and the first lowering the gaze has lost

It is something in ur neurology. Two lovers will react each one to the energy of the other one.

In our School we train exactly this level. The non verbal. There is an alchemy of the human being and of the relationship to learn.

We are ourselves and the other person at the same time.

For example, we may notice that the subject’s breathing slows exactly.

At the beginning you may only feel:

“Something happened.”

With training, that impression becomes more precise.

This is why our training does not only give you techniques. At a second level it gives you perception. At a third level you dont even know why you do something your body will do.

FEELING COMES BEFORE THEORY

Animal Magnetism begins with feeling — with the subtle inner signs that something is changing before theory arrives.

This is much more important than it sounds. That is experience that can be learnt.

Feeling means noticing the real changes inside us: we need to enter a grammar of inner feelings and understanding warmth, heaviness, calm, attraction, a change in breathing, a sensation in the hands, a different quality in the space between you and another person. In reality you are the tool that measures the interaction. You cannot measure it from outside as you are inside.

And training starts becoming real because you will feel inside you.

Historically we find the name Animal Magnetism with Mesmer.

But the idea is older.

People had already spoken about sympathy, influence and hidden relations between living beings. Van Helmont wrote about magnetic cures that he did for soldiers wounded by knifes. Sir Kenelm Digby became famous for the Powder of Sympathy where he healed peope.

Why did these ideas return again and again?

People were trying to explain something they could observe:

one person affects another, sometimes before words and sometimes at a level that is difficult to explain but easy to feel.

SYMPATHY: HOW ONE PERSON CAN AFFECT SOMEBODY OTHER

Take a very simple example.

You are with someone who is nervous and after a few minutes you also feel more tense.

Or you sit beside someone deeply calm and without deciding to do so your breathing begins to slow.

This seems normal.

But it contains something very deep.

One human system affects another, and this ordinary fact already contains a remarkable mystery.

In common language this could be called sympathy. Part of it in today science is called co-regulation, autonomic regulation or interpersonal synchronisation.

A modern example is two people talking face to face and gradually matching rhythm without noticing it: pauses, breathing, gestures and attention begin to coordinate. This part of a very subtle and bigger multifactorial mechanism. Daily interactions are so subtle that even experts looking 50 times at a video cannot really grasp everything going inside the two persons. Part of it can be called “hypnotic”

There is more.

And this “more” is exactly what interested us.

HYPNOSIS: AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE STORY

Hypnosis is extremely useful — hypnosis itself is far from being an ordinary or completely explained phenomenon.

It gives us a modern language for trance, catalepsy, analgesia, altered sensation and suggestion — phenomena in which pain can disappear, the body can become rigid, perception can change and ordinary voluntary control can be profoundly altered.

Take analgesia.

A hypnotist may use suggestion and imagery until a hand feels numb.

The phenomenon is real and useful.

But now imagine producing a comparable alteration while using very little language and placing much more importance on gaze and obtaining a trance even faster

The phenomenon may overlap, and in both fields there remains something extraordinary: a human being can enter a state that ordinary waking experience does not predict.

The path is different.

Hypnosis explains part of the territory.

Not all of it.

Why?

Because modern hypnosis often looks mainly at what happens in the subject.

Animal Magnetism also asks what happens in the operator.

For example, if the operator becomes internally still, the subject may feel something inside.

This changes everything.

Because the relationship itself becomes part of the phenomenon.

NON-VERBAL HYPNOSIS

What is non-verbal hypnosis?

Very simply:

Hypnosis without words.

For example, a practitioner can use fixation and gesture to produce a change of attention without speaking.

That is already non-verbal hypnosis.

Non-verbal hypnosis relies heavily on Animal Magnetism.

Because the operator comes back inside the phenomenon.

THE MYSTERY OF THE GAZE

Fascination is the power of the gaze.

The gaze is at the same time the most common and the most mysterious instruments people notice.

Someone looks at you in a certain way and you feel it immediately.

Or if you try to look more to a person you will notice that there is something in you and in her that changes.

You are speaking in a group. One person looks at you with a stable, unwavering gaze.

You begin to speak differently.

Nothing has been said, but the gaze has already modified the situation.

A gaze can attract, intimidate, calm or fascinate.

The gaze is one visible door into something deeper.

It is an instrument and a very powerful one.

As every instrument it is important to learn how to use it

Two people can look in the same way and produce completely different effects.

Why?

Because the person behind the gaze is different.

This is why we do not train only the eyes.

We train you to become a different person using the eyes.

HANDS AND MAGNETIC PASSES

The same happens with the hands.

At first, a magnetic pass can look like a simple movement.

Then an experienced operator makes an apparently similar pass and the subject’s breathing changes, the body becomes more still and the subjet enter a profound trance. There is a secret behind and the secret is in you

You are the hidden variable — and perhaps one of the deepest parts of the mystery.

FROM NATURAL ABILITY TO TRAINING

Some people already have presence.

Think of a teacher who enters a noisy room and the room becomes quiet without shouting.

Some naturally hold the gaze.

Some immediately understand when another person changes.

But these capacities are not fixed.

They can be developed.

For example, a person who originally looks away after two seconds can train until maintaining a calm gaze feels natural.

Presence becomes stronger.

Sensitivity becomes more precise.

The gaze becomes steadier.

Attention becomes more stable.

The operator learns to change his own state and to perceive the other person more accurately.

When these capacities develop together, the whole quality of the interaction changes.

This is why Animal Magnetism is not only a set of techniques. It is the deliberate development of capacities that normally appear only in fragments.

It is a training of the operator.

THE EFFECTS COME LATER

Take catalepsy, one of the most striking examples.

An arm stays rigid or the body becomes immobile.

Fine.

But we ask a different question:

What happened just before?

Imagine that a few seconds before the arm became rigid, the breathing changed, the gaze became fixed and the subject stopped making small movements.

Those details are not decoration.

They are the path toward the visible phenomenon.

This is more interesting than catalepsy alone.

Because when we understand the path, the phenomenon stops being an isolated trick.

The same is true for trance, analgesia, fascination and somnambulistic states.

The effect is visible and sometimes dramatic.

The process begins before the effect.

This is what we train.

A SHARED FIELD

Now go deeper.

Imagine two people sitting face to face.

At first both move normally.

After some minutes, the breathing becomes slower, movements reduce and the gaze becomes more stable.

Neither person planned this consciously.

Still, the interaction has changed.

This is what we mean when we say the relationship itself becomes part of the phenomenon.

The operator changes.

The subject changes.

And something develops between them.

This is where the old and mysterious idea of a shared field becomes practical.

We are not talking about poetry.

We are talking about what people perceive.

Something changes between two people.

And with training, you begin to notice it better.

Without sensitivity you see only the final result.

With sensitivity you begin to see the process.

AND THERE IS MORE

If we stop here and say:

“Animal Magnetism is gaze, breathing and synchronisation”

we have already made a mistake.

Why?

Because this is only part of the map.

Take magnetic somnambulism.

Historical accounts do not describe only relaxation or concentrated attention.

They also describe unusual lucidity, telepathic impressions, action at a distance and ecstatic states.

Whether every historical interpretation was correct is another question.

The important point is that the territory itself was larger.

We do not have to mention these things every time.

But we cannot write as if they were never part of the discipline.

They are part of its historical territory.

And they remind us that the field has always been larger, stranger and more fascinating than any simple explanation.

SCIENCE HELPS — BUT IT DOES NOT CLOSE THE QUESTION

Modern science gives us useful tools to illuminate parts of this mysterious territory.

For example, live eye-contact research can measure changes in attention and synchronisation between two people.

This is valuable.

But imagine that we then say:

“We have measured synchronisation, therefore Animal Magnetism is synchronisation.”

That would be a mistake.

We have measured one component.

We have not exhausted the discipline.

Psychology itself has important epistemological limits because it studies living people whose behaviour changes with context, relationship and observation.

For example, a person may react one way in a laboratory with sensors attached and another way in a live encounter with a trusted operator.

Animal Magnetism is even more complex.

The operator is part of the event.

The subject is part of the event.

The relationship are part of the event.

A GLIMPSE AT THE HISTORY

Now look at history.

Mesmer, Puységur, Deleuze, Du Potet and Lafontaine all worked with phenomena before modern hypnosis had its name and got strong results that are reported in the chronicles of their times. They got successful healing on many ailments that even today drugs dont heal. They even got extraordinary phenomena called “higher phenomena”

Then James Braid saw magnetic demonstrations and copied it from outside.

This is the crucial example.

He did not invent the phenomenon first and then demonstrate it.

He saw phenomena already being produced in a magnetic context and proposed another interpretation.

Hypnotism developed from there.

This is very important — and historically quite fascinating.

Hypnosis did not appear in an empty space.

It came from a field where the phenomena already existed.

A large territory existed.

Hypnosis developed one branch and tried until now unsuccessfully to put away the role of the operator.

But who the hypnotist is is always important. It is written in every book.

Animal Magnetism is at the basis.

This is why the two fields overlap.

But they are not the same.

THE ITALIAN LINE AND DR. MARCO PARET

For Dr. Marco Paret, this was not an academic curiosity. It was the search for a hidden practical principle behind phenomena that should not have been possible according to ordinary explanation.

He wanted results.

For example: if an old book described a person becoming suddenly immobile under a gaze

The real question was:

Can we observe something similar today?

If yes, under what conditions?

Why could one person stop another with the gaze?

Why could some operators create deep states so quickly?

Why did old descriptions correspond so closely to things that could still be observed?

These questions pushed the research forward because each answer revealed another layer of the mystery.

Direct transmission mattered.

He had the occasion to have powerful masters

Observation mattered.

Testing mattered.

Seeing what worked mattered.

This work gradually became MESMERISMUS®.

With MESMERISMUS® we reconnect with our inner force

WHY THIS MATTERS TODAY

Today people come to this field from hypnosis, NLP, energy work, pranotherapy, Reiki, qigong, breathwork or somatic work.

These are not the same things.

But many of them touch the same deeper question.

Take Reiki or pranotherapy.

Or take hypnosis. A hypnotist may already know suggestion extremely well.

Animal Magnetism asks: what happens before the suggestion, and what happens in the operator?

If you upgrade yourself you will upgrade your practice

AMONG THE STRONGEST TOOLS: THE MESMERIC CRISIS

Among the tools we use in Animal Magnetism there is also the magnetic crisis, or mesmeric crisis.

Among all the methods we have worked with, we have never observed transformations as powerful as those produced by the mesmeric crisis.

And this is not only our impression.

Many of our students are already experienced professionals — physicians, osteopaths, chiropractors, neurologists, natural-therapy practitioners and other specialists who have spent years working with the human body and therapeutic change.

Modern polyvagal theory can help us understand part of what happens during these profound reactions.

But what matters most is what these professionals actually observe.

They continue to study with us because they encounter reactions, releases and transformations of an intensity they had never seen in the methods they already knew.

And once you have seen this happen in front of you, it is very difficult to look at human change in the same way again.

WHAT SHOULD YOU STUDY?

If you already practise hypnosis, Animal Magnetism can add another level.

For example, imagine that you already know how to induce trance verbally.

Now repeat the session paying attention to your own state, gaze, distance and the exact moment the subject changes.

You begin to see the same session differently.

You do not ask only:

“What should I say?”

You also ask:

“What am I doing with myself?”

If you are beginning, Animal Magnetism gives you a powerful starting point because you begin with the instrument you will always carry with you:

yourself.

For example, learning to stabilise your own state is useful before you ever attempt a formal magnetic phenomenon.

Presence, attention, sensitivity and gaze matter in communication, leadership, relationships and daily life.

MESMERISMUS® teaches this in a progression:

first the operator,

then the relationship,

then the phenomena.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is Mesmerism the same as Animal Magnetism?

Historically, Mesmerism is the common name derived from Mesmer.

Animal Magnetism is the larger territory.

A simple way to see it: “Mesmerism” points to the historical line associated with Mesmer; “Animal Magnetism” names the wider field we are discussing.

How are Animal Magnetism and hypnosis related?

They overlap in trance, catalepsy, analgesia, altered sensitivity and focused attention.

For example, both can produce catalepsy.

But Animal Magnetism places much more emphasis on what the operator’s state, gaze, passes, touch, distance and relationship contribute to that phenomenon.

Can Animal Magnetism produce hypnotic phenomena?

Yes.

Fixation, catalepsy, analgesia, trance and somnambulistic states can all appear in magnetic work.

For example, a subject may enter a deep state through gaze and non-verbal interaction with very little spoken induction.

But these phenomena are not the whole field.

What is non-verbal hypnosis?

Hypnosis without words.

For example, a visual fixation induction can be non-verbal hypnosis.

When operator state, gaze, sensitivity, touch, distance and relationship become central, we move much closer to Animal Magnetism.

Why keep the term Animal Magnetism today?

Because it still describes something people understand immediately.

Animal means living: body, vitality, feeling.

Magnetism means attraction, influence and relation.

Think of the ordinary English expression “animal magnetism”: it still means a person whose presence attracts others.

The old term still points toward the human benefit.

What is MESMERISMUS®?

MESMERISMUS® is the contemporary system developed by Dr. Marco Paret to organise this magnetic tradition into progressive training.

For example, instead of teaching only a gaze technique, it develops the operator who uses the gaze.

It develops perception, state, sensitivity and non-verbal relationship together with magnetic passes, touch, distance, rhythm and fascination.

THE POINT

Animal Magnetism is not simply an old version of hypnosis, and hypnosis itself is not a completely solved phenomenon.

It is a larger and more mysterious field.

You begin by learning to feel.

For example, you begin to notice a change in your own breathing before you try to interpret it.

Then you learn to observe and change your own state.

Then you notice what changes in another person and in the relationship.

Hypnotic phenomena can appear.

And then you discover something important — perhaps the most fascinating point:

there is still more.

This is why the operator is not outside the phenomenon.

You are inside it.

You are the instrument.

REFERENCES

Franz Anton Mesmer, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, 1779.

A.-M.-J. Chastenet de Puységur, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal, 1784.

J. P. F. Deleuze, Histoire critique du magnétisme animal, 1813; Instruction pratique sur le magnétisme animal, 1825.

J. Du Potet de Sennevoy, Manuel de l’étudiant magnétiseur, 1846.

Charles Lafontaine, L’art de magnétiser, 1847.

James Braid, Neurypnology, 1843.

R. F. Burton, “Remarks upon a form of Sub-mesmerism, popularly called Electro-Biology,” The Zoist, 1852.

J. Hirsch et al., “Frontal, temporal and parietal systems synchronize within and across brains during live eye-to-eye contact,” NeuroImage, 2017.

J. K. Hietanen, “Affective eye contact: an integrative review,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2018.

ISI-CNV archive and contemporary teaching materials of Dr. Marco Paret and MESMERISMUS®.