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We report here a part of a book of Peter Blythe, one of the most important UK hypnotists that at the end of his life decided to write a book on mesmerism:
One hundred and thirty three years after the Societé de l’Harmonie was formed in Paris so Mesmer could start to teaching Animal Magnetism to a select group of students, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson William Temple Franklin, who was a great admirer of Mesmer, Mesmerism began to be taught once again in 1996. This time Animal Magnetism/Mesmerism is not being taught in Paris, but in Nice, in the South of France, and the person conducting the training is, Dr. Marco Paret.
To understand how Paret became a Mesmerist it is necessary to look at his background, because he was a level-headed businessman who after completing his studies at Turin University worked in marketing for the next five or six years and employed by major companies.
Then something incredible happened which changed his life. In 1990 a good friend of his, Max, became interested in hypnotism and to find more about it he approached Virgilio Torrizzano who, he had heard used hypnotism from time to time, and very successfully.
Max found out that Virgilio was working as a barber and went to see him.
The shop was full of customers waiting to have their hair cut, so he waited until one customer got out of the barber’s chair when he approached Virgilio asking him could he tell him how hypnotism worked. He thought he might be able to make arrangements for them to meet in the future at another mutually convenient time. But he was in for a surprise because without saying a word to Max he turned to the waiting customers, asking them if they would agree to take part in a simple experiment he wanted to conduct.
When they all agreed, although one of them did so rather reluctantly, he closed the shop door and fixed his gaze firmly upon the customer whose face showed he was far from happy at what was taking place; all he had was wanted was a haircut. But within seconds the customer’s obvious look of annoyance and defiance changed as Virgilio continued his fixed gaze and told him that the cigarette he was smoking tasted and smelled awful. The man then became doubled up in a paroxysm of coughing which was so violent Virgilio had to slap his face a number to bring him back to reality.
If that was not enough he turned his gaze on another customer, and without saying a word the customer’s face became ashen and virtually diaphanous as if it was made of wax. Then Virgilio asked him what he name was. The customer replied giving a woman’s name, much to the amusement of the other customers, but it was the name Virgilio had silently willed the customer to give. After that Virgilio returned him to his normal self.
Max was entranced by Virgilio’s demonstration and soon afterwards, and with Virgilio’s permission, took a number of friends to see him demonstrating his amazing, silent and rapid hypnotic demonstrations. On the other hand his friend Marco Paret remained initially unimpressed. Despite his negativity Max continued to regale him with what Virgilio was able to do, and constantly asked Marco to come with him and see for himself what amazing powers Virgilio possessed. Under that continued pressure Marco was finally persuaded to go and see for himself all the things Max had described and he had thought bordered upon the impossible. And not only did he see them but Virgilio successfully used his fixed gaze technique on him, but his personal experience was to change Marco Paret’s life.
After his personal experience he had long conversations with Max about how Virglio’s fixed method could be used to restore people to good health.
They both agreed they had found something which would of great benefit to humanity and decided before they did else they would approach Virgilio Torrizzano and ask him he would accept them as his students. He agreed and they learned things which other people would not believe really existed.
For instance, Virgilio not only had the ability to diagnose medical conditions accurately, he was also able to locate hidden objects. In addition to learning how to use instant ‘fixation’ they also learned how and where Virgilio had got his knowledge from.
When he was fourteen years old Virgilio he had met ‘Rolando’, a Belgian-born Alfred d’Hont, who, after a long and varied career as a soldier, a civil servant, journalist, author and poet, was introduced to animal magnetism/mesmerism in 1873. At first he used the normal, accepted method of mesmerising his subjects; stroking, or hand-movements down the body which took some twenty minutes. Then for some totally unknown reason he developed and started to use his own method of instant mesmerism which he subsequently called ‘Fascination Magnetism’ (‘Fascination Magnétique’):
All he had to do was to fix his gaze upon a person and they responded to what he silently willed them to do.
Soon after he had discovered he could use instant mesmerism he traveled the length and breadth of Europe giving public demonstrations of his unique abilities, and fortunately, during one of his visits to Italy in 1886 an eyewitness reported what he did in L’Italia:
‘Donato looks at the young man quickly, brusquely, and from very close; the operator then turns the subject round and continues to fix him and provoke with his glance; the latter, as though attracted and fascinated, follows him with wide open eyes.'
‘He experiments with about thirty young men, one by one... All of them respond immediately to the power of his fascination, by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces becoming contracted, terrified and sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and following his movements like a magnet.....Donato has all of them under his power, he attracts them in threes, sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring at their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist.... Donato, in the process, never speaks,: he thinks, he wants and he points....’
A famous German medical hypnotist, Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin, also wrote 'Donato and ‘Fascination’ in his book Hypnotism (1890. Walter Scott, London) about ‘Fascination’. Initially he referred to Donato as ‘a professional magnetizer’, although a little later he wrote that Donato was a ‘hypnotist’, which he was not, he was a Magnetic Fascinator. But despite Moll’s misinterpretation he went on to write, ‘As I saw in Paris, Donato uses a particular process to bring about this state. This process aims at a primary forced contracture of all the muscles of the body, in order, by this means to limit the voluntary movements as much as possible. In this case the eyes of the hypnotist and the subject are firmly fixed on one another. The subject finally follows every movement of the experimenter. If he goes backwards, the subject follows; he if comes forward, the subject does the same. In the same way the latter imitates every movement of the experimenter, only on the condition, that he knows he is intended to do so. We see here, as in the above third experiment, that fascination may be a primary form of hypnosis.
But it can also be originated secondarily out of the other hypnotic states; and that is more usual. When the experimenter has hypnotized the subject in some other way, and has him open his eyes, he can fix his own steadily on them, and thus induce the same phenomena. A variety of this fascination is to fix the eyes of the subject on some other object – for example, on the finger of the experimenter. In this case the fascinated person follows every movement made by the finger.’ (Pages 64/65)
What Moll did not apparently appreciate was that Donato never had use a hypnotic induction technique, he simply used a Fixed Gaze on a person and the fascination was immediately effective.
As so often happens when someone becomes interested in a particular subject they unexpectedly locate something important in the same area of their interest, and this was particularly true of Marco Paret and his friend Max. While they were in contact with Virgilio they heard of the work of a Professor Erminio who originally came from Pisa, who at the time lived in Milan. He was a man who had studied hypnotism from the same age as Virglio; when he was fourteen years old.
Nor did the coincidence stop there of age stop there. Professor Erminio also discovered his own way of to hypnotise people immediately, something he called, ‘Instant Hypnosis’, and more importantly achieved instant healing in the majority of people seeking his help. A few of his patients/clients required two or three sessions before their condition was permanently resolved.
Intrigued by what they heard about the Professor, Marco and Max telephoned him to ask whether they could meet him. Without any hesitation he said ‘Yes’, and that was to result in being the first of many visits where they were talked about and witnessed his techniques.
His method was very simple. Erminio would ask what and where the problem was. He would then instantly ‘hypnotise’ by fixating them with his eyes and seconds later he would feel, intuitively, the problem had gone where upon he would terminate the session. Because each session only last a matter of a few minutes he was able to see up to 300 people per day without feeling drained of energy at the end of the day.
How did it work?
A psychiatrist, Professor Muzzana tried to explain it. He said:
‘Erminio acts on the autonomous thalamus and hypothalamus within our cerebral axis, namely, the vegetative brain. He extirpates distress and restores happiness and self confidence. He removes addiction to smoking, alcohol and drugs. He has an exceptional rate of success with asthmatics, people affected by hypertension, and those beset by sexual problems or treated by dermatologists. I have attended hundreds of conferences on hypnosis: Whenever the speaker was asked to give a practical demonstration, he was almost always to bring it off successfully. This was not the case of Erminio Di Pisa. He is sure of succeeding!... The doctor who cures six or seven patients is one who displays an abundant command of his art. Erminio goes further, by seeking to harmonize his nature with his individual subjects!’.
It is of interest to note that Professor Muzzana only credits Erminio di Pisa with successfully treating people with psychosomatic disorders whereas he successfully treated many medical conditions which had previously been resistant to medical intervention. P.B.
Again luck played a part in what was to happen in the future. Paret soon became a friend of Emernio’s and it was with his help he was able to set establish his first hypnotic practice.
To many people what Erminio achieved may sound incredible, but his method worked, and when he died in 2002 it was estimated he had hypnotised and treated some 250,000 people.
While investigation into mesmerism was exciting to Marco and Max, the whole question of hypnotism in Italy was rather sterile. A few doctors and psychologists used the typical hypnotism approach with moderate success, although a large number of people who had been practicing magnetic cures before World War 2 renamed their method, calling it ‘Pranotherapy’, which was and is an energy laying on of hands similar to ‘Therapeutic Touch’.
But then ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’ (NLP), a system developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, burst upon the psychotherapeutic horizon promising to ‘help people have better, fuller and richer lives’, (Bandler, R. and Grinder, J. The Structure of Magic. Volume 2. 1975. Science & Behavior Books. Palo Alto, CA.) and to solve their emotional problems. In addition to the therapeutic aspect, the principles of NLP were adapted so it could play an important role in industrial team-building, business communication, persuasion and management training, and it was the latter which attracted Marco Paret because of his then involvement with marketing.
Rather than just read about NLP Marco decided to study it properly with the leading men in the NLP field, hence him eventually becoming recognised as a qualified NLP Master Trainer. But again Lady Luck laid down another path for him journey on. Purely by chance he saw a video of the American hypnotist, Gil Boyne, who was affectionately known as the ‘Godfather of Hypnotherapy’, and the founder of the ‘Hypnotic Training Institute’ in Los Angeles. And the things that struck Paret most, was that Gil Boyne had developed a Direct Gaze hypnotic induction technique which was closely linked to the technique Professor Erminio used, and more than that he
had even developed his own Rapid Induction which bore many similarities to Mesmerism. Having seen that video he researched to find was there any other unique hypnotists. He found another one. Another American, Ormond McGill, who was regarded by many as being the ‘Dean of American Hypnotists’.
Ormond McGill besides being a brilliant hypnotist and teacher of hypnosis had toured the Far East in 1958, when he was 45 years old and became interested in what he described as ‘Oriental Hypnotism’. His interest in the philosophy and practice of Oriental hypnotism was encouraged on a visit to India where he had the opportunity to how the Indian hypnotists worked.
He not only saw them working but was allowed to photograph them; the photographs appearing in his autobiography, The Secrets of Dr. Zomb (Crown House Publishing. 2003. Carmarthen, Wales, and Williston, Vt.) Anyone viewing his photographs will immediately see how they very closely resemble the techniques used by Mesmer and the mesmerists.
In view of their unique backgrounds it is little wonder that he made arrangements to visit Gil Boyne in America and find out whether his techniques were the same as Erminio’s. They weren’t, but when Gil found out Marco had studied NLP he told him and others in the group, ‘Why do you learn NLP because it only does what I do, but takes more time?’ Later, in a personal letter to me Marco wrote, ‘I think NLP is interesting, but it only scratches the surface. It is a useful tool to create a preliminary rapport with the use of words’. Although he still teaches courses on NLP.
It was on his American travels he met Ormond McGill and had a long conversation with him about some of the hypnotic fascination techniques he had seen and heard of on his visit to India.
After his American journey he returned to Italy and became a serious student with Virglio, and soon afterwards felt he was sufficiently knowledgeable to open the Institute of Hypnosis and NLP in Torino, Italy. In 1994 he and Max opened the Institute in Nice and were able to get it officially recognised as a training facility for psychotherapists and hypnotists. But all was not well on a personal level. Max, his long-time friend, decided a year after they had opened the Nice Institute he wanted to give up teaching and seeing patients, and go and live a quieter and less hectic life. This meant Marco was left to run the Institute and carry on the training programmes they had started. Then in 2006 he began, for the first time, to train people in Mesmerism and the Fascination techniques and, at the time, by the end of 2011 he had trained some 200 Italian mesmerists and 50 international mesmerists who had come from the United States, Germany, Australia, Canada, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Slovakia. He had also been invited to conduct Mesmeric training courses in the USA and Australia.
The numbers may appear on the surface to be small, but each course is restricted to 10-to-14 people so it can be personalised and he only does two courses in Mesmerism each year. But as each year passes, because Paret is a prolific writer more and more people, including a small number of doctors, are beginning to realise Mesmer has made a definite contribution to the healing practice of medicine. It has taken a long time to achieve the truth about him and his work, but Mesmer knew this would happen, despite a doctor saying on British television in February, 2012 that any doctor practicing ‘Alternative medicine’ was a disgrace to the medical and should be removed from the medical register and barred from practising medicine.
This whole story that we didn't write explains also why the Institute of Dr Paret can rightly call itself "the first mesmeric Institute" in the world.
At the moment dr. Paret began to teach his techniques he was the only one in doing it in the world and was even violently attacked by people that was still in the old paradigms and couldn't believe some results were possible.
But the efficacy of the techniques couldn't be denied.
And it is to note that only after Dr. Paret revelations other people tried to develop similar techniques, or students of Dr. Paret tried to copy or open similar institutes.
But for sure the only grant in this technique is a true lineage. Also Dr. Paret is still diffusing a vast corpus of materials, adding, as long as more people get interested in these techniques, new methods and new advanced elements. Dr. Paret is collaborating also with René William Léon, a former university professor that conducts an academic consortium for the study of similar techniques both in West as in the Eastern Countries as India and Nepal and for getting the most advanced information on the true oriental hypnotism and other techniques that are now incorporated in the training of Dr. Paret.
For example recently we added the technique of Campanelli, extremely efficient for stop smoking, and a complete framework for regression and personal development.
So contact us to know which Institutes and Trainers are authentically connected and authorised to the ISI-CNV school and come learn with Dr. Paret, that we could truly call the father of rebirth of mesmerism!
