Mesmerism is the art of changing another person’s state without words. It began with one physician in eighteenth-century Vienna, and it never stopped: what Franz Anton Mesmer called animal magnetism did not simply turn into hypnosis. It branched. Hypnosis is one branch, and the best known; magnetism proper continued in its own right and is still practised; the crises opened a line of their own, readable today through polyvagal theory; and a further part passed into what became psychology. The branch that worked through the eyes became fascination — the living core of what we teach today. Mesmerism is the trunk; hypnosis is a branch of it, and the two are not the same thing. Imagine sitting in a theatre, held by a speaker you cannot look away from. You say you are “mesmerised”. The word has outlived the man. Who was he, and why does his name still describe that experience?

In our School, the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret, this history is not decoration. It is the family record of a practice that has been handed down, person to person, for two and a half centuries.

Who was Franz Anton Mesmer?

Mesmer was born in 1734 in Iznang, on Lake Constance, and took his medical degree in Vienna in 1766 with a dissertation on the influence of the planets on the human body^[1]. He was a serious physician with an unusual conviction: that a subtle influence flowed between living beings, and that illness was what happened when that flow was obstructed. It is like a river blocked upstream: the trouble appears far from the place where the obstruction actually sits. He called it animal magnetism — animal in the old sense, meaning of the living soul, not of animals.

That single name covers several different things, and confusing them causes most of the modern misunderstanding. Under it sit: suggestive hypnosis, explained today in several competing ways; animal hypnosis, far more frequent in Mesmer’s practice than the suggestive kind, and given a neurological account only some three hundred years later through polyvagal theory; fluidic magnetism proper; the crises, which polyvagal theory also makes readable; non-verbal communication at the edge of what would otherwise be called telepathy; and telepathy and telepsychism themselves, outside mainstream study but not therefore non-existent. When we speak of animal magnetism, we say which of these we mean.

The medicine of his day was bleeding, purging and blistering. Mesmer thought it crude, and he was not alone in thinking so. What separated him from his colleagues was that he looked for the cure in the relationship between two people rather than in the pharmacy. Nor did he begin from nothing: brilliant as he was, Mesmer continued the work of the alchemists — what they would have called the way of Mercury — and the line running through Paracelsus, van Helmont, Robert Fludd and William Maxwell, who had all written of a subtle influence passing between living bodies. What he was describing is a general energy within a Western cosmological view — close to the Chinese Tao or to Indian philosophy, but turned pragmatically towards solving problems.

How did the first treatments work?

He began with magnets, passing them over the body of a patient named Franziska Österlin, who suffered from violent recurring crises. The symptoms shifted. Then came the observation that changed everything: the magnets were not necessary. His hands alone produced the same effects — and so did his attention, his presence, his gaze.

It is like a conductor who discovers that the orchestra is following his hands, not the baton he happens to be holding: the magnets were the baton. From that moment Mesmer worked with slow passes over the body, and with touch understood within a concept of energy that he called the fluid — a name that comes from the subjective sensation of tingling and warmth, close to the Chinese Chi or the Indian Prana — and above all with the fixed and steady look that his patients described as the strongest part of the treatment.

The bodily and non-verbal elements are still with us. The pass survives in what we teach as the magnetic passes; human energy lives in the magnetic touch and in the magnetic gaze.

What happened in Paris?

After the contested case of the blind pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis, ever more people were talking about him, and in 1778 Mesmer moved to Paris^[1]. There he became a phenomenon. Patients gathered around the baquet, a wooden tub with iron rods, holding hands in a circle while he moved among them in a lilac robe. People wept, shook, fell into what were called crises, and reported recoveries.

Energy was being generated. Mesmer had assembled, without the vocabulary to name it, a machine for producing shared states of energy and physiological activation: a group, an expectation, a rhythm, and a figure who moved with absolute calm and looked each person in the eye. It is like a room where one voice sets the pitch and the others tune to it unconsciously, without anyone asking — the same happens with states, and it is also measurable in the physiology of two people in real eye contact^[4]. But that is not all: the crises find their explanation in modern polyvagal theory, which means a real neurological change was taking place. And people did recover.

How could the science of that time face the mystery?

Three hundred years later, science is beginning to discover why those crises were real, why people changed, and why there were results. But how could the science of that day understand the phenomenon? Three commissions were appointed one after another, precisely because none of them managed to agree or to give a sufficient explanation of what was happening. To cite only the first, as is usually done, is a falsification of the historical record.

In 1784 Louis XVI appointed a commission that included Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly and the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin^[2]. They tested blindfolded subjects, magnetised trees, sham treatments. Their conclusion was precise: the effects were real, but in their opinion no magnetic fluid could be detected, and what produced them was imagination and imitation.

The report was contested from the first day, and for good reasons. It never defined the imagination it invoked, so it disqualified the phenomena without explaining them; it filed under imitation and suggestion effects that were real and neurological, and that today are read through hypnosis, through polyvagal theory and through other frameworks; and it was not unanimous. Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, a member of the parallel Royal Society of Medicine commission, refused to sign with his colleagues and published his own report — the only favourable one — arguing that a physical influence of one person upon another, with or without contact, must be admitted, and pointing to heat as an observable agent^[2]. There was also a secret report by Bailly to the minister on the moral dangers of the treatment: a motive that was not scientific. Deslon, for his part, answered that if medicine of the imagination is the better medicine, we might as well practise it.

The verdict was meant to end mesmerism. It did something else. By separating the effect from the fluid, the commission accidentally described the field that would become psychology: expectation, attention, relationship, suggestion — though even this account covers only a small part of the phenomena. Mesmer was refuted on his physics and vindicated on his phenomena. In the same period, with the Revolution approaching, Mesmer withdrew from Paris — we do not know why he left, and nothing ties his departure to the verdict, though he may have sensed the coming tension — and he went on practising abroad, healing people, until his death at Meersburg in 1815. That continuation is usually left out of the story.

What did Puységur discover?

That same year, 1784, one of Mesmer’s followers changed the story. The Marquis de Puységur, magnetising a young peasant named Victor Race on his estate at Buzancy, produced not a crisis but something nobody expected: a calm, lucid, wide-awake sleep in which Victor spoke, responded, and remembered nothing afterwards — like someone talking clearly in their sleep: awake enough to answer, deep enough to leave no trace^[3].

Puységur called it magnetic somnambulism, and from it two lines descend, not one. The first is hypnotic somnambulism, which medicine eventually absorbed and renamed. The second is lucid somnambulism: from the first day Puységur reported that Victor seemed to read his thoughts and to predict the course of his own illness, and that side of the discovery — the telepathic and clairvoyant one — was set aside by mainstream science and taken up instead by the psychical researchers. Whoever cites only the first line tells half the story.

What is certain is that the discovery moved the whole art away from convulsions and towards the quiet absorbed states our training still works with — the ones now associated with slower brain rhythms, alpha and theta.

Did science ever reopen the case?

Yes — and then, unable to find a solution, closed it again by decree. Animal magnetism had spread to other countries precisely because it worked, and was even taught in universities. In 1826 the Académie de médecine, pressed by Henri Marie Husson, chief physician of the Hôtel-Dieu, appointed a fresh commission on the explicit ground that a first judgement in matters of science is often defective. It worked from 1827 and read its conclusions on 21 and 28 June 1831: favourable, recognising as real most of the contested phenomena, magnetic somnambulism included^[10]. The Académie then refused to print it, so the most thorough investigation ever made on the subject counted officially as one man’s opinion.

A third academic inquiry followed in 1837, under Frédéric Dubois d’Amiens — the 1784 examination had itself been carried out by two parallel commissions, and the Husson review was the second. It is worth looking at how it was conducted, because the verdict is still quoted today. It was Didier Berna, a young physician and magnetiser, who asked to be examined and who submitted in advance the programme of experiments he proposed to perform. The commission appointed to judge him was composed almost entirely of declared opponents of magnetism. It did not accept the protocols he proposed, or recorded them differently; it refused his request that the commissioners sign the record of each session; and it reached its conclusions on the basis of about half a dozen experiments with two somnambulists^[12]. The report, read to the Académie that August, declared that none of the phenomena alleged by the magnetisers had been observed. Berna published a refutation of a hundred and sixteen pages the following year, and Husson objected that the report itself was hardly scientific — so much so that the Académie confined its conclusions to Berna’s two somnambulists and refused Dubois’s request to extend them to magnetism as a whole. That limitation has been quietly forgotten ever since.

The pattern repeated with the Burdin prize (1837-1841), offered to anyone who could read through opaque bodies. The commission never attended a single official experiment: three candidates were “examined” before the prize was withdrawn, although preparatory sessions with Léonide Pigeaire had convinced scientists of the standing of the physicist François Arago. Berna answered by offering a counter-prize some seventeen times larger to anyone who could prove that one sees perfectly well with the eyes properly covered. Nobody collected either sum, and the question was declared settled. Then, on 15 June 1842, the Académie de médecine resolved to concern itself with animal magnetism no longer. That was not an experimental result: it was a door closed from the inside, and it delayed serious study for decades — the work resumed only through Braid in Britain, and later through Liébeault, the Nancy school and Charcot.

This is why the history matters to a practitioner, and not only to a historian. As the philosopher Bertrand Méheust has shown, a disqualification is not a refutation: when a body of knowledge threatens the frame of a discipline, the discipline develops ways of setting it aside — and what is reabsorbed later is recovered, filtered and recalibrated, with part of the original knowledge lost in the passage^[11].

How did mesmerism become hypnosis?

Through the nineteenth century the practice split. In England John Elliotson defended it against his profession; in India James Esdaile performed hundreds of surgical operations on mesmerised patients, in an era before chemical anaesthesia. Then in the 1840s the Scottish surgeon James Braid gave the phenomenon a new name and a nervous, physiological explanation, coining neuro-hypnotism — soon shortened to hypnotism. It is like renaming a river once you have mapped its source: the water is the same, only the explanation is new. Braid had learned from a French magnetiser, Charles Lafontaine, whose demonstrations he attended in Manchester in 1841^[5].

Braid’s method began with a fixed gaze on a bright object held slightly above eye level. That detail matters more than the name change: at the very moment animal magnetism became respectable, what it kept was the eyes.

Where does fascination come from?

The line that most concerns our School also runs through the magnetisers who gave public demonstrations. The greatest of them was Donato — Alfred-Edouard D’Hont, born at Chênée near Liège in 1845, who gave his first sessions there in the 1870s and then moved on to Paris^[6]. He worked on healthy volunteers, in an instant, and he named his method fascination. In April 1886 his demonstrations at the Scribe Theatre in Turin divided the city, the newspapers and the physicians^[7].

Fascination is the eye-to-eye branch of the tradition: it produces a deep, absorbed trance instantly, on ordinary waking people, through the gaze alone — which is why it cannot be learned from a page. It is like a yawn crossing a room: nobody explains it, and it arrives anyway — except that here the operator chooses it, and can direct it. This is exactly the point where reading stops and transmission begins: the gaze does not travel in books. It goes from person to person, which is why our teaching happens live.

From Donato the line continues in Italy through Erminio Di Pisa and Master Virgilio Torrizzano, who initiated Prof. Dr. Marco Paret into hypnotic fascination^[8]. Our School is the current link in that chain.

What remains of Mesmer today?

The question of the fluid is still open. The 1784 commissioners found no evidence for it, but a fluidist current has never stopped: it runs through nineteenth-century magnetism and continues today in pranotherapy, where the Florentine neuropsychiatrist Luigi Lapi devised the Chirtest to record and measure what practitioners emit, and concluded — against the common belief of his own field — that heat is not the therapeutic factor^[10]. We do not settle that debate here: we note that it is open, and that no experiment has closed it. What is beyond dispute is everything Mesmer found while looking for the fluid: that a state can be induced without words; that gesture, rhythm, breath and gaze do the work; that the operator‘s own state is the instrument.

Modern research has been catching up for two decades. Live eye contact is accompanied by measurable coordination between two nervous systems^[4], and high-density EEG shows hypnotic induction unfolding as a progressive reorganisation of attention networks^[9]. The old masters had no instruments. They had two centuries of careful observation, and they were describing the same thing.

It is like an old map drawn before anyone had surveying tools: the coastline is recognisable, even where the reasons given for its shape are wrong.

How can you begin?

Stand in front of a mirror and look at yourself between the eyes, without blinking. Notice the changes in your own sensations. That is the beginning: the exercise every mesmerist since Mesmer has passed through, and it costs nothing to try.

Then watch the practical demonstrations on our YouTube channel, and see the full path in the Mesmerismus® training of our School. The rest is transmitted the way it always has been: in person.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Mesmerismus® the same as hypnosis?

Not quite. Hypnosis, as Braid renamed it, developed towards verbal suggestion and the closed eyes of induction. Mesmerismus® opens the non-verbal and energetic side: passes, touch, presence, and the gaze. The two overlap, but a mesmerist works before words, and often in seconds.

Were Mesmer’s phenomena real?

Yes: he was right about the phenomena. The 1784 commission was convinced that no magnetic fluid existed because it had no instruments — not even epistemological ones — with which to examine it, yet it confirmed that the effects were real, attributing them solely to imagination. In modern terms that means expectation, attention and relationship, while leaving out both the energetic side, for which the science of the day had no paradigm, and the neurological one, which polyvagal theory has since clarified.

What is fascination?

The technique named by Donato in the nineteenth century: producing a deep, absorbed trance through eye contact alone, on ordinary waking subjects, in an instant. It is the branch of the tradition whose secrets our School has inherited and continues to teach.

Can Mesmerismus® be learned from books?

Exactly as much as you can learn to swim by reading. History, principles and exercises can be learned from books — this page is one of them. The transmission itself passes only through the gaze and through the state of the person teaching, which is why every generation of this lineage has learned it from another person in the room, face to face.

In the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret this heritage is taught as an art of self-knowledge, communication, wellbeing and personal growth. It is not a medical treatment and makes no therapeutic claims.

Notes and References

[1] Mesmer, F. A. (1766). De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum, doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna; Mesmer, F. A. (1779). Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, Paris. Mesmer was born at Iznang in 1734 and died at Meersburg in 1815.
[2] Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal (1784), Paris — the royal commission of Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly and Guillotin.
[3] Puységur, A. M. J. de Chastenet, Marquis de (1784). Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal — the case of Victor Race and magnetic somnambulism.
[4] Hirsch, J. et al. (2017). «Frontal, temporal and parietal systems synchronize within and across brains during live eye-to-eye contact». NeuroImage, 157, 314–330; Palumbo, R. V. et al. (2017). «Interpersonal autonomic physiology: a systematic review». Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(2), 99–141.
[5] Braid, J. (1843). Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, London — the coining of neuro-hypnotism and the method of visual fixation.
[6] Alfred-Edouard D’Hont, known as Donato (Chênée, Liège, 1845 – Paris, 1900), Belgian magnetiser who began his public sessions at Liège in the 1870s and named his method fascination.
[7] Turin, April 1886: Donato’s demonstrations of fascination at the Teatro Scribe on healthy volunteers, widely debated in the press and among physicians.
[8] Paret, M., writings and seminars on hypnotic fascination — the lineage through Erminio Di Pisa and Master Virgilio Torrizzano.
[10] Foissac, P. (1833). Rapports et discussions de l’Académie royale de médecine sur le magnétisme animal, Paris — including the Husson report read on 21 and 28 June 1831; on 15 June 1842 the Académie resolved to consider the subject no further. On the living fluidist current: Lapi, L., Pranoterapia scientifica. Misurare i poteri di guarigione con il chirtest, Xenia, and Effetto Prana; Todeschini, M., Psicobiofisica; Margnelli, M. (CNR), on the physiology of altered states.
[12] Berna, D. J. (1838). Magnétisme animal. Examen et réfutation du rapport fait par M. E. F. Dubois (d’Amiens) à l’Académie royale de médecine le 8 août 1837, Paris, Rouvier — 116 pages; on the composition of the commission and the half-dozen experiments, see also Méheust, vol. 1, and Loubert, J.-B. (1844), Le magnétisme et le somnambulisme devant les corps savants, Paris, Baillière.
[11] Méheust, B. (1999). Somnambulisme et médiumnité (1784-1930), vol. 1 Le défi du magnétisme animal, vol. 2 Le choc des sciences psychiques, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
[9] «Decoding hypnotic consciousness: neural and experiential insights into induced and ideomotor suggestions» (2026). Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2026(1), niag019.

If the word mesmerised has always struck you as more than a figure of speech, you were right. There is a technique behind it, it has a name, and it has been kept alive for two hundred and fifty years by people who passed it hand to hand — and eye to eye.