Imagine this – you are sitting in a theatre and you find you are absolutely “mesmerised” by the speaker. Chances are you won’t dance, sleep, swoon, or fall into convulsions. But if Franz Anton Mesmer was addressing the audience, such behaviour would not be unusual. The word ‘mesmerise’ has lived on, but who was the person behind it? Why was he so famous?
The concerned physician
Mesmer, a visionary 18th century physician and healer achieved remarkable cures. He was an unusual man who was deeply concerned by the dreadful diseases people were suffering from, and highly critical of current approaches to medicine. He thought the use of bleeding, purgatives and opiates were often more painful and terrifying than the diseases themselves. So he set out to develop a method to relieve the suffering of his patients in as pain-free a manner as possible.
Animal Magnetism
Mesmer believed in an invisible, curative fluid or energy pervading the universe that influenced the human body. Highly influenced by the work of Isaac Newton and the theory of gravity, he theorised that the “tidal” influences of the planets also operate on the human body through a universal force, which he termed “animal magnetism”. According to Mesmer, an unbalanced supply of healing energy in the body would be the difference between health and illness. What he was describing is a general energy within a Western cosmological view, close to the Chinese Chi or the Indian Prana, but turned pragmatically towards healing. Consequently, he spent a great deal of time and effort in trying to master that “invisible fluid.”
The Successor of Paracelsus and van Helmont
Mesmer did not invent his idea; he inherited it, and then changed the way it was applied. He is the successor of Paracelsus and of Jan Baptist van Helmont, and the difference between them tells you exactly what mesmerism is.
Paracelsus, in the sixteenth century, treated the body as a map of correspondences: particular organs answered to particular states of mind, and each was linked to a planet — the heart to the Sun, the brain to the Moon, the liver to Jupiter, the spleen to Saturn, the kidneys to Venus[11]. He stimulated those organs directly, with substances, with minerals, with magnets. Van Helmont went a step further and located the agent in the living being itself: what he called the magnale magnum, and the ferment that gives a direction to matter without being matter — an influence, he argued, that passes between living bodies and can act at a distance[12].
Mesmer took the stimulation of Paracelsus and removed the substance. He worked on the same organs and the same states, but without pressing them: with the hands held close to the body, at a short distance, and with the long passes — what we teach today as proximal touch, a touch that is not a touch. This is why he never disowned magnets: like van Helmont’s ferment, they gave a direction. He simply concluded that a living human being gives it far more powerfully.
The idea that emotional states inhabit specific organs will be familiar to anyone who knows Chinese medicine, where anger belongs to the liver, fear to the kidneys, grief to the lungs. The resemblance is real and worth noticing. But the working method is not the same: acupuncture reaches the organ through the point and the needle, while the mesmerist reaches it through proximal touch, through the passes and through his own state — and this is what makes the results so immediate. It is a different system, not a Western translation of an Eastern one.
What the Founder of Homeopathy Said About This
The most interesting endorsement came from a man with no reason to give it. Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, devoted two aphorisms of the Organon to mesmerism, calling it “a marvellous, priceless gift of God to mankind”, and describing an action that works by contact, without contact, and even at a distance[13].
The reason he recognised it is precisely the reason it interests us. A homeopathic remedy acts on the suffering organ without stimulating it materially: the substance is no longer there in any ordinary sense, and what remains is a direction given to the vital force. The mesmeric pass does the same thing with the hand — it reaches the organ that suffers without pressing it. Hahnemann placed mesmerism alongside his remedies, and among therapeutic agents rather than curiosities, on exactly that ground[13].
It follows, and the founder of homeopathy said it himself, that mesmeric technique can be a sound complement to homeopathic treatment rather than a rival to it. Two methods, one logic: act on the direction, not on the mass.
Non-Verbal Hypnotic Powers
Mesmer believed cures could be effected by having patients do things such as sit with their feet in a fountain of magnetised water while holding cables attached to magnetised trees. Mesmer then came to believe that magnetic powers resided in himself, and during highly fashionable curative sessions in Paris he induced in his patients reactions ranging from sleeping or dancing to convulsions. These reactions have often been explained as hypnotic effects that Mesmer was at first unaware he possessed. They were real, and today they are read on two levels at once: the neurological one, described by polyvagal theory, and the energetic one, which the tradition has always described in terms of what is felt.
Intense experiences
In the past, when modern neurology was not yet developed, the method Mesmer succeeded in developing was defined as: The capacity of raising the emotional state of an individual, or a crowd, to an abnormal, but controllable intensity. Music, which plays a role in the control of the mind and nervous system of people, was a tool used by Mesmer to raise this emotional state. Today we understand that his results can be explained through polyvagal theory as well: a real neurological change was taking place[6].
Mesmer’s breakthrough case
Mesmer’s devotion to his patients was quite extraordinary. His breakthrough case was that of Franzl Oesterline, a 27 year old woman suffering from what he described as a convulsive malady: “the most troublesome symptoms of which was that the blood rushed to her head and there set up the most cruel toothaches and earaches, followed by delirium, rage, vomiting and swooning”. These symptoms were so severe that Fraulein Oesterline moved into Mesmer’s house to receive round-the-clock care.
Mesmer effected a cure by using a magnet to disrupt the gravitational tides adversely affecting his patient. He successfully induced in Fraulein Oesterline the sensation of a fluid draining rapidly from her body, taking her illness with it. Her recovery after that was complete and virtually instantaneous.
Non-Verbal Hypnotic Suggestion
From one contemporary perspective, Mesmer’s results have been explained as hypnotic suggestion — an account that covers only a part of the phenomena. Even Mesmer realised that the magnet probably had to do with only a part of the cure. He never disowned magnets: he came to think that they gave a direction — much as van Helmont’s ferment was said to do[3] — and that the human body could do the same, and do it more powerfully. The magnet was simply a device that allowed this to happen — like a conductor’s baton: the baton produces no sound, and yet the orchestra follows it; the magnet gave a direction to the patient’s system, and the human presence was what made it work along with the complex and lengthy sequence of hand gestures and touch known as the “mesmeric pass”.
Mesmer went on to achieve similarly impressive results with other patients, claiming cures for blindness, paralysis, convulsions and many other debilitating conditions. He became a celebrity and travelled extensively giving dramatic demonstrations of his techniques and powers at the courts of the European nobility.
Hostile reception
Mesmer’s public demonstrations, and above all the fact that he obtained results without conventional medical techniques, may well have contributed to the hostile reception he received from the medical establishment of the day. Whatever the case, his life and career became plagued with controversy. Three commissions were appointed one after another — in 1784, in 1826, and again in 1837 — precisely because none of them managed to agree or to explain what was happening; the second, under Husson, was favourable, and the Académie refused to print it. To cite only the first, as is usually done, is a falsification of the historical record: the full account is in the full history of animal magnetism.
Ancient practice
Today we have come to learn that hypnosis and trance states are fundamental human traits, which have been around for as long as humanity itself. Ancient texts from Egypt, China, Greece and Rome describe practices that today we might call “hypnotic”. For example, a Third Century papyrus scroll discovered at Thebes describes a young slave boy being entranced by the flickering flames of an oil lamp in order to receive advice from an oracle. Mesmer was the first to lead hypnotism out of the realms of the occult and into scientific study,
The Doctor’s Legacy
Mesmer’s legacy persisted, into the nineteenth century and beyond, as arguments over his techniques shaped the development of hypnosis as we know it today. Mesmer is considered the early pioneer of modern hypnotism — though animal magnetism is wider than hypnosis: hypnosis is one branch of it, beside magnetism proper, which is still practised, the crises, and the part that passed into what became psychology. The word “mesmerise” having shed its reference to the early pioneer of modern hypnotism, can have meanings such as: to enthrall, hypnotise or spellbind and lives on in our vocabulary.
What survives of Mesmer in our School
One part of his work never became a museum piece: the gaze. Mesmer’s patients described the fixed, steady look as the strongest part of the treatment, and in the nineteenth century Donato named that branch fascination. From Donato the line runs through Erminio Di Pisa and Master Virgilio Torrizzano to Prof. Dr. Marco Paret, and it is what we teach today as Mesmerismus®: the non-verbal and energetic side of this heritage, worked on the body and through the eyes.
It is like an old and powerful craft passed from hand to hand: what survives is not the workshop, it is the skill. You can watch it demonstrated on our YouTube channel, and follow the complete path in the Mesmerismus® training. The transmission itself happens in person, because the gaze does not travel in books.
Notes and References
[1] Mesmer, F. A. (1766). De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum, doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna — the planetary “tides” acting on the human body; 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] Franzl Oesterline (Franziska Österlin), Vienna, 1774: the convulsive illness and the magnet treatment described by Mesmer himself in the Mémoire.
[3] van Helmont, J. B. (1648). Ortus medicinae, Amsterdam — the ferment and the magnale magnum, the subtle influence passing between living bodies; with Paracelsus, Robert Fludd and William Maxwell (De medicina magnetica, 1679), this is the line Mesmer inherited, the one the alchemists would have called the way of Mercury.
[4] Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal (1784), Paris — Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly and Guillotin. Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, on the parallel Royal Society of Medicine commission, refused to sign and published the only favourable report, arguing that a physical influence of one person on another must be admitted.
[5] Foissac, P. (1833). Rapports et discussions de l’Académie royale de médecine sur le magnétisme animal, Paris — the Husson report read on 21 and 28 June 1831, favourable and never printed by the Académie; the third inquiry, under Dubois d’Amiens, followed in 1837, and on 15 June 1842 the Académie resolved to consider the subject no further.
[6] Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory, New York, Norton — the social engagement system of face, eyes and voice, and the physiology of the states Mesmer produced.
[7] Papyri Graecae Magicae (PGM), the Greek magical papyri of Roman Egypt — lamp and bowl divination with a young medium, the practice described in the Theban scroll.
[8] Braid, J. (1843). Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, London — the renaming of the field and the method of visual fixation, after Braid attended the demonstrations of the French magnetiser Charles Lafontaine in Manchester in 1841.
[9] Alfred-Edouard D’Hont, known as Donato (Chênée, Liège, 1845 – Paris, 1900), who named the eye-to-eye branch fascination; his demonstrations at the Teatro Scribe in Turin, April 1886.
[11] Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541), Archidoxa and Astronomia magna — the correspondence of organs, temperaments and planets, and the treatment of the organ through its correspondences.
[12] van Helmont, J. B. (1648). Ortus medicinae, Amsterdam — the magnale magnum, the ferment as a director of matter, and the magnetic influence between living bodies acting at a distance.
[13] Hahnemann, S. (1842). Organon der Heilkunst, 6th edition, aphorisms §288–289 on mesmerism — placed among the therapeutic agents beside mineral magnetism (§287) and massage (§290).
[10] 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 — measurable coordination between two nervous systems in live eye contact.
