Mesmeric passes — magnetic passes — are the slow movement of the operator‘s hands along another person’s body, at a small distance or in light contact, that can bring that person into a deep and pleasant trance without a single word. They are the oldest and most original instrument of the magnetic tradition, older than the gaze and older than any script, and the one that today’s manuals describe least. The old magnetisers simply moved their hands and the person went down, quickly and deeply — and many of them reported effects they catalogued as far beyond ordinary sleep. This once-secret art is the living centre of the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret, and anyone can learn it easily when guided.

Have you ever felt someone’s hand come close to your face without touching it — and noticed that your whole body had already reacted? Or felt a friend’s palm on your shoulder and, before any word, let your breath drop? That is the material the passes are made of. Any animal trainer knows it: a horse settles under a slow hand long before it understands a command, and animals cannot be talked into anything. So what actually passes between a hand and a body in that silent space?

What are mesmeric passes, and why are they called magnetic?

A simple definition: a pass is a movement of the hands that travels along the body, usually from the head downwards, and communicates a direction to the person’s system. The old authors said the name came from the gesture itself: the hands pass in front of the person being magnetised, again and again, patiently^[2]. Magnetic passes can be made in contact, or in the space around the body at the distance of a few centimetres; they can be long, from the head to the feet, or short, over one area; they can be slow and descending, which the tradition used to calm and deepen, or quick and transverse, which it used to bring the person back^[2][3].

They are called magnetic because Franz Anton Mesmer, who made a method of them in eighteenth-century Vienna and Paris, described what moved between operator and patient as a fluid, comparable to magnetism^[1]. He himself was clear that the word was an image, a way of pointing at something felt: animal magnetism is the trunk of this whole tradition, and hypnosis, which came later, is one of its branches. The passes belong to the trunk.

How are magnetic passes done?

How does a hand say something to a body? Not by pressing. The classical instruction, from Deleuze onwards, is almost disarmingly simple: sit in front of the person, collect yourself, let the hands descend slowly from the head along the arms and the body, keep the movement even, and repeat it for a long time without hurry^[2]. Du Potet and Lafontaine add the detail that matters most: the hands are only the visible part; what the person receives is the operator‘s attention, his steadiness, his presence^[3][4]. It is like carrying a full cup across a room: the skill is not in the arm, it is in the quiet that keeps the water still.

In the Mesmerismus® the central principle is this: the operator first learns to produce and maintain a quality of state in himself, and only afterwards lets the hands guide the other person towards a corresponding change. A hesitant hand is felt as hesitant; a tense hand transmits tension. That is why we do not give you a sequence of gestures to copy from a page. The gesture is taught live, corrected on your own hands, and it grows out of a presence you build first — here lies a great secret, the part almost everybody skips because they do not know it. The first exercise, from Prof. Dr. Paret’s books, is not even a pass: stand in front of a mirror and look at yourself between the eyes, without blinking, noticing what changes in your sensations. The hands will carry what you have found there.

What does the person feel during a pass?

What the old reports describe, and what people still describe in our courses, is remarkably constant. Some report warmth following the hand; some a tingling, a light pressure, a heaviness settling in the arms and legs; many a deep, unusual quiet, a pleasant emptiness that is in fact spacious, and a persistent interest in the person whose hands are moving^[2][5]. The face changes — the eyelids grow heavy, the blinking becomes rarer, the breathing drops — and at a certain depth the person may stop following the outer world altogether. Puységur, Mesmer’s pupil, called this magnetic somnambulism, and obtained it with the hands alone^[6][7].

These are possibilities, not guarantees: each person’s system answers in its own way, and the tradition itself insisted that the same passes act differently on different people^[2]. Two things, however, are constant. The change is visible from the outside, and it happens before any explanation. It is like when someone slowly draws the curtains in a bright room: nobody tells you to relax, and yet the whole body does.

Why does a hand act before words?

Why does the body listen to a hand at a level where it does not listen to a sentence? Because the first dialogue of every human being is made of hands, warmth and breath, months before words, and that channel stays open for the whole of life. Modern neuroscience studies exactly this. The space immediately around the body — the peripersonal space — is a zone where sight, movement and touch are integrated by dedicated networks, so that a hand approaching the face or the chest is registered by the nervous system before any contact^[8][9]. And touch itself has a second channel: slow, gentle, warm stroking activates the C-tactile fibres, studied for their role in pleasantness, in the sense of the body from within, and in the regulation of the autonomic system^[10][11]. A slow pass, made a few centimetres from the skin or in light contact, speaks to precisely these systems.

There are two levels here, and both are real to anyone who practises. The neurological level, best described today by polyvagal theory: face, hands and voice belong to a system that signals safety or danger below any conscious decision, and the operator‘s state regulates the state of the person in front of him^[12][13]. And the energetic level, which the tradition has always described through what is felt — warmth, current, pressure, energy — and which the fluidist current, that is, the researchers who hold that a real energy passes between people, has never stopped investigating^[1][14]. The two accounts are not rivals; they are two descriptions of one fact, and the practitioner meets them together.

Where do the passes come from, and why is the tradition still so powerful?

For the Egyptians the hand laid on the sick was a power of the gods, and the laying on of hands runs through every ancient medicine. Mesmer gave the gesture a method and a name in 1779^[1]; Puységur discovered in 1784 that the same hands could produce a lucid sleep^[6]; Deleuze in 1825 and Du Potet in 1846 wrote the practical manuals that magnetisers used for a century^[2][3]; Lafontaine demonstrated the passes in public across Europe, and it was watching him in Manchester, in 1841, that James Braid began the experiments that led him to rename the field hypnotism^[4][15]. The English-speaking world kept the word: Vincent, in 1893, still describes the mesmeric passes, positive and negative, as the first method of induction^[15].

The tradition never stopped. In Italy it passed from Donato to Erminio Di Pisa and to Master Virgilio Torrizzano, who initiated Prof. Dr. Paret into hypnotic fascination and into the magnetic work of the hands, and it is now taught in the Mesmerismus® school, which a recent English handbook on the subject describes as a modern school of the art headed by Dr. Marco Paret^[16][17]. It is powerful today for the same reason it was powerful in 1779: it works on the body before it works on the mind, and it does so without depending on the person’s beliefs. The full story is on the page on the history of mesmerism.

How do passes, touch and gaze work together in non-verbal hypnosis?

The passes are one of the instruments of non-verbal hypnosis, and they rarely work alone. The hypnotic gaze opens the door: the purely hypnotic gaze blocks, like the snake with the little bird; the magnetic gaze fascinates and attracts. The passes then carry the person down, and the magnetic touch on the forehead, the shoulders or the solar plexus closes the circle. It is like a piece of music: the gaze is the first note that catches the ear, the passes are the rhythm that carries you, the touch is the chord that holds. Beneath all three there is the same thing, the operator‘s presence — and, for those who look further, beyond the ordinary, the tradition keeps a more mysterious side of this work, described on the page on the secret power of the gaze.

How can you learn the art of mesmeric passes?

Like swimming: by doing it, next to someone who already knows how. The transmission passes from the master’s hands and eyes to the student’s — that is, through a precise, live teaching, in which the gesture is shown, felt on your own body, and corrected on your own hands. The passes do not travel in books, and months of solitary reading and practice do not replace a few days of guided work in the Mesmerismus® training. What the training builds, together with the gesture, is a powerful triad — unstoppable confidence, self-esteem, security — because the work develops the essence of the operator, and you will change intimately, inside, through this practice. The related disciplines are the mental void and magnetic presence; the demonstrations are on our YouTube channel, where the passes are shown rather than described.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do mesmeric passes require physical contact?

Both forms exist and both are taught. Passes at a short distance from the body work on the peripersonal space; passes in light contact add the affective channel of touch. The tradition used both, choosing according to the person and the moment, and the operator learns to feel which one the person’s system is asking for.

Can anyone learn magnetic passes, or is it a gift?

You need a guide. What is mistaken for a gift is a person who already holds a stable presence without knowing how. The skill divides into parts that can be taught: your own state first, then the quality of attention, then the hands. The gesture is the last thing you learn, and the easiest.

Is there a scientific explanation for what people feel?

There are two, and they arrive together. The neurological one: peripersonal space, affective touch and the autonomic regulation described by polyvagal theory. The energetic one, which the tradition has described for two and a half centuries and which the fluidist researchers still investigate. In our School both are named, and neither is closed.

Are mesmeric passes safe?

The passes produce a state of receptive absorption and deep rest. They are not a medical treatment and do not replace medical or psychological care. In our School they are taught as an art of self-knowledge, communication and presence, and only to people who promise to use them for the good — the power of a technique makes the quality of the person using it even more important.

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. (1779). Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal. Geneva–Paris, Didot — the twenty-seven propositions.
2. Deleuze, J. P. F. (1825). Instruction pratique sur le magnétisme animal. Paris, Dentu — the classical description of the passes, their kinds and their effects.
3. Du Potet de Sennevoy, J. (1846). Manuel de l’étudiant magnétiseur. Paris, Baillière.
4. Lafontaine, C. (1847). L’art de magnétiser, ou le magnétisme animal considéré sous le point de vue théorique, pratique et thérapeutique. Paris, Baillière.
5. Guidi, F. (1860). Il magnetismo animale considerato secondo le leggi della natura. Milan — nineteenth-century Italian accounts of the sensations reported during magnetisation.
6. Puységur, A. M. J. de Chastenet, Marquis de (1784). Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal. Paris.
7. Crabtree, A. (1993). From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven, Yale University Press.
8. Serino, A. (2019). «Peripersonal space (PPS) as a multisensory interface between the individual and the environment». Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 99, 138–159.
9. Brozzoli, C., Makin, T. R., Cardinali, L., Holmes, N. P. & Farnè, A. (2011). «Peripersonal space: a multisensory interface for body–object interactions», in The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes. Boca Raton, CRC Press.
10. McGlone, F., Wessberg, J. & Olausson, H. (2014). «Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling». Neuron, 82(4), 737–755.
11. Löken, L. S., Wessberg, J., Morrison, I., McGlone, F. & Olausson, H. (2009). «Coding of pleasant touch by unmyelinated afferents in humans». Nature Neuroscience, 12(5), 547–548.
12. Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York, Norton.
13. On the open debate: Grossman, P. et al. (2026). «Why the polyvagal theory is untenable». Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 23(1), 100–112; and, in the same issue, Porges, S. W. (2026). «When a critique becomes untenable», 113–128. The discussion concerns the physiological model, not the observation that hands, face and voice regulate another person’s state.
14. Méheust, B. (1999). Somnambulisme et médiumnité, 2 vols. Le Plessis-Robinson, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond — on the epistemology of the controversy over animal magnetism.
15. Vincent, R. H. (1893). The Elements of Hypnotism. London, Kegan Paul — chapter IV, on the mesmeric passes, positive and negative, and on Braid’s method; Braid, J. (1843). Neurypnology. London, Churchill.
16. Paret, M. (2011). Training Manual: Mesmerismus – Fascination – Presence. ISI-CNV, Université Européenne.
17. Gerrard-Barlow, L. Modern Day Mesmerism — on the contemporary school of the art headed by Dr. Marco Paret.

A hand moving slowly near a body changes that body’s state before any word is spoken. That is what the mesmeric passes are, and what they have always been: the most original instrument of the magnetic tradition, carried by the operator’s presence, working through the oldest channels of human communication — distance, movement, warmth, rhythm and touch. It is learned live, hand to hand and eye to eye, and it is still being taught.