A hand placed on the forehead, and a person goes down into trance without a word: this is the magnetic touch, the oldest and most original gesture of the magnetic tradition, and the one that closes the circle opened by the gaze and carried by the passes. The old magnetisers used it constantly — a hand on the forehead, two hands on the shoulders, a palm on the solar plexus — and they hypnotised quickly and deeply, often reaching states that today’s hypnotists rarely see. This once-secret art is the living centre of the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret, and anyone can learn to induce trance with the hand, easily, when guided.

Think of the last time a hand rested on your shoulder at the right moment. You did not decide to relax; your breath simply dropped, your shoulders came down, and something in you said yes before you had thought anything. A mother’s hand on a feverish forehead does the same, and it did so long before medicine had a name for it. Animals know it too: a horse or a dog settles under a calm hand, and animals cannot be talked into anything. So what does a hand actually say to a body, and how does the tradition turn that into an instrument?

What is the magnetic touch?

A simple definition: the magnetic touch is the contact of the operator‘s hand with a precise point of the person’s body — the forehead, the shoulders, the solar plexus, the hands — made with a steady presence and a clear intention, so that the person’s state changes. Nothing is pressed and nothing is asked. In the tradition the touch is the third instrument of non-verbal hypnosis: the hypnotic gaze opens the door, the magnetic passes carry the person down, and the touch fixes the state and deepens it. It is like a chord at the end of a phrase of music: the notes before it have prepared the ear, and the chord is what holds.

The magnetisers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries described it in detail. Deleuze opens the classical instruction with the hands on the person’s shoulders and the thumbs in contact, held there until a common warmth is felt, before the passes even begin^[1]; Lafontaine and Du Potet return again and again to the contact of the hand as the moment in which the operator‘s energy — the fluid, as they called it — passes most directly^[2][3]. Animal magnetism is the trunk of this whole tradition, and hypnosis, which came later, is one of its branches; the touch belongs to the trunk.

How does the hand induce trance?

How can a hand do what a long induction script cannot? By speaking to the body at a level where sentences do not arrive. 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 hand transmit it. A hesitant hand is felt as hesitant; a tense hand transmits tension; a hand that is quiet, warm and present transmits exactly that, and the person’s system takes it as a signal that it may let go. It is like leaning against a wall you know will hold: you do not decide to rest your weight on it — the body checks, finds it solid, and rests.

That is why we do not give you a sequence of points to press 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 touch: stand in front of a mirror and look at yourself between the eyes, without blinking, noticing what changes in your sensations. The hand will carry what you have found there.

What does the person feel?

What people describe, in the old reports and in our courses, is remarkably constant, and it is best given as possibilities rather than as a law. Under a hand on the forehead many report the eyelids growing heavy and a quiet descending from the head into the body; under two hands on the shoulders, a weight that finally lets itself be carried, and the breath dropping; under a palm on the solar plexus, a warmth spreading outwards and a deep, unusual calm^[1][4]. Some feel a tingling, some a pleasant heaviness in the arms and legs, many a spacious emptiness and a persistent interest in the person whose hand it is. The face changes — the blinking becomes rarer, the features smooth out — and at a certain depth the person stops following the outer world. These are signals we notice in a person who is going down; each system answers in its own way, and the operator learns to read them.

Why does touch act before words?

Why does the body listen to a hand at a level where it does not listen to a sentence? Because touch was our first language, months before words, and that channel stays open for the whole of life. Modern neuroscience describes it precisely. The skin carries a second system beside the one that tells us where we are touched: slow, gentle, warm contact 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^[5][6][7]. A supportive hand measurably lowers the brain’s response to threat: in a well-known experiment, holding a trusted hand reduced the activity of the threat circuits while the person waited for a mild shock^[8]. And the space around the body registers an approaching hand before contact, through the networks of the peripersonal space^[9].

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 under his hand^[10][11]. 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^[2][12]. The two descriptions arrive together, and the practitioner meets them as one fact.

Where does the magnetic touch come from?

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 and every temple. Mesmer gave the gesture a method and a name in 1779^[13]; Puységur obtained the lucid sleep with the hands alone in 1784^[14]; Deleuze and Du Potet wrote the manuals that magnetisers used for a century^[1][3]; and when James Braid, in 1843, renamed the field hypnotism, he kept the contact of the hand among his means of induction^[15]. The tradition continued: 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^[16]. The full story is on the page on the history of mesmerism; for those who look further, beyond the ordinary, the tradition keeps a more mysterious side of the work of the hands, described on the page on the secret power of the gaze.

How to learn to induce trance with the hand?

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 contact is felt on your own body and corrected on your own hands. The touch does 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 magnetic presence and the mental void; the demonstrations are on our YouTube channel, where the hand is shown rather than described.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the magnetic touch applied?

The tradition uses a few precise points: the forehead, the shoulders, the solar plexus, the hands. Each has its own effect and its own moment, and the operator learns live which one the person’s system is asking for. The point matters less than the presence of the hand that touches it.

Is the magnetic touch the same as a hypnotic induction by touch?

It is its root. Classical hypnosis kept a few touches — on the forehead, on the arm — as signals inside a verbal script. In the magnetic tradition the touch is the instrument itself: it works on the body before the mind, and it carries the operator‘s state directly.

Do you need 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 hand. The gesture is the last thing you learn, and the easiest.

Is it safe?

The magnetic touch produces a state of receptive absorption and deep rest. It is not a medical treatment and does not replace medical or psychological care. In our School it is taught as an art of self-knowledge, communication and presence, and only to people who promise to use it 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. Deleuze, J. P. F. (1825). Instruction pratique sur le magnétisme animal. Paris, Dentu — the opening contact of the hands and thumbs, and the effects reported.
2. Lafontaine, C. (1847). L’art de magnétiser. Paris, Baillière.
3. Du Potet de Sennevoy, J. (1846). Manuel de l’étudiant magnétiseur. Paris, Baillière.
4. Guidi, F. (1860). Il magnetismo animale considerato secondo le leggi della natura. Milan — Italian accounts of the sensations reported under magnetisation.
5. McGlone, F., Wessberg, J. & Olausson, H. (2014). «Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling». Neuron, 82(4), 737–755.
6. 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.
7. Morrison, I., Löken, L. S. & Olausson, H. (2010). «The skin as a social organ». Experimental Brain Research, 204(3), 305–314.
8. Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S. & Davidson, R. J. (2006). «Lending a hand: social regulation of the neural response to threat». Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039.
9. Serino, A. (2019). «Peripersonal space (PPS) as a multisensory interface between the individual and the environment». Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 99, 138–159.
10. Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York, Norton.
11. 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.
12. Méheust, B. (1999). Somnambulisme et médiumnité, 2 vols. Le Plessis-Robinson, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
13. Mesmer, F. A. (1779). Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal. Geneva–Paris, Didot.
14. Puységur, A. M. J. de Chastenet, Marquis de (1784). Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal. Paris.
15. Braid, J. (1843). Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep. London, Churchill.
16. Paret, M. (2011). Training Manual: Mesmerismus – Fascination – Presence. ISI-CNV, Université Européenne.

A quiet hand on the forehead changes a person’s state before any word is spoken. That is the magnetic touch, and that is what it has always been: the gesture that closes the circle of gaze and passes, carried by the operator’s presence, working through the oldest channel of human communication — the skin. It is learned live, hand on hand, and it is still being taught.