MESMERISM

And the Magic of Eliphas Lévi

European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism 2013

Gothenburg
 MESMERISM

 Scholars such as Goodrick-Clarke and McIntosh have argued that

mesmerism had an important influence on French occultism.
 Franz Antone Mesmer (1734-1815) developed a concept of the
influence of the planets on the human body and an invisible fluid
within the body.
 He believed knowledge of this astral fluid could be applied in
healing.
FRANZ ANTONE MESMER
 ANIMAL MAGNETISM

 Mesmer had taken a medical degree at the University of Vienna

where he wrote a thesis entitled de Planetarum Influxu in Corpe Humano
in 1766.

 Theorized that if the ebb and flow of the astral fluid was out of
line with universal rhythms, nervous or mental disorders and sickness
would result.
 ANIMAL MAGNETISM

 Mesmer engaged with esoteric symbols.

 He would apply magnets to the body.

 Treatment rooms were bathed in soft light.

 Mesmer himself wore robes embroidered with occult symbols.

 He achieved some startling cures.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM
ANIMAL MAGNETISM
 ANIMAL MAGNETISM

 Techniques included stages of hypnosis or lucid consciousness

during which spiritualist phenomena could be channeled by
magnetized patients through the suggestion of the mesmerist.

 Mesmer’s approach remained controversial in Vienna.

 He treated patients in Germany, Switzerland, and Hungry in the

period of 1775-76.
 MESMERISM

 Frustrated by the skeptical rejection of his theories by medical

authorities of Vienna, Mesmer moved to Paris in 1778.
 Soon he was famous in Paris.
 Through his French disciple, Charles d’Eslon, Mesmer was
introduced to the chief medical personnel in France.
 However, the Paris medical faculty rejected his theories as had the
University of Vienna.
 MESMERISM

 Mainly through the influence of Marie Antoinette, a Royal

Commission was appointed from the French Academy of Sciences.

 It consisted of Benjamin Franklin, the infamous Dr. Guillotin, and

Antoine Lavoisier.

 Later, a panel from the Royal Medical Society also investigated

Mesmer’s work. Both judged animal magnetism to be fake or false.
 MESMERISM

 It has been argued by Jocelyn Godwin that today we live in a more

psychologically aware society and it is easier to appreciate the impact
he might have had on his patients through things such as the
atmosphere he created in his salons and the beliefs of his patients.

 In a more psychologically aware world, we know the importance of

the power of belief in healing.
 MESMERISM

 Godwin maintains that, ‘if we have this awareness, it is thanks to

those who followed in Mesmer’s footsteps and developed, in the teeth
of the medical establishment, the techniques of hypnosis and the
theory of the unconscious mind. No one had heard of those in 1784.’
• The Theosophical Enlightenment, 1994
 MESMERISM

 Robert Darnton claims that in the hands of radical mesmerists,

mesmerism became a camouflaged political theory.

 The mesmerism of the 1780s became enmeshed with political fads.

 By 1787, writers such as J.L. Cara argued that physical and social ills
could be cured by a combination of cold baths, hand washing, dieting,
and philosophical books.

 He claimed the American Revolution was a victory for virtue.

 MESMERISM

 Claimed that ‘Liberty is the principle of health!’

 He was impressed with the health of Americans.
 Believed that mesmeric fluid operated both as a physical and moral
force. Like Rousseau's Social Contract it links liberty with virtue.
 Darnton claims that mesmerism had taken such a grip on France
that its place in history cannot be limited to the 1780s. It continued to
mold popular attitudes well into the nineteenth century.
 MESMERISM

 Monroe argues that a “science of God” was created in France in

the nineteenth century by transforming metaphysics from a matter of
philosophical speculation to one of rigorous experimental study.

 These scientists were by no means isolated eccentrics and their

efforts to reach a new understanding of the beyond were part of a
wave of innovative religious thought and practice that first emerged
with mesmerism in the late eighteenth century.
 MESMERISM

 By the early 1850s, around the same time that spiritualism was making
its appearance, mesmerism and phrenology had become popular and
numerous mesmeric publications and journals were being circulated.

 Like spiritualism, mesmerism and phrenology were influenced by

science and religion. Butler argues that both blended into an appropriate,
accepted and desirable balance for the intellectual climate of the time.
 MESMERISM

 Butler maintains that all classes, but predominantly the middle class,
found in these scientifically based theories, rooted in a magical past, a
retreat from materialism and the demise of traditional religion.
 However, mesmerism found itself at odds with the growing
empiricism of the time.
 Goodrick-Clarke argues that Mesmer’s hypothesis, ‘was easily attacked
because his intangible, invisible fluid could not be detected by any known
means or instrument.’
ELIPHAS LÉVI
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1875) was born in Paris.

 He studied for the Catholic priesthood but was also known to
travel in left-wing and feminist circles.
 He published a series of radical texts in the 1840s that combined
social radicalism with a militant apocalyptic Christianity and was twice
imprisoned for subversive writings under the July Monarchy
(1830-1848).
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 In 1848 he ran unsuccessfully for election to the Constituent

Assembly and during the Revolution of 1848 he edited the short lived
Le Tribun du Peuple.
 The breakdown of republican institutions following the revolution
destroyed his faith in both socialism and democracy.
 His quest to bring order, harmony and justice to a troubled France
would eventually take him to mysticism.
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 Goodrick-Clarke argues that Lévi mixed the ideas of mesmerism

with his philosophy of magic, explaining all sympathetic magic in
terms of the “Astral Light” or “Great Magical Agent” described as a
subtle fluid that pervades the universe with four physical
manifestations in heat, light, electricity, and magnetism.

 The Astral Light can be affected by the human will and can act
upon the human imagination.
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 ‘even the most fluidic forms are immortal, subsisting always in the
permanence of their raison d’être, which is the combination of light
with the aggregated potencies of the molecules of the first substance.
Hence they are preserved in the astral fluid, and can be evoked and
reproduced according to the will of the sage.’
• Transcendental Magic, A.E. Waite
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 ‘There exists a force in Nature which is far more powerful than

steam, and by whose means a single man, who can master it and
knows how to direct it, might throw the world into confusion and
transform its face. The force was known to the ancients; it consists of
a universal agent whose supreme law is equilibrium, and whose
direction depends immediately on the Great Arcanum of
transcendent magic.’ The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 Lévi argues that ‘this agent, which barely manifests under the
uncertainties of the art of Mesmer and his followers, is precisely what
the medieval adepts called the first matter of the magnum opus.’

 He also refers to it as ‘this ambient and all-penetrating fluid.’

• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI
 this body of the Holy Ghost, which we call the Astral Light and the Universal Agent,
this electro-magnetic ether, this vital and caloric is represented on ancient monuments by
the girdle of Isis, which twines in a love-knot round two poles, by the bull-headed serpent,
by the serpent with the head of a goat or dog, in the ancient theogonies, and by the
serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn. It is the winged
dragon of Meda, the double serpent of caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it is
also the brazen snake of Moses, encircling the Tau, that is, the generative lingam; it is the
Hyle of the Gnostics, and the double tail which forms the legs of the solar cock of
Abroxos. Lastly, it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force which
souls must conquer, in order to detach themselves from the chains of earth.
• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 Lévi then explains that the Great Magic Agent is revealed by four
kinds of phenomena which he calls caloric, light, electricity, and
magnetism. He maintains that ‘these four imponderable fluids are,
therefore, the diverse manifestations of one and the same force,
which is the substance created by God before all else when he said
“Let there be Light!” and there was light.’
• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 Showing the influence of Kabbalah he states that ‘the Astral

Light or terrestrial fluid is saturated with images or reflections of
all kinds, which can be evoked by our soul and submitted to its
Diaphane as the Kabbalists call it.
• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 Finally, he says ‘Clairboyants merely evoke the images of places in

the Astral Light; they do not actually travel to those places, and they
can see nothing but what exists in this light, which is latent and acting
on the nerves, enabling somnambulists to perceive by means of
nerves only and without help of radiating light.’
• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 ‘Mesmer recovered the secret science of Nature, he was not its

inventor. The primeval one, and elementary substance whose
existence he proclaims in his Aphorisms, was well known to Hermes
and Pythagoras. Synesius who celebrates it in his hymns, discovered
its revelation among the Platonic reminiscences of the Alexandrian
School.’
• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 ‘the Astral Light has an immediate action on the nerves, which are
conductors in the animal economy, and convey it to the brain; so, in
the somnambulistic state, it is possible to see by the nerves, without
the need for radiating light, the astral fluid being a latent light, as
physics have recognized the existence of latent caloric.’
• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 ‘magic power extends further; but it is not only the pretended

magnetic fluid, it is the whole Astral Light, it is the element of
electricity and of thunder which can be placed at the disposal of the
human will. What must be done to acquire this formidable power?
Zoroaster tells us: we must be acquainted with those mysterious laws
of equilibrium which subject to the empire of good even the powers
of evil themselves’
• The Mysteries of Magic
 ELIPHAS LÉVI

 He goes on to argue that ‘the experiments of Mesmer and his

successors have proved the animal magnetism can communicate to
inert objects the life and will of man. There is, therefore, small room
for astonishment at the phenomenon, so frequent in our own days, of
speaking and moving tables.’
• The Mysteries of Magic
 CONCLUSIONS

 While Lévi was clearly influenced by mesmerism he does not see it

as introducing something new.

 While he may have been influenced by Mesmer’s work, he was

obviously influenced by a number of other sources, and sees Mesmer
as being influenced by other sources.
 CONCLUSIONS

 The concept of Astral Light was really a synthesis of information

from a variety of sources and influences rather than merely a
transmission of a repacked concept of animal magnetism or the
mesmeric fluid.

 Both Mesmerism and French occultism were tied up with the

political climate of nineteenth century France.
QUESTIONS

llo203@exeter.ac.uk