Doug McCrae
Legend
Human knowledge has always advanced – fire and stone tools are even older than homo sapiens – and human beings have always tried to make sense of the world around them using their reason and the best information available.
But I think we can trace an explanation of paranormal powers that is recognisable to us as scientific, or at least as an attempt to be scientific, back to the concept of animal magnetism, also known as mesmerism, in the late 18th century. Perhaps even to a specific date, November 23rd 1775. The following excerpt is from the entry Animal Magnetism by Bertrand Méheust in the Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (2006):
Animal magnetism influenced notions of magic, which I think is what leads to the synthesis of magic and psychic powers we see in later works of 20th or 21st century fantasy. From the chapter Science and the Occult by Egil Asprem in The Occult World (2015):
But I think we can trace an explanation of paranormal powers that is recognisable to us as scientific, or at least as an attempt to be scientific, back to the concept of animal magnetism, also known as mesmerism, in the late 18th century. Perhaps even to a specific date, November 23rd 1775. The following excerpt is from the entry Animal Magnetism by Bertrand Méheust in the Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (2006):
[Franz Anton] Mesmer’s reputation as a doctor and healer soon began to grow. In 1775, Prince Elector Max Joseph of Bavaria invited him to assist in an investigation of séances of exorcism held near Constance by Father Johann Joseph Gassner, a priest who was attracting crowds and performing what appeared to be miraculous healings, laying on his hands to expel evil spirits. On November 23, 1775, after observing Gassner, Mesmer undertook to reproduce the same phenomena. He found that he could produce seizures in an epileptic patient merely by a touch of the finger, and could cause the sick to have apparent convulsions. On the strength of this, he concluded that Gassner was sincere, but did not understand what he was doing; his cures were real, but explainable by the effect of a mysterious agent, hitherto unknown: the "animal magnetism" that he, Mesmer, had just discovered. Thus mesmerism was born from an unlikely combination of efforts: the attempt to interpret exorcism from a rational standpoint; experimentation in magnetic medicine; and the first tentative theories of electricity and magnetism...
In April 1784 Armand Marie Jacques Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, Colonel of Artillery and a prominent landowner, began to spend his spare time healing his employees by magnetizing them according to the principles of Mesmer’s doctrine. He was called to the bedside of a young peasant suffering from an inflammation of the lungs. Suddenly and unexpectedly, he plunged his patient into a mysterious state of unconsciousness… The patient’s personality changed; a new self emerged, which seemed to overhang his waking consciousness. Furthermore, the young man appeared to be able to predict the course of his malady, to establish its stages, and to read the thoughts of his healer, even before they were fully formed… Puységur established, in repeating the experiment upon more patients, that this state of consciousness could be reproduced fairly regularly, and that other somnambulists were equally capable of diagnosing maladies, reading thoughts, and perceiving events outside normal consciousness.
Animal magnetism influenced notions of magic, which I think is what leads to the synthesis of magic and psychic powers we see in later works of 20th or 21st century fantasy. From the chapter Science and the Occult by Egil Asprem in The Occult World (2015):
The different theories and practices associated with Mesmerism came to exert an enormous influence on nineteenth-century esoteric currents, notably occultism and spiritualism. It provided a science-like explanation of magic in Joseph Ennemoser’s Geschichte der Magie (1844), which in turn became the single most important influence on H.P. Blavatsky’s published works of Theosophy. Eliphas Levi’s massively influential Dogme et rituel de la haute magie similarly looked to Mesmerism for its account of the magical agent, 'astral light'.
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