Abstract
Brach’s chapter centers on a movement that claimed to be profoundly innovative: Mesmerism. Its founder, Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), maintained that his medical approach was completely new, scientific and drawn on the “discovery” of the Mesmeric fluid. In the early nineteenth century, as Mesmerism found itself rejected by the French medical establishment, some of its supporters thought to find an issue by reconnecting the movement to contemporary Spiritualism and to the magical tradition. Brach analyzes the ideas of Jules Dupotet (1796–1881), who sought to redefine the Mesmeric practitioner as a magician. Brach argues that Dupotet tried to reinvent Mesmerism for the post-Romantic age, at a time when magic was about to be reinstated as a subject of public interest. Dupotet’s innovation also meant that his brand of Mesmerism rejected mainstream science in favor of an esoteric approach to magnetic cure.
This chapter evolved from a paper originally delivered at the 1st International Conference on Contemporary Esotericism held at Stockholm University, 27–29 August 2012.
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Notes
- 1.
Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud. Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 38–105; from a socio-political perspective, Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968) (French translation: La Fin des Lumières. Le mesmérisme et la Révolution, Paris: Perrin, 1984); Nicole Edelman, “Somnambulisme, médiumnité et socialisme,” Politica Hermetica 9 (1995): 108–17.
- 2.
Anne-Marie Baron, Balzac occulte (Lausanne and Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 2012), 29–77; Ernst Leonardy, Marie-France Renard, Christian Drösch, Stéphanie Vanasten, eds., Traces du mesmérisme dans la littérature européenne du XIXè siècle (Brussels: Publications des Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 2001).
- 3.
See Adam Crabtree’s annotated bibliography, https://www.esalen.org/ctr-archive/animal_magnetism.html#title, accessed 27 March 2017.
- 4.
During the eighteenth century, the French medical establishment had gradually wrenched from the Church the monopoly of therapeutic practice(s) and was consequently in no mood to relinquish its hard-won official hold on it; see Franklin Rausky, Mesmer et la révolution thérapeutique (Paris: Payot, 1977).
- 5.
In this respect, one of its original names was “gravitational magnetism,” in an attempt to conflate it with Isaac Newton’s famous discovery of universal attraction and, thus, to confer it an even higher degree of scientific relevance.
- 6.
Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet de Puységur, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal (Paris: Dentu, 1784 [3rd most complete edition, 1820]).
- 7.
That is, the agitated, almost “hysterical” patterns of behavior induced—as part of the cure—in the patients undergoing treatment around the famous baquet de Mesmer.
- 8.
Alice Joly, “J.-B. Willermoz et l’Agent Inconnu des Initiés de Lyon,” in De l’Agent Inconnu au Philosophe Inconnu, eds. Robert Amadou and Alice Joly (Paris: Denoël, 1962), 11–154; Christine Bergé, “Le corps et la plume. Ecritures mystiques de l’Agent inconnu,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 38 (2009–2010): 41–59, https://rh19.revues.org/3867, accessed 20 September 2015.
- 9.
Bertrand Méheust, Somnambulisme et médiumnité, 2 vols, I (“Le défi du magnétisme”) (Paris: Synthélabo, 1999).
- 10.
John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith. Mesmerism, Spiritism and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 64–94; French translation: Laboratoires de la foi. Mesmérisme, spiritisme et occultisme en France de 1853 à 1914 (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2013).
- 11.
In this particular case, the Academy intended to denounce what it perceived as Mesmerism’s shoddy principles – such as the Nervengeist or “nerve fluid,” for instance, and unsound therapeutical practices (on the Nervengeist as a later, naturphilosophisch elaboration, see Antoine Faivre, “Recherches sur les courants ésotériques dans l’Europe moderne et contemporaine,” Annuaire de l’Ecole pratique des hautes études – Sciences religieuses 115 (2006–2007): 327–28; Nicole Edelman, “Un savoir occulté ou pourquoi le magnétisme animal ne fut-il pas pensé « comme une branche très curieuse de psychologie et d’histoire naturelle»?,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 38 (2009–2010): 115–32, http://rh19.revues.org/3877, accessed 19 July 2015).
- 12.
With authors such as Puységur, Deleuze, Alexandre Bertrand (1795–1831). See Méheust, Somnambulisme et médumnité, I; Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 171–280; Jean-Pierre Peter, “De Mesmer à Puységur. Magnétisme animal et transe somnambulique, à l’origine des thérapies psychiques,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 38 (2009–2010): 19–40, http://rh19.revues.org/3865, https://doi.org/10.4000/rh19.3865, accessed 2 September 2015. For a parallel study of this evolution in Great Britain, Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
- 13.
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 136–48; John S. Haller Jr., Swedenborg, Mesmer and the Mind/Body Connection. The Roots of Complementary Medicine (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2010). However, the historical connections between the doctrines of Swedenborg and Animal Magnetism are first documented in the 1780s.
- 14.
Guillaume Cuchet, Les Voix d’outre-tombe. Tables tournantes, spiritisme et société (Paris: Le Seuil, 2012); Monroe, Laboratories of Faith, 15–63, 95–149.
- 15.
Extended biographical details (including Dupotet’s links in later life with the Theosophical Society) have already been discovered by Anne Jeanson and will appear in her forthcoming doctoral dissertation dedicated to Dupotet’s life and works. One cannot help noting, however, that Dupotet’s later claim (1852) of having been trained by the sole observation of Nature and of owing very little, if at all, to formal schooling is enough of a romantic commonplace to warrant suspicion, especially under the pen of an author constantly challenging institutional knowledge and lamenting the disdain of science for Animal Magnetism.
- 16.
Considering the alleged dates, Dupotet is more likely to have attended Deleuze’s (and possibly Alexandre Bertrand’s) lectures, if anything, than to have actually studied Magnetism with Puységur or Faria.
- 17.
This attitude was rather a novelty at the time, and of a kind which was sternly opposed by Deleuze or Puységur, who intended (after the fiasco of the Victor Race séances in Paris) to henceforth keep the practice of Animal Magnetism strictly in the therapeutic and private domains.
- 18.
Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 146–48.
- 19.
Dupotet, Journal du Magnétisme II (Paris, 1845), 345.
- 20.
Dupotet, Journal du Magnétisme, VII (Paris, 1848), 97.
- 21.
An encyclopedic anthology of this literature can be found in Sylvester Rattray, ed., Theatrum sympatheticum (Nuremberg: Johan. Andream Endterum, & Wolfgangi junioris haeredes, 1662). See also Roberto Poma, Magie et guérison. La rationalité de la médecine magique (XVIe-XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Orizons, 2009).
- 22.
Michel-Augustin Thouret, Recherches et doutes sur la magnétisme animal (Paris: Prault, 1784); Jean-Jacques Paulet, L’Antimagnétisme, ou Origine, progrès, décadence, renouvellement et réfutation du magnétisme animal (London, n.p., 1784); Koen Vermeir, “Guérir ceux qui ont la foi. Le mesmérisme et l’imagination historique,” in Mesmer et mesmérismes. Le Magnétisme animal en contexte, eds. Bruno Belhoste and Nicole Edelman (Paris: Omniscience, 2015), 119–46, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01454109, accessed 8 May 2016.
- 23.
Jules Dupotet, La magie dévoilée ou principes de science occulte (Paris: Imprimerie De Pommeret Et Moheau, 1852). An abbreviated English translation was published as Magnetism and Magic by A. H. E. Lee (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927). Interestingly, Arthur Hugh Evelyn Lee (1875–1941) was also the compiler of the famous anthology The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1916; still in print) and has equally written on the topic of alchemy with H. Price, A Modern Interpretation of Alchemy (London: The Quest, 1921). Lee also was a close friend—among many others—of the writer and occultist Charles Williams (1886–1945), see S. Bray and R. Sturch, eds., Charles Williams and his Contemporaries (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 7 (article by G. Lindop). Distribution of the original French edition was apparently limited to a very restricted number of signed copies of the volume, handed over to the elect few who could put up the handsome price asked for it by Dupotet, who was perhaps replicating here—on a much smaller scale, obviously—Mesmer’s fee for admission into his Société de l’Harmonie universelle, which was first intended to number only 100 members.
- 24.
Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 190–96.
- 25.
Dupotet, Journal du Magnétisme VII, 24.
- 26.
That is, terrestrial magnetism, heat, light and electricity; Jules Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 3rd edition (Paris: Librairie Paul Vigot, 1893), 64.
- 27.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 220–23; in his Journal du Magnétisme II, 1845, 328, Dupotet writes for instance that “magnetized objects differ only by name from amulets or talismanic artefacts.”
- 28.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 203. This term was due to enjoy much success with later occultists, including Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875); see n. 39 below.
- 29.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 182.
- 30.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 184.
- 31.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 85; 124; 254. Our author had already drawn the attention to what he calls “magic mirrors” in his Journal du Magnétisme, in 1849–1851, that is, before A.-L. Cahagnet’s (1809–85) pages on the same topic (Magie magnétique, Paris: Germer Baillère, 1854, 72ff.). About Cahagnet, but seen from a quite different perspective, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The First Psychonaut? Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet’s Experiments with Narcotics,” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 7, no. 2 (2016): 105–23.
- 32.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée , 64. Some of the earlier magnetizers, such as Mesmer himself, Puységur or Deleuze, believed goodwill and moral rectitude on the practitioners’ part to be an absolute prerequisite of the curing power of mesmerism, which could not in principle be misused.
- 33.
As well as by the author’s caveat at the outset of the book, where he states that reading it is superfluous to anyone craving merely to “do some good” with magnetism.
- 34.
Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 67–72.
- 35.
Dupotet actually shares such claims with other writers on the topic of Mesmerism, such as his contemporary Henri Delaage, Le Monde occulte ou Mystères du Magnétisme (Paris: Dentu, 1856), passim, which has strong Catholic overtones.
- 36.
See the references given in note 21.
- 37.
Without actually identifying its sources, Dupotet quotes in fact (La magie dévoilée, 11) passages from Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, as quoted in turn by Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596) in his Traicté des chiffres (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1586), ff. 26v°-27v°. He also refers, without proper citation, to Keleph Ben Nathan’s (Jean-Philippe Dutoit-Membrini, 1721–1793) La Philosophie divine, 3 vols. (Lausanne: n.p., 1793), I, 53–57, on a fivefold classification of magic (Magie dévoilée, 167–68). He does, however, mention by name J. Ennemoser (1787–1854) and his book on the history of Animal Magnetism as early as 1845 and 1847 (i.e., before the appearance of the 1854 English translation of the Geschichte der Magie - first edition 1844) in the Journal du Magnétisme; on Ennemoser and his work, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Joseph Ennemoser and Magnetic Historiography,” Politica Hermetica 25 (Special Issue “Esotérisme et romantisme”) (2011): 65–83.
- 38.
Taken here in the sense of immaterial and invisible, yet capable of material efficacy. See C. Göttler and W. Neuber, eds., Spirits Unseen. The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
- 39.
As attempted, soon after Dupotet, by other writers such as H. Delaage, A.-L. Cahagnet, Magie magnétique or even Eliphas Lévi, whose famous Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris, Germer Baillière, 1854–1856) owes a lot to Animal Magnetism and whose La clé des grands mystères (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1861) discusses Dupotet’s Magie dévoilée in several chapters (both books by Lévi have been translated into English, respectively by A. E. Waite in 1896 and Aleister Crowley); see Julian Strube, Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Levi (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 532–41. It is likely that Lévi’s strong insistence on “willpower” as essential to the magiste also stems from Dupotet, who—following the example of Mesmer himself, Puységur or Deleuze—is adamant in his upholding of the magnetizer’s unswerving concentration of will in order to achieve magical and/or magnetic results.
- 40.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 205ff; 222.
- 41.
“Il y a des prêtres spirituels, qui ne le sont pas par l’ordination commune... mais ils sont faits et institués prêtres d’une façon immédiate par Dieu” (“There are spiritual priests who are not made such by way of common ordination... but are made and established as priests by the immediate action of God:” letter from Count F. de Fleischbein to Mademoiselle de Fabrice, 10/10/1769, quoted by Auguste Viatte, Les Sources occultes du romantisme, Paris: H. Champion, 1992, 2 vol (orig. ed. 1928); I, p. 24; “C’est (le magnétiseur) un prêtre au plus haut sens du mot;” “He (the magnetiser) is a priest in the highest sense of the word:” Oswald Wirth, L’imposition des mains et la médecine philosophale (Paris: Chamuel, 1897), 99 (our translations).
- 42.
Although, to our knowledge, he never uses the word himself.
- 43.
Along with Deleuze, Dupotet is nevertheless labelled a fluidiste (as opposed to the spiritualistes such as Cahagnet, Farra or Billot) in an article by Jules Lovy, published in L’Union Magnétique (1854–1861), 10 July 1857.
- 44.
Marco Pasi, “The Modernity of Occultism: Reflections on some Crucial Aspects,” in Hermes in the Academy. Ten Years’ Study of Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam, eds. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Joyce Pijnenburg (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 59–74.
- 45.
Dupotet, La magie dévoilée, 234, 253.
- 46.
John Patrick Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph. A Nineteenth Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 137–38; 276–78.
- 47.
Alison Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic. Invoking Tradition (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7.
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Brach, JP. (2021). Psychic Disciplines: The Magnetizer as Magician in the Writings of Jules Dupotet de Sennevoy (1796–1881). In: Hedesan, G.D., Rudbøg, T. (eds) Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67906-4_7
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