Robert C. Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195146806
- eISBN:
- 9780199834204
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195146808.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This book explores the history and present status of unchurched spirituality in the U.S. Nearly 20% of all Americans consider themselves interested in spiritual issues even though they never step ...
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This book explores the history and present status of unchurched spirituality in the U.S. Nearly 20% of all Americans consider themselves interested in spiritual issues even though they never step inside a church or synagogue. Most would describe themselves as spiritual at a personal level, but in some way alienated from organized religion. Today's alternative spirituality is the outgrowth of long‐standing traditions in American religious life. Colonial Americans were astonishingly eclectic in their religious pursuits, availing themselves of sundry magical and occult religious philosophies. In the nineteenth century, a number of metaphysical systems (e.g., Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, mesmerism, and spiritualism) penetrated deep into the spiritual vocabulary of middle‐class Americans who were eager to synthesize science and religion into a single vision of the universe. By the early twentieth century, there was already something of an “American tradition” of unchurched spirituality. Diverse interests including alternative medicine, parapsychology, the hidden powers of the unconscious mind, and Asian religions all contributed to the spiritual journeys of those who looked for religious inspiration outside America's established churches. The book concludes by demonstrating that far from the kooky and self‐absorbed dilettantes they are often made out to be, America's unchurched spiritual seekers embrace a mature and dynamic set of beliefs.Less
This book explores the history and present status of unchurched spirituality in the U.S. Nearly 20% of all Americans consider themselves interested in spiritual issues even though they never step inside a church or synagogue. Most would describe themselves as spiritual at a personal level, but in some way alienated from organized religion. Today's alternative spirituality is the outgrowth of long‐standing traditions in American religious life. Colonial Americans were astonishingly eclectic in their religious pursuits, availing themselves of sundry magical and occult religious philosophies. In the nineteenth century, a number of metaphysical systems (e.g., Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, mesmerism, and spiritualism) penetrated deep into the spiritual vocabulary of middle‐class Americans who were eager to synthesize science and religion into a single vision of the universe. By the early twentieth century, there was already something of an “American tradition” of unchurched spirituality. Diverse interests including alternative medicine, parapsychology, the hidden powers of the unconscious mind, and Asian religions all contributed to the spiritual journeys of those who looked for religious inspiration outside America's established churches. The book concludes by demonstrating that far from the kooky and self‐absorbed dilettantes they are often made out to be, America's unchurched spiritual seekers embrace a mature and dynamic set of beliefs.
Cathy Gutierrez
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195388350
- eISBN:
- 9780199866472
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195388350.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter examines Spiritualist writings about health and the body. For a movement that was otherworldly in its focus, Spiritualists were extremely interested in medicine and many, including ...
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This chapter examines Spiritualist writings about health and the body. For a movement that was otherworldly in its focus, Spiritualists were extremely interested in medicine and many, including Andrew Jackson Davis, worked as healers and country doctors. In an epoch when bloodletting and heroic measures were still common, a spiritual or philosophical explanation for ill health was often preferable to mainstream authority. Spiritualists embraced the idea of the Grand Man from Swedenborg, where the microcosm of the human body reflected the macrocosm of the universe as a whole. Resembling the Kabbalah’s articulation of Adam Kadmon and tracing its roots to Plato’s Timaeus, this construction of the body as the cosmos in miniature did not distinguish between the material and spiritual worlds but rather saw them as united parts of the divine.Less
This chapter examines Spiritualist writings about health and the body. For a movement that was otherworldly in its focus, Spiritualists were extremely interested in medicine and many, including Andrew Jackson Davis, worked as healers and country doctors. In an epoch when bloodletting and heroic measures were still common, a spiritual or philosophical explanation for ill health was often preferable to mainstream authority. Spiritualists embraced the idea of the Grand Man from Swedenborg, where the microcosm of the human body reflected the macrocosm of the universe as a whole. Resembling the Kabbalah’s articulation of Adam Kadmon and tracing its roots to Plato’s Timaeus, this construction of the body as the cosmos in miniature did not distinguish between the material and spiritual worlds but rather saw them as united parts of the divine.
Ann Lee Bressler
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195129861
- eISBN:
- 9780199834013
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195129865.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
A major part of Universalism’s appeal through the first half of the nineteenth century was its proponents’ reputation for contentiousness. The movement had always attracted more than its share of ...
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A major part of Universalism’s appeal through the first half of the nineteenth century was its proponents’ reputation for contentiousness. The movement had always attracted more than its share of self-taught religious critics, and this was never more the case than during the Second Great Awakening, when the opportunities for denouncing irrationality and superstition seemed endless. However, as the revivals subsided, the targets for popular rationalism became less obvious, and Universalist energies were forced to seek new outlets. Without their traditional enemies, many Universalists began to waver in their sense of direction, and the denomination became subject to powerful centrifugal tendencies. Among the major new preoccupations of Universalists in this period were the popular “spiritual sciences” of phrenology, mesmerism, and spiritualism, and the heirs of John Murray and Hosea Ballou proved remarkably receptive to these and related teachings, which flowered in the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.Less
A major part of Universalism’s appeal through the first half of the nineteenth century was its proponents’ reputation for contentiousness. The movement had always attracted more than its share of self-taught religious critics, and this was never more the case than during the Second Great Awakening, when the opportunities for denouncing irrationality and superstition seemed endless. However, as the revivals subsided, the targets for popular rationalism became less obvious, and Universalist energies were forced to seek new outlets. Without their traditional enemies, many Universalists began to waver in their sense of direction, and the denomination became subject to powerful centrifugal tendencies. Among the major new preoccupations of Universalists in this period were the popular “spiritual sciences” of phrenology, mesmerism, and spiritualism, and the heirs of John Murray and Hosea Ballou proved remarkably receptive to these and related teachings, which flowered in the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.
Robert C. Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195146806
- eISBN:
- 9780199834204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195146808.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
In colonial America, only 15% of the population belonged to a church. The majority was nonetheless spiritual at a personal level, but fashioned their personal beliefs by drawing upon a variety of ...
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In colonial America, only 15% of the population belonged to a church. The majority was nonetheless spiritual at a personal level, but fashioned their personal beliefs by drawing upon a variety of magical and occult philosophies. Astrology, divination, and witchcraft permeated everyday life in the colonies. By the early and mid‐nineteenth century, the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson gave middle‐class Americans a new vocabulary for describing their inner‐relationship to unseen spiritual dimensions of life. And, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, both mesmerism and spiritualism provided general audiences with new ways of exploring this inner‐relationship to the spirit world.Less
In colonial America, only 15% of the population belonged to a church. The majority was nonetheless spiritual at a personal level, but fashioned their personal beliefs by drawing upon a variety of magical and occult philosophies. Astrology, divination, and witchcraft permeated everyday life in the colonies. By the early and mid‐nineteenth century, the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson gave middle‐class Americans a new vocabulary for describing their inner‐relationship to unseen spiritual dimensions of life. And, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, both mesmerism and spiritualism provided general audiences with new ways of exploring this inner‐relationship to the spirit world.
Stefan Andriopoulos
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226020549
- eISBN:
- 9780226020570
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226020570.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics ...
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Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. This book shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing this preoccupation through the period's films—as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts—the author pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one's will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler famously portrayed the hypnotist's seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, the author also develops an innovative reading of Kafka's novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies.Less
Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. This book shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing this preoccupation through the period's films—as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts—the author pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one's will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler famously portrayed the hypnotist's seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, the author also develops an innovative reading of Kafka's novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies.
Tony James
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198151883
- eISBN:
- 9780191672873
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151883.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, European Literature
This chapter focuses on Alexandre Bertrand. Bertrand, trained as a doctor and engineer, had a practical and scientific attitude towards the study of mesmerism and somnambulism, even so he did not ...
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This chapter focuses on Alexandre Bertrand. Bertrand, trained as a doctor and engineer, had a practical and scientific attitude towards the study of mesmerism and somnambulism, even so he did not hesitate to change some of his initial beliefs. He published two important works. One was the Traité du somnambulisme (1823) and the other was his Histoire critique du magnétisme animal en France (1826). This work explains how he had been led to the conclusion that animal magnetism does not exist, thus changing the opinion he had held in his previous work and in his public lectures. Bertrand was a major contributor on medical matters to the ‘liberal romantic’ journal Le Globe and the series of articles he wrote in 1825 publicized his revised ideas before they became available in book form. His distinctive contribution was to see somnambulism as a kind of ecstasy, and he used historical material.Less
This chapter focuses on Alexandre Bertrand. Bertrand, trained as a doctor and engineer, had a practical and scientific attitude towards the study of mesmerism and somnambulism, even so he did not hesitate to change some of his initial beliefs. He published two important works. One was the Traité du somnambulisme (1823) and the other was his Histoire critique du magnétisme animal en France (1826). This work explains how he had been led to the conclusion that animal magnetism does not exist, thus changing the opinion he had held in his previous work and in his public lectures. Bertrand was a major contributor on medical matters to the ‘liberal romantic’ journal Le Globe and the series of articles he wrote in 1825 publicized his revised ideas before they became available in book form. His distinctive contribution was to see somnambulism as a kind of ecstasy, and he used historical material.
Emily Ogden
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226532165
- eISBN:
- 9780226532479
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226532479.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This book offers a history of mesmerism, or animal magnetism, in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) United States. Imported from the plantations of the French Antilles by founder Charles Poyen, ...
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This book offers a history of mesmerism, or animal magnetism, in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) United States. Imported from the plantations of the French Antilles by founder Charles Poyen, established in New England textile-factory cities, and practiced throughout the US, mesmerism was surprisingly central to American life and to such canonical figures as Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It embraced a variety of phenomena, including somnambulism, mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Widely practiced from the 1830s to 1860, when it gave way to successor practices spiritualism and hypnosis, this occult science was understood by its practitioners as a way to make rational use of other people’s credulity, or tendency toward belief. The same predispositions that false priests had exploited to inveigle their devotees would now be made to serve modern ends, such as labor discipline, communication, and self-culture. Mesmerism thus poses a challenge to our ordinary view of secularization. Mesmerists neither rejected enchantment nor succumbed to it; instead, they managed it and exploited it in others. The history of mesmerism offers a fresh perspective on scholarly concerns related to modernity and the secular, such as colonialism, agency, the ideal of “empowerment,” and the place of belief. It shows us that modern enchantment is not a radical alternative or an atavistic throwback, but a target and a technique of management.Less
This book offers a history of mesmerism, or animal magnetism, in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) United States. Imported from the plantations of the French Antilles by founder Charles Poyen, established in New England textile-factory cities, and practiced throughout the US, mesmerism was surprisingly central to American life and to such canonical figures as Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It embraced a variety of phenomena, including somnambulism, mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Widely practiced from the 1830s to 1860, when it gave way to successor practices spiritualism and hypnosis, this occult science was understood by its practitioners as a way to make rational use of other people’s credulity, or tendency toward belief. The same predispositions that false priests had exploited to inveigle their devotees would now be made to serve modern ends, such as labor discipline, communication, and self-culture. Mesmerism thus poses a challenge to our ordinary view of secularization. Mesmerists neither rejected enchantment nor succumbed to it; instead, they managed it and exploited it in others. The history of mesmerism offers a fresh perspective on scholarly concerns related to modernity and the secular, such as colonialism, agency, the ideal of “empowerment,” and the place of belief. It shows us that modern enchantment is not a radical alternative or an atavistic throwback, but a target and a technique of management.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195320992
- eISBN:
- 9780199852062
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195320992.003.0010
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
This chapter examines the influence of mesmerism and spiritualism on the history of Western esotericism. It explores the relation between science and spirituality and traces the development of animal ...
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This chapter examines the influence of mesmerism and spiritualism on the history of Western esotericism. It explores the relation between science and spirituality and traces the development of animal magnetism from the combination of the notion of fluid and the powers of the mind in science. It discusses the works of Franz Anton Mesmer and his doctoral dissertation concerning the influence of the planets in the human body where he posited on the existence of an invisible, universally distributed fluid that flows continuously everywhere and serves as a vehicle for the mutual influence among heavenly bodies, the earth, and living things.Less
This chapter examines the influence of mesmerism and spiritualism on the history of Western esotericism. It explores the relation between science and spirituality and traces the development of animal magnetism from the combination of the notion of fluid and the powers of the mind in science. It discusses the works of Franz Anton Mesmer and his doctoral dissertation concerning the influence of the planets in the human body where he posited on the existence of an invisible, universally distributed fluid that flows continuously everywhere and serves as a vehicle for the mutual influence among heavenly bodies, the earth, and living things.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195320992
- eISBN:
- 9780199852062
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195320992.003.0011
- Subject:
- Religion, World Religions
This chapter examines ritual magic from 1850 to the present. The modern occult revival of the 19th century was a complex phenomenon with widespread causes. Romanticism stimulated interest in the ...
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This chapter examines ritual magic from 1850 to the present. The modern occult revival of the 19th century was a complex phenomenon with widespread causes. Romanticism stimulated interest in the mysterious and the unknown, which in turn created a cultural receptivity to Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and magic. Freemasonry also served as an important factor in the occult revival by serving as a channel of Hermetic wisdom. The growth of fringe Masonry also reflected the contemporary revival of ritualism in the Anglican Church and this movement significantly influenced the restoration of sacramental worship to Anglican devotion and the revival of religious orders.Less
This chapter examines ritual magic from 1850 to the present. The modern occult revival of the 19th century was a complex phenomenon with widespread causes. Romanticism stimulated interest in the mysterious and the unknown, which in turn created a cultural receptivity to Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and magic. Freemasonry also served as an important factor in the occult revival by serving as a channel of Hermetic wisdom. The growth of fringe Masonry also reflected the contemporary revival of ritualism in the Anglican Church and this movement significantly influenced the restoration of sacramental worship to Anglican devotion and the revival of religious orders.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198187271
- eISBN:
- 9780191719028
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187271.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Questions of survival were much discussed during the 19th century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath ...
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Questions of survival were much discussed during the 19th century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath of particular acts and utterances. Some of these questions emerged in the intellectual and stylistic preoccupations of individual writers, such as Dickens, Tennyson, and FitzGerald. Others contributed towards the cultural atmosphere they shared, in which shifty and overlapping ideas of ‘influence’ (from the seductive touch of the mesmerist to the contagious breath of the poor) became central to attempts to work out how far-reaching were the effects that people had on one another and themselves. This book sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of enquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), this study redraws the map of 19th-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might still help us make of ourselves.Less
Questions of survival were much discussed during the 19th century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath of particular acts and utterances. Some of these questions emerged in the intellectual and stylistic preoccupations of individual writers, such as Dickens, Tennyson, and FitzGerald. Others contributed towards the cultural atmosphere they shared, in which shifty and overlapping ideas of ‘influence’ (from the seductive touch of the mesmerist to the contagious breath of the poor) became central to attempts to work out how far-reaching were the effects that people had on one another and themselves. This book sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of enquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), this study redraws the map of 19th-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might still help us make of ourselves.
Alberto Gabriele
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620351
- eISBN:
- 9781789623901
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620351.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s ...
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This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.Less
This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.
Christina Zwarg
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198866299
- eISBN:
- 9780191898457
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198866299.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Not about Haiti but about the haunting power of its revolution, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect U.S. discussions of slavery and abolition both before ...
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Not about Haiti but about the haunting power of its revolution, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect U.S. discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War, sometimes with surprising intensity and endurance. Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, it challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U.S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery’s perpetrators. To do so, it shows how trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer’s “crisis state” has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the “talk cure” can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States. The Archive of Fear argues that a strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery—and that key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. Reviewing trauma theory through its pre-Freudian roots—especially as the alarm of slavery’s perpetrators relates to the temporal patterns of Mesmer’s “crisis state”—widens our sense of the affective atmospheres through which emancipation had to be sought. And it illuminates the fugitive approach Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois devised to confront and defuse the archive of fear still blocking full emancipation today.Less
Not about Haiti but about the haunting power of its revolution, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect U.S. discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War, sometimes with surprising intensity and endurance. Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, it challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U.S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery’s perpetrators. To do so, it shows how trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer’s “crisis state” has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the “talk cure” can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States. The Archive of Fear argues that a strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery—and that key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. Reviewing trauma theory through its pre-Freudian roots—especially as the alarm of slavery’s perpetrators relates to the temporal patterns of Mesmer’s “crisis state”—widens our sense of the affective atmospheres through which emancipation had to be sought. And it illuminates the fugitive approach Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois devised to confront and defuse the archive of fear still blocking full emancipation today.
Courtenay Raia
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226635217
- eISBN:
- 9780226635491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226635491.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Rather than abandoning knowledge of a metaphysical reality, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) committed himself to vindicating its existence with empirical evidence. With the establishment of psychical ...
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Rather than abandoning knowledge of a metaphysical reality, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) committed himself to vindicating its existence with empirical evidence. With the establishment of psychical research in 1882, Myers finally found his mature formulation for that project, one he would take into the very heart of Jean Martin Charcot’s experimental psychology. Between 1885 and 1886, the calendar of papers presented before the Société de Psychologie Physiologique showed a rising interest in telepathy, a momentum secretly orchestrated by Charles Richet with the aid of Frederic Myers. Charcot discretely pulled the plug in 1887, but not before Myers leveraged that published data into his own star turn, venturing his psychical theory of dynamic psychology. “Multiplex Personality” (October, 1886) was the platform upon which Myers would later raise the subliminal self (1892-1896), an extended model of consciousness with a distinctly romantic architecture. Psychical anomalies erupted at either end when consciousness fell either too far in or rose too far out of its ordinary neurological framework. With the subliminal self, Myers secured in the idiom of science the existential conditions he had sought for himself in faith, poetry, and philosophy, leaving behind the original map of the unconscious that would later guide Carl Jung.Less
Rather than abandoning knowledge of a metaphysical reality, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) committed himself to vindicating its existence with empirical evidence. With the establishment of psychical research in 1882, Myers finally found his mature formulation for that project, one he would take into the very heart of Jean Martin Charcot’s experimental psychology. Between 1885 and 1886, the calendar of papers presented before the Société de Psychologie Physiologique showed a rising interest in telepathy, a momentum secretly orchestrated by Charles Richet with the aid of Frederic Myers. Charcot discretely pulled the plug in 1887, but not before Myers leveraged that published data into his own star turn, venturing his psychical theory of dynamic psychology. “Multiplex Personality” (October, 1886) was the platform upon which Myers would later raise the subliminal self (1892-1896), an extended model of consciousness with a distinctly romantic architecture. Psychical anomalies erupted at either end when consciousness fell either too far in or rose too far out of its ordinary neurological framework. With the subliminal self, Myers secured in the idiom of science the existential conditions he had sought for himself in faith, poetry, and philosophy, leaving behind the original map of the unconscious that would later guide Carl Jung.
Christina Zwarg
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198866299
- eISBN:
- 9780191898457
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198866299.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Mesmerism first arrived in the northern hemisphere through Haiti, and the link between mesmerism and slave insurrection that Douglass and Stowe revive before the Civil War is part of the fugitive ...
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Mesmerism first arrived in the northern hemisphere through Haiti, and the link between mesmerism and slave insurrection that Douglass and Stowe revive before the Civil War is part of the fugitive archive of modernity. Because mesmerism is important to the early history of psychoanalysis, its affiliation with insurrection widens the psychic horizon to include the crisis triggered by the “impossible demands” of emancipation. Recognition of that enduring sense of crisis unites the work of Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois and opens to view the environmental power shaping early trauma theory. Hegel believed that the transmission of affect at the center of the mesmeric crisis could supersede normal channels of communication while Douglass and Stowe found such relays alternately promising and threatening for democratic practice. Significantly, the temporal dimensions of Mesmer’s crisis state allowed for an extended recalibration of the ongoing moment, or “the future in the present.”Less
Mesmerism first arrived in the northern hemisphere through Haiti, and the link between mesmerism and slave insurrection that Douglass and Stowe revive before the Civil War is part of the fugitive archive of modernity. Because mesmerism is important to the early history of psychoanalysis, its affiliation with insurrection widens the psychic horizon to include the crisis triggered by the “impossible demands” of emancipation. Recognition of that enduring sense of crisis unites the work of Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois and opens to view the environmental power shaping early trauma theory. Hegel believed that the transmission of affect at the center of the mesmeric crisis could supersede normal channels of communication while Douglass and Stowe found such relays alternately promising and threatening for democratic practice. Significantly, the temporal dimensions of Mesmer’s crisis state allowed for an extended recalibration of the ongoing moment, or “the future in the present.”
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719088414
- eISBN:
- 9781526115256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719088414.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Mesmerism is explored in Poe’s ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ (1844), ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ (1844). The near-dead subject becomes an object for ...
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Mesmerism is explored in Poe’s ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ (1844), ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ (1844). The near-dead subject becomes an object for quasi-scientific investigation in Poe, which can be related to his theory of the cosmos outlined in Eureka (1848), where God is described as an author who has plotted the structure of the universe and Poe claims that literary plots represent an inadequate neo-platonic echo of this creative power. Poe also suggests that at the end, at the moment of death, meaning will be produced and this is a theme developed in the tales about mesmerism, and in others which centre on death and resurrection such as ‘Morella’ (1835) and ‘Ligeia’ (1838). The idea that meaning will appear at the end is also a theme in Poe’s detective tales and the account of Poe will emphasise how the problems of decoding are linked to interpretations of death and dying. An emphasis on readers can also be witnessed in Wuthering Heights and ‘The Lifted Veil’, which also centre on issues of interpretation which are bound up with models of writing and reading.Less
Mesmerism is explored in Poe’s ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ (1844), ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ (1844). The near-dead subject becomes an object for quasi-scientific investigation in Poe, which can be related to his theory of the cosmos outlined in Eureka (1848), where God is described as an author who has plotted the structure of the universe and Poe claims that literary plots represent an inadequate neo-platonic echo of this creative power. Poe also suggests that at the end, at the moment of death, meaning will be produced and this is a theme developed in the tales about mesmerism, and in others which centre on death and resurrection such as ‘Morella’ (1835) and ‘Ligeia’ (1838). The idea that meaning will appear at the end is also a theme in Poe’s detective tales and the account of Poe will emphasise how the problems of decoding are linked to interpretations of death and dying. An emphasis on readers can also be witnessed in Wuthering Heights and ‘The Lifted Veil’, which also centre on issues of interpretation which are bound up with models of writing and reading.
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226720784
- eISBN:
- 9780226720852
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226720852.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter focuses on the manipulation of sensibility. The Viennese polymath Franz Anton Mesmer captured the imagination of Paris society in the early 1780s with his claim to have harnessed the ...
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This chapter focuses on the manipulation of sensibility. The Viennese polymath Franz Anton Mesmer captured the imagination of Paris society in the early 1780s with his claim to have harnessed the imponderable fluid of human sensibility. He said he could channel this fluid using implements such as wands, tubs filled with water and metal, and his own fingers. His assertions were borne out by dramatic results: he could provoke powerful sensations, emotional agitation, and dramatic convulsions in his patients. Louis XV appointed two commissions of academicians and doctors to look into the matter, and the chapter tells the story of their investigation and its startling conclusion.Less
This chapter focuses on the manipulation of sensibility. The Viennese polymath Franz Anton Mesmer captured the imagination of Paris society in the early 1780s with his claim to have harnessed the imponderable fluid of human sensibility. He said he could channel this fluid using implements such as wands, tubs filled with water and metal, and his own fingers. His assertions were borne out by dramatic results: he could provoke powerful sensations, emotional agitation, and dramatic convulsions in his patients. Louis XV appointed two commissions of academicians and doctors to look into the matter, and the chapter tells the story of their investigation and its startling conclusion.
Graeme Pedlingham
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526124340
- eISBN:
- 9781526136206
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526124340.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter explores the treatment of objects, things, in Marsh’s major Gothic works: The Beetle, The Goddess and The Joss. The increasing popularity in the late nineteenth century of collecting and ...
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This chapter explores the treatment of objects, things, in Marsh’s major Gothic works: The Beetle, The Goddess and The Joss. The increasing popularity in the late nineteenth century of collecting and consuming objects offers a context in which boundaries between people and things become uncertain, with objects seemingly exercising a disturbing agency. Marsh’s texts present mutually transforming encounters between objects and characters that question the stability of identity. The chapter suggests that whilst transgressing boundaries between self and not-self is often explored in critical analysis through mesmerism, a more appropriate conceptual framework for Marsh is provided by object relations psychoanalysis, and specifically Christopher Bollas’s notion of ‘transformational objects’. Developing this notion in relation to Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’, the chapter identifies Marsh’s objects as ‘transformational things’, encounters with which often lead to terrifying breakdowns of selfhood, conveying a pervasive sense of existential horror and exposing the precariousness of late-nineteenth-century identity.Less
This chapter explores the treatment of objects, things, in Marsh’s major Gothic works: The Beetle, The Goddess and The Joss. The increasing popularity in the late nineteenth century of collecting and consuming objects offers a context in which boundaries between people and things become uncertain, with objects seemingly exercising a disturbing agency. Marsh’s texts present mutually transforming encounters between objects and characters that question the stability of identity. The chapter suggests that whilst transgressing boundaries between self and not-self is often explored in critical analysis through mesmerism, a more appropriate conceptual framework for Marsh is provided by object relations psychoanalysis, and specifically Christopher Bollas’s notion of ‘transformational objects’. Developing this notion in relation to Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’, the chapter identifies Marsh’s objects as ‘transformational things’, encounters with which often lead to terrifying breakdowns of selfhood, conveying a pervasive sense of existential horror and exposing the precariousness of late-nineteenth-century identity.
Bruce Wyse
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784992699
- eISBN:
- 9781526124050
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Blending aspects of the religious novel with Gothic motifs, Horace Smith’s 1845 novel Mesmerism: A Mystery employs mesmerism to make its case for a radical transvaluation of death. Prematurely ...
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Blending aspects of the religious novel with Gothic motifs, Horace Smith’s 1845 novel Mesmerism: A Mystery employs mesmerism to make its case for a radical transvaluation of death. Prematurely spiritualised by mesmeric treatment, the protagonist Jane Harvey attains a preternatural awareness of the liminal space between life and death, and, in the novel’s affirmative re-conception of the Death and the Maiden motif, she repeatedly encounters a mysterious phantom that proves to be the mildly uncanny yet enticing embodiment of death itself. The text evokes the ‘mistaken terror of death’ in order to dispel it and enthusiastically affirms both the Evangelical ‘good death’ and what Phillipe Ariès calls the ‘beautiful death’. However, in its disproportionate emphasis on death per se, and its polemical drive to reconceive death as ‘The Universal Friend’, the novel flirts with the heterodoxy that its personified Death is the principal redeemer of humankind.Less
Blending aspects of the religious novel with Gothic motifs, Horace Smith’s 1845 novel Mesmerism: A Mystery employs mesmerism to make its case for a radical transvaluation of death. Prematurely spiritualised by mesmeric treatment, the protagonist Jane Harvey attains a preternatural awareness of the liminal space between life and death, and, in the novel’s affirmative re-conception of the Death and the Maiden motif, she repeatedly encounters a mysterious phantom that proves to be the mildly uncanny yet enticing embodiment of death itself. The text evokes the ‘mistaken terror of death’ in order to dispel it and enthusiastically affirms both the Evangelical ‘good death’ and what Phillipe Ariès calls the ‘beautiful death’. However, in its disproportionate emphasis on death per se, and its polemical drive to reconceive death as ‘The Universal Friend’, the novel flirts with the heterodoxy that its personified Death is the principal redeemer of humankind.
Emily Ogden
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226532165
- eISBN:
- 9780226532479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226532479.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
When we think of modernity, we think of a period from which enchantment has been banished—and sometimes to which it may return as a radical or counter-cultural alternative. This chapter argues that ...
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When we think of modernity, we think of a period from which enchantment has been banished—and sometimes to which it may return as a radical or counter-cultural alternative. This chapter argues that we should think instead of a period in which enchantment is very much present, but is subject to new forms of management. After addressing a range of views on modern enchantment, including those of Ann Braude, Alex Owen, Molly McGarry, Jane Bennett, and Michael Saler, this chapter shows how the management of enchantment by those who view it as delusion, or credulity, has been a blind spot for many approaches. Mesmerism, with its practitioners who aimed toward disenchantment themselves but who also enchanted others, can prompt us in the right direction. This chapter proposes that scholars of secularity and of the occult should refocus their attention on delusion as a means of understanding secularization, enchantment, and modern skepticism.Less
When we think of modernity, we think of a period from which enchantment has been banished—and sometimes to which it may return as a radical or counter-cultural alternative. This chapter argues that we should think instead of a period in which enchantment is very much present, but is subject to new forms of management. After addressing a range of views on modern enchantment, including those of Ann Braude, Alex Owen, Molly McGarry, Jane Bennett, and Michael Saler, this chapter shows how the management of enchantment by those who view it as delusion, or credulity, has been a blind spot for many approaches. Mesmerism, with its practitioners who aimed toward disenchantment themselves but who also enchanted others, can prompt us in the right direction. This chapter proposes that scholars of secularity and of the occult should refocus their attention on delusion as a means of understanding secularization, enchantment, and modern skepticism.
Emily Ogden
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226532165
- eISBN:
- 9780226532479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226532479.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter describes the first major debunking of mesmerism, the Paris animal magnetism investigation of 1784 chaired by Benjamin Franklin, and that debunking’s reception in the US from 1784 to the ...
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This chapter describes the first major debunking of mesmerism, the Paris animal magnetism investigation of 1784 chaired by Benjamin Franklin, and that debunking’s reception in the US from 1784 to the 1830s. It shows, first, that mesmerism was known in the US as a falsehood before it was known as a truth; and second, that this early debunking furnished mesmerism and hypnosis with a concept important to subsequent practice: suggestion, the phenomenon of the subject readily believing and obeying the mesmerist. This phenomenon was first described not by mesmerists but by Benjamin Franklin and others investigating the claims of mesmerism’s founder Franz Anton Mesmer. The Franklin commission decided that imagination, not animal magnetism, was the reason for the convulsions and cures Mesmer observed: patients believed they would be affected, and so they were. Imagination was the foundation for suggestion. Ranging from Bruno Latour’s work on belief to Elizabeth Inchbald’s play Animal Magnetism and Hannah Webster Foster’s novel The Coquette, this chapter demonstrates the strange tendency of debunking to prompt, rather than suppress, further practice.Less
This chapter describes the first major debunking of mesmerism, the Paris animal magnetism investigation of 1784 chaired by Benjamin Franklin, and that debunking’s reception in the US from 1784 to the 1830s. It shows, first, that mesmerism was known in the US as a falsehood before it was known as a truth; and second, that this early debunking furnished mesmerism and hypnosis with a concept important to subsequent practice: suggestion, the phenomenon of the subject readily believing and obeying the mesmerist. This phenomenon was first described not by mesmerists but by Benjamin Franklin and others investigating the claims of mesmerism’s founder Franz Anton Mesmer. The Franklin commission decided that imagination, not animal magnetism, was the reason for the convulsions and cures Mesmer observed: patients believed they would be affected, and so they were. Imagination was the foundation for suggestion. Ranging from Bruno Latour’s work on belief to Elizabeth Inchbald’s play Animal Magnetism and Hannah Webster Foster’s novel The Coquette, this chapter demonstrates the strange tendency of debunking to prompt, rather than suppress, further practice.