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Medicine

Cathy Gutierrez

in Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance

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 ... More

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

Universalism and Spiritual Science

Ann Lee Bressler

in The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880

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 ... More

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

The Emergence of Unchurched Traditions

Robert C. Fuller

in Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America

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 ... More

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

Mesmerism and Spiritualism

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

in The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction

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 ... More

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

Ritual Magic from 1850 to the Present

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

in The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction

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 ... More

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

The Author Function in Walter Besant’s Fiction: The Notion of Artistic Value in the Wake of Copyright Law and the Nationalist Restructuring of the Book Trade

Alberto Gabriele

in Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform

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 ... More

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

“The Incandescent Solid beneath Our Line of Sight”: Frederic Myers, the Self, and the Psychiatric Subconscious

Courtenay Raia

in The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siécle

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 ... More

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

From writing to reading: Poe, Brontë and Eliot

Andrew Smith

in Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History

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 ... More

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

The Mesmerism Investigation and the Crisis of Sensibilist Science

in Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment

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 ... More

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

‘Something was going from me – the capacity, as it were, to be myself’: ‘transformational objects’ and the Gothic fiction of Richard Marsh

Graeme Pedlingham

in Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890-1915: Rereading the fin de siècle

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 ... More

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

Entranced by death: Horace Smith’s Mesmerism

Bruce Wyse

in The Gothic and Death

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 ... More

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

Out on Credulity!: An Introduction

Emily Ogden

in Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism

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 ... More

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

It Does Not Exist: Animal Magnetism Before It Was True

Emily Ogden

in Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism

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 ... More

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