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is it not most humiliating, after shuffling and wriggling hopelessly in the
inexorable meshes of serried facts, to collapse suddenly, and call the hated net a
"suitable enclosure," in which forsooth, you don't mind being caught? Now this,
as it seems to me, is precisely what Messrs. Charcot and the French hypnotists
and their medical admirers in England are doing. Ever since Mesmer's death at the
age of eighty, in 1815, the French and English "Faculty," with some honorable
exceptions, have ridiculed and denied the facts as well as the theories of Mesmer,
but now, in 1890, a host of scientists suddenly agree, while wiping out as best
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STUDIES IN OCCULTISM
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they may the name of Mesmer, to rob him of all his phenomena, which they
quietly appropriate under the name of "hypnotism," "suggestion," "Therapeutic
Magnetism," "psychopathic Massage," and all the rest of it. Well, "What's in a
name?"
I care more for things than names, but I reverence the pioneers of thought who
have been cast out, trodden under foot, and crucified by the orthodox of all ages,
and I think the least scientists can do for men like Mesmer, Du Potet, Puysegur, or
Mayo and Elliotson, now they are gone, is to "build their sepulchers."
But Mr. Haweis might have added instead, the amateur Hypnotists of Science dig with their own
hands the graves of many a man and woman's intellect; they enslave and paralyze freewill in
their "subjects," turn immortal men into soulless, irresponsible automata, and vivisect their souls
with as much unconcern as they vivisect the bodies of rabbits and dogs. In short, they are fast
blooming into "sorcerers," and are turning science into a vast field of black magic. The rev.
writer, however, lets the culprits off easily; and, remarking that he accepts "the distinction"
[between Mesmerism and Hypnotism] "without pledging himself to any theory," he adds: --
I am mainly concerned with the facts, and what I want to know is why these cures
and abnormal states are trumpeted about as modern discoveries, while the
"faculty" still deride or ignore their great predecessors without having themselves
a theory which they can agree upon or a single fact which can be called new. The
truth is we are just blundering back with toil to work over again the old disused
mines of the ancients; the rediscovery of these occult sciences is exactly matched
by the slow recovery of sculpture and painting in modern Europe. Here is the
history of occult science in a nutshell. (1) Once known. (2) Lost. (3)
Rediscovered. (4) Denied. (5) Reaffirmed, and by slow degrees, under new
names, victorious. The evidence for all this is exhaustive and abundant. Here it
may suffice to notice that Diodorus Siculus mentions how the Egyptian priests,
ages before Christ, attributed clairvoyance induced for therapeutic purposes to
Isis. Strabo ascribes the same to Serapis, while Galen mentions a temple near
Memphis famous for these Hypnotic cures. Pythagoras, who won the confidence
of the Egyptian priests, is full of it. Aristophanes in "Plutus" describes in some
detail a Mesmeric cure -- [kai prota men de tes kephales ephepsato], etc., "and
first he began to handle the head." Caelius Aurelianus describes manipulations
(1569) for disease "conducting the hands from the superior to the inferior parts";
and there was an old Latin proverb -- Ubi dolor ibi digitus, "Where pain, there
finger." But time would fail me to tell of Paracelsus (1462) (2) and his "deep
secret of Magnetism"; of Van Helmont (1644) (3) and his "faith in the power of
the hand in disease." Much in the writings of both these men was only made clear
to the moderns by the experiments of Mesmer, and in view of modern Hypnotists
it is clearly with him and his disciples that we have chiefly to do. He claimed, no
doubt, to transmit an animal magnetic fluid, which I believe the Hypnotists deny.
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STUDIES IN OCCULTISM
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They do, they do. But so did the scientists with regard to more than one truth. To deny "an
animal magnetic fluid" is surely no more absurd than to deny the circulation of the blood, as they
have so energetically done.
A few additional details about Mesmerism given by Mr. Haweis may prove interesting. Thus he
reminds us of the answer written by the much wronged Mesmer to the Academicians after their
unfavorable Report, and refers to it as "prophetic words."
"You say that Mesmer will never hold up his head again. If such is the destiny of
the man it is not the destiny of the truth, which is in its nature imperishable, and
will shine forth sooner or later in the same or some other country with more
brilliancy than ever, and its triumph will annihilate its miserable detractors."
Mesmer left Paris in disgust, and retired to Switzerland to die; but the illustrious
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