Supernatural (9 page)

In fact, Jean Paul does not always write on this ecstatic level; many of his works are about humble schoolmasters who live quietly in some small country village, and marry a local girl, and spend their lives peacefully teaching children the three Rs, and writing poetry which they never try to publish.
But whether he is writing of magnificent landscapes or idyllic little villages, we can see why thousands of young people read Jean Paul with tears in their eyes, and regarded him as the greatest writer since Shakespeare.
It seems absurdly ironic that he is now totally forgotten.

But what is so interesting here is how much things have changed in the sixty years since
Pamela.
Richardson was a realist; people read him because he wrote about the sort of people they knew.
But if you are going to be carried away by a writer, rather like Sinbad the Sailor being carried up into the air by the roc, you may as well go for stories about young counts with mysterious fathers, which take place in the midst of magnificent scenery.
If, like most of Jean Paul’s readers, you had never been outside your native town or village, then why not also have the benefits of a technicolour travelogue?

But as you read Jean Paul’s splendid description of Isola Bella, you will notice that the mood it attempts to induce is one of
abandonment.
Like Albano, you are supposed to cry ‘Oh God!’, and feel as if you want to fling yourself off the terrace and swoop like a bird over the sea.
Jean Paul is trying to persuade you to
give yourself
to this wonderful landscape, like a girl giving herself to a lover.
And here we encounter the greatest problem of the romantics.
They may have intuitions of hidden powers, of the ability to fly or to float into the air like a balloon.
But it is all basically Christmas cake and pretty girls.
You sit back
passively
and wait for it to be handed to you on a plate.
Church, on the other hand, is excited by his insight to make a sudden effort:

‘I exerted that will, visualising my hands and pressing downwards upon the centre of the earth.
It was no surprise to me that I left the ground .
.
.’

And the student Beard, we may recall, had been reading a book about the power of the will when he decided to try to ‘appear’ to his fiancée Miss Verity.

These ‘hidden powers’ we are speaking about demand a certain effort, a non-passive attitude—something like Powys’s ‘thrill of malicious exultation’, the feeling that he is a ‘demiurgic force’, not a passive creature waiting to be swept off his feet.

In the following chapter I want to look more closely at some of these ‘hidden powers’, and the methods by which we can contact them.
But it is important, above all, to remember that the method for contacting these powers consists in ‘subjectivising’, withdrawing inside yourself.
This
is the basic secret of ‘magic’.

1.
Tertium Organum,
Chapter 14
.

1.
Quoted in my
Beyond the Occult,
p. 187
, and in
Phantasms of the Living,
by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Volume 2,
p. 461
.

1.
Yeats:
Essays and Introductions,
p. 37
.

2

The Powers of the Hidden Self

S
IX YEARS BEFORE
the publication of
Pamela,
the wife of a gamekeeper on the shores of Lake Constance, in Austria, gave birth to a male child whose influence would be as tremendous and far-reaching as that of Samuel Richardson.
Unfortunately for Franz Anton Mesmer, he was not a novelist but a scientist and a philosopher—I say unfortunately because everybody loves a good story, but few people like being asked to think.
Even clever people are inclined to react to original ideas with indifference or hostility.
So Mesmer’s amazing contribution brought him little but trouble, and when he died in 1815, he was virtually forgotten.
Yet his ideas, as we shall see, are virtually the intellectual cornerstone of modern psychology.

Mesmer grew up amidst peaceful mountain scenery, and it left its mark on him for a lifetime.
His naturally religious temperament inclined him towards the priesthood, but after attending a Jesuit university at Dillingen, he came to realise that his immense curiosity pointed to a career in science and philosophy.
So he studied philosophy, then law, and ended up at the age of 32 with a medical degree as well.
Interestingly enough, his doctoral thesis was called ‘The Influence of the Planets Upon the Human Body’.
But its thesis was less absurd than it sounds.
Mesmer believed that nature is pervaded by invisible energies—the force of gravitation is an example—and that when we are in tune with these energies, we are healthy.
When the energies are blocked, either by physical problems or negative mental attitudes, we become unhealthy.
If the energies can become unblocked, we become healthy again.

This cheerful attitude brought him success, and within two years he had married one of his wealthy patients, a widow von Posch, and moved into a magnificent house in Vienna, where he counted the Mozarts among his many friends.
It looked as if nothing could stand in the way of a lifetime of good fortune and respectability.

But how can the ‘vital energies’ be unblocked?
One obvious way is to induce a crisis—we recognise this when we take aspirin to get rid of a cold by making us perspire.
In Mesmer’s day, most doctors tried to induce a crisis by bleeding the patient, which, amazingly enough, often seemed to work.
But there should surely be easier ways?
In 1773, he thought he might have stumbled on the solution.
His friend Father Maximilian Hell, the Professor of Astronomy at Vienna University, had been experimenting with magnets, and was inclined to believe that they could unblock the vital fluids—he even designed specially shaped magnets that would fit over various parts of the body.
Mesmer tried it out on a patient in 1773, taking with him his friend Leopold Mozart.
29-year-old Franziska Oesterlein lay in bed suffering from general debilitation.
Mesmer tried applying some of Hell’s powerful magnets, moving them from her stomach down to her feet.
After an hour or so, Frau Oesterlein reported strange currents moving around her body.
These built up to a crisis, and she ended by feeling much better.
Repeated doses of the magnetic treatment soon cured her.

Father Hell was naturally inclined to claim the credit, and at first Mesmer was inclined to give it generously.
Then he noticed something rather odd.
One day when he was bleeding a patient, he noticed that the flow of blood increased when he moved close, and decreased when he moved away.
It looked as if his own body was producing the same effect as the magnets.
Instead of using magnets, he began passing his hands lightly over the patient.
This seemed to work just as well.
And as he tried the method on more patients, Mesmer decided that he had discovered the basic principle of healing: not ordinary ‘magnetic’ magnetism, but
animal
magnetism.
In 1779 he published a pamphlet on his discovery.
To his astonishment, it aroused general hositility instead of the acclaim he had expected from his colleagues in the medical profession.
They insisted that Mesmer was a charlatan who cured his patients by mere suggestion—a notion in which there was obviously a certain amount of truth.
They also suggested that Mesmer’s motives in passing his hands over the bodies of female patients were not as pure as they should be.

As rich patients talked about spectacular cures, the hostility grew.
Mesmer spent a week at the estate of Baron Haresky de Horka, who suffered from unaccountable ‘spasms’ and fits, and he persisted throughout a disappointing week when it looked as though the baron was failing to respond to treatment.
It took six days before the baron began to shudder with asthmatic paroxysms.
When Mesmer held the baron’s foot, they stopped; when he held his hand, they started again.
Clearly, Mesmer was controlling the baron’s vital fluids and making them flow at will.
With enough of this, he reasoned, all the blockages should be cleared away, like masses of twigs and leaves in a stream, and the energies should flow unimpeded.
So they did; when Mesmer returned to Vienna, the baron was cured.

Undeterred by mounting hostility, Mesmer thought of new ways of distributing the magnetic fluid: he ‘magnetised’ jars of water, connected up the jars with metal bands, and placed the apparatus in a large wooden tub half-filled with iron filings and water.
Patients sat with their feet in the water, or sat with their backs against magnetised trees.
The results were remarkable—but his colleagues pointed out that leaving scantily clad men and women in close contact with one another would probably stimulate their vital fluids anyway .
.
.

Mesmer’s good angel was off-duty on the day he agreed to treat a blind young pianist named Maria Theresa Paradies, a protégée of the Empress.
He was unaware that her blindness was due to a detached retina.
Oddly enough, after a few weeks of treatment in Mesmer’s house, the girl became convinced she could see dimly.
A Profesor Barth was sent to examine her, and he admitted privately to Mesmer that she seemed to have improved.
But his report stated that she was still blind—which was undoubtedly true.
The girl had be be dragged away from Mesmer’s house by force.
And Mesmer, tired of insults and threats, decided to move to Paris in 1778.

Here he met with the same mixture of acclaim and vilification.
Dr Charles D’Eslon, personal physician to the king’s brother, became an ardent admirer, and lectured on Mesmer’s ideas to the Society of Medicine on September 18, 1790.
Mesmer’s mixed-group cures continued to attract dozens of wealthy patients, who would sit with their feet in the wooden tub or
baquet,
and form a chain and press their bodies together to facilitate the flow of vital fluid.
One patient, Major Charles du Hussay, was cured of the after-effects of typhus, which had turned him into a trembling wreck, by a ‘crisis’ that made his teeth chatter for a month, but which left him perfectly restored.
Cases like this so impressed the king that he offered Mesmer a lifelong pension to remain in France; Mesmer demanded half a million francs for research.
When the king refused, he left France—on the same day that D’Eslon was lecturing to the medical faculty—and returned only when his patients contributed 350,000 gold louis, many times more than what he had asked for.
But Mesmer had made an enemy of the king, who appointed a ‘commission’ of scientists to look into Mesmer’s ideas.
It included the great American Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Lavoisier (who was to lose his head in the Revolution) and the inventor of a new decapitation machine, a certain Dr Guillotin.
It is an episode that reflects discredit on Franklin, who was much prejudiced against Mesmer.
He was also ill, so that he did not actually attend any of the ‘experiments’.
But he signed the report which dismissed ‘animal magnetism’ as mere imagination.
Mesmer was actually absent from France at the time (1794) and was not even consulted.
He returned, but nothing could restore his fortunes.
A hostile doctor introduced himself as a patient, allowed Mesmer to ‘cure’ him, then wrote a report denouncing him as a quack.
This kind of thing was unanswerable.
After the Revolution (during which he lost all his money) Mesmer fled.
The Austrian police prevented him from returning to Vienna.
He spent his last quarter of a century living quietly in Constance, not far from his birthplace.

Now it may seem to many open-minded readers that Mesmer’s critics were by no means incorrect: that his theories
were
absurd, and that his cures were, indeed, due to ‘suggestion’.
Yet this is really to miss the point.
We must remember, to begin with, that medicine in the time of Mesmer was completely ‘materialistic’, in the sense that it was firmly believed that all medical problems are physical in origin, (to which they added as a corollary: ‘and can be cured by bleeding’.) Even if we take the least sympathetic view of Mesmer, we have to recognise that he had stumbled on a recognition of tremendous importance: that the mind plays as much a part in illness as the body.
If his sceptical colleagues had been open-minded enough to study his cures, instead of attacking them as quackery, they would have found themselves asking questions that would have created a science of psychology a century before Freud.

Second, our conviction that Mesmer’s ideas about magnetism and ‘animal magnetism’ are based on pure ignorance may well be incorrect.
Well into the late 19th century, many doctors were still conducting serious experiments with magnets, and producing some extremely interesting results—for example, causing paralysis to move from one side of the body to the other.
We have forgotten all this, and our descendants may well shake their heads at our complacency.

Moreover, in the 20th century, another remarkable rebel, Wilhelm Reich, came independently to the conclusion that health is governed by ‘tides’ of vital fluid; he called this ‘orgone energy’.
Reich
was,
in many ways, a crank; he was more Freudian than Freud, and believed that all illness can be explained in terms of sexual neurosis.
Yet his indifference to current scientific dogmas led him to some interesting discoveries which may well be one day considered as an important contribution to modern science.

It may also be mentioned in passing that it has now been scientifically established that the human body possesses an ‘aura’ or ‘life-field’, which seems to be electrical in nature.
A young biologist named Hans Driesch divided a sea urchin’s egg into two and killed off one half; the other half did not turn into half a sea urchin embryo; to his surprise, it turned into a perfect but smaller embryo.
When he pressed two embryos together they turned into a double-size embryo.
Driesch realised that there must be a kind of invisible blueprint, like a magnetic field, which ‘shapes’ living things, just as a magnet can shape iron filings on a sheet of paper.
A later experimenter, Harold Saxton Burr, discovered that he could measure this ‘life-field’ with a voltmeter, and diagnose illness from its fluctuations.
In effect, he has placed what occultists call ‘the human aura’ on a scientific basis.
This
is almost certainly what Mesmer was affecting with his magnetic fields.