Mesmerism

The Mystica Encyclopedia · All entries · Rewritten October 2026

Mesmerism at a glance

Franz Anton Mesmer and the theory of animal magnetism

Franz Anton Mesmer was born in 1734 at Iznang, near Lake Constance, and studied medicine in Vienna. His doctoral dissertation of 1766, De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body), argued that the heavenly bodies act on living beings through a subtle universal medium. In the 1770s he began treating patients with magnets, then concluded that the magnets were unnecessary and that the healing force resided in the practitioner himself. He called this force animal magnetism (see Animal Magnetism).

According to Mesmer, health depended on the free flow of this fluid through the body. Disease was an obstruction, and the physician could restore balance by channeling the fluid, usually through passes of the hands, touch and steady gazing. Treatment often produced a dramatic "crisis" in the patient, such as convulsions, weeping or fainting, which Mesmer interpreted as the turning point of the cure.

Paris, the baquet and the 1784 royal commission

Controversy over his treatments, including the case of the blind pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis, helped push Mesmer out of Vienna, and in 1778 he settled in Paris. There his practice became fashionable. To treat many patients at once he used the baquet, a wooden tub filled with water, iron filings and glass, from which iron rods projected for patients to hold while seated in a circle, often to music. Followers formed the Society of Harmony to teach and spread the doctrine.

In 1784 King Louis XVI appointed commissions to examine animal magnetism. The best known, drawn from the Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, included Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, Jean Sylvain Bailly and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. It studied the methods of Mesmer's former pupil Charles d'Eslon and ran some of the earliest blind trials in the history of science: subjects who believed they were being magnetized reacted strongly even when they were not, and failed to react when they were magnetized without knowing it. The commissioners concluded that there was no evidence for a magnetic fluid and attributed the effects to imagination and imitation. A second commission of the Royal Society of Medicine reached a similar verdict, with the botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu dissenting. Historians often cite these trials as an early recognition of what is now called the placebo effect.

Puysegur and magnetic sleep

Mesmerism did not die with the commission's report. In 1784 the Marquis de Puysegur, magnetizing patients on his estate at Buzancy, observed that a young peasant named Victor Race fell into a calm, sleep-like trance instead of a convulsive crisis. In this state Race spoke more freely and seemed to respond to the magnetizer's suggestions. Puysegur called the condition artificial or magnetic somnambulism. His emphasis on a gentle trance and on the will of the operator, rather than on a physical fluid, shifted the practice toward the psychological territory later explored by hypnotism.

Somnambulic subjects were sometimes said to diagnose illnesses, see distant places or read with their eyes closed. Such claims linked mesmerism with clairvoyance and other reported psychic powers, and they fed directly into later psychical research.

From mesmerism to hypnotism

During the first half of the nineteenth century mesmerism spread across Europe and America through lecturers and stage demonstrators. In Britain the physician John Elliotson promoted it in medicine, and the surgeon James Esdaile reported operations performed on mesmerized patients in India before chemical anesthesia came into use. In 1841 the Scottish surgeon James Braid attended a demonstration by the traveling magnetizer Charles Lafontaine in Manchester. Braid became convinced that the trance was real but rejected the idea of a magnetic fluid, explaining it instead as a physiological state brought on by fixed attention. In his book Neurypnology (1843) he adopted the term "hypnotism" to separate his approach from mesmerism. Later researchers such as Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim in France made hypnosis a subject of medical study.

Influence on spiritualism, New Thought and occultism

Mesmerism provided much of the vocabulary and practice of nineteenth-century alternative religion. The entranced subject who spoke with unusual insight became a model for the spiritualist medium, and the American seer Andrew Jackson Davis began his career as a mesmeric clairvoyant. In New England the clockmaker Phineas Parkhurst Quimby moved from mesmeric healing to the view that illness was rooted in belief, an idea that shaped the New Thought movement and influenced debates around Christian Science. Occult writers, including Helena Blavatsky and Eliphas Levi, absorbed the idea of a universal vital fluid or astral light into their own systems.

Scientific view and legacy

Modern science does not recognize animal magnetism or any magnetic fluid. The 1784 conclusion that the effects came from expectation, suggestion and imagination has been borne out by later research, and the phenomena once credited to magnetism are studied today under hypnosis, suggestion and placebo response. Mesmer himself spent his last years in relative obscurity and died at Meersburg in 1815. His name survives in the English verb "to mesmerize", meaning to hold someone's attention as if spellbound, and historians treat mesmerism as an important bridge between Enlightenment medicine, the history of psychology and modern esotericism.

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