Animal magnetism

A blank day as Miss Pencloser goes with Wilson and his wife to the Suttons.

Have begun Binet and Fera's Animal Magnetism.

What strange deep waters these are! Results, results, results, and the cause an absolute mystery.

It is stimulating to the imagination, but I must be on my guard against that.

But something interesting remained.

People continued reporting profound experiences during practices descended from Mesmerism.

And eventually, the investigation of some of those phenomena contributed to entirely different areas of study, including hypnosis.

Then came spiritualism, occultism, theosophy, new thought, western encounters with Asian religious and philosophical traditions.

I got bored in lockdown and spent ages going through old mesmerist books that are in French, translating them into English with the help of a French Canadian guy.

And Mesmerism, they used to do lots of trance-based things where they would get the other to communicate through the person and embody the whole person.

But they had to put the person into a deep trance for that.

He was just working on this woman's leg and the guy was a doctor before and he saw this woman years before, I think it was close to 10 years before he saw this woman and he couldn't fix her as a doctor.

But he, just the same thing you were showing us with the swan, it seems like this person spontaneously happened in her knee and this guy had the intuition to be like these aren't random movements there is a communication coming through here and that is so bizarre

that story is so trippy I got bored in lockdown and like spent ages going through like old mesmerist books that are in French translating them into English with the help of a French Canadian guy and Mesmerism, they used to do lots of trance-based things where they would get the other to communicate through the person and embody the whole person.

But they had to put the person into a deep trance for that.

He was just working on this woman's leg and the guy was a doctor before and he saw this woman years before, I think it was close to 10 years before he saw this woman and he couldn't fix her as a doctor.

I've not.

Mesmerism is where his name came from.

He wrote a book about mesmerism and he was able to control people by adding metals to their drinks and stuff like that with magnetism.

Yeah.

And

if we think about so much of this began in France, you know, from Mesmer to Charcot, the Salpêtrière, Nancy's school with Bernheim, and Coué also with auto-suggestion.

Yes, Emil Coué, right.

What for you the greatest thing France gave in the field of hypnosis and maybe its biggest mistake too?

Le chef de l'Académie Française avait dit que de parler l'anglais, c'est une nécessité.

De parler français, c'est un privilège.

So Mesmer was a Viennese physician who started practicing something that he called animal magnetism, where he thought that the problem with people who had many problems like phobias and things like that was that they had abnormal magnetic fields in their brain and in their body.

And so he would sit them down next to a paquet, which was a tub filled with iron filings and weakly magnetic.

My mesmerize...

Mesmerism is 60.

Okay.

I'm

Let's see how this works.

Okay.

Mesmerism skill is 94.

I

The execution of the latter operation is described very minutely.

The Talmudic pathology ascribes diseases to a constitutional vice, to evil influences affecting the body from without, or to the effect of magic.

It recognizes, among other things, the origin of jaundice from retention of bile, and of dropsy from the suppression of urine.

The latter, in general, was divided into anasarca, ascites, and tympanites.

The pupil must begin to study early in the morning after having rinsed his mouth and prayed to the cow and the gods, and cease late in the evening.

Conference with fellow students is enumerated among the means adapted to give the student a better insight into his studies.

The general pathology of the Hindus, says J.H. Bass in his excellent History of Medicine, points out as the characteristics of health a serene spirit, clear sense, and perfect understanding, uniform warmth from a uniform mixture of the fluids and elements and undisturbed regularity of the secretions and functions of the body.

Diseases are divided into natural and supernatural, the work of demons, with subordinate classes as accidental, corporeal, mental, original and complicating, secondary, internal and external.

[laughs] Illusion.

Uh, I hope you're ready, Nick, for animal magnetism taught by the, uh, the arts of Mesmer.

I can tell you I'm magnetically drawn to you, Michael.

Wow.

It's like ana- the animal magnetism isn't even really a main thing.

Like, even when they get...

So there's a magician, and he, as you mentioned, he falls in the path of Mesmer.

Um-