Read Solomon's Secret Arts Online
Authors: Paul Kléber Monod
The second distinguishing feature of English animal magnetism was its high degree of commercialization, which reflected the social diversity of its clients. This had not been the intention of Mainauduc. He proposed the formation of “an Hygiæn Society,” consisting of “Ladies,” meaning upper class women, who would take charge of the diffusion of magnetic teachings in London. His early cures were entirely aimed at the elite and court circles. The duchess of Devonshire, leading hostess of her day, accompanied Elizabeth Sheridan on her second visit to Mainauduc. This time, Mrs Sheridan “found herself attack'd as before but in a more violent degree, her limbs being now convuls'd.” The duchess herself “was thrown into Hysterics, Lady Salisbury put to sleep the same morning—And the Prince of Wales so near fainting that he turned quite pale and was forced to be supported.”
36
Here was a truly blue-blooded roomful of convulsionaries! A list of Mainauduc's patients includes the duke of Gloucester, Lords Milford and Rivers, the Marchioness Townshend, the countess of Hopetown, Lady Archer, Lady Luttrell and two Ladies Beauclerk, General Rainsford, Richard Cosway and his wife, Maria. The sceptical George Winter, who attended Mainauduc's lectures in 1788, wrote that his fellow students included 3 male lay peers, 6 peeresses, a bishop, 5 Right Honourable gentlemen and ladies, two baronets, 7 Members of Parliament, a clergyman, two physicians, 7 surgeons and ninety-two other people “of respectability.” The 1798 subscription list to Mainauduc's published lectures comprised persons no less well-born: viscount Chetwynd, the marquess and marchioness of Hertford, Lady Clive, Lady Charlotte Campbell (future novelist and friend of “Monk” Lewis) and assorted colonels.
37
This was the sort of high-society crowd that
Mesmer himself had cultivated in Vienna and Paris; but it was not big enough to sustain more than one successful magnetist.
Mainauduc's chief rivals aimed at a less exalted clientele, attracting them with lower fees for instruction. They relied heavily on public advertising, in a variety of forms. John Bell introduced his lectures through an advertising pamphlet, while Loutherbourg, John Holloway, Benedict Chastanier and the mysterious Dr Yeldall advertised in newspapers. Chastanier and Holloway also issued broadsheets.
38
Holloway offered lectures on animal magnetism six days a week, either at his house in Hoxton or at another site in Pall Mall. A course of three afternoon lectures normally cost £1.5s.0d. per person, although it could rise as high as 5 guineas, and Winter huffed that Holloway had realized £2,000 in fees. “A Gentleman and his Wife will be admitted as one person,” Holloway added, liberally. Those living at a distance from London could engage his services, provided they could gather a sufficient number of pupils. Holloway would travel anywhere in England or Scotland to speak to a class of thirty people, and claimed to have educated almost two hundred.
39
Perhaps the most successful advertising technique of all, however, proved to be word of mouth. Loutherbourg and his wife offered free treatments to paupers at their house in Hammermith, and were soon overwhelmed by customers. Mary Pratt claimed that they cured two thousand people between Christmas 1788 and July 1789, adding that crowds of three thousand had lined up for tickets. These charitable efforts forced the exhausted Loutherbourgs to retire to the country.
40
The burgeoning sphere of public discourse in London provided further advertising for the magnetists through debating clubs and the theatre. In September 1789, the Coach Makers’ Hall Society of Cheapside debated the question of whether it was “consistent with reason or religion to believe, that Mr. Loutherbourg has performed any cures by a divine power without any medical application?” The artist was defended by at least three gentlemen, and the debate was adjourned to the following week, when it was finally decided against him. In the same month, Dr Yeldall was called upon to defend his methods before an audience at the weekly forum known as the City Debates. Yeldall's oration upholding the validity of animal magnetism “impressed that Conviction on a numerous and brilliant Audience, which caused them almost unanimously to declare, that his Practice of Animal Magnetism was founded on the sound Principles of Philosophy.”
41
The dramatist Elizabeth Inchbald added to the public debate through her farce
Animal Magnetism
; it debuted at Covent Garden in 1788 and remains very funny. The story revolves around a valet who pretends to be “Doctor Mystery, author, and first discoverer of that healing and sublime art,
Animal Magnetism
.”
42
Although
The Times
wished the play to be as successful against magnetism as Ben Jonson's
The Alchemist
was
against gold-making, it did not present a straightforward condemnation of the practice. One of the actresses was reportedly magnetized during rehearsals and thrown into convulsive fits of laughter!
43
It is difficult to estimate the size of the audience stirred up by this publicity, but it was undoubtedly substantial, and must have extended into the middling and even lower ranks of society. Hoxton was not a fashionable destination for the upper classes (it was full of Nonconformists), so the customers at Holloway's house were probably of the middling sort. John Cue, who also lived in Hoxton, taught and practised healing free of charge, although Martin sneered that he accepted money from “suitable patients.”
44
The Loutherbourgs’ clients included a teenage apprentice, the daughter of a chairman, a news-carrier and several women who seem to have been servants. As already suggested, women were always prominent among the magnetized, although practising female magnetists were rare.
45
Lucy de Loutherbourg cured patients alongside her husband, and Mainauduc had at least one female assistant, Ann Prescott. A disgruntled student of John Holloway, “Maria,” published a short pamphlet entitled
The Secret Revealed: or Animal Magnetism Displayed
.
46
George Winter asserted that Mary Pratt performed magnetic cures, although there is no other evidence for this.
47
The third point to be made about animal magnetism in England is that it depended heavily on the occult. The same might be said of the phenomenon in Strasbourg, where it was dominated by Swedenborgians, or in Lyons, where it was practised by the occult Masons of the Élus-Coens.
48
The impact of occult philosophy was noted with disapproval by the English opponents of magnetic healing. John Martin accused the magnetists of reading nothing but “
arcana
” or occult writings, such as Agrippa, Fludd, J.B. van Helmont, the seventeenth-century Scottish physician William Maxwell and Paracelsus—precisely the books recommended for study by the author of
Wonders of Animal Magnetism Displayed
, although he added Sir Kenelm Digby, a few astrologers (Culpeper, Lilly, Coley, Saunders), Henry More and others.
49
John Bell referred to Paracelsus as one of the precursors of animal magnetism, suggesting that he, “as well as many other anatomists, have admitted poles in man.”
50
Writers who were sympathetic to animal magnetism compared it to Sir Kenelm Digby's weapon salve and to the methods of the seventeenth-century Irish “Toucher” Valentine Greatrakes. Like the Royal Touch in earlier times, animal magnetism was advertised as an effective treatment for the King's Evil, or scrofula.
51
The relationship of animal magnetism to occult science was explained by the astrologer Ebenezer Sibly, who included a long discussion of the practice in his
Key to Physic, and the Occult Sciences
(1795). He perceived it as proof of the traditional theory of sympathies and antipathies in nature. As he put it in his
somewhat tortured prose, “the atmospherical particle to each individual receives from the general fluid the proper attraction and repulsion.” Sibly equated the universal fluid to a “vital force” that was subject to celestial as well as earthly forces.
52
This was one of the most original readings of animal magnetism to be published in England, and it reached a large audience, as the work was reprinted in 1800, 1802, 1806 and 1814. It was accompanied by an engraving of “The Operator putting his Patient into the Crisis” that has since become a standard illustration of the technique. Sibly may have also had something to do with the republication in 1793 of a treatise that had first appeared fifty years before on “Magnetical Cures,” falsely attributed to the Dutch chemist Herman Boerhaave. It made the same argument as Sibly about sympathies and antipathies, but it recommended healing by “True Magick, grounded upon natural Causes,” and even endorsed figures, sigils and talismanic images, “because their Operation is natural, and perform'd by the wonderful Influence of the celestial Bodies agreeing with our Bodies.”
53
Sibly did not market sigils or talismans, but the occult theory behind this work was very similar to his. Francis Barrett, who
did
endorse talismans, included chapters on magnetic healing in
The Magus
, where he presented a typically confusing pastiche of natural magic with what he called “the spirit of the blood.” Much of Barrett's discussion was derived from Sibly.
54
Some were willing to extend the occult foundations of animal magnetism beyond Europe. According to a scandalized John Martin, the magnetist John Holloway announced in one of his lectures that animal magnetism “is exactly similar to the
Heathen priestesses
, when they gave out their answers in pagan Temples.” Holloway then recounted a story about two European ships voyaging to India that were separated near the coast. “To give them satisfaction, one of the Indians being worked upon [i.e. subjected to animal magnetism], became insensible, and had all the symptoms of a crisis.” After his recovery, “he assured the sailors, he had seen their companions, that they were safe, and would ere long arrive at the same place: which came to pass.” Holloway followed this up with another “extravagant” tale about an Indian “who possessed great powers of magnetism,” and was allowed to heal people, although he had to commit a murder once a year. Martin thought the anecdote revealed that magnetism was “from Satan and not from God.”
55
Holloway's Indian analogies signify the beginnings of a cross-cultural interchange on the subject of visions that would influence British ideas of magnetic healing into the mid-nineteenth century.
56
Occult Freemasons, alchemists and Swedenborgians were thrilled by animal magnetism. While serving as governor of Gibraltar, General Rainsford translated and wrote a preface to a French account of a young woman who experienced visions while under magnetic treatment. The testimony of “M
lle
N–” suggested that “the
Will
of the
Spirit
& of the
Soul
shew themselves most sensibly in the
Solar Plexus
.” Rainsford also translated a letter on somnambulism addressed to the Swedenborgians at Strasbourg. Animal magnetism, the author concluded, was a kind of divine spiritual healing.
57
The Loutherbourgs, who cured simply by touch, held the same opinion. “Anthony Pasquin” relates how Loutherbourg's successful career as a magnetist ended when a crowd of invalids broke into his house at Hammersmith and destroyed “his most valued medicaments,” which probably means his alchemical work. Loutherbourg's friend Richard Cosway attempted his own extravagant magnetic therapies. He believed he had the ability to look inside people's bodies, and once diagnosed a friend as suffering from “a
hole
in your
liver
.”
58
In animal magnetism as in other occult matters, Cosway was an incorrigible dilettante.
After an initial burst of enthusiasm, some Swedenborgians had second thoughts about magnetic healing, among them Benedict Chastanier. He served as assistant to Mainauduc for ten months, then began to offer lessons on animal magnetism himself. By 1786, however, Chastanier had moved away from conventional Mesmerist notions, endorsing the view that they were “not only vicious as to morality, but also very dangerous as to physic.”
59
According to a Swedenborgian critic of animal magnetism, Dr William Spence, Chastanier “at last found out its evil tendency, and like an honest man first abandoned the practice and next exposed it.” In a 1787 work on the spirit world, Chastanier denounced animal magnetism as “modern quackery, which is a true branch of magic.”
60
He meant diabolical magic, as he was not opposed to occult science; apparently, Chastanier practised alchemy “to distract himself.”
61
Chastanier always followed his own lights, but his initial fascination with animal magnetism may be connected with a deeper religious issue: namely, universal salvation. He was well known in Swedenborgian circles as the possessor of certain original manuscripts by Swedenborg, passed on to him by Auguste Nordenskjöld. He insisted that they gave him an insight into “the Assessor's” mind to which no other follower could aspire. In 1791, in
The New Magazine of Knowledge Concerning Heaven and Hell
, he defended “universal restitution” as being part of Swedenborg's teachings.
62
In short, the punishment of the wicked was not eternal.
It seems odd that “universal restitution” should have become a divisive question for animal magnetists, but it did. Both John Holloway and John Cue attacked the doctrine, although neither was a Swedenborgian.
63
Universal salvation, of course, provided a justification for human freedom and the perfectibility of society. It was conducive to radical political views. When the English Dissenters, on three separate occasions between 1787 and 1790, asked Parliament for the suspension of the Test and Corporation Acts, which kept
them from holding political office, the spread of the doctrine of universal salvation among them—especially among Unitarians like Joseph Priestley—was a factor in the rejection of their demands.
64
Animal magnetism could be seen as promising an earthly form of universal salvation, by which any ailment could be healed by an occult power. Critics perceived that this would distribute divine blessings indiscriminately. “Magnetic attraction,” one of them fumed, “seems to have levelled all distinctions; so that believers, and unbelievers, Turks, Jews, and Schismaticks, may be found mingled together in the number of its disciples.” In his own condemnation of animal magnetism, George Winter compared its alleged cures to tales of people being suddenly struck dead by the hand of God. “Can man perform such acts as the above?” he asked, answering sternly, “No.”
65
Only divine power could decide who was fit to receive supernatural assistance.