This is sample from the essay ‘Entertaining the Supernatural: Animal Magnetism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science’
by Professor Peter Otto, Chair of English Literary Studies, University of Melbourne
Victorian Popular Culture: Sensation, Spiritualism and Magic. © Adam Matthew Digital Ltd. 2008

‘Entertaining the Supernatural: Animal Magnetism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science’
Professor Peter Otto, Chair of English Literary Studies, University of Melbourne

Loss of belief in the supernatural and its replacement by faith in reason are often thought to be clear signs that a society has left its traditional forms and become modern. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”, Kant announces in An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’(1784), and “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another”. [1] The use of one’s understanding, it is assumed, brings secularization and disenchantment in its wake, throwing into disrepute a host of fictitious entities (fairies, ghosts, spirits, demons, souls, gods), pseudo-sciences (alchemy, astrology, magic, divination, numerology, palmistry, Mesmerism), and paranormal powers (extra-sensory perception, second-sight, telepathy, pre-cognition, clairvoyance, prophecy, a sixth sense). This triumphal narrative is such an important part of the way contemporary western cultures understand themselves that many are surprised to discover the extent to which the modern world has been haunted by its supernatural others.

The Enlightenment (the Age of Reason) is usually associated with figures such as the father of British empiricism John Locke (1632-1704), the mathematician and natural philosopher Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and the sceptical philosopher and author Voltaire (1698-1778); but the Age of Reason is also the age of the visionary and spirit-seer Immanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the evangelist John Wesley (1703-91), and the father of Mesmerism or animal magnetism Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815).

The Age of Reason culminates in the French Revolution (1789), but this event heralds the birth of Romanticism and, particularly in England, a resurgence of prophecy, visionary inspiration and enthusiasm. To cite only the most obvious examples: the poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827) claimed to be able to speak with the dead, John Milton (1608-74), King Edward III (1312-77) and even “The Man who built the Pyramids”. [2] Richard Brothers (1757-1824), the self-styled “Nephew of the Almighty”, attracted followers from all ranks of society, along with the anxious attention of the Privy Council, when he published A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times (1794), predicting that George III would lose his throne; and in the early nineteenth-century, the prophetess Joanna Southcott (1750-1814), guided by the voice of a spirit named Shiloh, inspired a millenarian movement that at its height had more than 100,000 followers.

The nineteenth century, the Age of Progress, during which there is a gradual “secularization of the European mind”, is paradoxically also a period in which a large portion of the population renewed their acquaintance with the supernatural. Writing in the aftermath of the First World War, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) recalled the last forty years of the nineteenth century (along with the first decade of the next) as being:

superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping, materialization séances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of the world did sooth-sayers, astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift to the abyss. [3]

Although Spiritualism is sometimes treated as a Victorian and Edwardian phenomenon, it continued to flourish in the period between the first and second world wars, with some scholars arguing that in the 1930s it was still more popular than in the previous century. [4]

In the years immediately following World War II, it seemed to many that belief in the supernatural had finally begun to ebb. Yet with the benefit of hindsight it can be argued that this period prepared the ground for the New Age movement, its emergence marked by the establishment of the Findhorn Foundation in 1964. [5] Bringing eastern and western religious traditions into dialogue with the modern supernatural and elements of modern science, the New Age movement has for more than forty years provided an intellectual “home” for those fascinated by occultism, neo-paganism, witchcraft, astrology, shamanism, meditation, reincarnation, psychic experience, crystal gazing, channeling and so forth.

As Marina Warner writes in her Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century:

modernity did not by any means put an end to the quest for spirit and the desire to explain its mystery; curiosity about spirits of every sort (to adapt Oberon’s phrase) and the ideas and imagery which communicate their nature have flourished more vigorously than ever since the seventeenth century, when the modern fusion of scientific inquiry, psychology, and metaphysics began. [6]

How is one to explain the persistence of belief in fictitious entities, pseudo-sciences and paranormal powers that should have been discredited long ago by reason?

Until recently, the most common answers to this question treat such beliefs as symptoms of “a wild return to archaic forms” of thought, compensation for a world that has become too rational, or evidence that the work of Enlightenment has not yet been completed. [7] Yet recent studies, particularly of nineteenth-century Spiritualism and Mesmerism suggest that the relation between the normal and the paranormal, the rational and the irrational, is in modernity much closer and more complicated than this first set of answers admits. [8]

Further complicating traditional views of the period, the Victorian supernatural develops in dispute (and usually unadmitted dialogue) with secular magic and Psychical Science. The remarkable flowering of the former during the late-nineteenth and early-twenty-first centuries provides an index of illusion’s ability to fascinate the modern world, even as that world attempts to liberate itself from superstition and credulity. (This fascination continues in twentieth-century cinema and the contemporary vogue for special effects and virtual reality. [9] The emergence of Psychical Science in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its attempts to develop scientific methods for testing the veracity of claims made by spiritualists and mesmerists, provides a remarkable case study of the modern exchanges between belief and scepticism. As this suggests, the forms taken by the modern supernatural range from those urging belief in the “truth” of their phenomena, to those that take scepticism as one of their primary points of reference; and, between these extremes, those that invite their audiences merely to suspend disbelief in their visionary spectacles.

Before returning to the question of why belief in fictitious entities, pseudo-sciences and paranormal powers has persisted, we must sketch in more detail these four key elements of the modern supernatural -- Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Psychic Science and secular magic – elements that together outline the cultural field with which this collection is concerned.

Mesmerism

In the late eighteenth-century, Mesmer claimed to have discovered a universal magnetic fluid that passed through all things. Illness, in his view, occurred when the flow of this fluid was impeded. Health could therefore be restored simply by removing blockages, allowing the magnetic fluid to flow freely once more. To do so, the mesmerist used touch, will-power, music, magnetic devices (such as the baquet, a tub filled with iron filings) to increase the flow of fluid, often precipitating a healing “crisis” in patients, as the magnetic fluid surged through their bodies.

Mesmer himself “repudiated all mysticism and occultisms”, believing that he had discovered a material force and natural therapy. [10] Nevertheless, in the 1780s and 1790s, as his “new science” became fashionable, some of his followers were startled by the unusual phenomena that appeared in the course of their work. Crabtree divides these phenomena into two groups, the lower and the higher. The lower group includes: waking sleep (the patient, although soundly asleep, is able to answer questions addressed to them); double consciousness and double memory (providing apparent evidence of a “species of consciousness” distinct from the waking self); suggestibility; heightened memory; deading of the senses; insensibility to pain; and rapport (a “special connection with the magnetizer”). [11] The higher phenomena were still more remarkable: “a kind of physical continuity between mesmerist and patient”, to the extent that the “movements of the mesmerist’s body could be transmitted to the patient”; mental rapport, such that the patient seemed able to read the mesmerist’s thoughts; the ability, while in a mesmeric trance, to “mentally travel over great distances”; and “an elevated state of consciousness” in which some patients seemed able to “communicate with spirits of the departed”. [12]

The catalyst for the nineteenth-century revival of interest in Mesmerism was the publication in 1831 of the report of the committee commissioned by the French Académie de Médicine to investigate mesmeric phenomena. Nearly fifty years earlier, in August 1784, two French Royal Commissions had discounted Mesmerism. One concluded that there was no evidence for the existence of the magnetic fluid postulated by Mesmer and that, quite reasonably, a non-existent fluid could not help people regain their health. The other reported that the cures they had witnessed could readily be explained without recourse to the doctrines of Mesmerism. In contrast, the new investigation concluded that mesmeric phenomena were real, and that they ranged from states in which patients were insensible to external stimuli, to some of the higher phenomena listed above. [13] With the publication in 1833 of a translation of this report, and the arrival in London in June 1837 of “Baron” Charles Dupotet de Sennevoy (1796-1881), a mesmerist who had “produced” many of the most startling of the effects witnessed by the committee, the stage was set for Victorian England’s “mesmeric mania”.

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Endnotes:

1 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Has Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 54-60: 54.

2 G. E. Bentley Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 377.

3 George Bernard Shaw, “Preface” to "Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" in Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces (London: Bodley Head, 1972) vol. 5, pp. 20-21.

4 Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 13-14.

5 For an account of and brief history of the Findhorn Foundation see “The Findhorn Foundation: Who are we?” at http://www.findhorn.org/about_us/display_new.php

6 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 10.

7 Webb, James, The Flight from Reason (London: Macdonald, 1971), pp. xi-xiv.

8 See, for example, Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 83.

9 For an account of some of the continuities between cinema and the performances of nineteenth and early-twentieth century magicians, see Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also Simon During, Modern Enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002) and Warner, Phantasmagoria.

10 Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 4.

11 Adam Crabtree, Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality (New York: Praeger, 1985), pp. 9-13.

12 Crabtree, Multiple Man, pp. 13-18.

13 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of the Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 42.