Adam Parfrey
HEALTH, WEALTH, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MIND CURE
IN THE LATE nineteenth century, Americans were moving away from farms and small towns and pouring into cities with millions of new Catholic and Jewish immigrants.
With its doctrine of doom and depravity, hellfire and damnation, Calvinist Puritanism, the primary religion of post-Revolutionary America, seemed increasingly at odds with the large, beautiful, untamed land, with its freedom of church and state and endless possibilities.
The popularity of Freemasonry and other secret societies catapulted in popularity in the late nineteenth century, providing manly drinking clubs and extravagant pomp and ritualism to its members. These deist clubs threatened the Catholic church to such a degree that in 1884, Pope Leo XIII issued the “Humanum Genus,” a papal encyclical condemning Freemasonry. Catholics, wishing to join a fraternal order that offered similar insurance programs and quasimilitaristic regalia, were offered instead the ability to join another sort of fraternal organization, The Knights of Columbus, around the same time. In turn, the Ku Klux Klan, a Protestant fraternal order, warned against the influx of immigrants for reasons of job security and its view that Catholics practiced demonic idolatry.
Immigrants to the new land often embraced a less orthodox variety of the European version of their faith. Reform Jews were particularly interested in integrating themselves into society at large, rejecting messianic nationalism and kosher practices. Unlike their Orthodox brethren, Reform rabbis were expected to receive a secular education.
Within the fast-growing cities, a smorgasbord of disparate beliefs started to reveal themselves: Theosophy, Ariosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, Rosicrucianism, Mystical Christianity, Spiritualism, Mediumism, and hundreds of occult and fraternal orders.
The New Thought movement was created and expanded during this “Gilded Age” of the late nineteenth century, a time of delirious industrialization, of robber barons and shady business practices. During the early 1890s, the world economy tailed into a recession. Banks foreclosed on farms and farmers moved into cities, where they often had to learn the sales trade, and how to convince others to purchase inessential goods.
In America, the old faiths were changing guard, obscure faiths were showing their faces, and new faiths began to grab people’s attention.
The revolutionary idea of New Thought was to make God and extraordinary possibilities accessible to all. All one needed to change reality was the ability to change one’s mind.
The central concept of New Thought, that thoughts have presence in the material world, is derived mostly from ancient sources, Hermetic sources, that likely predated Christianity. According to Hermetic philosophy, all matter is made either as a thought in the mind of God, or as a word emanating from the mouth of God.
How exactly did this ancient Hermetic knowledge make its way into the New Thought movement? The first avenue was through Franz Anton Mesmer.
We have all heard the word “mesmerized,” which owes its origin to Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Mesmer discovered what he called magnétisme animal (animal magnetism), which later became popularly known as “Mesmerism.”
Mesmer was born in the village of Iznang, Germany, and studied medicine at the University of Vienna in 1759. While a medical student, Mesmer was impressed by the writings of Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, commonly known as Paracelsus (1493–1541).1 Paracelsus was the first European physician to explore the phenomenon of magnetism in relation to the human organism, and his studies in this area were based on the Hermetic principle of interrelationship, namely, “as above, so below.” Mesmer’s “27 Propositions” are taken directly from the writings of Paracelsus.
The high level of Hermetic penetration into Mesmer’s ideals is incontrovertible. Even Isaac Newton, on whose writings Mesmer based his doctoral thesis, was teeming with Hermetic ideology.2 Mesmer adored Newton and, above all, wanted to be considered a physicist on his level. It was for this reason that Mesmer declined to give due accord to God and the high spirit in his writings on the phenomenon of magnetism, even though his Hermetic predecessors always recognized the Divine as the key source of power.
It was under the influence of a friend that Mesmer undertook his magnetic studies. Maximilian Hell (1720–1792), a court astronomer and Jesuit priest, used magnets in the treatment of diseases. Hell believed that everyone possessed a magnetic force which connected all human beings, and he attempted to rationalize a belief in astrological influences on human health as being the result of planetary forces through a subtle, invisible fluid. Later, Mesmer would discredit Hell, and convince the world that it was he, Mesmer, who in fact had the correct answers where magnetic healing was concerned.
In 1766, Mesmer published his doctoral dissertation, De Planetarum Influxu in Corpus Humanum,3 that focused on the influence of the moon and the planets on the human body and on disease.4 The main influence on this work was astrophysics (rather than astrology) that relied mainly on the theories of Isaac Newton. In the dissertation, Mesmer postulates the existence of a universally distributed but invisible fluid that flows continuously, everywhere. (Newton referred to this fluid as “the Aether” in his writings, as did many others after him.5) This cosmic fluid, according to Mesmer, served as a vehicle for the reciprocal influences of heavenly bodies, the earth, and living organisms. Mesmer called his theory of the action of this cosmic fluid “animal magnetism.” In a later work, Mesmer described his animal magnetism in the following terms:
I set forth the nature and action of Animal Magnetism and the analogy between its properties and those of the magnet and electricity. I added “that all bodies were, like the magnet, capable of communicating this magnetic principle; that this fluid penetrated everything and could be stored up and concentrated, like the electric fluid; that it acted at a distance.”6
Mesmer believed that the universe was filled with available energy, and that “the harnessed powers of the cosmic energies” were accessible only to those whose consciousness had risen high enough to perceive them, such as himself. Mesmer believed that sickness and disease were caused by imbalances of the universal fluid within the body. According to d’Eslon, Mesmer understood health as the free flow of the process of life through thousands of channels in our bodies. Illness was caused by obstacles to this flow. Overcoming these obstacles and restoring flow produced crises, which restored health.7 (To us this may sound quaint, but acupuncture is based on this concept, and has been used for thousands of years.)
The action of this power over distance was also very specifically outlined in the Paracelsus material:
By the magic power of the will, a person on this side of the ocean may make a person on the other side hear what is said on this side . . . the ethereal body of a man may know what another man thinks at a distance of 100 miles or more.8
Over time, Mesmer developed varying techniques to put his patients into a sort of trance through the use of touching, stroking, hypnotic stares and the waving of magnetic wands to restore cosmic fluid imbalance. Dr. Mesmer treated his patients while dressed in long, lavish, silken purple robes, brandishing various glass rods which
