IX
JULES DU POTET
MAGICIAN AND HEALER
 Jules du Potet de Sennevoy (1796-1881) of France was not a trained physician, even while he became one of the most visible and successful teacher-healers of the 19th century. Du Potet briefly audited classes in a Parisian medical school in his early years. But more importantly, he grew up admiring and studying nature like numbers of other true healers before him. They studied nature in its common outer worldly sense but more importantly with respect to its silent spiritual essence. In the year 1815, Jules heard the word “magnetism” pronounced for the first time. That moment coincided with the death of Anton Mesmer who brought “animal magnetism” to light in Europe, most especially in Paris. After a few years of intense study and practice, Monsieur Du Potet shared his wealth of magnetic healing experience throughout Europe as far as Russia and Great Britain. Mesmer and Du Potet both equated magnetism with nature/spirit and spent their lives using it to heal their fellows. “Nature
is the Garment of God.”
Johann von Goethe In his writings, Du Potet admitted that he was an oddball in his family and that he did not fit into school or other typical activities of the day. But as a student of nature, he came to life when he recognized its connection with magnetism. Like Mesmer, he was an “observer” and destiny charged him to look at nature in ways that few had dared to consider over the ages. Beyond observation, he was led to imitate nature. “Nothing
without nature, everything with it!!!”
Two centuries ago, Du Potet noted that science largely ignored nature. Therein lies “an agent superior to matter, a secret law which proves the existence of a God and of another life.” Today, nature is even more ignored when so much of medicine takes place in diagnostic investigation, laboratory testing, technological studies, and scientific protocols. Du Potet equated nature-spirit with magic or the occult power was understood and used long times past. In more recent times, it has been equated with chi, mana, prana, nervous fluid, magnetism, somnambulism, ecstasy, enchantment, fascination, and more. The ancients called it the occult power of the soul aka spirit. “The ancients admitted in man intelligence, natural, universal or metaphysical, ethereal and divine…. They claimed even that the soul of man, enclosed in his carnal body, could then communicate with the intelligences released from matter, and drawn by them to the most instructive lights.” Jules du Potet recognized that currents of subtle force naturally enter and leave each individual all day long. When two humans approach each other, there is a mutual insensible penetration of their two auras. These forces go forth as if they were touched with intelligence and influence both people. Du Potet wrote that, “Man acts on all that which surrounds him by an animistic force: physicians do not know it…. A thousand facts are there to attest to the existence of mysterious forces acting on us and penetrating us without ceasing. It is necessary to unveil some of them: it is by magic that we will arrive there.” Monsieur du Potet likened this force to the incorporeal light suspected or seen by so many great men and proclaimed by Jesus Christ when he said: “I AM the light of the world … Ye are the light of the world.” “All
is magic in us, around us …”
Du Potet taught that, “if the word of magnetism should be replaced by the one of magism, it would be more exact.” And that philosophers and sages of ancient times were magicians as well as healers. He established the link, “the pact consummated; an occult power came to offer me its aid, it was joined with the force which was my own, and permitted me to see the light. It is then that I discovered the path of true magic.” Du Potet was disturbed to note that simple and primitive men believe in and often work with the world spirits while scholars and scientists reject those claims because they have no devices to detect and measure them. But, an intent investigator can be brought to belief “by a serious examination of the facts of nature and of himself.” Somewhere along the course of history we lost the gifts of “divine perception, then the faculty to act on the elements which surround [us] and on all animals.” As humans became divorced more and more from nature, our senses became blurred and blocked. Jules wrote 150 years ago that, “Our civilization has degraded itself physically and morally, it has been rendered into a machine and killed its proud and free soul.” Then, how much more machine-like have our own lives become along the way! “All
is magic in nature.”
Neither magic nor nature have disappeared. They are ever-present, waiting to be called upon to lift and aid, nourish and heal human being. “Magic is a means, magnetism opens all the locks, penetrates as far as the brain, and it is then only that one can recognize what belongs to matter and what is the domain of the pure spirit.” |
Magicians Directory
“Even as there is only one nature, one life, one health,
there is, only one disease, one remedy, one healing.”
Mesmer
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