Anton Mesmer was a forerunner who endeavored to carry a grand light to his fellows. Yet, he was an imperfect man in an imperfect world. He had gifts and discoveries to share, but they were briefly recognized and poorly received. Some of the fault lay in the presentation of his truths and in himself.

Nonetheless, he was the transmitter of an innovative paradigm with great potential to aid in the healing and preservation of humanity. His magnetism will rise again when times and cycles allow.

Mesmer’s doctrine might have been considered new because it had never been so dramatically and publicly presented. All the while whether Mesmer realized it or not, the essentials of animal magnetism had been known and used for the benefit of mankind by healers in many ages and places. What eventually became known as mesmerism had been part of the philosophy of ancient Greece, Egypt, and India. For those with an open eye, magnetism might even be remembered as “the favorite science of Jesus,” the great physician and healer.

Mesmer’s opportunity was to recover and re-present that which had shown its face repeatedly around the world. “There is nothing new under the Sun,” Mesmer merely re-cognized and re-energized and re-packaged Natural forces.

Anton Mesmer’s vision is not lost, though it has been dormant, submerged, and largely forgotten for generations now. Dr. Mesmer and the process which bears his name still live on in sundry ways. Yet, how they have been maligned and distorted by so many – who even now misuse the Doctor’s name as they MESMERIZE this and that and the other thing so freely. All without the slightest understanding of the meaning of the word and its parent.

The essential problem arose soon after the beginning. The natural world was little understood over the ages into Mesmer’s day. In many ways, it is less so today. “We have lost all connection with nature.”

Anton Mesmer was an exception, a child of nature who never lost touch with it. He actually grew through adulthood into a broader, deeper, clearer relationship with that world – one much more real and true than the opaque material dimension we are so accustomed to.

In his last book, the Mesmerismus, he wrote, “I declare, at the beginning, that this work, with regard to which I have taken no one’s opinion, but my own, appears without any scientific equipment, and has alone originated out of my own experience and observations. I consider it, therefore, free from those prejudices and errors which are introduced by an artificial education. I have kept my labours free from that species of sophistry and pedantry; it remains for posterity to measure and adorn the pathway which I have thrown open.”

Mesmer’s work may have been his own, but it was surely stamped with the spirit of thousands of healers – some in the likes of Paracelsus, Van Helmont, and Greatrakes – who had passed before him. Mesmer admitted that even Father Gassner was working with animal magnetism, only doing it with a “superstitious” twist.

The good that Mesmer and Gassner and many, many others spawned was readily charged to bombast and bloviation, imposture and fakery, imagination and suggestion, hysteria and seduction. What can’t be understood is often abused out of fear and Mesmer surely generated awe in all manner of people in his own time and thereafter. “Those Mesmerian magnetists most certainly are deluded and deceived.” But then, who is the deceiver and who the deceived? How much of life in any age is subject to general perception rather than real fact, common desire over honest truth, group volition above the genuine article?

Dr. Mesmer seemed to tout new discoveries. But, he really followed in the faded footsteps of great thinkers and sages, practitioners and healers of prior ages – Aesculapius and the Hygeians, Pythagoras and Hippocrates, temple healers and indigenous charmers the world around. Maybe they and he really KNEW things which have been muddied by history, travestied for financial considerations, and denied for political gain. Dare we see that medicine in any age is hardly above politics, clubbing, and money?

Fortunately, accusations that Mesmer was a charlatan and a fraud – that he hoodwinked, manipulated and contrived merely to make himself known and fill his pockets – were repeatedly discredited over the generations. At this distance, we quickly pass over such light-headed, mean-spirited remarks and give them their minuscule due. There is far too much evidence supporting Mesmer’s successes and kindness of heart to give credence to such claims.

Still, Mesmer’s name does not gleam in lights when brought to modern minds. At least four significant, distorted views regarding Mesmer’s work still stand out. They need to be set to rest so that the valuable treasure he brought can be resurrected. He expected his due some day. Better late than not at all.

1) “It is only imagination.” Detractors and supporters alike continually attributed Mesmer’s success to suggestion, imagination and imitation while downplaying the essentials of his magnetic theses. The importance of suggestion in all medical and healing work is only too evident to the slightest study. It was important to his crusade but incidental to what Mesmer was about.

Suggestion and imagination are tools of every physician and healer. We know into modern times, “Far more important than what the physician does is the patient’s belief in what the physician does.” (William Osler)

2) “They believed, so they were cured.” It was merely the mental effect of the operator on the poor subject patients. Theatrics and staging made Mesmer into the healing impresario he became.

Certainly, Mesmer towered over his patients, assistants and even the medical guild of the time. Who could stand up to his bold pronouncement, “There is only one disease and only one cure?”

But, his work was far bigger than his being. It was passed on to hundreds and proven by them in many thousands of cases over generations to come. Nonetheless, Mesmer declared that, “Above all, they must believe.” (That dictum was and is subject to exceptions.)

3) “It is the crisis.” Crises were critical to mesmeric healings. Anton Mesmer promoted histrionic crises as the necessary means to healing especially in his early work and in group settings. But over time, his method became more truly a holistic, communal, even sacred work as he dealt intimately with human ills in all sorts of environs.

Furthermore, he gave evidence on a number of occasions that the vaunted crisis could be circumvented by his own work or by nature’s more mysterious means. Mesmer was known to heal and cure in moments and with lasting results without the slightest sign of crisis. A brief passage in the Aphorisms gives the clue that the mandatory crisis just was not necessarily so. “The least apparent crisis, is when nature acts in secret without any violence by breaking by degrees the obstacles that prevent circulation, and dispels them by insensible perspiration.”

He also was aware of the phenomenon of magnetic sleep and trance (somnambulism) – which could substitute for crises, but also could lead patient and operator astray. The Doctor chose not to focus on them as others did when they followed their own paths after leaving his tutelage. Mesmer was convinced that magnetic treatments should be directed for curative purposes. Alternative uses may have their value, but animal magnetism is most naturally directed towards relief of suffering.


4) “The Universal Fluid is balderdash.” This is, by far, the major sticking point for so many who have wondered about Mesmerism. The problem persists to the present day. Much of it falls back on the fact that people find it easier to judge than to investigate. Some are not satisfied unless the earth quakes: “If I can’t see it move me or a machine can’t test it, then it just does not exist.”

But with the passage of two and a half centuries, we now gather more and more support for Mesmer’s theses from diverse sources. The Universal Fluid under many names is, after all this time, being more widely understood. Elusive though it be, the Fluid is now gaining recognition among the public, physicists and other scientists, and even medical practitioners.

Stefan Zweig spent most of his biographical sketch referring to Mesmer’s mistaken understanding and wishful thinking about animal magnetism. Yet in the last pages on Mesmer in his Mental Healers, he let his imagination take flight for a moment. He wrote, “… what right have we to dismiss with contempt the theory of Mesmer and the fluidists that one human being can influence another by some sort of ultra-subtle physical emanation to which Mesmer gave the (doubtless inappropriate) name of ‘animal magnetism?’”

In another breath he admitted that to this day, Mesmer’s phenomena are yet unexplained. “Whether magnetic healing is effected by animistic means or by the influx of a fluid, is still unsolved today.” The same could be said for many of the offshoots of Mesmer’s animal magnetism. The cause and effects of trance mediumship, hypnotism, and simple auto-suggestion are far from being understood. That like so many aspects of human health and disease. This should hardly be a surprise as the mechanism by which aspirin works has still not been elucidated.

Would that science and medicine had listened to Anton Mesmer, despite his bombast and arrogance. The world would be a much different place today. And quite possibly much better.

Charles d’Eslon wrote that, “Animal magnetism, in M. Mesmer’s hands, seems to be nothing other than Nature herself.”

Fabre d’Olivet put the idea a bit differently so as to include himself in the same category, “Mesmer’s fluid is none other than the universal man himself, affected and put in movement by one of his emanations.”

Much of the conflict might have been solved with some attention to terminology. Nature, fluid, current, emanations, influence, vertu, etc. have nebulous meanings now and then. Let’s try another word: ENERGY.

It seems almost as though energy was not in the 18th century dictionary. The words and ideas were not there for Mesmer to articulate, regardless of his faulty French. Maybe his efforts came off as unexplainable, fantastic, extraordinary because the concept of energy was so little understood.

But, such was not the whole case. Nicolas Bergasse utilized the word énergie a number of times in his writings and teachings. The word, however, was practically unused and unrecognized by other teachers, writers and practitioners of animal magnetism.

It took James Wyckoff and Jerome Eden, students of Wilhelm Reich, to pick up the thread in the 1970s. Wyckoff dug more deeply into the effort to make Mesmer’s life and work more understandable. His universal fluid and animal magnetism could be offered with new wording. It was all about ENERGY, he said.

“Mesmer was dealing with energy. The descriptions of Deleuze, Bailly and many others of the manifestations of patients in treatment indicate surely that Mesmer was opening his patients, unblocking their stasis and getting the energy to flow…. Mesmer’s ‘crisis’ to which he brought his patients was a breaking through to a fresh, healthier state.”

Mesmer’s magnetic fluid was simply an all-encompassing energy like ones in common parlance today: ether, chi, ki, prana, force. “The Force be with you.” The Magnetizer was merely massaging, manipulating, directing subtle energy. And the patient was responding, in ordinary and extraordinary ways, to the transfer of that energy to his/her body, in and around and often out – through evacuations of emotional and physical wastes.

The idea and word ENERGY work today. Practically every body in the modern world from kindergarten up understands the word. Children need to guard their energy. Adults try to replenish theirs with vitamins and exercises. Therapists suggest that patients scan their energies. It is not just nerves that worries people, it is their energy. People try to conserve energy for their wallet and for their health. The power company recommends that customers do energy audits on their homes. Coal energy has been replaced by petroleum energy, electrical energy, and atomic energy. Information technology uses subtle electronic energy to transfer and manipulate vast amounts of data every day and practically everywhere. Energy and force, while little appreciated in past ages, are well recognized elements of the present one.

The times have also changed such that energy has entered to a large degree into alternative healing if not into orthodox medicine. Today, we have all manner of comparable therapies which are clearly based on energy flows and adjustments: Acupuncture, Qigong, Reiki, Shiatsu, Jin Shin, Therapeutic Touch, Touch for Health, etc. There are other intermediate remedies which manipulate energies in one way or another: Chiropractic, CranioSacral Therapy, Homeopathy, Kinesiology, Osteopathy, Reflexology. Even Medicine and Surgery assuredly cause the transfer of energy between practitioner and patient, and sometimes back again. Every time a doctor gives a patient a prescription, there is an energy transfer. When a touch is passed, a smile is directed, a word shared. All can be supportive and healing. Anton Mesmer would approve of that while sneering at much of what passes for modern medical practice. “All useful remedies in ordinary Medicine achieve advantageous success only by happy combinations, or by due chance, they were used [unknowingly] by conductors of animal Magnetism.”

Most everyone knows that humans, although appearing as solid material, are really energy in constant flux and reflux (as Mesmer might say). Humans are energy, live in a sea of energy, receive and emit waves of energy constantly. In different words, “All creatures, mankind, animals, and even every inanimate object emanates it [the magnetic fluid], either as an aura or a varying light, and that whether consciously or not.” (H.P. Blavatsky)

Mesmer’s work with the magnetic fluid caused him to be derogatorily called a Thaumaturge. Mesmer didn’t like it, but maybe he should have felt complimented. In fact, Anton Mesmer’s work was merely a preview of things to come. He endeavored to improve medicine through physics and astronomy focused through his work with the magnetic energy which is all around us. Humanity’s “obligation” to him will inevitably be fulfilled as Anton Mesmer is rediscovered to be an explorer of the natural world, a healer with magical talents, and a benefactor to the sick and injured.