The Approach to Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy : Part 1

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 5 of 17)

There is, however, another stage in this long line of development which needs to be considered since it supplies a double point of departure; once for the most outstanding healing cult in our time - Christian Science - and once for the greatly enlarged use of suggestion in modern medical practice, and that is mesmerism and "animal magnetism."

Mesmerism a Point of Departure for Modern Healing Cults

Paracelsus may be taken as a starting point just here. He is known in the history of medicine "for the impetus he gave to the development of pharmaceutical chemistry, but he was also the author of a visionary and theosophical system of philosophy." He believed in the influence of the stars upon men, but he enlarged upon the old astrologic faiths. "He believed the human body was endowed with a double magnetism, one portion attracted to itself the planets and was nourished by them, the result of which was the mental powers, the other portion attracted and disintegrated the elements, from which process resulted the body." His world, therefore, was a world of competitive attractions. He believed the well had an influence over the sick through magnetism and used the magnet in his practice.

"This dual theory of magnetic cures, that of the magnetic influence of men on men and of the magnet on man, was prevalent for over a century." "It is, then, upon these ideas - the radiation from all things, but especially the stars, magnets and human bodies, of a force which would act in all things else, and which was in each case directed by the indwelling spirit, together with the conception of a perpetual contact between reciprocal and opposing forces - that the mysticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly depends."

These ideas were adopted by a group of men who are now only names for us. The phenomena of magnetism fascinated them and supplied them analogies. There is, they thought, an all-prevailing magnetic influence which binds together not only celestial and terrestrial bodies, but all living things. Life and death were for them simply the registry of the ebbing and flowing of these immaterial tides and they ended by conceiving a vital fluid which could be communicated from person to person and in the communication of which the sick could be healed - the driftwood of their lore has come down to us on the tides of time; we still spoke of magnetic personalities - and they sought in various ways to control and communicate these mysterious forces.

One of them invented steel plates which he applied to the body as a cure for disease. He taught his system to Mesmer who made, however, one marked advance upon the technique of his predecessors and gave his name to his methods; he produced his results through physical contacts and passes. But he shared with his predecessors and stated with that compact clearness of which the French language is so capable even when dealing with obscure matters, that there is a "fluid so universally diffused and connected as to leave nowhere any void, whose subtlety is beyond any comparison and which by its nature is capable of receiving, propagating and communicating all impressions of movement.... This reciprocal action is subject to mechanical laws at present unknown." This fluid in its action governs the earth and stars and human action.

He originated the phrase "Animal Magnetism" and was, though he did not know it, the originator of hypnotism; until well within our own time mesmerism was the accepted name for this whole complex group of phenomena. The medical faculties examined his claims but were not willing to approve them, but this made no difference in Mesmer's popularity. He had so great a following as to be unable to deal with them personally. He deputed his powers to assistants, arranged a most elaborate apparatus and surrounded his whole procedure with a dramatic setting of stained glass, mirrored and scented rooms and mysterious music.

The result of it all naturally, as far as his patients were concerned, was marked excitements and hysterias. They had often to be put into padded rooms. And yet the result of all this murky confusion was said to be numbers of marked cures. He was investigated by the French government and two commissions presented their reports, neither of which was favorable. Imagination, not magnetism, they said, accounted for the results. His popularity wore away markedly when he undertook to explain his method and reveal his secrets. He left Paris in 1815 and lapsed into obscurity.

The Scientific Investigation of Mesmerism in France

As has been said, there are two lines of development growing out of Mesmer and his methods. Ten years after Mesmer left Paris Alexander Bertrand pointed out that after the elimination of errors due to fraud or mal-observation, the results which Mesmer and his associates had produced were due not to animal magnetism, but to expectation induced by suggestion and intensified by the peculiar setting which Mesmer had contrived for his so-called treatments. The schools of medicine were slow to follow out Bertrand's discovery and it was not until something like twenty years later, through the studies of Braid, that hypnotism began to be taken seriously.

But once the matter was brought broadly before them, the doctors began to follow it through. Charcot, in the Salpêtriére, used hypnotic suggestion for the correction of abnormal mental and nervous states. The psychologists took up the matter and hypnotic suggestion has come to be not only a legitimate subject for the investigation of the student and an accepted method in correction of abnormal mental states, but as it were a window through which we are beginning to see deeply into unsuspected depths and intricacies of personality.

Modern faith healing cults, however, have not come to us down this line, though the studies of Bertrand, Braid, Charcot, Du Bois and their associates supply the interpretative principles for any real understanding of them. Mesmerism naturally appealed to the type of mind most easily attracted by the bizarre and the mysterious. There are always amongst us the credulous and curious who find little enough either to awe or inspire them in the broad sweep of law, or in such facts as lie open to the light of reason. Such as these are impatient of discipline, eager to free themselves from the sequence of cause and effect; they are impressed by the occult powers and seek short cuts to health, or goodness, or wisdom.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company