Mesmerism: Animal Magnetism, Franklin & Hypnosis

Who was Franz Anton Mesmer?

Franz Anton Mesmer was born in 1734 in Iznang on Lake Constance, in what is now southern Germany. He studied theology, philosophy and finally medicine in Vienna, and in 1766 earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the influence of the planets on the human body. In it he argued for a kind of gravitation that flows through the cosmos and through us. A wealthy marriage made him rich, and his Vienna home became a gathering place; Leopold Mozart and the young Wolfgang Amadeus were guests.

In 1774 Mesmer treated a young woman with recurring seizures by placing magnets on her body. She reacted violently, then felt better. Mesmer soon concluded that the power was not in the iron at all but in himself: an "animal," meaning living, magnetism that passed from the magnetizer into the patient.

The theory of the universal fluid

Mesmer's theory fits in a sentence. An invisible, subtle fluid fills the universe and connects the stars, the Earth and every living being. Inside the body it flows like water through pipes. When it stalls, we fall ill. The magnetizer gets the current moving again until the blockage breaks in a "crisis" (a fit, a crying spell, a faint), after which healing follows.

In 1779 Mesmer summed up his teaching in 27 propositions. Anyone who talks today about energy flow, blockages and releasing them will recognize the basic pattern. Mesmer did not see himself as a magician, but as a natural scientist who had discovered a new force comparable to electricity or gravity.

From scandal in Vienna to the baquet in Paris

Mesmer's Vienna career ended in scandal. He treated the blind pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis, whose parents and doctors soon disputed her supposed improvement; the affair went public, and in 1778 Mesmer left for Paris. There he became famous.

Because demand was too great for one-on-one treatment, he invented the baquet: a large closed wooden tub filled with water, iron filings and powdered glass, with iron rods sticking out. Patients held the rods to ailing body parts, formed a chain with a rope or by holding hands, and were also treated with "magnetic passes," slow hand movements over the body without touching it. People in crisis were carried to a padded side room, the salle des crises. Mesmer grew rich; his followers founded societies that taught the method for steep fees. Among the enthusiasts was the Marquis de Lafayette, fresh from the American Revolution, who wrote to George Washington in 1784 about Mesmer's discovery.

1784: Benjamin Franklin and the magnetized tree

The craze worried King Louis XVI. In 1784 he appointed a commission staffed with some of the greatest minds of the age: the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, and the American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, then 78 and living in Passy outside Paris. The commissioners examined the practice of Mesmer's disciple Charles d'Eslon.

They did something revolutionary for the time: they blinded their trials. Blindfolded subjects reacted strongly when they believed they were being magnetized, and not at all when they really were but did not know it. In Franklin's garden at Passy a tree was "magnetized"; a blindfolded young man fainted at a completely different tree. The verdict: no fluid could be detected, and the effects came from imagination, imitation and touch. A second, secret report also warned the king about the moral dangers of the intimate treatment situation.

Setup	What the subject believed	What happened
Blindfolded, actually magnetized	"Nothing is happening."	No reaction
Blindfolded, not magnetized	"I am being magnetized right now."	Strong reactions, up to a crisis
"Magnetized" tree in the garden at Passy	"This is the tree." (wrong tree)	Fainted at the untreated tree

Simplified from the 1784 commission report. Historians count these as some of the earliest blinded experiments.

What the commission got right, and what it missed

Scientifically the result was clear: no fluid. But the commissioners did not deny that people experienced something. They put it down to the power of imagination, and in doing so touched a field that would only be taken seriously much later. Expecting that something will help can in fact ease symptoms; today we call that the placebo effect, and researchers such as Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard have spent careers on it. We look at how expectation and ritual interact in do spells actually work?

Not every scholar accepted the verdict. The botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, a member of a parallel commission of the Royal Society of Medicine, wrote a dissenting opinion and called for further study. Mesmer himself lost influence, withdrew, and died in 1815 in Meersburg on Lake Constance, not far from where he was born.

Puységur and magnetic sleep

In that same year, 1784, a student of Mesmer made a discovery with far bigger consequences than the baquet. The Marquis de Puységur magnetized a young peasant named Victor Race on his estate at Buzancy. Instead of falling into convulsions, Race sank into a calm, sleep-like state in which he talked, answered questions and remembered nothing afterward. Puységur called it artificial somnambulism.

That shifted the focus away from the crisis and toward an altered state of consciousness. Through the nineteenth century, physicians and Romantic writers experimented with "magnetic sleep," and in some circles somnambulists were said to see at a distance or speak with the dead. A direct line runs from here to the séance rooms of American Spiritualism, whose traditions survive in places like Lily Dale and other Spiritualist camps.

Mesmerism comes to America

Mesmerism crossed the Atlantic. In 1836 the French lecturer Charles Poyen toured New England, demonstrating magnetic sleep on stage, and a wave of traveling "professors" followed. One of the people he inspired was a Maine clockmaker, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who worked as a mesmerist before concluding that healing came from the patient's beliefs rather than from any fluid. Quimby's ideas fed into the New Thought movement and, through it, into the modern law of attraction; we trace that line in where the law of attraction came from. Mary Baker Eddy, later the founder of Christian Science, was one of Quimby's patients in 1862.

American writers loved it, too. Edgar Allan Poe published "Mesmeric Revelation" in 1844 and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" in 1845, the story of a dying man held in a mesmeric trance at the moment of death. Many readers at the time took the second one for a true case report.

From mesmerism to hypnosis

The next step came from the Portuguese-Indian priest Abbé Faria in Paris, who insisted that the effect lay in the patient and in suggestion, not in the magnetizer. The Scottish surgeon James Braid finally studied the shows of traveling magnetizers in the 1840s, explained the state physiologically, and coined the word hypnosis from the Greek hypnos, sleep.

So a dead end became a research field. In the United States the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis was founded in 1957, with Milton H. Erickson as its first president, and in 1958 the American Medical Association recognized hypnosis as a legitimate tool in medical practice. Today the American Psychological Association has its own division for psychological hypnosis. Mesmer's name survives in an everyday English verb: to mesmerize, to fascinate or hold spellbound.

The legacy: energy work and the pendulum

Hand passes over the body without touching it look a lot like several forms of present-day energy work, and practitioners sometimes discover the family resemblance only when they read Mesmer's story. Read more about how that field handles evidence in our guide to Reiki and crystals.

The pendulum belongs in this story as well. In the same era the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul studied the so-called sidereal pendulum and showed that tiny, unconscious muscle movements set it swinging, what is now called the ideomotor effect. So whoever works with a pendulum is working with themselves. That takes nothing away from the pendulum; it simply moves its source from a cosmic fluid to your own perception. Our pendulum guide shows how to use it honestly.

Quiz: what draws you to mesmerism?

Common experiences

These are typical patterns people describe, not attributed quotes. People who experience hypnosis today rarely describe it as sleep. In forum threads and comment sections the same picture keeps coming back: they were awake the whole time, heard everything, and felt heavy and at the same time very focused. Disappointment is also common among people who expected the "remote control" of stage shows. Historians, for their part, like to point out the irony of 1784: testing a mistake produced one of the first blinded studies. And in energy work, practitioners often say they only noticed how close their hand movements are to Mesmer's passes after reading his history.

What we do not promise

We do not claim that a magnetic fluid exists or that magnetizing cures disease. We also do not promise that a pendulum delivers answers "from outside"; it shows your own unconscious movements. Hypnosis is a serious method. For physical or mental health problems it belongs in the hands of a licensed physician, psychologist or therapist, not on a stage and not in self-experiments on other people. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Practically: how to explore it yourself

1. Run the 1784 experiment. Have someone blindfold you and either "magnetize" you or do nothing. Write down what you feel. Experiencing how strongly expectation works teaches more than any theory.
2. Try Chevreul's pendulum. Hold a pendulum over a sheet of paper with a cross on it and think only "left, right." Watch how it moves without your deliberately steering it.
3. Tell trance apart from control. A relaxed, focused state is not the same as losing your will. Reputable hypnosis works with you, not on you.
4. Read the source. The 1784 commission report is short, clear and still a model of critical testing; English translations are easy to find.

Frequently asked questions

What is mesmerism?

The teaching of Franz Anton Mesmer that an invisible fluid connects the cosmos and the body and that illness can be released by magnetizing. It is also called animal magnetism.

What was the baquet?

A large wooden tub filled with water and iron filings, with iron rods sticking out. Patients held the rods to ailing body parts and formed a chain.

What did Benjamin Franklin's commission find in 1784?

That no fluid could be detected and that the effects came from imagination, imitation and touch. Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly and Guillotin were among its members.

Is hypnosis the same as mesmerism?

No. Hypnosis grew out of mesmerism but explains the state without any fluid, through attention and suggestion. James Braid coined the term in the 1840s.

Where does the word mesmerize come from?

From Mesmer's name. In English it now means to fascinate or hold someone spellbound.

Does the pendulum have anything to do with Mesmer?

Indirectly. In the same era the chemist Chevreul showed that unconscious muscle movements make a pendulum swing, the ideomotor effect.

Sources and further reading

• Franz Anton Mesmer: Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, Geneva and Paris, 1779.
• Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal, Paris, 1784 (Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly, Guillotin and others).
• Robert Darnton: Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Harvard University Press, 1968.
• Henri F. Ellenberger: The Discovery of the Unconscious, Basic Books, 1970.
• James Braid: Neurypnology, London, 1843.
• Robert C. Fuller: Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
• Edgar Allan Poe: "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844) and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845).