Robin Waterfield - Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

It is 1784. You are in a dimly lit salon in a mansion in a prosperous section of Paris. The room is presided over by a tall, slightly overweight man dressed in a purple cloak trimmed with lace and embroidered with occult symbols. Other sigils decorate the walls and heavy velvet curtains cover the windows, allowing just the odd ray of sunlight in to strike the thickly carpeted floor, and hardly a sound penetrates from the street outside. Melodious piano music can be heard softly from another room. You and a number of other Parisians are seated around a large, low tub, and there are other such tubs in the room, three for the rich and one for the poor. However, there are few poor people at their tub, since it is fashionable Paris that is fascinated by this new science. Movable iron rods stick out through the cover of the tub and have been bent at right angles, so that from where you sit on chairs around the tub you and the others can hold the rods, or apply them directly or by means of an attached rope to an afflicted part of the body. The other end of these rods, you have been informed, are resting in phials of magnetized water, and these phials in turn stand in a pool of water containing magnetized iron filings. The wizard, who is none other than Franz Anton Mesmer, calls this contraption a baquet (which just means tub), and explains that it, or the attentions of an individual healer such as himself, can restore the lost balance of the magnetic fluid which pervades the universe and animates all living creatures, and whose disturbance is ill health. The group of clients grasp the rods and wait in silence. The atmosphere in the room grows very intense. Occasionally Mesmer or one of his assistants prowls around the room. To complete his appearance as a wizard, Mesmer carries a wand, with a metal tip. He inspects the woman next to you, passes his hands behind her back without touching her, points the wand at her, and she goes into convulsions. Her body begins to jerk, and her breathing is shallow and uneven; a flush comes over her face and neck. Finally she collapses gently to the floor, coughing up phlegm. Assistants calmly come and take her away to another room, which you can see is lined with mattresses and soft silk drapes. Mesmer follows to attend to her, now that she is on the road to health.

*

It is 1850. You are in the comfortable and cluttered drawing room of a well-to-do self-styled doctor. He sits you down in a straight-backed chair, and pulls up another chair opposite you. If you are a woman, you are chaperoned, and he delicately places your knees to one side of his; if you are a man he sits with his knees between yours. He feels rather too close for comfort, but you are here of your own free will to be mesmerized, and so you submit. He asks you gently to relax, and tells you that you have nothing to fear. Then silence falls. He makes a few sample passes over your hands, from the wrist to the fingertips, drawing his hands close to the skin, so close that you can feel the warmth of his hand, but never quite touching. To your surprise after a while you feel a faint coolness and tingling. Satisfied, he then proceeds to take your right hand in his left hand, and your left hand in his right hand, in a special grip that involves pinching the balls of your thumbs, and he asks you to stare intently at one of his eyes. He returns your gaze without blinking for some minutes; you can feel him exerting his will to some end which is mysterious to you. You begin to feel a strange sensation of heaviness and drowsiness. Without speaking a word, he begins to make passes with his hands over your forehead and eyes and down to your neck. Your eyelids begin to feel very heavy and that is the last you remember clearly for a while.