Whisperers
Page 18
Toward the end of 1712, Swedenborg left England for Europe in search of further scientific knowledge. In Leiden, he met with Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who had just begun his pioneering work with the microscope. In Paris he discussed technical matters with leading lights in mathematics and astronomy. Wending his way home in late 1714, he sent to his brother-in-law a list of inventions that had occurred to him during his travels. These included such prescient scientific developments as a “flying carriage,” a submarine, a siphon, sluices, pumps, and, almost a century and a half before the birth of Freud, “a method of conjuring the wills and affections of men’s minds by means of analysis.”6
Swedenborg eventually returned to Sweden in 1715 with such a well-established reputation that the following year King Charles XII made him Extraordinary Assessor to the Royal College of Mines. It proved a less impressive appointment than it appeared. The king died in 1718 and, due to the political instability that followed, Swedenborg did not actually take up his office until 1724. He followed his own scientific endeavors, however, and busied himself with inventing a method of transporting ships safely overland.
In 1733, he took leave of absence from the board of the Royal College of Mines in order to publish his first scientific work, the three-volume Opera Mineralia. In the first book he developed a nebular hypothesis to account for the formation of planets (which anticipated the work of Kant and Laplace) and an atomic theory of matter. The second and third volumes were scientific studies of iron, steel, copper, and brass. At this stage of his career, a less likely candidate for spirit contact could scarcely be imagined. Yet it happened.
Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist turned mystic whose communications with spirits enabled him to ‘see’ events hundreds of miles distant
It began with his dreams. Swedenborg started a travel dairy in 1743. The first ten entries were devoted to his waking experiences, but thereafter he took to noting down the contents of his dreams. Almost from the beginning, he took to interpreting them as well. In one vivid example, he found himself lying beside a woman whom he took to be his guardian angel. She told him he smelled bad, which he later interpreted as a comment on the state of his spiritual health. The dream marked the beginning of a period of great transcendent temptations, alternating eventually with more positive, near-mystical experiences. On the day after Easter, for example, he was abruptly cast prostrate on the floor to the sound of a peal of thunder. He began to pray and quickly sensed the presence of Jesus Christ, who asked him if he had a clean bill of health. When Swedenborg responded that Jesus should know best about this, Jesus suggested he should get one.
Come October, Swedenborg was seized by a sense of deep peace. Christ came again to him in a dream with the admonition that he should undertake nothing without divine guidance. By late 1744, the dream journal came to a close, but not, it transpired, his contact with spirits. He began to publish a series of books on religious themes, notably the story of creation, in which he expounded what he believed to be the deeper meaning of the book of Genesis. (He even returned to his Hebrew studies so he could read his sources in the original.) He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, holding with most mystics that God’s prime characteristic was unity, and called for a new Christianity that would expand on the original rather than replace it. He introduced one seminal volume with the words:
The arcana which are revealed in the following pages are those concerning heaven and hell, together with the life of man after death … it has been granted me to associate with angels and to converse with them as one man with another, and also to see the things which are in the heavens as well as those which are in the hells and this for the space of thirteen years, and so to describe these things from what I have myself seen and heard.7
The works, which collectively amounted to a new theology, were issued anonymously, but in 1759 something happened that was to bring the question of authorship into the open.
In July of that year, Swedenborg had returned from a trip to London and was staying in Göteborg on Sweden’s west coast. On the evening of the nineteenth, he went to dine with friends at the home of William Castel, a wealthy local merchant. Early on in the evening, he became disturbed and eventually withdrew from the company to take some fresh air in the garden. He returned with the news that a great fire had broken out in Stockholm not far from his home. The announcement may have been met with some skepticism—Stockholm is approximately three hundred miles away from Göteborg—but Swedenborg continued to report the progress of the fire to his fellow guests until, around eight p.m., he exclaimed with relief that the fire had been extinguished just three doors from his house.
Several other guests had homes in Stockholm, so that news of Swedenborg’s curious pronouncement quickly spread. When it reached the provincial governor, he summoned Swedenborg to his residence the following day for a detailed firsthand account of what had happened. It was not until July 21 that a messenger arrived from Stockholm with a letter reporting the disaster. The details coincided in every respect with the account Swedenborg had given two days earlier. The story circulated rapidly and Swedenborg gained a reputation for having extraordinary powers. Soon people began to suspect he must be the author of the equally extraordinary books that had been appearing over the past several years.
The critical factor, for our present thesis, was not the expanded biblical theology propounded by Swedenborg, but his open admission—in his very first theological volume—that his doctrines were not intellectual constructs but a direct spirit revelation emanating from the very highest sources. In his analysis of Swedenborg’s career, John Selwyn Gummer stresses that Swedenborg was not prone to trances, nor did he conduct any form of séance, but rather he engaged in regular direct communication with beings from heaven, experiencing them as physically present. According to Gummer, his religious writings, which included a guided tour of both heaven and hell, were literal reports of his experiences. Swedenborg himself had this to say:
I am well aware that many persons will insist that it is impossible for anyone to converse with spirits and with angels during his lifetime in the body; many will say that such intercourse must be mere fancy; some that I have invented such relations in order to gain credit; whilst others will make other objections. For all these, however, I care not, since I have heard, seen and felt.8
Although fiercely attacked in his own day, by the philosopher Kant among others, Swedenborg’s literary legacy was enough to guarantee him a following in later years. The first sign of things to come appeared ten years after his death in 1772 when a Church of England cleric named John Clowes established, in Manchester, a Society for Printing, Publishing and Circulating the Writings of the Hon. Emanuel Swedenborg. Clowes translated many of Swedenborg’s works into English and preached Swedenborgian doctrines from the pulpit. Swedenborg’s own writings predicted the formation of a “New Church,” Christian in essence, but expanding on the Gospel message to include the insights Swedenborg had gained through his heavenly visions. In May 1787 a New Church movement was founded in England. Two years later, there were several physical churches opened across the country while the first General Conference of the New Church was held in London. Before long, missionaries were carrying the Swedenborg revelation to an international audience. One who brought them to the shores of America was the famous “Johnny Appleseed” (John Chapman).
Although membership of the New Church remains comparatively small in the twenty-first century, the large corpus of Swedenborg’s visionary work is still in print, with fresh translations issued every few years. Consequently, his ideas continue to shine as an unlikely beacon from Enlightenment times, attracting the attention of theologians and to some extent esotericists, once again engendered by spirit contact and revelation.
Not all spirits carried the same weight as those that appeared to Emanuel Swedenborg, but spirit activity nonetheless remained lively throughout the period. The Faustian legend, accepted as a statement of literal truth, survived more or less intact un
til the Enlightenment, after which it reemerged in a different form. Interest in the art of ceremonial conjuration gradually waned, but the desire to contact spirits did not. Despite the intellectual rationalism characteristic of the Enlightenment, it would be a mistake to assume the period had much in common with our own. New habits of scientific observation were subject to psychological factors, so that microscopic examination of donkey semen revealed tiny donkeys and mermaids could still be spotted sunbathing on their rocks.9 The scientific method, as we know it today, was still in its infancy and the scientific mind remained open to all sorts of fantastic possibilities. A herald of one such possibility was a physician named Franz Anton Mesmer.
Mesmer was born in Iznang, near Lake Constance in Swabia, in 1734. He was educated in two Jesuit universities—Dillingen and Ingolstadt—before attending medical school at the University of Vienna. His medical dissertation in 1766 postulated that the gravitational pull of the planets influenced human health by way of an invisible fluid permeating nature and the human body, an idea he almost certainly picked up from a prominent English physician named Richard Mead. But nine years later, Mesmer modified this theory: now it was no longer gravitation that influenced the fluid, but magnetism. He experimented with this idea—one patient was required to swallow a preparation containing iron, then endure magnets attached to her body—but while it appeared to work, Mesmer again modified his basic theory. Now he replaced ferrous magnetism with a speculative “animal magnetism” in which direct manipulation of the fluid produced therapeutic results. This idea too seemed to be borne out in practice, and soon Mesmer abandoned the use of magnets altogether. Instead he manipulated the fluid in his patients’ bodies by making “magnetic passes” over them with his empty hands. As a therapy, the approach was astonishingly successful. Mesmer’s reputation grew and his fame spread. In 1775, he was approached by a representative of the Munich Academy of Sciences to give an opinion on the work of a self-effacing Austrian priest named Johann Joseph Gassner, who was one of the most successful healers of his day.
Fr. Gassner was ordained in 1750 and began his ministry in the tiny village of Klösterle (in eastern Switzerland) in 1758. A few years later he noticed he had become prey to headaches and dizziness while celebrating Mass and hearing confession. The specific timing of his symptoms led him to suspect a Satanic attack. Fortunately the Church had techniques to combat such an eventuality. Fr. Gassner performed a ritual of exorcism, said the relevant prayers, and his troubles disappeared. Impressed by the result, he took to exorcising the sick of his parish, again with dramatic success. Soon he found patients traveling to see him from neighboring districts. Among them was the Countess Maria Bernadine von Wolfegg. When he successfully exorcised her as well, his fame began to spread like wildfire.10
Gassner distinguished between two kinds of illness—natural and preternatural. Natural illnesses he referred to a physician. Preternatural he divided into three categories: circumsessio, the symptoms of which masqueraded as natural illness but were, in fact, caused by the Devil; obsessio, illness caused by sorcery; and possessio, which was the result of possession by evil spirits. In all cases, he first subjected willing patients to a trial exorcism during which he asked the demon to manifest the disease symptoms. If nothing happened, he concluded the disease was of natural origin and sent the patient to a doctor. If symptoms appeared, he continued with the exorcism and drove out the spirits that were causing the problem.11
Although his methods were hugely successful in effecting cures, Gassner’s basic theories were at variance with the new rationalism of the Enlightenment. Even at the height of his fame he was the focus of fierce controversy, and in 1775 Prince-Elector Karl Theodor appointed a commission of inquiry to investigate his cures. Mesmer was one of its members.
It is difficult today to think of Mesmer as a champion of the Enlightenment, but the fact was that he represented new ideas and methods that, within the milieu of the time, seemed strictly scientific. They certainly made no appeal to Satan and his minions for their justification. Mesmer examined the Gassner approach, then demonstrated that everything Gassner could do he (Mesmer) could do better. He concluded that while Gassner was an honest man, he was nonetheless mistaken in his conclusions. His cures were actually effected by animal magnetism, unconsciously applied. Exorcism had nothing to do with them.12 Thus, in the turning point of 1775, Mesmer banished spirits from medical theory. But the spirits refused to stay banished and it was only a few years before they began to haunt mesmerism itself.
Despite (or possibly because of) the fact that Mesmer achieved some spectacular cures, Viennese physicians accused him of fraud, leading him to move to Paris in 1778. Interest in his theory of animal magnetism spread rapidly. Within a few years a correspondent of the Royal Society of Medicine wrote that “even the coolest heads in town talked of nothing but mesmerism,” while a survey by the Society concluded that few sizeable towns in France lacked mesmeric treatment centers.13 As the practice of mesmerism, professional and amateur, continued to spread, so did its associated phenomena.14 Spirit contact arose when two brothers discovered a new form of somnambulistic mesmerism (now generally believed to be hypnosis) and found that one of their subjects could communicate with the dead.15
This proved to be no isolated event. In a letter to the Société Harmonique in Strasbourg, the Swedenborgian Exegetical and Philanthropic Society of Stockholm explained that “angels” had possessed somnambulists in Sweden, thus providing “the first immediate correspondence with the invisible world.”16 In Lyons, mesmerism was absorbed into two essentially spiritist cults, La Concorde and the secret Loge Elue et Chérie. In both organizations, mesmerized subjects channeled messages from God.
Table turning, a technique later associated with Spiritualism, in which invisible forces cause a small table to move, was at first attributed to the influence of the magnetic fluid. But while some mesmerists saw this only as the mechanistic manipulation of animal magnetism, others assumed spirit intervention: “Ask the table, that is, the spirit that is inside it; it will tell you that I have above my head an enormous pipe of fluid which rises from my hair up to the stars … by which the voice of spirits on Saturn reaches my ear.”17
Clearly, the mesmeric manifestation of spirits was not an isolated phenomenon. In his History of Hypnotism, Alan Gault puts it bluntly: “A major treatise would hardly suffice to exhaust somnambules’ descriptions of their contacts with the spirits of diseased persons, or with angelic or spiritual beings, and of their visions of, or visits to, heaven or Hades or limbo … Not infrequently the two kinds of voyage—astronomical and eschatological—are combined and the moon and the planets are represented as being the probationary homes of departed spirits. Often the voyages are conducted under the guidance of the somnambule’s own particular guardian spirit, who also fulfils the more mundane role of medical and moral adviser.”18
As a professor of psychology, Dr. Gauld is naturally wary of the claims of mesmerism in this respect. The subhead of the section of his book that deals with paranormal phenomena is prefaced by the word ostensibly,19 and he takes care to point out that where his “magnetic somnambules” reported voyages to the moon or planets, “the accounts are frequently picturesque [but] the amateur astronomer will search them in vain for anticipations of modern discoveries.”20 He is, however, kinder to one of the better known examples of spirit contact: Frau Friedericke Hauffe, the “Seeress of Prevorst.”
As a child, Frau Hauffe was prey to visions and prophetic dreams. She became increasingly introverted following an arranged marriage and began to exhibit symptoms of various illnesses from about the age of twenty-one.21 As her symptoms worsened, her physician prescribed “magnetic passes and medicines” and soon Frau Hauffe decided she was being magnetized by the spirit of her dead grandmother. Poltergeist phenomena broke out around her, untypical in that objects floated slowly through the air rather than being thrown.22 Later “she began to see another person behind the one she was looking at. T
hus behind her youngest sister she saw her deceased brother, Henry; and behind a female friend, she saw the ghostly form of an old woman, whom she had known in her childhood at Lowenstein.”23
Since only magnetic passes could alleviate the symptoms of her various illnesses, the seeress spent more and more of her time in the magnetized condition. This produced in her four distinct states: (1) what appeared to be a normal waking consciousness, but with heightened psychic sensitivity; (2) a magnetic state that produced vivid and sometimes prophetic dreams; (3) a transitional state between sleep and waking (now usually termed “hypnogogic”) during which she would write and speak a mysterious “inner language”; and (4) a similar state to number 3, but with added clairvoyance, which allowed her to diagnose and prescribe for herself and others. In all of these states, she was liable to see apparitions.24 Gauld points out the similarities with other clairvoyant somnambules of the time and adds the telling detail that she had a guardian spirit in the person of her dead grandmother.25 In this she greatly resembled a new breed of clairvoyant waiting in the wings of history: the Spiritualist medium.