Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  While we're in this period of history, I should mention that in The Three Hostages John Buchan attributes considerable knowledge of hypnotism to the famous thirteenth-century astrologer and physician Michael Scot. I have not been able to confirm this at all. I suspect, then, that Buchan simply chose the name of Scot at random for his own fictional purposes.

  Anyway, given that there is evidence of the practice of hypnotism in the Middle Ages, in the evil eye, some more tantalizing texts slot into place. Here are the most important, in chronological order. The best one is also the earliest: a certain Theophilus, in his Breviary of Diverse Arts, quoted in the thirteenth-century encyclopedia Lumen animae (The Light of the Soul), is reported as remarking how difficult it is to wake someone up when they have been put to sleep by enchanters and thieves. He doesn't say that they were drugged; he clearly takes for granted that people could be and were put to sleep by unscrupulous people. This surely is certain evidence of the practice of hypnosis, although details of the theory (if there was one) and the practice are lost.

  In the light of Theophilus’ testimony, other glimpses start to sound like relics of hypnosis. Nicolas Oresme (whom we have already met) told in Quodlibeta 2 and 44 how incantations can make men beat themselves, or unyoke their horses and put the yokes on their own necks. In the light of modern stories about the absurd things hypnotized people can be persuaded to do, this looks significant. However, Oresme adds, in fairness, that he has never personally witnessed any magicians getting people to do such things.

  Another fragmentary glimpse is provided by Giorgio Anselmi, a philosopher from Parma, who was alive in the middle of the fifteenth century. In his Astronomia he makes a careful distinction:

  Haustus is more powerful than fascination. This is the phenomenon whereby through incantations or spells or invocations a man is so thoroughly bound that nothing gets through to him, and it is as if he has lost the use of his senses, and is dull and mindless, and for whole days at a time he seems to be absent, as though he had been drained of all his physical and mental strength.

  This is interesting. Anselmi associates haustus with fascination, except that fascination uses only the eyes, whereas haustus uses speech. Could a practitioner of haustus have used rhythmic speech, as many modern hypnotists do? Unfortunately, there is no further trace of haustus as a distinct practice, and we don't even know whether the spells were to be chanted by the operator while the subject was actually present. The word haustus gives us no further clue: it literally means ‘drawing’ or ‘draining’ (as in our word ‘exhaustion’), so what is important about the experience for Anselmi is that it leaves its victim in a zombie-like state, with his powers drawn out of him.

  There was a phenomenon familiar in the Middle Ages of a magician conjuring up illusory castles and so on for the amazed entertainment of the audience. We might be tempted to attribute this to mass hypnotism – or even think that the audience had been snacking on the local mushrooms – but we are lucky to have preserved a number of the spells required for creating this illusion (recently published by historian Richard Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century), and hypnotism is not involved at any stage; the operator has no such contact with his audience, but apparently works on his own in all sincerity to create the illusion.

  Conclusions

  This, unfortunately, is all the evidence there is – and it is a far more thorough survey than one usually meets in books on hypnosis. It does seem safe to conclude that what we call hypnosis was known in the medieval world, at any rate, even if not in the ancient world. But even in the medieval world, evidence is scarce and hard to assess. This paucity of evidence may not be an accident of time. It may in fact be the case that there was no tried-and-tested, handed-down technique, but rather the accidental and therefore piecemeal discovery of how to induce trances in people.

  But even the disappointingly negative features of this chapter bring home two important conclusions. The first is simple: evidence for the induction of trance states is no more evidence for hypnosis than, say, evidence for the ingestion of narcoleptic drugs is evidence for hypnosis. To repeat: not every trance state is a hypnotically induced state. In February 1999 I saw a brilliant production of Shakespeare's Tempest at the Barbican in London, directed by Adrian Noble. Now, as everyone knows, there is plenty of enchantment in the play; both Prospero and Ariel have the ability to put others into a trance. Ariel is even trapped on this earth because the person who originally put a spell on him has since died – a trace of the same superstition that survives as one of the supposed dangers of hypnotism. In this production Prospero, for instance, made various hypnotic passes over Miranda in order to entrance her. Shakespeare himself left no stage directions, so we have no way of knowing how the scene would originally have been enacted; but I think we can be reasonably sure that hypnotism would not have been his model, as it was for Noble.

  The second conclusion is a word of caution. I started this chapter by putting down the over-enthusiastic attempt to lend respectability to hypnotism by giving it a long history, with little regard for the facts. I end by expanding the same topic and casting doubt on what I call ‘hypnotic imperialism’. This is the tendency of some theorists of hypnosis to attempt to explain too many phenomena as hypnosis. In particular, there has been considerable discussion of whether acupuncture is a form of hypnosis. There are certain similarities – for instance, the acupuncturist likes to build up rapport with a patient, and to get her to relax – and it is interesting (though not conclusive) that the same people who can derive benefit from acupuncture are also those who are most hypnotizable. But current evidence suggests that there is a reasonable physiological basis to acupuncture: it works by stimulating the body's nervous system and encouraging endorphins, our natural painkillers, to help in the healing process. The most convincing evidence is that experiments have shown that hypnosis does not reduce pain in animals, but acupuncture does. This shows that acupuncture has a physiological basis, and is not identical to hypnosis.

  Hypnotic imperialists are perhaps misled by the extended use of the term in common parlance: ‘I was so hypnotized by the film that I didn't notice the time passing.’ But this is a metaphor, not a statement of fact. Alternatively, they may have been misled by the kind of over-broad definition of hypnotism one occasionally comes across in which any attempt to gain a person's attention and make them do something or act in a certain way is seen as hypnotism. John Grinder and Richard Bandler, founders of neurolinguistic programming, are arch-imperialists: ‘If you think of hypnosis as altering someone's state of consciousness, then any effective communication is hypnosis,’ says Connirae Andras in the preface to their book Trance-formations. Perhaps the worst – or do I mean the silliest? – case of hypnotic imperialism that I have come across is William J. Bryan's book Religious Aspects of Hypnosis, which I have already mentioned. Bryan defines prayer as ‘a state of hypnosis in which the mind is super-concentrated on God’, God is described as a hypnotist, and religious services are described so that they seem hypnotic. Bryan is writing not just as a hypnotherapist, but as a totally sincere Christian. He is misled by his basic premiss, that hypnosis has to be an emotional experience, similar to the emotions aroused in religion. The relation between hypnosis and religious practices such as meditation will occupy us in a later chapter. In the meantime, we can turn from the slender evidence of the ancient and medieval world to more modern times.

  3

  Franz Anton Mesmer

  The beginnings of hypnosis in the West are, as I said, hard to excavate. But as we hack our way through the jungle, we suddenly come across a clearing with the remains of complete edifices. They are covered in creepers and weeds, to be sure, but one ruin is particularly prominent, towering above the rest. This tower represents Franz Anton Mesmer. In his chequered career as a healer, he encapsulated in miniature the whole range of the future history of hypnosis, from flamboyant showmanship to serious medicine, and from wacky theorizi
ng to the limits of science (such as they were in his time). Was Mesmer a charlatan or the prophet of a new medicine? The jury is still out.

  Early Life

  Franz Anton Mesmer was born on 23 May 1734 in Iznang, a small village near Radolfzell, in the beautiful country around the western end of Lake Constance in Swabia, which is now part of Germany (just – the border with Switzerland is close), but was then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a gamekeeper, and Mesmer was one of a number of children. He went to school at Dillingen, in Bavaria, and then went on to the University of Ingolstadt in 1752. He studied theology there, but there is no record that he ever graduated, and he was certainly not ordained. No one knows what he did between 1755 and 1759, but perhaps he was studying at some other university, because by the time he entered the University of Vienna in 1759 he had, or claimed to have, a PhD.

  At Vienna he studied law for a year before transferring to medicine, the subject that would occupy him for the rest of his life and make his fame and fortune. We have no information to enable us to read between the stark lines of these early data. He changed his major topic of study twice: is this the sign of a flighty mind or a desire to gain a broad educational background? He ended up with medicine: was this the result of vocation or desperation? How did he support himself financially for thirteen years of study? Perhaps he had a patron, because his father was not rich; perhaps he took odd jobs to keep himself in food and textbooks.

  Mesmer graduated on 20 November 1765. The medical school required a dissertation, as well as regular examination papers, and the title of his was De influxu planetarium in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Heavenly Bodies on the Human Body). This inevitably sounds to us today like an occult treatise, unsuited to a medical degree, but in fact it was strictly scientific. The question Mesmer tackled was the effect of gravitation on human beings, and his hypothesis was that there is a universal gravitational fluid, which acts as a medium through which the planets may influence life on earth. Modern hackles rise: are we in the realm of astrology? In fact, Mesmer was contemptuous of astrology, or at least astrologers. The idea of a universal fluid seems more than a little far-fetched. But in its day reference to a universal fluid, even as an unsubstantiated hypothesis, would not have seemed unscientific: scientists posited various arcane fluids to explain a number of natural phenomena (such as light, gravity, heat and electricity), and as candidates for a universal fluid the world had already been offered ether, phlogistic fluid, vitrious fluid and resinous fluid. Only twenty-five years later, shortly after the period of Mesmer's greatest success in Paris, Luigi Galvani first noticed that the thighs of dissected frogs twitched when lightning flashes in the sky, and then found that they also did so when stimulated by a direct electric current. The scientific world went mad for electricity, and few had any doubt that it was the universal animating force of the world and all its parts.

  This was the era when Erasmus Darwin imagined he had evidence that plants felt mother love, and when jolts of electricity delivered by the popular Leyden jar were thought to have curative properties. It was also the era of work that we would today recognize as scientific, from people such as Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and John Dalton, Jean-Baptiste Fourier and Joseph Priestley; but the number and variety of scientific beliefs being published made it hard for the layman to distinguish fact from fiction. And the layman was interested; this was an era of popular science like no other, when balloon flights were of more interest than the imminence of political revolution, and the latest theory of the universe was discussed in the streets as well as the salons of the aristocracy. But in fact – and oddly, given that he was awarded the degree – Mesmer's thesis was entirely unoriginal, and even in places an act of plagiarism. Perhaps the requirements for a dissertation were not as stringent then as now; perhaps (as in the ancient world) plagiarism was seen as a compliment not a crime; perhaps his examiners were unfamiliar with the work from which Mesmer plundered whole sentences and a complete list of case histories.

  This work was Richard Mead's De imperio solis ac lunae (On the Rulership of the Sun and Moon, 1704). Mead was an English doctor who moved in the highest circles of English society, and was the personal physician to both Queen Anne and Isaac Newton. Most of the forty-eight pages of Mesmer's dissertation are taken up with physics, and contain a summary of Newton's theory of gravitation and tides, followed by an unacknowledged précis of Mead's application of this to the human body. Mead postulated that there was a ‘nervous fluid’ in the body which was affected by the gravitational pull of the sun and moon. Mesmer postulated a universal gravitational fluid which exists as the medium of gravity, since the heavenly bodies would be unable to exert any influence on one another in a vacuum, and which therefore transmits the influence of the planets on to human bodies as well as everywhere else. Mesmer adapted Newton's theory of tides to the human body and before long he would be claiming to be able to create tides in the human body by magnetism.

  Throughout his life Mesmer liked to see himself – and liked others to see him – as an original thinker, a misunderstood genius. In actual fact, though, his dissertation was derivative and his theories were not startling in the context of their times. Anyway, armed with a degree from a medical school as good as any in Europe, Mesmer set up a practice in Vienna, the rival of Paris as the European capital of culture. Before long, he had worked his way up to the highest levels of society, chiefly by the fortunate marriage, on 10 January 1768, to the wealthy widow Maria Anna von Posch, whose first husband had been a government official. The wedding was a splendid affair, conducted in the fourteenth-century St Stephen's Cathedral by the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Migazzi, but the marriage was not blessed with happiness. He found her stupid and dull, but presumably this downside was more than offset by her positive qualities: she gave him money and respectability. She already had a teenage son, Franz, and Mesmer never had any children of his own.

  Maria's father gave them a large house at 261 Landstrasse, in the most prosperous district of Vienna, overlooking the Prater park. Here the couple lived in the grand style; attached to the house was a garden large enough to be laid out with avenues and statues, a belvedere and so on. Mesmer added laboratories and a small concert hall. He was musical, playing the clavichord and cello very competently, and specializing in the arcane glass harmonica, an instrument consisting of a series of different-sized glass bowls – a development of the method of making music by tapping tumblers filled with varying quantities of water. The American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention of the glass harmonica, but this is not the only way in which his path and Mesmer's were destined to cross.

  As well as making music himself, Mesmer turned himself into something of a patron of the arts. He soon became friends with Christoph Willibald von Gluck and Joseph Haydn, but his most famous friendship was with Leopold Mozart, who was in Vienna promoting the talent of his son, twelve years old in 1768, Wolfgang Amadeus. Leopold Mozart and Mesmer were on good terms, and saw quite a bit of each other over the years, whenever the Mozarts were in town. A 1773 letter of Mozart to his wife in Salzburg gives us a glimpse of the relationship: ‘I did not send a line by the last post for there was a big musical rout at our friend Mesmer's house … Our host plays Miss Davies's glass harmonica vastly well. He is the only person in Vienna who has learned to perform upon this instrument, and he possesses a far more handsome glass machine than was Miss Davies's own. Wolfgang has played it too.’ (The instrument was known as ‘Miss Davies's glass harmonica’, because an English woman, Marianne Davies, had become famous as a performer on the instrument. At concerts, her sister Cecilia used to sing along with her.)

  In September 1768, not long after the Wunderkind had arrived in the city, Leopold was frustrated in getting an opera of his son's performed in public on a large scale. Mesmer kindly offered the little theatre in his garden, and this place then goes down in history as the site of the first performance of a Mozart opera. The
young genius composed Bastien and Bastienne specially for the occasion. Later, however, he did not repay his debt to Mesmer in kind: the only direct reference in his works to Mesmer's theories is a piece of burlesque. Towards the end of the first act of Così fan tutte Ferrando and Guglielmo, in disguise, have pretended to swallow poison, in an attempt to persuade Fiordiligi and Dorabella of the sincerity of their wooing. Despina, the girls’ servant, who is in on the whole charade (the men are in disguise in order to try to win a bet with Don Alfonso, who does not believe the girls will remain faithful to them), comes in disguised as a healer, carrying a huge magnetic stone with which she revives the two men. Despite the superficially complimentary words – ‘This magnetic stone should give the traveller pause. Once it was used by Mesmer, who was born in Germany's green fields, and who won great fame in France’ – the whole scene is supposed to be played in a comic fashion. Depending on how the stone was shaped and wielded, the scene could even be made comically obscene. The opera dates from 1790, by which time it had become popular to ridicule Mesmer and his theories; even though, as usual, it was Lorenzo da Ponte, not Mozart himself, who wrote the words to the opera, it looks as though Mozart was pandering to the audience's expectations and whims in allowing his librettist to get away with this ridicule.