CHAPTER III
MESMERISTS AND SOMNAMBULISTS
THE Church in its great wisdom forbids us to consult oracles and to violate by indiscreet curiosity the secrets of futurity. In our day the voice of the Church is no longer heeded; the people go back to diviners and pythonesses; the somnambulists have become prophets for those who believe no longer in the Gospel precepts. It is not realised that preoccupation over a predicted event suppresses our freedom in a sense and paralyses our means of defence; by consulting Magic, to foresee future events, we give earnests to fatality. The somnambulists are the sibyls of our epoch, as the sibyls were somnambulists of antiquity; happy are those querents who do not place their credulity at the service of immoral or senseless magnetists, for by the very fact of their friendly consultations they place themselves in communion with the immorality or folly of those who inspire the oracle; the business of the mesmerist is easy and his dupes are manifold. Among those who are devoted to magnetism it is therefore important to know who are in earnest.
Among these, M. le Baron Du Potet must be placed in the front rank, and his conscientious work has already done much to advance the science of Mesmer. He has opened at Paris a practical school of magnetism, to which the public is admitted for instruction in the processes and verification of the phenomena obtained.
Baron Du Potet is of an exceptional and highly intuitive nature. Like all our contemporaries, including the most instructed, he knows nothing of the Kabalah and its mysteries, but magnetism has notwithstanding revealed to him the science of Magic, and as it is still dread in his eyes, he has concealed that which he has found, even while feeling it necessary to reveal it. The book which he has written on the subject is sold only to his adepts, and then under the seal absolute of secrecy.1 We have entered into no bond with M. Du Potet, but we shall reserve his secret out of respect for the convictions of a hierophant. It is sufficient to say that his work is the most remarkable of all products of pure intuition. We do not regard it as dangerous, because the writer indicates forces without being precise as to their use. He is aware that we can do good or evil, can destroy or save, by means of magnetic processes, but the nature of these is not clearly and practically put forward, on which we offer him our felicitations, for the right of life and death presupposes a divine sovereignty, and we should regard its possessor as unworthy if he consented to sell it—in what manner soever.
M. Du Potet establishes triumphantly the existence of that universal light wherein lucids perceive all images and all reflections of thought. He assists the vital projection of this light by means of an absorbent apparatus which he calls the Magic Mirror; it is simply a circle or square covered with powdered charcoal, finely sifted. In this negative space the combined light projected by the magnetic subject and the operator soon tinges and realises the forms corresponding to their nervous impressions. The somnambulist sees manifested therein all dreams of opium and hasheesh, and if he were not distracted from the spectacle convulsions would follow.
The phenomena are analogous to those of hydromancy as practised by Cagliostro; the process of staring at water dazzles and troubles the sight; the fatigue of the eye, in its turn, favours hallucinations of the brain. Cagliostro sought to secure for his experiments virgin subjects in a state of perfect innocence, so as to set aside interference due to nervous divagations occasioned by erotic reminiscences. Du Potet's Magic Mirror is perhaps more fatiguing for the nervous system as a whole, but the dazzlements of hydromancy would have a more dangerous effect upon the brain.1
M. Du Potet is one of those deeply convinced men who suffer bravely the disdain of science and the pre-judgment of opinion, repeating beneath his breath the profession of secret faith cherished by Galileo: E pur simuove. It has been discovered quite recently that the tables turn, as the earth itself turns, and that human magnetisation imparts to portable articles, made subject to the influence of mediums, a specific movement of rotation. Objects of extraordinary weight can be lifted and transported through space by this force, for weight exists only by reason of equilibrium between the two forces of the Astral Light. Augment the action of one of them and the other will give way immediately. Now, if the nervous apparatus indraws and expels this light, rendering it positive or negative according to the personal super-excitation of the subject, all inert bodies submitted to its action and impregnated with its life will become lighter or heavier, following the flux and reflux of the light, which—in the new equilibrium of its movement—draws porous bodies and non-conductors about a living centre, as planets in space are drawn, balanced and gravitate about their sun.
This excentric power of attraction or projection supposes invariably a diseased condition in the person who is the subject thereof; the mediums are all excentric and badly equilibrated beings; mediomania supposes or occasions a sequence of other nervous manias, fixed notions deordinated appetites, disorderly erotomania, tendencies to murder or suicide. Among persons so effected moral responsibility seems to exist no more; they do evil with good as their motive; they shed tears of emotion in a church and may be surprised at bacchanalian orgies. They have a way of explaining everything—by the devil or the spirits which obsess and carry them away. What would you have of them? They live no more in themselves; some mysterious creature animates them and acts in their place; this being is named “Legion”.
The reiterated efforts of a healthy person to develop mediumistic faculties cause fatigue, disease and may even derange reason. It is this which happened to Victor Hennequin, formerly an editor of La Démocratie Pacifique and, after 1848, a member of the National Assembly. He was a young barrister, with a plentiful flow of eloquence, wanting neither education nor talent, but he was infatuated with the reveries of Fourier. Being banished as an after-consequence of December 2, he took up table-turning during his enforced inactivity; he fell a victim all too soon to mediomania and believed himself an instrument for the revelations of the soul of the earth. He published a book entitled Save the Human Race; it was a medley of socialistic and Christian reminiscences; a last gleam of reason flickered therein; but the experiences continued and folly triumphed. In a final work of which only one volume was issued, Victor Hennequin represents God in the guise of an immense polypus located at the centre of the earth, having antennae and horns turned inwards like tendrils all over his brain, as also over that of his wife Octavia. Soon afterwards it was reported that Victor Hennequin had died from the consquences of a maniacal paroxysm in a madhouse.1
We have also heard of a lady belonging to the aristocracy who gave herself up to communications with pretended spirits in tables and who, scandalised beyond measure at the unsuitable replies of her particular piece of furniture, undertook a journey to Rome to submit the heretical article to the chair of St. Peter. She carried it with her and had an auto-da-fé in the capital of the Christian world. Better to burn her furniture than to court madness, and to say the truth it was an imminent danger for the lady here in question. Let us not laugh at the episode—for we are children of an age of reason in which men who pass as serious, like the Comte de Mirville, ascribe to the devil unexplained phenomena of Nature.
In a drama which is well known on the boulevards there is much to be heard of a magician who, requiring a formidable auxiliary, created an automaton, being a monster with the paws of a lion, a bull's horns and the scales of leviathan. To this hybrid sphinx he imparted life, but took flight incontinently, being terrified at the work of his hands. The monster followed in pursuit, appeared between him and his betrothed, set fire to his house, burnt his father, carried off his son, and continuing the chase to the sea, followed him on board a ship which he caused to be engulfed, but finally made an end of himself amidst thunder. This awful spectacle, rendered visible by fear, has been realised in the history of humanity; poetry has personified the phantom of evil and has endowed it with all forces of Nature. It has sought to enlist the chimera as an aid to morality, and has then gone in fear of the ugliness begotten by its own dreams. From this time forward the monster has pursued us through the ages; it makes grimaces between us and the objects of our love; an impure nightmare, it strangles our children in their sleep; it carries through creation, that father's house of humanity, the inextinguishable torch of hell; it burns and tortures our parents everlastingly; it spreads black wings to hide heaven from our eyes; it shrieks to us: “Hope no more.” It mounts the crupper and gallops behind us like remorse; it plunges into the ocean of despair the last rock of our hopes; it is the old Persian Ahriman, the Egyptian Typhon, the darksome god confessed by the heretics of Manes, the Comte de Mirville and the Black Magic of the devil; it is the world's horror and the idol of bad Christians. Men have tried to laugh at it and have been afraid; they have caricatured it and trembled, for the cartoons have seemed to take life and to mock at those who made them. All this notwithstanding, its reign is over, though it will not perish overwhelmed by a bolt from heaven; science has conquered the lightning and converted it into torches; the monster will dissolve before the brightness of science and truth; the genius of ignorance and darkness can only be blasted by the light.
1 See La France Mystique, vol. i, pp. 36 et seq., for a contemporary account of Du Potet and of the periodical magnetic séances which took place au dessus du restaurant des Frères Provençaux, au Perron du Palais-Royal.
1 According to another account, the Magic Mirror was an ordinary circle of evocation drawn with charcoal. Wandering spirits were supposed to be conjured therein.
1 His madness is said otherwise to have been partial, or characterised by many lucid intervals. His second work was Religion, and it preached the doctrine of reincarnation, with periodical changes of sex. It described the Deity as an infinite substance in which circulated myriads of soul-entities