Download or read book Credulity written by Emily Ogden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.
Download or read book Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France written by Robert DARNTON and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris and began to promulgate an exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton's lively study provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.
Download or read book Mesmerism written by Franz Anton Mesmer and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mesmerism the Discovery of Animal Magnetism written by Franz Mesmer and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1779, Franz Anton Mesmer wrote an 88-page book, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, to which he appended his famous 27 Propositions. While undertaking research, G.F. Frankau obtained, on loan from a private library, an original edition of Mesmer's Mémoire sur la découverte de Magnétism Animal. Realising its medico-historical importance and tempted by a layman's vanity to undertake the translation himself, he eventually decided that the task could only be accomplished by an expert; He secured the services of Captain V. R. Myers of the Berlitz School of Languages. Myer's rendering of the eighteenth-century French is highly praiseworthy. The adjective "mesmeric", the substantive "mesmerism", and the verb to "mesmerise" have not changed their meanings since they first became current-posterity's unique tribute to a unique man.
Download or read book Mesmerism Unveiled written by Leslie J Gee and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Mesmerized written by Alison Winter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-12 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: An Invitation to the Seance1: Discovery of the Island of Mesmeria 2: Animal Magnetism Comes to London 3: Experimental Subjects as Scientific Instruments 4: Carnival, Chapel, and Pantomime 5: The Peripatetic Power of the "New Science" 6: Consultations, Conversaziones, and Institutions 7: The Invention of Anesthesia and the Redefinition of Pain 8: Colonizing Sensations in Victorian India9: Emanations from the Sickroom 10: The Mesmeric Cure of Souls 11: Expertise, Common Sense, and the Territories of Science 12: The Social Body and the Invention of Consensus Conclusion: The Day after the Feast Notes Bibliography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Facts in Mesmerism with reasons for a dispassionate inquiry into it written by Chauncy Hare Townshend and published by . This book was released on 1840 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mesmerism written by Franz Anton Mesmer and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 Reprint of 1948 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer [1734-1815] was a German doctor who theorized the existence of a natural energy transference occurring between all animated and inanimate objects; what he called animal magnetism, later also referred to as mesmerism. Mesmer's theory attracted a wide following between about 1780 and 1850 and continued to have some influence thereafter. 1843 the Scottish doctor James Braid proposed the term hypnosis for a technique derived from animal magnetism; today the word "mesmerism" generally functions as a synonym of "hypnosis". This publication is a reprint of the first English translation in 1948 of Mesmer's historic Memoire sur la Decouverte du Magnetisme Animal to appear in English. It was originally published in French in 1779.
Download or read book The Rationale of Mesmerism written by Alfred Percy Sinnett and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mesmerism Medusa and the Muse written by Anne DeLong and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity explores the connections among the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa as an icon of the gendered gaze. An analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and the prose of Mary Shelley reveals that these Romantic-era writers equate the enraptured state that produces spontaneous literary creation with the mesmeric trance. These writers employ Medusan imagery to portray both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject, a conflation of subject/object positions that complicates issues of agency, subjectivity, and gender. Images of Medusan mesmerism ultimately work to deconstruct Romantic ideological dichotomies of self/other, female/male, muse/artist, and sublime/beautiful. In contrast to a traditional, masculinized Romantic discourse that emphasizes self-possession, this study uncovers a feminized, improvisational, Romantic discourse, characterized “Other-possession,” an assumption of the mesmerized subject position that enhances subjective fluidity. This study interrogates the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity through an examination of Romantic poetry, prose, and theory that utilizes mesmeric and Medusan metaphors to suggest creative inspiration.Building on recent scholarship about improvisational poetics, the subversive potential of mesmerism, and Medusa as a feminist icon, this work suggests that the mesmeric Medusan muse not only enables creativity for women writers but also provides a mirror in which they view (and through which they give voice to) their own societal oppression. The mesmeric Medusan muse in Romantic-era literature—from the Ancient Mariner and the Frankenstein monster to the tragic, abandoned Sapphic poetess—often represents the face of oppression, an unwelcome and monstrous truth in nineteenth-century British society. For women writers in particular, braving the stare of the Medusan muse enhances empathy, and therefore inspiration and literary productivity.
Download or read book Laboratories of Faith written by John Warne Monroe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in séances and magic rituals were seekers after experimental data as well as spiritual truth. A young astronomy student wrote of his quest: "I am not in the presence or under the influence of any evil spirit: I study Spiritism as I study mathematics." He did not see himself as an ecstatic visionary but rather as a sober observer. For him, the darkened room of occult practice was as much laboratory as church. In an evocative history of alternative religious practices in France in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, John Warne Monroe tells the interconnected stories of three movements—Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism. Adherents of these groups, Monroe reveals, attempted to "modernize" faith by providing empirical support for metaphysical concepts. Instead of trusting theological speculation about the nature of the soul, these believers attempted to gather tangible evidence through Mesmeric experiments, séances, and ceremonial magic. While few French people were active Mesmerists, Spiritists, or Occultists, large segments of the educated general public were familiar with these movements and often regarded them as fascinating expressions of the "modern condition," a notable contrast to the Catholicism and secular materialism that prevailed in their culture. Featuring eerie spirit photographs, amusing Daumier lithographs, and a posthumous autograph from Voltaire, as well as extensive documentary evidence, Laboratories of Faith gives readers a sense of what being in a séance or a secret-society ritual might actually have felt like and why these feelings attracted participants. While they never achieved the transformation of human consciousness for which they strove, these thinkers and believers nevertheless pioneered a way of "being religious" that has become an enduring part of the Western cultural vocabulary.
Download or read book Mesmerism Its Apponents written by George Sandby and published by . This book was released on 1848 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mesmerism Its History Phenomena and Practice written by William Lang and published by . This book was released on 1843 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What is Mesmerism The question answered by a mesmeric practitioner or Mesmerism not miracle etc written by George H. BARTH and published by . This book was released on 1853 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls written by Robert C. Fuller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of mesmerism in nineteenth-century America is the story of how, for the first time, a psychological theory arose to meet the everyday religious and intellectual needs of Americans. Robert Fuller gives us the first complete history of American mesmerist philosophy. He traces its development from an obscure scientific hypothesis to a powerful spiritual philosophy that deeply influenced many of the period's emerging Protestant religious sects. He investigates in depth the role of mesmerism in the Mind-Cure movement and New Thought and paints for us the cultural landscape existing at a time when thousands of antebellum Americans turned from their churches to the realm of psychology in search of self-understanding. In the early part of the century, mesmerism was for the most part the territory of carnival showmen. Itinerant mesmerists during the 1830s placed subjects in trancelike states from which they could divulge the contents of sealed envelopes and describe in detail locales to which they had never traveled. Literary figures such as Poe and Hawthorne seized upon mesmerism, depicting its workings at their most sinister and diabolical extreme. But by midcentury, mesmerism was beginning to enter the American consciousness in ways that involved anything but parlor trickery. Straddling a fine line between religious myth and scientific philosophy, mesmerism's spiritual tenets resonated almost perfectly with important currents in contemporary religious life. Universalists, Swedenborgians, and early spiritualists adopted the doctrine of mesmerism as evidence of man's unity with the Almighty. The self-made mind-cure practitioner Phineas Quimby used mesmeric theory to develop his "power of positive thinking," a concept that led eventually to the emergence of the Christian Science movement. But, Fuller shows, mind-cure cultists such as Quimby also helped transform mesmerism into a kind of self-help spirituality. Later writers condensed the principles of mesmeric healing into handy maxims that could be assimilated by a popular reading audience. Thus Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls presents a paradigmatic instance of the role played by psychology in the American sensibility. In addition, Fuller's study constitutes a rich and hitherto unexplored chapter in American intellectual history.
Download or read book A Conversazione on Mesmerism and Phreno mesmerism Between a Mesmerist and an Antimesmerist written by Thomas ADAIR and published by . This book was released on 1845 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mesmerist written by Ronald L. Smith and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen-year-old Jessamine Grace and her mother make a living as sham spiritualists—until they discover that Jess is a mesmerist and that she really can talk to the dead. Soon she is plunged into the dark world of Victorian London’s supernatural underbelly and learns that the city is under attack by ghouls, monsters, and spirit summoners. Can Jess fight these powerful forces? And will the group of strange children with mysterious powers she befriends be able to help? As shy, proper Jess transforms into a brave warrior, she uncovers terrifying truths about the hidden battle between good and evil, about her family, and about herself.
