Mesmer e la Société de l Harmonie Universelle/en

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Franz Anton Mesmer (Weiler, 23 May 1734 – 1815) is the founder of scientific animal magnetism — the figure from whom the entire tradition originates, reaching, through du Potet, Lafontaine and Donato, all the way to the ISI-CNV.

As Donato writes in Le Magnétisme Triomphant: «Mesmer was the first who, in magnetism, united experimentation with theory and teaching. It is therefore from Mesmer that the advent of scientific magnetism must be dated.»

The theory of the universal fluid

Mesmer theorized the existence of a universal fluid permeating all bodies — animate and inanimate — capable of being directed by a magnetizer to produce therapeutic and phenomenal effects (catalepsy, somnambulism, distance vision). He opened the first baquet (collective magnetic tub) in Paris in 1778.

As reported by Dr. Paret in the History of Hypnotism, Mesmer's theory maintained «a universally diffused fluid, through a mutual influence between celestial bodies, the earth and animate bodies, continuous so as to suffer no voids, of incomparable subtlety, capable of receiving, propagating and communicating all impressions of movement».

The First Royal Commission (1784)

The commission appointed by Louis XVI — composed of Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Guillotin — concluded in 1784 that the magnetic fluid was not scientifically demonstrable. But it recognized that the phenomena were real. This distinction — real phenomena, contested theory — is the starting point of all subsequent debate in magnetism.

The Société de l'Harmonie Universelle (1784)

Concurrently, Mesmer founded the Sociétés de l'Harmonie — organizations for the diffusion of magnetism structured as confraternities with controlled access. According to Dr. Paret (History of Hypnotism), «they formed throughout France, Germany and Switzerland, and many distinguished persons were initiated into their secrets». The Strasbourg Society alone counted 180 members.

The structure was explicitly para-Masonic: whoever wanted to learn magnetism had to join, pay a fee, promise confidentiality. The social composition: aristocrats, court physicians, military officers, Enlightenment philosophers.

The French Revolution (1789+) dispersed these societies. Many members emigrated, taking magnetism to Germany, Holland, Sweden, Russia and America. The model of «privileged access to magnetic knowledge» survived, however, throughout the 19th century — in du Potet's schools, in Beauregard's circles, in Durville's networks.

Mesmer as continuator of the Paracelsian Spirituslehre

Mesmer's «universal fluid» (1779, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal) is not — in the historical-philological perspective now documented by Gerhard Klier in his Die drei Geister des Menschen. Die sogenannte Spirituslehre in der Physiologie der Frühen Neuzeit (Sudhoffs Archiv Beiheft 50, Franz Steiner Verlag 2002) — an 18th-century invention from nothing, but the direct historical continuation of the doctrine of the spiritus vitalis (= Calor Innatus = animated arterial blood of the heart) which European medicine had taught uninterruptedly from Galen (2nd century AD) through the Arabic-Latin Middle Ages, Paracelsus (16th century), Servetus, Fludd, Fernel, Van Helmont, up to the hinge of the 17th century (Descartes, Harvey).

Klier reconstructs in detail the break that occurs in the 17th century: the classical doctrine of the Spirituslehre — according to which the three spiritus (naturalis in the liver, vitalis in the heart, animalis in the brain) are living mediators between soul and body, and between microcosm and macrocosm — transforms under the pressure of Cartesian rationalism and, in parallel, continues in two branches:

Physicalist branch — the spiritus animalis flowing in the nerves is progressively reinterpreted as electric nerve current (Galvani 1791, Volta, Du Bois-Reymond 1840), direct antecedent of modern neurology. The classic work by W.F. Bynum Vom Spiritus animalis zu Nervenaktionsstrom (1980, cited by Klier) reconstructs this transformation
Operative-initiatic branch — the spiritus vitalis (Calor Innatus) is taken up by Mesmer as «magnetic fluid» maintaining integrally its traditional qualities: living mediator between macrocosm and microcosm, vector of heat and life, capable of action on self and others, transmissible by impulse, contact, gaze, word. It is the same substance that the alchemists called androgynous Mercury (cf. Alchimia e Magnetismo sect. IV) and that Renaissance medicine called spiritus vitalis

This reading is confirmed from within the European magnetic tradition: Du Potet (La Magie Dévoilée, 1875) explicitly connects animal magnetism to Paracelsian alchemy and Renaissance Hermeticism; Cahagnet speaks of the fluid as «vital blood of the soul»; Kremmerz in Naples (cf. Kremmerz e Ordine Osirideo Egizio) operates openly as continuation of the Italian spagyric school of the 17th century. And the Gruppo di UR-KRUR in 1927-1929 — with Evola in La Tradizione Ermetica (1931) — doctrinally formalizes the convergence: the fluid of the magnetists is the Mercury of the alchemists, and the authentic magnetist operators are the «sons of Hermes».

For the reader wishing to delve deeper into the physiological-medical roots of Mesmerian magnetism, the page Morfologia Occulta of the wiki cluster — particularly in sections IV-bis (the Renaissance Spirituslehre), IV-ter (the alchemical path nigredo→albedo→rubedo as fluidic transit liver→heart→brain→archea), IV-quater (magnetism as historical continuation of the Spirituslehre), VI-bis (the three physical/vital/psychic planes of the Paret School as operative re-proposition) — provides the unified historical-doctrinal framework based on Klier's studies and the UR-KRUR tradition.

Mesmer and the ISI-CNV genealogy

As Donato summarizes: «Suppress Mesmer and magnetism, you necessarily suppress Puységur and magnetic somnambulism, Braid and hypnotism, Charcot and grand hypnotism. Suppress Deleuze, du Potet, Lafontaine [...] their remarkable works.»

Primary sources

Anti-hallucination system: Dossier estratti ISI-CNV.

Donato, Le Magnétisme Triomphant — Google Doc — sect. I «Avant Mesmer» + sect. II «Mesmer»: definition universal fluid, founding role | PDF gallica
Paret, History of Hypnotism — Google Doc — Mesmer and Sociétés de l'Harmonie sections (lines 86-107, 1030-1045) | TXT ricercabile
Annales du Magnétisme Animal 1814-1816 — contemporary journal of the post-Mesmer period; n.1 July 1814