Latest / The Occult Rejects / The Mechanics of Magick: Hypnosis — The Occult Science That Became Psychology Part 1

Transcript

The Mechanics of Magick: Hypnosis — The Occult Science That Became Psychology Part 1 · The Occult Rejects

0:02
Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What's going to happen
0:12
Speaker 1: than what? Welcome back to the occult rejects. Today we
0:28
Speaker 1: begin one of the strangest, most important subjects in the
0:31
Speaker 1: entire history of modern psychology, hypnosis. But we are not
0:36
Speaker 1: beginning with the cheap version, the cartoon version, the stage
0:40
Speaker 1: routine where a man swings a watch and supposedly steals
0:42
Speaker 1: another person's will. We are not beginning with the nightclub act,
0:46
Speaker 1: the clucking chicken, the helpless subject, or the fantasy that
0:50
Speaker 1: one human being can simply turn another human being into
0:52
Speaker 1: a machine. We are going back into the older world
0:55
Speaker 1: that produced hypnosis, animal magnetism, ex assistic healing, trance, somnambulism,
1:03
Speaker 1: magnetic sleep, suggestion, hysteria, dissociation, dynamic writing, occult will, mind cure, religion,
1:11
Speaker 1: and the psychological theories that eventually cracked open the modern
1:14
Speaker 1: idea of the unconsciousness. This is why hypnosis belongs in
1:19
Speaker 1: the mechanics of magic, not because hypnosis proves every supernatural
1:23
Speaker 1: claim ever made about occult power. It does not prove
1:26
Speaker 1: that a magnetizer can command any person like a puppet.
1:29
Speaker 1: It does not prove that trance speech is automatically spirit communication,
1:33
Speaker 1: or that hypnotic memory is a reliable doorway into the past.
1:36
Speaker 1: Those are the easy traps, and we are not walking
1:39
Speaker 1: into them. The real reason hypnosis matters is more useful,
1:43
Speaker 1: more disturbing, and much harder to dismiss. Hypnosis proves that
1:47
Speaker 1: human beings are profoundly responsive to attention, authority, expectation, atmosphere, repetition,
1:53
Speaker 1: symbolic pressure, bodily focus, and suggestion. It proves that a
1:59
Speaker 1: voice can change since then an image can organize emotion,
2:02
Speaker 1: and that a charge setting can alter the way pain, memory, identity,
2:06
Speaker 1: and agency are experienced. It proves that the human being
2:10
Speaker 1: is not a sealed rational machine, but a nervous, imaginative,
2:14
Speaker 1: suggestible creature whose body can be moved by meaning. That
2:18
Speaker 1: is the heart of this episode. Hypnosis begins in the
2:21
Speaker 1: language of invisible force and ends up helping create the
2:24
Speaker 1: language of modern psychology. It begins as animals suggestion and
2:28
Speaker 1: becomes nervous sleep. It begins as magnetic fluid and becomes
2:31
Speaker 1: a suggestion. It begins as a cult healing and becomes
2:35
Speaker 1: clinical technique. It passes through religious healing, enlightenment, science, stage performance, spiritualism, hysteria, dissociation, psychoanalysis,
2:45
Speaker 1: new thought, ceremonial cultism, self hypnosis, and eventually the modern
2:49
Speaker 1: study of pain, memory, agency, and the divided self. Every
2:55
Speaker 1: error renames the phenomena according to its own worldview, but
2:58
Speaker 1: the central problem remains the same. What can happen to
3:01
Speaker 1: the human mind and body when attention is narrowed, expectation
3:05
Speaker 1: is intensified, and authority is accepted. The first part is
3:10
Speaker 1: the historical descent. We are going from the older world
3:13
Speaker 1: of hidden influence into the birth of hypnotic trance. We
3:17
Speaker 1: are going to look at exorcism, paracelsia, medicine, Johann Joseph Gassner,
3:22
Speaker 1: Mesmer's animal magnetism, the Beauquet, Benjamin Franklin's Commission Pissiger's magnetic somnambulism,
3:29
Speaker 1: Abe Farrier, James Braid, and James Esdale's Mesmerick surgery in Bengal.
3:35
Speaker 1: The next part we will move from suggestion into the
3:38
Speaker 1: unconscious through Charcot, the Nancy School, Janet, the idometer effect, spiritualists, mediumship,
3:45
Speaker 1: automatic writing, Freud, the cult, revival, new thought, auto suggestion,
3:50
Speaker 1: and the esoteric mind. But before the clinic, before the
3:54
Speaker 1: brain scan, before the court case, before the therapist's office,
3:58
Speaker 1: and before the intelligence agencies begin dreaming of weaponized trans
4:02
Speaker 1: There is the old question of hidden influence. The modern
4:06
Speaker 1: world likes to pretend that it invented the mind body problem,
4:09
Speaker 1: but it did not. Long before psychology had its modern vocabulary,
4:14
Speaker 1: religious healers, folk practitioners, physicians, exorcists, magicians, and philosophers were
4:20
Speaker 1: already wrestling with the fact that belief can enter the body.
4:24
Speaker 1: A word can terrify, a blessing can calm, A curse
4:28
Speaker 1: can make a person waste a way under fear, A
4:30
Speaker 1: confession can release pressure, A command can organize chaos. A
4:34
Speaker 1: ritual can tell the body what its suffering means. The
4:37
Speaker 1: old explanations were different from ours, but the human problem
4:40
Speaker 1: underneath them was not childish. People knew that fear could sicken,
4:45
Speaker 1: hope could strengthen, imagination could torment, authority could reorganize experience,
4:50
Speaker 1: and a person could feel acted upon by forces they
4:52
Speaker 1: did not fully control. Hypnosis does not appear suddenly as
4:57
Speaker 1: a clean scientific discovery, rose out of the borderland where medicine, religion, occultism,
5:03
Speaker 1: and early psychology had not yet separated into the modern categories.
5:07
Speaker 1: We use today in that borderland. Words could heal, gestures
5:11
Speaker 1: could command, touch could transmit power. Imagination could be dangerous,
5:16
Speaker 1: and the body was not treated as a sealed biological object.
5:19
Speaker 1: The body was porous. It could be influenced by spirits,
5:23
Speaker 1: divine grace, demonic pressure, planetary virtues, moral disorder, invisible sympathy, fear, desire,
5:30
Speaker 1: and subtle natural powers. A person could be sick because
5:34
Speaker 1: the humors were imbalanced, because the soul was afflicted, because
5:38
Speaker 1: the spirit had entered, because the imagination had been seized,
5:41
Speaker 1: because sin had opened a door, or because some hidden
5:44
Speaker 1: current in nature had been blocked to us. Some of
5:48
Speaker 1: the explanations sound dead and strange, but the structure underneath
5:53
Speaker 1: them is still alive. A priest commanding and demon a
5:57
Speaker 1: cunning person muttering a charm, a healer placing hand on
6:00
Speaker 1: a sufferer, a magnetis claiming to restore invisible balance, and
6:04
Speaker 1: the physician calming and nervous patient all share one broad feature.
6:08
Speaker 1: They work through a charge relationship between authority, belief, body,
6:13
Speaker 1: and meaning. The sufferer is not only treated physically. They
6:18
Speaker 1: are placed inside a story. They are told what is
6:21
Speaker 1: happening to them, their sensations are interpreted, their fear is organized,
6:26
Speaker 1: their body is given a script to follow. That is
6:29
Speaker 1: why hypnosis matters for a cult history. It is one
6:32
Speaker 1: of the places where the old ritual machinery becomes visible
6:35
Speaker 1: under modern pressure. The magnetizer does not invent trance out
6:40
Speaker 1: of nowhere. He inherits older structures of command, healing, crisis, touch, gaze, atmosphere,
6:47
Speaker 1: and belief. The physician does not simply replace the priest.
6:51
Speaker 1: He carries some of the priests authority into a new costume.
6:54
Speaker 1: The psychologist does not simply destroy the occult. It is
6:57
Speaker 1: also not a story where ocultism was right about everything
7:00
Speaker 1: in science merely stole its language. That is too easy.
7:04
Speaker 1: The better story is stranger. Hypnosis is a process of translation.
7:10
Speaker 1: Visible fluid becomes an expectation, Magnetic crisis becomes a nervous response.
7:15
Speaker 1: Spirit speech becomes automatic action, Fascination becomes attention, possession becomes dissociation,
7:22
Speaker 1: spellcraft becomes a suggestion. The old terms do not survive unchanged,
7:27
Speaker 1: but the human vulnerability they pointed towards does survive. Something
7:31
Speaker 1: in the person can respond before the conscious ego has
7:34
Speaker 1: finished giving permission. That is the real doorway into the unconscious,
7:39
Speaker 1: not just streams, not just Freud, not just sexuality, repression
7:43
Speaker 1: or symbolic interpretation. The unconscious also enters modernity through the
7:48
Speaker 1: hypnotized body. To somnambulists, the hysterical symptom, the automatic hand,
7:54
Speaker 1: the involuntary movement, the forgotten command, the transvoice, and the
7:57
Speaker 1: strange action a person performs while saying I do not
8:01
Speaker 1: know why I did that. Hypnosis forced Martin thought to
8:05
Speaker 1: ask whether it self was truly one thing. It forced
8:08
Speaker 1: the question of whether memory could be hidden, whether speech
8:11
Speaker 1: could come from somewhere below deliberate speech, whether a symptom
8:14
Speaker 1: can carry meaning, whether the body could obey an idea,
8:17
Speaker 1: and where the consciousness was only the surface of a
8:20
Speaker 1: deeper machinery. This is why Part one begins with animal magnetism.
8:25
Speaker 1: Mesmer's invisible magnetic fluid looked scientifically broken, and it was.
8:30
Speaker 1: But if we only laugh at that theory, we missed
8:33
Speaker 1: the inheritance. Animal magnetism failed as physics, but it survived
8:38
Speaker 1: as psychology. The fluid disappeared, but suggestion remained. The cosmic
8:43
Speaker 1: force disappeared, but altered attention remained. The occult explanation was challenged,
8:48
Speaker 1: corrected and dismantled, but the core phenomenon did not vanish.
8:53
Speaker 1: Human beings still trembled, slept, spoke, remembered, forgot, healed, performed, obeyed, resists,
9:00
Speaker 1: and suffered under the pressure of meaning. Before hypnosis had
9:04
Speaker 1: its modern name, before it entered the clinic, before it
9:07
Speaker 1: entered psychoanalysis, before it became a tool for pain control
9:10
Speaker 1: or a problem for a forensic memory, there was an
9:13
Speaker 1: older world of hidden influence. There was the belief that
9:16
Speaker 1: the body could be touched by invisible powers. There was
9:19
Speaker 1: the belief that speech could command what ordinary medicine could
9:22
Speaker 1: not reach. There was the belief that imagination was not
9:25
Speaker 1: harmless fantasy, but a force capable of shaping flesh. There
9:30
Speaker 1: was the belief that the human being was open. The
9:33
Speaker 1: first task is to enter that older world honestly, not
9:37
Speaker 1: to believe everything it believed, and not to sneer at
9:40
Speaker 1: it from a modern distance, but to understand the ground
9:43
Speaker 1: from which hypnosis grew. Once we see that ground, clearly,
9:47
Speaker 1: Mesmer does not appear as an isolated eccentric walking in
9:50
Speaker 1: with a strange theory of magnetic fluid. He appears as
9:54
Speaker 1: a transitional figure, standing between the priests and the psychologist,
9:58
Speaker 1: between exorcism neurology, between occult medicine and experimental science, between
10:04
Speaker 1: the old world of spirits and the modern world of
10:07
Speaker 1: the nervous system. Before Mesmer, there was already a ritual
10:11
Speaker 1: technology of influence. Mesmer gave it a new language. He
10:15
Speaker 1: took the ancient drama of hidden power and dressed it
10:17
Speaker 1: in the clothing of enlightenment nature. The demon became a blockage,
10:22
Speaker 1: the blessing became a treatment, the crisis became a cure
10:26
Speaker 1: to priestly command became magnetic operation. The invisible spirit became
10:30
Speaker 1: invisible fluid. And with that shift, the story of hypnosis begins.
10:36
Speaker 1: Before Franz Anton Mesmer even enters the story, the West
10:40
Speaker 1: already has an entire vocabulary for hidden influence. That is
10:43
Speaker 1: important because hypnosis does not emerge from a blank scientific world.
10:47
Speaker 1: It grows out of a much older, religious, medical, magical,
10:51
Speaker 1: and philosophical landscape where the human being is understood as
10:54
Speaker 1: open to forces beyond ordinary conscious control. A body could
10:59
Speaker 1: be treated as sex, but it could also be treated
11:01
Speaker 1: as afflicted, possessed, fascinated, cursed, enchanted, morally disordered, imaginatively seized,
11:08
Speaker 1: spiritually polluted, or thrown out of harmony with nature. The
11:13
Speaker 1: categories were not clean. Medicine touched religion, religion touched magic,
11:19
Speaker 1: touched philosophy, Philosophy touched astrology, alchemy, and the invisible virtues
11:24
Speaker 1: of things. In that old world, the body was not
11:27
Speaker 1: imagined as a sealed machine. It was porous, exposed to
11:31
Speaker 1: divine grace, demonic assault, planetary influence, spiritual temptation, subtle sympathies, fear, desire,
11:39
Speaker 1: and imagination. Illness might arise from a physical imbalance, but
11:43
Speaker 1: it might also be interpreted as the effect of a spirit,
11:46
Speaker 1: a sin affright, an image impressed too deeply on the mind,
11:49
Speaker 1: or cursed spoken with force, or hidden disarmony between the
11:53
Speaker 1: person and the larger cosmos. We do not need to
11:56
Speaker 1: accept those explanations literally in order to understand why they matter.
12:01
Speaker 1: They show that pre modern and early modern culture already
12:04
Speaker 1: believed that meaning could enter flesh. The word, the image,
12:08
Speaker 1: the authority, figure, the ritual setting, and the invisible cause
12:12
Speaker 1: were all part of the body's story. Religious healing and
12:16
Speaker 1: exorcism are especially important here because they show the power
12:19
Speaker 1: of command. An exorcistic right the healer or priest is
12:22
Speaker 1: not simply comfort to sufferer he speaks with authority, He
12:26
Speaker 1: names the affliction, He addresses the hidden force. He creates
12:30
Speaker 1: a drama in which the invisible problem is expected to
12:33
Speaker 1: reveal itself, resist, speak, tremble, or depart. The possessed or
12:38
Speaker 1: afflicted person is not only inside a medical situation. They
12:42
Speaker 1: are inside a symbolic theater, where voice, sacred names, gestures, prayers, objects,
12:48
Speaker 1: and witnesses all shape the experience. The right tells the
12:52
Speaker 1: body that something is happening. It gives suffering a plot.
12:56
Speaker 1: This does not mean exorcism and hypnosis are the same thing.
13:00
Speaker 1: They are not. They belong to different worlds of explanation,
13:03
Speaker 1: but structurally they share something important. Both place the sufferer
13:08
Speaker 1: or subject inside a charge relationship with authority. Both use voice,
13:13
Speaker 1: expectation and ritualized the tension. Both can produce dramatic bodily responses.
13:19
Speaker 1: Both can reorganize fear by giving it a script. Both
13:23
Speaker 1: can make the invisible visible through the body. In exorcism,
13:26
Speaker 1: the hidden agent as a spirit or demon. In mesmerism,
13:30
Speaker 1: the hidden agent becomes magnetic fluid. In later psychology, the
13:34
Speaker 1: hidden agent becomes suggestion to association, unconscious conflict, trauma, or expectation.
13:40
Speaker 1: The names change, but this stage remains recognizable. The role
13:44
Speaker 1: of imagination is crucial. In early modern medical and philosophical culture.
13:49
Speaker 1: Imagination was not treated as harmless make believe. It was
13:53
Speaker 1: considered powerful, even dangerous. A terrifying image, a deep fear,
13:58
Speaker 1: a maternal impression, a demonic tnisation and erotic obsession, or
14:02
Speaker 1: a violent emotional shock could be thought to affect the body.
14:06
Speaker 1: Imagination was a bridge between mind and flesh. It could disturb, imprint, seduce, sicken,
14:13
Speaker 1: or heal. Mardern psychology will later speak in different terms
14:18
Speaker 1: stress response, psychosomatic symptom, expectancy, trauma, memory, condition, fear, ortonomic arousal.
14:27
Speaker 1: But the older world had already noticed the basic human problem.
14:30
Speaker 1: The image inside the mind is not always trapped inside
14:33
Speaker 1: the mind. Paracelsus belongs in this background because he gives
14:37
Speaker 1: the old world one of its most influential medical occult languages.
14:42
Speaker 1: He was not a hypnotist, and we should not pretend
14:44
Speaker 1: he was, but his medicine made room for invisible virtues,
14:48
Speaker 1: astral influence, sympathy, imagination, and the hidden powers of nature.
14:53
Speaker 1: Paracelsus challenged the old medical authorities of his age, but
14:56
Speaker 1: he did not replace magic with narrow mechanical medicine. He
15:00
Speaker 1: imagined the human being as part of the living cosmos,
15:03
Speaker 1: connected to stars, minerals, plants, poisons, spirits, signatures, and subtle forces.
15:10
Speaker 1: The physician, in this view was not merely a technician
15:13
Speaker 1: of the body. He was an interpreter of nature's hidden operations.
15:17
Speaker 1: This matters because Mesmer's animal magnetism becomes intelligible inside a
15:21
Speaker 1: world Paracelsian and esoteric medicine helped prepare. If the body
15:26
Speaker 1: is already thought to be connected to invisible natural forces,
15:29
Speaker 1: then mesmers claim that a universal magnetic fluid moves through
15:32
Speaker 1: the living being does not sound completely alien. It sounds
15:36
Speaker 1: like a new Enlightenment version of an older occult medicine.
15:40
Speaker 1: The vocabulary changes, but the dream remains familiar. Nature is
15:44
Speaker 1: filled with subtle powers, and the trained operator can learn
15:47
Speaker 1: to direct them. Paracelsian influence also keeps us from making
15:51
Speaker 1: the mistake of treating occult medicine as simply irrational nonsense.
15:55
Speaker 1: It was often wrong in its explanations, but it was
15:58
Speaker 1: not stupid in the questions it asked. It asked how
16:01
Speaker 1: a body in cosmos relate. It asked how imagination affects health.
16:06
Speaker 1: It asks why certain substances seem to act on the nerves,
16:09
Speaker 1: the blood, the spirit, or the moon, and asked whether
16:12
Speaker 1: the medicine required more than mechanical repair. Those questions survive
16:16
Speaker 1: even after the old answers fail. Hypnosis will inherit the
16:19
Speaker 1: same fate. Its first theory will fail, but the questions
16:23
Speaker 1: it raises will not. Another figure who belongs directly before
16:27
Speaker 1: Mesmer is Johannes Joseph Gasner, the eighteenth century Catholic priests
16:31
Speaker 1: and exorcist healer. Gasner treated many illnesses as forms of
16:35
Speaker 1: spiritual affliction, demonic influence, or conditions that could be relieved
16:39
Speaker 1: through religious command. His practice belongs to the old world
16:43
Speaker 1: of exorcistic healing, but he is historically important because he
16:46
Speaker 1: stands close to Mesmer's emergence. Mesmer's animal magnetism is partly
16:51
Speaker 1: and naturalized answer to the kind of healing Gasner represented.
16:56
Speaker 1: Where Gasner uses religious command, Mesmer offers natural force. Where
17:00
Speaker 1: Gasner speaks to the demonic or spiritual cause, Mesmer speaks
17:04
Speaker 1: of fluid blockage, crisis, and harmony. This shift is one
17:08
Speaker 1: of the great transformations in this story. Mesmer does not
17:11
Speaker 1: simply destroy the older ritual pattern. He modernizes it. He
17:16
Speaker 1: takes the structure of the invisible influence and gives it
17:19
Speaker 1: the costume of natural philosophy. The patient is still open
17:22
Speaker 1: to hidden power. The operator still matters. This setting still matters.
17:27
Speaker 1: Crisis still matters. Relief still comes through a dramatic reordering
17:30
Speaker 1: of the body, but the explanatory language changes. The invisible
17:34
Speaker 1: demon becomes an invisible fluid. Exorcistic struggle becomes magnetic crisis.
17:39
Speaker 1: Priestly authority becomes medical charisma, the ritual cure becomes a
17:43
Speaker 1: treatment that can present itself as scientific. This is why
17:48
Speaker 1: Mesmer stands between worlds. He is not simply a doctor,
17:52
Speaker 1: and he is not simply an occultist. He is a
17:54
Speaker 1: transitional figure moving through a culture where electricity, magnetism, nerves, astronomy, chemistry,
18:01
Speaker 1: and medicine are changing the imagination of hidden force. The
18:05
Speaker 1: eighteenth century is fascinated by invisible powers that are not
18:08
Speaker 1: necessarily supernatural. Electricity shocks the body, magnets attract iron, gravity
18:14
Speaker 1: moves planets across space, Nerves carry sensation, and new science
18:18
Speaker 1: suggests that nature contains forces that cannot be seen but
18:22
Speaker 1: can still act. Mesmer enters that atmosphere and makes one
18:25
Speaker 1: of the boldest claims possible. Perhaps life itself is governed
18:29
Speaker 1: by such a force, and perhaps disease comes when that
18:32
Speaker 1: force is blocked. This is the moment where the old
18:36
Speaker 1: magical universe begins to speak in modern scientific accents. The
18:41
Speaker 1: language of spirits does not disappear, but it is joined
18:44
Speaker 1: and sometimes replaced by the language of fluid, energy, current, force, polarity, balance,
18:50
Speaker 1: and nature. This is one reason animal magnetism spread so powerfully.
18:55
Speaker 1: It did not feel like a return to medieval superstition
18:58
Speaker 1: to everyone who encountered it too many, it felt like
19:01
Speaker 1: the discovery of a hidden natural law. It felt like
19:04
Speaker 1: the invisible world had not been abolished by science, but
19:07
Speaker 1: confirmed in a new form. That is the dangerous beauty
19:10
Speaker 1: of Mesmer's moment. He takes the ritual logic of exorcism,
19:14
Speaker 1: the subtle body imagination of occult medicine, the cosmic sympathy
19:18
Speaker 1: of older natural magic, and the new prestige of enlightenmented science,
19:22
Speaker 1: then binds them together in one system. Animal magnetism is
19:26
Speaker 1: born from that fusion. It is not yet hypnosis in
19:29
Speaker 1: the modern sense, but it is one of the wounds
19:32
Speaker 1: from which hypnosis will come. It gives modern Europe a
19:35
Speaker 1: new figure, the operator, who does not kiss the spell
19:38
Speaker 1: and does not command the demon, but directs an invisible
19:41
Speaker 1: natural force through the living body. This is why we
19:44
Speaker 1: cannot begin the hypnosis story with a pocket watch. The
19:47
Speaker 1: pocket watch is a late cartoon. The real beginning is
19:51
Speaker 1: much stranger. It begins with the poorest body, the commanded spirit,
19:55
Speaker 1: the dangerous imagination, the healer's touch, the charged word, the
19:59
Speaker 1: subtle force, the crisis of the sufferer, and the authority
20:02
Speaker 1: figure who claims to know what is moving beneath the surface.
20:06
Speaker 1: Mesmer will walk into that older chamber and rename it.
20:10
Speaker 1: He will say the power is not demon, not miracle,
20:12
Speaker 1: not witchcraft, not prayer, but animal magnetism. And once he
20:17
Speaker 1: says that, the old ritual of hidden influence enters the
20:20
Speaker 1: modern age. Fran Anton Mesmer enters the story as a physician,
20:25
Speaker 1: but he is never only a physician. He appears at
20:28
Speaker 1: the point where an old world view is dying and
20:30
Speaker 1: a new one has not fully learned how to explain itself.
20:34
Speaker 1: He does not come forward as a village sorcerer or
20:36
Speaker 1: a priest commanding demons. He presents himself as a man
20:40
Speaker 1: of medicine, nature, harmony, and universal law. But the system
20:44
Speaker 1: he offers is filled with the older dream of occult medicine,
20:48
Speaker 1: that the body is crossed by invisible forces, that sickness
20:51
Speaker 1: comes from hidden blockage or imbalance, and that the trained
20:54
Speaker 1: operator can restore the flow. Mesmer called this force animal magnetism.
20:59
Speaker 1: He believe believe that a subtle universal fluid pervaded nature
21:02
Speaker 1: and moved through living bodies. This was not magnetism in
21:06
Speaker 1: the modern laboratory sense, and that distinction matters. Mesmer was
21:10
Speaker 1: using the prestige of magnetism, electricity, astronomy, and natural philosophy
21:15
Speaker 1: to describe something broader and stranger. In his theory, the
21:19
Speaker 1: universe itself was filled with a hidden current. The planets,
21:23
Speaker 1: the body, the nerves, health, sickness, and human influence were
21:27
Speaker 1: linked through the invisible medium. Disease came from obstruction or
21:31
Speaker 1: disorder in the movement of the fluid. Healing meant restoring circulation.
21:35
Speaker 1: The magnetizer was the person who knew how to direct, regulate,
21:38
Speaker 1: or transmit the force. That is why Mesmer is so
21:42
Speaker 1: important to this episode. Animal magnetism is occult medicine. Dressed
21:46
Speaker 1: in enlightenment clothing. It borrows the authority of science, but
21:50
Speaker 1: keeps the structure of older subtle body systems. It speaks
21:53
Speaker 1: the language of fluid force, harmony, and nature, but it
21:57
Speaker 1: still depends on invisible influence, operator, authority, ritual, atmosphere, and
22:02
Speaker 1: the belief that the human body could be transformed by
22:05
Speaker 1: unseen currents. Mesmer's system belongs to the age of electricity
22:09
Speaker 1: and magnetism, but spiritually and structurally it still lives near
22:14
Speaker 1: the old world of astro medicine, sympathetic healing, exorcistic command,
22:18
Speaker 1: and magical touch. This is why we should not make
22:21
Speaker 1: the mistake of treating Mesmer as merely ridiculous. His theory
22:25
Speaker 1: of literal magnetic fluid did not survive scientific testing, but
22:29
Speaker 1: his importance does not end there. Mesmer was wrong about
22:32
Speaker 1: the mechanism, but he had stumbled into a real zone
22:36
Speaker 1: of human vulnerability. He understood that people could be altered
22:39
Speaker 1: inside a charged therapeutic situation. He understood that the body
22:43
Speaker 1: responds to authority, expectation, touch, crisis, attention, and atmosphere. He
22:50
Speaker 1: understood that healing is never only chemical or mechanical, because
22:53
Speaker 1: the patient is not only a body, but a body
22:56
Speaker 1: inside a story. Mesmer misnamed the force, but he did
22:59
Speaker 1: not invent the responsiveness. The most famous instrument of Mesmer's
23:03
Speaker 1: practice was the back get, the large tub or vessel
23:07
Speaker 1: used in group treatment. Patients gathered around it in a
23:10
Speaker 1: carefully arranged room metal rods extended from the vessel. The
23:13
Speaker 1: patients held the rods, touched one another, or sat connected
23:17
Speaker 1: through chords in contact. As part of the same therapeutic circuit.
23:21
Speaker 1: Music might be played, sometimes with the glass harmonica, which
23:24
Speaker 1: gave the room a strange, floating atmosphere. The magnetizer moved
23:28
Speaker 1: through the space as the central authority. The patients waited, watched, listened, touched, breathed, trembled,
23:35
Speaker 1: and interpreted every sensation through the expectation that animal magnetism
23:39
Speaker 1: was moving through them. To Mesmer and his followers, the
23:42
Speaker 1: reactions around the back get were signs that the magnetic
23:45
Speaker 1: fluid was acting on the nervous system. Patients might sweat, shake, cry, laugh, faint, convulse, fuel, heat,
23:54
Speaker 1: fall into crisis, or report relief. These reactions were not
23:58
Speaker 1: treated as random, They were given me A convulsion could
24:01
Speaker 1: be understood as an obstruction being forced upon. Tears can
24:04
Speaker 1: become released. Fainting could become evidence of the force. A
24:08
Speaker 1: sensation of warmth might mean the current was circulating. The
24:11
Speaker 1: patient's body was not merely reacting, it was being read.
24:14
Speaker 1: This is the key to understanding the back at. It
24:17
Speaker 1: was not just a medical device. It was a social
24:20
Speaker 1: and sensory machine. It gathered sufferers into a group, surrounded
24:24
Speaker 1: them with expectation, organized touch, sound, silence, waiting, suggestion, and
24:30
Speaker 1: emotional contagion, and then placed them under the direction of
24:33
Speaker 1: a charismatic operator. It told them in advance that crisis
24:37
Speaker 1: might be part of the cure. It gave their symptoms
24:40
Speaker 1: a script and their sensations a meaning. Inside that room,
24:43
Speaker 1: private suffering became collective drama. That is why the backcat
24:47
Speaker 1: matters for the mechanics of magic. It shows how an
24:50
Speaker 1: environment can be built to concentrate belief. The chamber does
24:53
Speaker 1: not merely hold bodies, It arranges them. It gives them
24:56
Speaker 1: a roll, a story, and a reason to notice every
24:59
Speaker 1: flicker of sensation as part of hidden operation. The same
25:03
Speaker 1: body that might ignore a trumor in ordinary life can
25:06
Speaker 1: experience that trauma as a sign of invisible movement when
25:09
Speaker 1: placed inside a system that teaches it how to read itself.
25:13
Speaker 1: Ritual works in part by teaching the body what its
25:15
Speaker 1: own signals mean. A racing heart can be fear, divine
25:19
Speaker 1: or sexual, excitement, panic, possession, inspiration, or the arrival of spirit,
25:25
Speaker 1: depending on the frame around it. A sudden chill can
25:28
Speaker 1: be nothing, or it can become presents. Tears can be grief, cleansing, confession, release,
25:34
Speaker 1: or grace. Trembling can be pathology, ecstasy, energy, or crisis.
25:40
Speaker 1: The body produces sensations, but culture and ritual interpret them.
25:44
Speaker 1: Mesmer's backett made that interpretive machinery visible. This is why
25:49
Speaker 1: lazy skepticism is not enough. Bad skepticism stops at the
25:53
Speaker 1: statement there is no magnetic fluid. That is true, but
25:57
Speaker 1: it is not the whole story. Serious analysis asks why
26:00
Speaker 1: people responded anyway? What did the room do, What did
26:04
Speaker 1: the music do? What did touch do? What did the
26:06
Speaker 1: rods do? What did the expectation of crisis do? What
26:09
Speaker 1: did the presence of other trembling bodies do? What did
26:12
Speaker 1: Mesmer's authority do? What did the patient's own hope, fear, desperation,
26:17
Speaker 1: and imagination contribute? The magnetic fluid may fail as physics,
26:22
Speaker 1: but the situation still worked as a technology of attention, belief,
26:26
Speaker 1: and bodily expression. This distinction matters because the debunking of
26:30
Speaker 1: a theory is not the same thing as the disappearance
26:32
Speaker 1: of a phenomenon. Animal magnetism, as Mesmer explained, it did
26:36
Speaker 1: not hold up, but suggestion, expectation, group influence, ultered detention,
26:42
Speaker 1: emotional contagion, and psychophysiological arousal did not vanish. The backhet
26:47
Speaker 1: was not a machine that proved Mesmer right. It was
26:49
Speaker 1: a machine that proved human beings are easier to organize
26:52
Speaker 1: than they liked to admit. The whole arrangement had the
26:55
Speaker 1: structure of a right. There was a special space. There
26:59
Speaker 1: was a central objet. There were instruments, There was an atmosphere.
27:02
Speaker 1: There was an operator. There was a theory of invisible force.
27:06
Speaker 1: There was a group of sufferers who came with need
27:09
Speaker 1: and expectation. There are bodily signs interpreted as proof that
27:12
Speaker 1: something hidden was happening. There was crisis, there was release,
27:17
Speaker 1: there was testimony. This is not an insult to ritual.
27:20
Speaker 1: It is a recognition that ritual and therapy have often
27:23
Speaker 1: overlapped because both deal with bodies and distress, and both
27:27
Speaker 1: use meaning to shape experience. Mesmer's brilliance and his danger
27:32
Speaker 1: was that he occupied the role of the operator at
27:34
Speaker 1: the center of the drama. He was the one who
27:37
Speaker 1: claimed to understand the invisible force. He was the one
27:40
Speaker 1: who moved among the patients. His gestures, touch, gaze, and
27:44
Speaker 1: authority became part of the treatment. This kind of authority
27:47
Speaker 1: can comfort and organize, but it can also dominate. Every
27:52
Speaker 1: history of hypnosis has to keep that double edge in view.
27:55
Speaker 1: The operator may heal, but the operator also becomes powerful
27:59
Speaker 1: because the soul the object's body has been placed inside
28:02
Speaker 1: the operator's explanation. The atmosphere around Mesmer was therefore not
28:07
Speaker 1: only medical. It was social, theatrical, erotic, religious, and political.
28:13
Speaker 1: He attracted devotion and suspicion. He offered relief to people
28:16
Speaker 1: who may have felt ignored, misunderstood, or barely served by
28:20
Speaker 1: ordinary medicine. At the same time, his methods threatened to
28:23
Speaker 1: establish medical authority because he seemed to be producing dramatic
28:26
Speaker 1: effects through a force elite institutions cannot verify or control.
28:32
Speaker 1: The question was not only whether Mesmer was right. The
28:34
Speaker 1: question was who had the right to define what was
28:37
Speaker 1: happening in the patient's body that question became unavoidable in
28:41
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty four, when animal magnetism came under official investigation
28:46
Speaker 1: in France. The French Royal Commission included Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier,
28:52
Speaker 1: Jean Salvaine Bailey, Joseph Ignace Gilleton, and other major figures.
28:57
Speaker 1: Their task was to determine whether Mesmer's magnetic floe it
29:00
Speaker 1: existed as a real physical force. In one sense, the
29:04
Speaker 1: result was devastating to Mesmus's theory, but the deeper importance
29:07
Speaker 1: of the commission is that it did not simply close
29:09
Speaker 1: the book. It shifted the mystery inward. The commission's tests
29:13
Speaker 1: tried to separate the supposed magnetic force from the subject's
29:16
Speaker 1: belief that the force was present. That is the crucial move.
29:20
Speaker 1: They were not merely asking whether people had strange experiences
29:23
Speaker 1: they knew people did. They were asking what caused those experiences.
29:27
Speaker 1: Was it a magnetic fluid acting independently of belief, or
29:30
Speaker 1: was it imagination and expectation acting through the body. In
29:34
Speaker 1: some cases, subjects reacted when they believed they were being
29:37
Speaker 1: magnetized even though they were not. In other cases, supposed
29:40
Speaker 1: magnetism produced no effect when the subject did not know
29:43
Speaker 1: was being applied. The old question of hidden force became
29:46
Speaker 1: an experimental question about belief. This is why the Franklin
29:50
Speaker 1: Commission deserves more than a quick mention. It is one
29:53
Speaker 1: of the early ancestors of placebo control thinking. It separates
29:57
Speaker 1: the claimed active force from the expectations surround Apply this
30:01
Speaker 1: supposed magnetism, remove the belief and see what happens in
30:05
Speaker 1: that structure. We can already see the beginning of a
30:08
Speaker 1: modern science of suggestion. The commissioner's conclusion damage animal magnetism
30:13
Speaker 1: as invisible physics, but it also revealed the power of imagination.
30:17
Speaker 1: That word imagination should not be heard as dismissal. In
30:21
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century context, imagination was still understood as a
30:25
Speaker 1: potent faculty, not merely a synonym for fake. The commissioners
30:29
Speaker 1: were shown that belief, expectation, and mental representation could produce
30:33
Speaker 1: bodily effects. They are not proving that the patients had
30:36
Speaker 1: experienced nothing. They were proving that the experience did not
30:40
Speaker 1: require measurements fluid. That is the hinge of the story.
30:44
Speaker 1: Animal magnetism fails as a literal theory, but the body's
30:48
Speaker 1: response to belief becomes harder to ignore. The first great
30:51
Speaker 1: scientific attack on mesmerism accidentally becomes one of the first
30:54
Speaker 1: great demonstrations of suggestion. The official verdict says, in effect,
30:59
Speaker 1: that magnetism is not the cause, but the unofficial herodance
31:03
Speaker 1: says something more haunting. Imagination can act like a cause.
31:07
Speaker 1: Expectation can enter the nerves. The story a person believes
31:11
Speaker 1: can alter what the body feels. This is where the
31:15
Speaker 1: modern mind begins to appear. The hidden force is no
31:18
Speaker 1: longer necessary outside the subject. It may be inside the
31:21
Speaker 1: subject's own expectation, attention, fear, hope, and interpretation. That shift
31:28
Speaker 1: is enormous a Mesment's system. That magnetizer directs a fluid.
31:32
Speaker 1: After the commission, the deeper question becomes what the subject
31:35
Speaker 1: brings to the event. What does the subject expect? What
31:38
Speaker 1: does the subject imagine? What does the subject fear? What
31:42
Speaker 1: sensation is amplified by attention. What bodily response becomes possible
31:46
Speaker 1: when the subject believes that a crisis may come? What
31:49
Speaker 1: does authority make the body ready to do? This does
31:53
Speaker 1: not mean the magnetizer becomes irrelevant. The operator still matters,
31:57
Speaker 1: because the operator creates the situation in which expectation becomes powerful.
32:02
Speaker 1: The operator frames the event, directs attention, touches or does
32:06
Speaker 1: not touch, speaks or remains silent, predicts what may happen,
32:10
Speaker 1: and interprets the subject's responses. But the source of power
32:14
Speaker 1: is no longer simply imagined as a fluid flowing from
32:17
Speaker 1: one person into another. Power begins to appear as relational.
32:22
Speaker 1: It is the exchange between operator and subject, between belief
32:26
Speaker 1: and body, between authority and responsiveness, between the room and
32:30
Speaker 1: the nervous system. This is the place where hypnosis begins
32:34
Speaker 1: to separate from animal magnetism, not all on ones, and
32:38
Speaker 1: not cleanly, but decisively. The old language of fluid continues
32:42
Speaker 1: to circulate for a long time, especially among mesmerists and occultists,
32:46
Speaker 1: but another language begins to form underneath it suggestion, imagination, concentration,
32:52
Speaker 1: nervous response, ultered detention, and divided consciousness. The magnetic theory weakens,
32:58
Speaker 1: but the psychological prime grows stronger. For the history of occultism,
33:03
Speaker 1: this is a profound moment. The invisible force has been
33:06
Speaker 1: challenged by science, but science has not made influence disappear
33:10
Speaker 1: and has relocated influence. The power is no longer proven
33:14
Speaker 1: to be a cosmic fluid, but It is also not nothing.
33:17
Speaker 1: It is now entangled with expectation, attention, social trust, fear, hope,
33:23
Speaker 1: and the authority of the operator. The mystery has moved
33:26
Speaker 1: from the universe into the subject. That movement is one
33:30
Speaker 1: of the birth canals of modern psychology. Mesmer's defeat is
33:33
Speaker 1: therefore not really a defeat for the larger theme. If anything,
33:37
Speaker 1: the failure of animal magnetism makes the story more interesting.
33:41
Speaker 1: Had the commission found a physical fluid, hypnosis might have
33:44
Speaker 1: remained a branch of strange physics. Instead, the collapse of
33:47
Speaker 1: the fluid force later thinkers to confront the human being
33:51
Speaker 1: more directly. What kind of creature responds to a force
33:54
Speaker 1: that is not there? What kind of body trembles under
33:57
Speaker 1: an idea? What kind of mind can generate symptoms crisis,
34:00
Speaker 1: relief and conviction under the pressure of expectation. Those questions
34:05
Speaker 1: will not stay with Mesmer. They will pass to his followers,
34:08
Speaker 1: and one of those followers will transform the entire story.
34:12
Speaker 1: With Mesmer, the central event is often the crisis, the
34:15
Speaker 1: dramatic bodily reaction, the shaking, fainting, convulsion, and release. But
34:21
Speaker 1: with armand Marie Jacques d. Chastenet. The Marquis de Psecure
34:25
Speaker 1: dissenter shifts. The great phenomenon is no longer only the
34:29
Speaker 1: convulsive body. It becomes the altered mind. It becomes magnetic sleep.
34:33
Speaker 1: It becomes somnamblism. It becomes a person who appears awake
34:37
Speaker 1: and not awake at the same time, speaking from a
34:39
Speaker 1: condition that seems to belong neither to ordinary consciousness nor
34:43
Speaker 1: ordinary sleep. Once the magnetic crisis becomes magnetic somnambulism, hypnosis
34:48
Speaker 1: stops being only a story about invisible influence and becomes
34:52
Speaker 1: a story about divided awareness. The body has already responded to,
34:56
Speaker 1: meaning now the mind itself begins to split open. Pi
35:01
Speaker 1: Scurre does not simply repeat Mesmer's system. He changes the
35:04
Speaker 1: center of gravity. With Mesmer, the dramatic sign of animal
35:08
Speaker 1: magnetism was often the crisis, the trembling body, the convulsion,
35:12
Speaker 1: the fainting, the emotional storm, the sudden release. But Pi scure,
35:17
Speaker 1: the most important phenomenon becomes something quieter and stranger. It
35:20
Speaker 1: becomes magnetic somnambulism. Somnambulism means sleepwalking, but in Pcecure's magnetic practice,
35:27
Speaker 1: it becomes something more than ordinary sleepwalking, the subject enters
35:31
Speaker 1: a sleeplike state, but does not become simply unconscious. The
35:35
Speaker 1: person may speak, respond, answer questions, obey instructions, describe inner sensations,
35:42
Speaker 1: and sometimes appear more lucid or confident than an ordinary
35:45
Speaker 1: waking life. The body is calm, the eyes may be closed.
35:49
Speaker 1: The subject seems asleep and not asleep at the same time.
35:52
Speaker 1: They may return to ordinary awareness afterward, with little or
35:55
Speaker 1: non memory of what happened in that magnetic state. This
35:59
Speaker 1: is the because the mystery is no longer only in
36:02
Speaker 1: the body's crisis. Now the mystery is consciousness itself. With Pieagure,
36:07
Speaker 1: the question changes. It is no longer simply what is
36:10
Speaker 1: the magnetizer transmitting? It becomes what state has the subject entered?
36:15
Speaker 1: Mesmus system still imagines the active power as an invisible
36:18
Speaker 1: fluid directed by the operator. Piagura still works inside the
36:22
Speaker 1: mesmeric universe, but the phenomenon he discovers points beyond it.
36:25
Speaker 1: The subject becomes layered. There is ordinary waking consciousness, and
36:30
Speaker 1: then there is another condition underneath it or beside it,
36:33
Speaker 1: where the person can speak, obey, perceive, remember, forget, and
36:38
Speaker 1: act in ways that do not fit the simple model
36:40
Speaker 1: of a single conscious self. This is one of the
36:42
Speaker 1: first clear roads towards the unconsciousness. Piicagura does not give
36:46
Speaker 1: us freud gianet or modern dissociation theory, but he gives
36:50
Speaker 1: latest psychology a problem it cannot ignore. A person can
36:53
Speaker 1: act intelligently outside ordinary waking self possession. A person can
36:58
Speaker 1: speak from an ould condition. A person can respond to
37:01
Speaker 1: command and later return to normal consciousness without fully owning
37:04
Speaker 1: what occurred. If that is possible, then the mind is
37:08
Speaker 1: not a flat surface. It has depth, it has division,
37:11
Speaker 1: it has hidden rooms. This is why magnetic somnambalism becomes
37:15
Speaker 1: so important to the later history of psychology and occultism.
37:18
Speaker 1: The somnambulist appears to occupy an in between condition, suspended
37:23
Speaker 1: between sleep and waking, passivity and agency, obedience and intelligence.
37:29
Speaker 1: To the magnetizer, this may look like evidence that the
37:31
Speaker 1: magnetic state has opened deeper faculties. To the spiritualist, it
37:35
Speaker 1: may look like the doorway through which spirits speak. To
37:38
Speaker 1: the physician, it may become hysteria or nervous disorder. To
37:42
Speaker 1: the psychologist, it may become dissociation, automaticism, subconscious action, or suggestibility.
37:49
Speaker 1: The same body the same voice, the same old behavior
37:53
Speaker 1: can be read through radically different worlds. This is where
37:56
Speaker 1: the history becomes unstable in the most useful way. Magnetic
38:01
Speaker 1: somnambulism does not belong neatly to science or occultism. It
38:04
Speaker 1: sits between them. It can be seen as trance, possession, mediumship, hysteria, dissociation, performance, obedience,
38:12
Speaker 1: or altered consciousness. Every error looks into the somnambulists and
38:16
Speaker 1: sees its own theory of the human being. The mesmerist
38:19
Speaker 1: sees fluid, The spiritualist sees spirit, The neurologists sees pathology.
38:24
Speaker 1: The psychologist sees hidden process. The occultist sees the astral,
38:28
Speaker 1: the will, the inner planes of the trained imagination. The
38:31
Speaker 1: skeptic sees suggestion, role or fraud. The phenomenon becomes a mirror.
38:38
Speaker 1: P Secure's discovery also changes the role of the subject.
38:41
Speaker 1: In the older mesmeric model, the operator can easily appear
38:45
Speaker 1: as the possessor of power. The magnetizer knows the fluid, directs,
38:49
Speaker 1: the fluid, commands the treatment, and stands at the center
38:52
Speaker 1: of the therapeutic drama. But magnetic somnambulism makes the subject
38:56
Speaker 1: more mysterious the subject is not merely a body receiving force.
39:00
Speaker 1: The subject speaks, the subject reveals, The subject enters another
39:04
Speaker 1: condition of awareness. The operator may still guide the process,
39:08
Speaker 1: but the depth seems to open inside the person being magnetized.
39:12
Speaker 1: The unknown is no longer only in nature, It is
39:15
Speaker 1: inside the human being. This matters deeply for the mechanics
39:19
Speaker 1: of magic, because so much ritual practice depends on the
39:21
Speaker 1: idea that ordinary waking consciousness is not the only available state.
39:27
Speaker 1: The sere, the medium, the profit, the oracle, the visionary,
39:31
Speaker 1: the dreamer, the possessed, the initiate, and the entrance practitioner
39:35
Speaker 1: all stand at this threshold. The surface self loosens, another motive,
39:40
Speaker 1: speech or procession appeers. The person may say I do
39:43
Speaker 1: not know that I do not remember saying that something
39:47
Speaker 1: moved through me, or I was not fooling myself. Whether
39:50
Speaker 1: a tradition calls that spirit genius, damon unconscious process, dissociation, inspiration,
39:57
Speaker 1: or suggestion, the structural problem is the same. The human
40:01
Speaker 1: being can produce experience that does not feel fully authored
40:04
Speaker 1: by the ordinary ego. Magnetic somnambulism also helps explain why
40:09
Speaker 1: hypnosis in spiritualism later become so entangled. Once a person
40:13
Speaker 1: in trance can speak from another state, it becomes easy
40:16
Speaker 1: for religious and occult cultures to ask who is speaking.
40:20
Speaker 1: Is this the subject's deep in mind? Is it an
40:22
Speaker 1: elevated faculty? Is it clairvoyance? Is it a spirit? Is
40:26
Speaker 1: it a memory? Is it imagination? Is it suggestion? Once
40:30
Speaker 1: the voice appears from the threshold, interpretation becomes everything. The
40:34
Speaker 1: trance itself does not settle the meaning. The culture around
40:38
Speaker 1: the trance tells the voice what it is. That is
40:41
Speaker 1: one of the most important lessons in the entire history
40:43
Speaker 1: of hypnosis. Altered states do not interpret themselves. A person
40:48
Speaker 1: may tremble, speak, cry, see images, feel a presence, or
40:53
Speaker 1: lose ordinary memory, but those events do not arrive with
40:56
Speaker 1: labels attached. The label comes from the room, the tradition,
41:00
Speaker 1: the operator, the doctor, the priest, the psychologist, the audience,
41:05
Speaker 1: and the subject's own expectations. In one setting, the voice
41:09
Speaker 1: as a demon, and another it is a spirit guide.
41:12
Speaker 1: In another, it is a subconscious In another, it is
41:15
Speaker 1: a symptom. In another it is a performance. The human
41:18
Speaker 1: body produces the event, but the surrounding system produces the meaning.
41:23
Speaker 1: This is why hypnosis cannot be understood only as a technique,
41:28
Speaker 1: It must be understood as a relationship between state and interpretation.
41:32
Speaker 1: The same altered responsiveness can be framed as healing, possession, mediumship, pathology, entertainment,
41:39
Speaker 1: self transformation, or manipulation. The mechanism may overlap, but the
41:44
Speaker 1: meaning changes the experience. A subject who believes they are
41:47
Speaker 1: entering sacred trans may experience reverence and revelation. A patient
41:51
Speaker 1: who believes they are undergoing treatment may experience relief or diagnosis.
41:55
Speaker 1: A stage volunteer who believes they are inside a comic
41:58
Speaker 1: performance may experience permission to act outside ordinary inhibition. The
42:03
Speaker 1: body responds not only to suggestion, but to the entire
42:06
Speaker 1: world the suggestion creates after p segure, the history of
42:10
Speaker 1: hypnosis solely begins to move away from the magnetizer's fluid
42:14
Speaker 1: and towards the subject's own state. That movement becomes sharper
42:18
Speaker 1: with Abe Paria, a figure who deserves more attention than
42:21
Speaker 1: he usually receives. Paria was an Indo Portuguese Catholic priest, intellectual,
42:26
Speaker 1: and early theorist of what later becomes hypnotic suggestion. His
42:30
Speaker 1: importance is that he disrupts the olda mesmer hierarchy. In
42:33
Speaker 1: Mesmer's world, the operator appears to possess the power. The
42:37
Speaker 1: magnetizer transmits the force, the subject receives it. Paria shifts
42:41
Speaker 1: the explanation towards the subject's own receptivity. This is a
42:45
Speaker 1: major change. Faria argues, in effect, that the decisive factor
42:49
Speaker 1: is not a mysterious substance passing from the operator into
42:53
Speaker 1: the subject, but the subject's own capacity to enter the state.
42:57
Speaker 1: The subject's concentration, expectation, willingness, and responsiveness becomes central. The
43:04
Speaker 1: operator still matters, but not because he possesses an invisible current.
43:09
Speaker 1: He matters because he gives direction, creates confidence, commands attention,
43:13
Speaker 1: and establishes the conditions under which the subject can respond.
43:18
Speaker 1: The power is no longer imagined as something poured into
43:21
Speaker 1: the subject from the outside. It is produced at the
43:24
Speaker 1: meeting point of instruction, belief, attention, and bodily cooperation. This
43:30
Speaker 1: weakens the priestly charisma of the mesmerist. In the pure
43:33
Speaker 1: Mesmeric model, the operator can easily become almost sacramental, the
43:37
Speaker 1: one who knows the hidden force, the one who controls
43:39
Speaker 1: the current, the one before whom the patient enters crisis.
43:43
Speaker 1: Paraa's approach cuts into that druma. If the effect depends
43:47
Speaker 1: on the subject's on mind, then the magnetizer is not
43:49
Speaker 1: a magician transmitting power in the old sense. He is
43:53
Speaker 1: closer to a guide, director, or organizer of attention. He
43:57
Speaker 1: does not create the hitting capacity he calls it for.
44:00
Speaker 1: That shift is one of the first major steps toward
44:02
Speaker 1: modern hypnosis. The mystery moves from the universe into the subject.
44:07
Speaker 1: It becomes less cosmic and more psychological. The invisible fluid
44:11
Speaker 1: is no longer the main actor. The subject's receptivity becomes
44:14
Speaker 1: the door. This does not make the phenomenon fake, It
44:17
Speaker 1: makes it more intimate. It means that hypnosis is not
44:20
Speaker 1: simply something done to a person. It is something that
44:23
Speaker 1: happens through the person. The subject is not a passive object.
44:27
Speaker 1: The subject participates in the construction of the state. This
44:31
Speaker 1: point corrects one of the oldest myths about hypnosis, the
44:35
Speaker 1: myth of total domination. Popular culture imagines hypnosis as one
44:39
Speaker 1: will overpowering another will. The hypnotist commands and the subject
44:43
Speaker 1: obeys like a machine. But the deeper history, especially from
44:47
Speaker 1: Farier onward, shows something more complicated. Hypnosis depends on relationship expectation,
44:53
Speaker 1: participation and responsiveness. Even when the operator holds authority, the
44:58
Speaker 1: subject's own mind and body complete the event. There is influence,
45:03
Speaker 1: but not simple mechanical control. There is vulnerability, but not
45:07
Speaker 1: absolute puppetry. For occultism, Faria's shift is extremely important. It
45:12
Speaker 1: helps explain why so many magical and religious systems place
45:15
Speaker 1: enormous weight on preparation. The practitioner must be made ready,
45:20
Speaker 1: The imagination must be trained, the will must be focused,
45:24
Speaker 1: the body must be placed in proper condition. The ritual
45:27
Speaker 1: space must be charged, but the participant must also be receptive.
45:32
Speaker 1: A spell, prayer, initiation, or invocation does not act on
45:36
Speaker 1: a dead object. It acts within a person whose attention, expectation, believe, fear, desire,
45:43
Speaker 1: and bodily state all matter. Faria's subjects centered turn gives
45:47
Speaker 1: modern language to something ritual traditions had long understood. In practice,
45:52
Speaker 1: the right must find a prepared vessel. This is also
45:57
Speaker 1: where this story becomes ethically complicated. If the subject participates
46:01
Speaker 1: in hypnosis, then the subject is not simply powerless, but
46:04
Speaker 1: the participation does not erase power imbalance. A subject may
46:08
Speaker 1: participate because they trust the operator, fear the operator, need relief,
46:13
Speaker 1: warn approval wish to belong or have been trained to
46:16
Speaker 1: accept a certain authority. The fact that hypnosis is not
46:20
Speaker 1: mechanical mind control does not mean influence is harmless. Suggestion
46:24
Speaker 1: can be cooperative and still dangerous. Consent can be real
46:28
Speaker 1: and still fragile. Trust can heal, but trust can also
46:32
Speaker 1: be exploited. This is why p Segur and Fyria together
46:36
Speaker 1: are so important. P Sgurur reveals the altered state as
46:39
Speaker 1: a problem of consciousness. Firier reveals the subject's own receptivity
46:43
Speaker 1: as a central factor. Together they begin pulling hypnosis out
46:47
Speaker 1: of the old theory of magnetic fluid and towards the
46:50
Speaker 1: modern study of mind. The operator remains powerful, but no
46:54
Speaker 1: longer absolute. The subject becomes mysterious, active, layered, and vulnerable.
47:00
Speaker 1: The hidden force is no longer only in the cosmos,
47:02
Speaker 1: It is in the structure of human responsiveness itself. By
47:07
Speaker 1: this point, animal magnetism is already transforming beneath its own language.
47:11
Speaker 1: The old vocabulary of fluid, current and transmission still survives,
47:15
Speaker 1: but the real center has shifted. First, the Franklin Commission
47:19
Speaker 1: exposed imagination and expectation as active forces. Then Pisegure revealed
47:24
Speaker 1: the strange condition of divided awareness, Denfaria made the subject's
47:27
Speaker 1: receptivity central. These moves do not yet create modern clinical hypnosis,
47:32
Speaker 1: but they prepare the ground. The fluid is weakening, the
47:35
Speaker 1: mind is emerging. The next figure gives that emerging mind
47:39
Speaker 1: a new name and a new scientific costume. James Braid,
47:42
Speaker 1: a Scottish surgeon, will look at Mesmerism and reject a
47:45
Speaker 1: magnetic fluid, but he will not reject the phenomena. He
47:48
Speaker 1: will attempt to rebuild it through fixation, attention, physiology, and
47:53
Speaker 1: what he calls nervous sleep. With Braid, the eye, the nerves,
47:57
Speaker 1: and concentrated attention moved to the center of this, the magnetizers,
48:01
Speaker 1: a visible current begins to disappear, and the hypnotic method
48:04
Speaker 1: starts to become something recognizably modern. James Braid is the
48:09
Speaker 1: figure who gives hypnosis much of its modern shape. He
48:12
Speaker 1: was a Scottish surgeon, and that matters because he comes
48:15
Speaker 1: into the story not as a mystic, not as a
48:17
Speaker 1: ceremonial magician, and not as a defender of Mesmer's invisible fluid,
48:21
Speaker 1: but as a medical man trying to explain a strange
48:23
Speaker 1: phenomenon without surrendering to animal magnetism. Braid encounters mesmerism, takes
48:29
Speaker 1: it serious enough to study, and then does something historically important.
48:33
Speaker 1: He rejects the magnetic fluid while keeping the altered state.
48:37
Speaker 1: That move is one of the major transitions in the
48:39
Speaker 1: whole episode. Braid does not say nothing is happening. He
48:43
Speaker 1: does not reduce everything to fraud. He does not pretend
48:46
Speaker 1: the subject's altered condition is meaningless. Instead, he argues that
48:50
Speaker 1: the explanation is wrong. The magnetizer is not transmitting a
48:54
Speaker 1: cosmic fluid into the patient. The subject is entering a
48:58
Speaker 1: condition produced by attention fixation, nervous process, and mental concentration.
49:03
Speaker 1: The invisible current begins to fade, the eye, the brain,
49:07
Speaker 1: and the nerves moved to the center. In eighteen forty three,
49:11
Speaker 1: Braid publishes Neuropnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered
49:16
Speaker 1: in relation with Animal magnetism. Even the title tells the story.
49:20
Speaker 1: He is still arguing with mesmerism, but he is trying
49:22
Speaker 1: to drag the phenomenon into physiology. He calls it nervous sleep,
49:26
Speaker 1: not because hypnosis is simply ordinary sleep, but because he
49:29
Speaker 1: is trying to describe a state in which the nervous
49:32
Speaker 1: system is altered by focused attention. The subject fixes the gaze, narrows, awareness,
49:37
Speaker 1: becomes absorbed, and enters a condition in which suggestion, imagery, bodily, sensation,
49:42
Speaker 1: and expectation can act more powerfully. This is where the
49:46
Speaker 1: word hypnosis enters the modern story. Braid takes a name
49:49
Speaker 1: from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, because the state
49:52
Speaker 1: appeared sleeplike. Later, he came to think the word was
49:56
Speaker 1: not ideal, because the condition was not really sleep in
49:59
Speaker 1: the ordinary sense. He preferred the idea of monoideism, the
50:02
Speaker 1: dominance of the one idea, one focus, one line of
50:05
Speaker 1: thought occupying the mind. That correction is important because it
50:09
Speaker 1: points directly toward the mechanism that matters for the mechanics
50:12
Speaker 1: of magic. Hypnosis is not mainly about sleep. It is
50:15
Speaker 1: about concentration. It is about narrowing the field. It is
50:18
Speaker 1: about one idea becoming powerful enough to reorganize the body's experience.
50:23
Speaker 1: That is why brain matters so much for ritual practice.
50:27
Speaker 1: Many magical, religious, and contemplative techniques begin by narrowing attention
50:32
Speaker 1: a candle, flame, a black mirror, a crystal, a sigil,
50:36
Speaker 1: a mandala, an icon, a rosary, a mantra, a sacred name,
50:40
Speaker 1: a repeated prayer, a rhythm, a breath pattern, a posture,
50:44
Speaker 1: a drumbeat, or a ritual gesture can all become instruments
50:47
Speaker 1: of fixation. This does not mean all those practices are
50:51
Speaker 1: simply hypnosis. That would be too flat, and it would
50:54
Speaker 1: insult the complexity of the traditions. But Bray gives us
50:57
Speaker 1: language for one thing many of them do. They reduce
51:01
Speaker 1: the noise of ordinary consciousness and allow a chosen image, phrase, sensation,
51:06
Speaker 1: or intention to dominate the field. Once that happens, the
51:10
Speaker 1: mind does not behave in the ordinary distracted way. The
51:13
Speaker 1: symbol becomes heavier, the spoken word becomes more charged, the
51:17
Speaker 1: imagined scene becomes more vivid. The body begins to respond
51:20
Speaker 1: to meaning as if meaning were environment. The person is
51:23
Speaker 1: not merely thinking about one thing. They are entering a
51:25
Speaker 1: condition where the thought itself begins to organize sensation. This
51:29
Speaker 1: is why ritual does not depend only on belief as
51:32
Speaker 1: an abstract opinion. Ritual works through attention and makes the
51:36
Speaker 1: idea bodily. Braid's work also helps separate hypnosis from the
51:40
Speaker 1: myth of the all powerful operator. In Mesmer's world, the
51:44
Speaker 1: magnetizer can appear as the one who owns the force.
51:47
Speaker 1: In Braid's world, the subject's own attention becomes the doorway.
51:51
Speaker 1: The operator may still guide, instruct and frame the experience,
51:55
Speaker 1: but the state is produced through processes inside the subject.
51:59
Speaker 1: The gaze fixes, the attention narrows, the ordinary stream of
52:03
Speaker 1: thought is interrupted. The subject's nervous system becomes responsive to
52:06
Speaker 1: a new pattern. The power is no longer imagined as
52:09
Speaker 1: a mysterious fluid poured from one person into another. It
52:13
Speaker 1: is a condition created through the relationship between instruction and attention.
52:18
Speaker 1: This is why Braid isn't merely a debunker. He is
52:21
Speaker 1: a translator. He translates mesmerism into the language of nineteenth
52:25
Speaker 1: century physiology. He strips away the animal magnetic fluid, but
52:29
Speaker 1: he preserves this central phenomenon, altered responsiveness. He keeps a
52:33
Speaker 1: trance while changing the theory, and that pattern will repeat
52:36
Speaker 1: again and again. In the history of hypnosis, the occult
52:40
Speaker 1: explanation is challenged, but the human fact remains. The old
52:44
Speaker 1: name dies, but the body still responds. This is one
52:47
Speaker 1: of the reasons hypnosis becomes so important to psychology. It
52:50
Speaker 1: forces the modern world to admit that suggestion is not nothing.
52:53
Speaker 1: If the subject can stare, focus, enter an altered condition,
52:56
Speaker 1: and then experience changes in sensation, movement, memory, or agency,
53:01
Speaker 1: then consciousness is not as simple as it pretends to be.
53:04
Speaker 1: The person is not a sovereign rational machine issuing commands
53:07
Speaker 1: from a clear throne. The person is a layered creature
53:10
Speaker 1: whose attention can be narrowed, whose body can answer ideas,
53:13
Speaker 1: and whose experience can be shifted by expectation. For the
53:17
Speaker 1: mechanics of magic, Braid gives us one of the cleanest
53:19
Speaker 1: bridges between ritual and psychology. The magical operator may speak
53:23
Speaker 1: of will, symbol, spirit, astral light, divine name, or the
53:27
Speaker 1: charging of an image. The psychologists may speak of attention, absorption, suggestion,
53:32
Speaker 1: and expectancy. Those vocabularies are not identical, and they should
53:36
Speaker 1: not be collapsed into one another too quickly, but they
53:39
Speaker 1: meet at the human threshold where focused attention allows symbolic
53:42
Speaker 1: material to become bodily effective. That is the place where
53:46
Speaker 1: a sigil is not merely seen but impressed, a name
53:50
Speaker 1: is not merely spoken but vibrated. A prayer is not
53:53
Speaker 1: merely recited but entered. A command is not merely heard
53:56
Speaker 1: but embodied. Braid also gives us a way to talk
53:59
Speaker 1: about the ear. His method often involves visual fixation, and
54:03
Speaker 1: visual fixation has a long ritual history. The eye tires,
54:08
Speaker 1: the field narrows, peripheral awareness fades, the object of focus
54:12
Speaker 1: becomes increasingly dominant. This is why so many visionary technologies
54:16
Speaker 1: begin with seeing gazing into flame, looking into water, watching smoke,
54:21
Speaker 1: staring into a mirror, fixing attention on sacred things, tracing
54:24
Speaker 1: a symbol, or holding the mind on a single form.
54:27
Speaker 1: The visible object becomes a lever on the nervous system.
54:30
Speaker 1: The image outside trains the image inside. This does not
54:34
Speaker 1: mean Braid proves that mirror gazing or crystal scrying is
54:37
Speaker 1: scientifically validated as spirit contact. That would be the wrong claim.
54:41
Speaker 1: The better claim is sharper. Braid helps us understand how
54:44
Speaker 1: fixation can create the conditions in which unusual perception, imagery, expectation,
54:50
Speaker 1: and bodily response become more likely. In a ritual frame,
54:54
Speaker 1: that may be interpretated as vision contact, omen spirit or revelation.
55:00
Speaker 1: In a psychological frame, it may be interpreted as absorption, imagery, suggestion, projection,
55:05
Speaker 1: or altered attention. The experience may be real as experience,
55:09
Speaker 1: even while the interpretation remains contested. Braid therefore changes the
55:14
Speaker 1: direction of the story. With mesmer the invisible force is
55:17
Speaker 1: still imagined as a cosmic fluid. With Pi Segur, the
55:20
Speaker 1: subject enters a strange sleep walking condition. With Faria, the
55:23
Speaker 1: subject's own receptivity becomes central. With Braid, the mechanism is
55:27
Speaker 1: pulled into attention and the nervous system. The operator is
55:30
Speaker 1: still there. The ritual frame is still there, The altered
55:34
Speaker 1: state is still there, but the explanation is no longer
55:37
Speaker 1: a cult fluid. It is becoming psychological and physiological. And yet,
55:42
Speaker 1: even as Braid is trying to make hypnosis more scientific,
55:45
Speaker 1: mesmerism does not disappear. It continues in other forms, other countries,
55:50
Speaker 1: and other medical experiments. One of the most striking examples
55:53
Speaker 1: comes through James Esdale, another Scottish surgeon working in a
55:57
Speaker 1: European salon, but in colonial Bengal. If Braid gives us
56:01
Speaker 1: nervous sleep as theory, Esdale gives us mesmerism on the
56:04
Speaker 1: surgical body. Esdale's story breaks hypnosis out of the parlor.
56:09
Speaker 1: We are no longer only talking about trembling patients around
56:12
Speaker 1: a backcat somnambulists speaking from magnetic sleep or a subject
56:16
Speaker 1: staring at an object in a controlled demonstration. We are
56:19
Speaker 1: talking about surgery, pain, empire hospitals, colonial medicine, and the
56:24
Speaker 1: body opened under the claim of mesmeric anesthesia. In the
56:28
Speaker 1: eighteen forties, Esdale reported using mesmerism as the esthetic method
56:32
Speaker 1: in India, especially in the operations performed on Indian patients.
56:36
Speaker 1: His accounts became famous and controversial. He claimed that the
56:40
Speaker 1: patients could undergo major procedures with driistically reduced pain while
56:44
Speaker 1: in a mesmeric state. Some of the operations he reported
56:47
Speaker 1: were serious, bodily and extreme. This is not stage hypnosis.
56:53
Speaker 1: This is not drawing room entertainment. This is not surgical
56:56
Speaker 1: theater becoming another testing ground for the question that has
56:59
Speaker 1: haunted the whole episod can attention, trance, expectation, and authority,
57:04
Speaker 1: ultra bodily suffering. Esdale's work has to be handled carefully
57:07
Speaker 1: because it sits inside colonial medicine. This is not a clean,
57:11
Speaker 1: heroic story of one enlightened doctor discovering the powers of
57:14
Speaker 1: the mind. British India was a world of empire, racial hierarchy,
57:19
Speaker 1: medical authority, coercive structures, and unequal power. The patients were
57:24
Speaker 1: not entering the situation as social equals. The hospital and
57:27
Speaker 1: the colonial state shaped the entire encounter. So when we
57:30
Speaker 1: talk about Esdale, we should not romanticize the scene. We
57:34
Speaker 1: should not treat Bengal as a mystical backdrop where a
57:36
Speaker 1: European medicine simply discovered Indian magic. We should ask what
57:40
Speaker 1: happens when mesmerism, surgery, colonial authority, pain, and local traditions
57:45
Speaker 1: of trance or healing all meet under imperial conditions. That
57:49
Speaker 1: tension is exactly why Esdale belongs here. He shows that
57:52
Speaker 1: hypnosis and mesmerism were never only about ideas. They were
57:56
Speaker 1: about bodies under authority. They were about who gets to
57:59
Speaker 1: define pain, who gets to experiment, who gets believed, and
58:02
Speaker 1: who gets written into the medical record. In Europe, mesmerism
58:07
Speaker 1: had already raised the question of the operator's power, and
58:10
Speaker 1: Begal that question becomes sharper because the operator is not
58:12
Speaker 1: only a doctor, he is a colonial doctor. The patient
58:16
Speaker 1: is not only a patient, The patient is inside imperial
58:19
Speaker 1: medical system. The power imbalance is built into the room
58:23
Speaker 1: before the trance ever begins. At the same time, Esdeal
58:27
Speaker 1: cannot be dismissed as a revelant. His mesmeric surgery attracted
58:30
Speaker 1: serious attention because anesthesia is one of the great medical
58:33
Speaker 1: problems of the nineteenth century. Before ether and chloroform became
58:37
Speaker 1: widely established, surgery was a nightmare of pain, speed, restraint, shock,
58:42
Speaker 1: and endurance. Anything that seemed to reduce surgical suffering matter.
58:47
Speaker 1: If trance could blunt pain, the mesmerism was no longer
58:50
Speaker 1: only a strange theory of hidden influence. It might become
58:52
Speaker 1: a practical weapon against one of medicine's greatest horrors. This
58:55
Speaker 1: is where Esdeal connects directly to modern hypnotic analgesia. Do
59:00
Speaker 1: not need to accept every claim he made. We do
59:02
Speaker 1: not need to pretend his reports meet modern standards of evidence.
59:05
Speaker 1: But the historical question he raises is real. Can an
59:08
Speaker 1: altered state change pain? Can expectation, dissociation, absorption, and suggestion
59:14
Speaker 1: alter the way suffering is experienced. Modern hypnosis research answers
59:19
Speaker 1: that question with more careful methods and more cautious language,
59:23
Speaker 1: But the basic problem is already present in Esdel's operating room.
59:27
Speaker 1: Pain is not only a signal from tissue. Pain is
59:30
Speaker 1: an experience built through attention, fear, expectation, bodily focus, and meaning.
59:37
Speaker 1: This does not mean pain is imaginary. That is one
59:39
Speaker 1: of the most destructive misunderstandings in the whole field. If
59:42
Speaker 1: hypnosis changes pain, that does not prove the pain was fake.
59:46
Speaker 1: It proves the nervous system is part of the pain.
59:48
Speaker 1: It proves that suffering isn't a simple mechanical bell ringing
59:51
Speaker 1: at a fixed volume. The same body can experience pain
59:54
Speaker 1: differently depending on attention, terror, trust, expectation, dissociation, and context.
1:00:01
Speaker 1: Esdale's reports belong in this history because they forced the
1:00:04
Speaker 1: question onto the body in the most brutal form, the knife,
1:00:07
Speaker 1: the wound, the operating table, the authority of the surgeon,
1:00:11
Speaker 1: and the possibility that trance might change what the patient endures.
1:00:15
Speaker 1: Esdale's place in the story also shows why hypnosis has
1:00:18
Speaker 1: always lived between healing and power. The same process that
1:00:21
Speaker 1: might relieve suffering can become experimental, coercive, or exploitative depending
1:00:26
Speaker 1: on the situation. A person in pain is vulnerable, a
1:00:29
Speaker 1: person seeking treatment is vulnerable. A colonized patient is vulnerable
1:00:33
Speaker 1: in ways that cannot be ignored. Mesmerism offered the promise
1:00:36
Speaker 1: of relief, but it also intensified the authority of the operator.
1:00:40
Speaker 1: This double edge runs through the entire history of hypnosis.
1:00:43
Speaker 1: It can soothe, it can shave, it can heal, it
1:00:46
Speaker 1: can dominate, It always has to be judged by the
1:00:49
Speaker 1: structure of power around it. By placing Braid and Esdale together,
1:00:53
Speaker 1: we see two different nineteenth century paths away from mesmer
1:00:56
Speaker 1: Braid tries to explain the trance through fixation, nervous sleep,
1:01:00
Speaker 1: and attention, as Dale tries to use mesmerism practically against
1:01:03
Speaker 1: surgical pain. One gives hypnosis to scientific vocabulary, the other
1:01:08
Speaker 1: gives mesmerism a medical battlefield. One pulls the phenomenon into
1:01:11
Speaker 1: the eye in the nervous system, the other places it
1:01:14
Speaker 1: under the knife. Together they show that hypnosis is no
1:01:17
Speaker 1: longer only a theory of invisible fluid. It is becoming
1:01:20
Speaker 1: a problem for medicine, physiology, pain, and the practical manipulation
1:01:25
Speaker 1: of bodily experience. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
1:01:28
Speaker 1: animal magnetism had already lost its cleanest claim. The fluid
1:01:33
Speaker 1: was weakening, the force was being questioned, but the phenomenon
1:01:36
Speaker 1: had not disappeared. Bodies still trembled, subjects still entered strange sleep.
1:01:40
Speaker 1: Pain could be altered, memory could shift at tension could narrow,
1:01:43
Speaker 1: until one idea ruled the field. The old occult force
1:01:47
Speaker 1: was dying as physics but surviving as method. This is
1:01:50
Speaker 1: where Part one lands. Hypnosis begins in an older world
1:01:54
Speaker 1: of hidden influence, where spirits, imagination, divine grace, demonic pressure,
1:01:58
Speaker 1: subtle forces, and and occult medicine all belonged to the
1:02:01
Speaker 1: body's story. Mesmer takes that old ritual machinery and gives
1:02:05
Speaker 1: it a new enlightenment language. Animal magnetism, invisible fluid, blockage, crisis,
1:02:10
Speaker 1: and cure to backet turns treatment into a social and
1:02:14
Speaker 1: sensory right. Franklin's commission wounds the magnetic fluid, but exposes
1:02:18
Speaker 1: the deeper force of expectation. Pi Segur discovers magnetic somnambulism
1:02:23
Speaker 1: and moves the mystery from the convulsive body into the
1:02:25
Speaker 1: divided mind. Various shifts the center from the operator's power
1:02:29
Speaker 1: to the subject's receptivity. Braid renames the trance as nervous
1:02:33
Speaker 1: sleep and places attention, fixation and the nervous system at
1:02:36
Speaker 1: the center. Esdale carries Mesmerism into the surgical theater, where
1:02:40
Speaker 1: the question becomes whether the trans can alter pain itself.
1:02:43
Speaker 1: So the first part ends with transformation, not a disappearance.
1:02:47
Speaker 1: Animal magnetism fails as physics but survives as psychology. The
1:02:51
Speaker 1: occult force is not simply destroyed, it is translated. The
1:02:55
Speaker 1: invisible fluid becomes expectation. The magnetic crisis becomes nervous response.
1:03:00
Speaker 1: The operator's power becomes the subject's attention. The ritual chamber
1:03:04
Speaker 1: becomes a laboratory of influence. The old question, what hidden
1:03:08
Speaker 1: force moves the body becomes a more dangerous modern question,
1:03:12
Speaker 1: what hidden power already lives inside the mind. In the
1:03:16
Speaker 1: next part, that question moves into the clinic, the electual hall,
1:03:19
Speaker 1: the seance room, and the early unconscious. Charcot will place
1:03:23
Speaker 1: hypnosis inside the medical theater of hysteria. The Nancy school
1:03:26
Speaker 1: will argue that suggestion belongs not only to the sick,
1:03:29
Speaker 1: but to ordinary human nature. Gianet will study automatism and dissociation.
1:03:33
Speaker 1: Spiritualists will hear voices from the dead, where psychologists here
1:03:36
Speaker 1: hidden process. Freud will inherit the wound Hypnosis opened and
1:03:40
Speaker 1: build one of the most influential theories of the unconscious
1:03:43
Speaker 1: from its wreckage, and the occult world will answer back.
1:03:46
Speaker 1: Taking hypnosis. Suggestion will symbol in the subconscious into modern
1:03:51
Speaker 1: magical practice. The fluid dies, the trance remains, and once
1:03:56
Speaker 1: the hidden force moves inward, the modern self begins to
1:03:59
Speaker 1: split open. And that's the end of Part one. Hope
1:04:03
Speaker 1: you all enjoyed, and until the next one, everybody be well.