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Mesmerism

tophatsandfedoras:

My mesmerism class today was very, very different. In a good way.  It’s usually run like a seminar where the teacher talks a little and we mostly discuss the readings amongst ourselves.  Today we actually tried to mesmerize one another.

A bit of background information: mesmerism is a “science” started around 1750 by a man named Antony Mesmer.  He believed in a universal fluid that flows through everything, and that when a person was in pain, the fluid in them was blocked up and a mesmerist could relieve them of their pain with their practice.  What happens is that there are two people, an operator and a medium/patient.  The operator stares into the eyes of the medium to develop a rapport and impose his/her will upon them and the medium feels him/herself getting heavy until they can’t keep his/her eyes open.  When this happens, the operator makes passes with their hands from the top of the person’s head to their feet without touching them, reinforcing their control and guiding the fluid, hopefully healing the person. This may sound an awful lot like hypnotism. 

There were, of course, people who didn’t use it for quite its intended purpose.  People who maybe put on a production and mesmerized people on stage for others’ enjoyment and to earn money.  There’s also people who just wanted to control others, though that seems to happen more in stories than in real life. No, really, there were a lot of authors who wrote mesmeric texts: Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, just to name a few.

So imagine a bunch of students sitting around in a classroom, having been paired up by the teacher, staring deeply into one another’s eyes.  We laughed, too.  It’s really hard to keep staring into someone’s eyes for that long (the suggested time is 10-20 minutes), not to mention awkward.  We sobered up soon enough and something strange happened.

It started working.

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