Portland: 1862

The road that led from Franklin’s lightning rod to the age of electronics was the brilliantly lit highway of scientific reason and research. There was nothing occult about the discovery of electromagnetism by Faraday in 1831. The great physical contributions of Maxwell, Hertz, Thomson, and a host of others could take place only in that atmosphere of mathematical clarity inherited from the Enlightenment and indeed from the Greeks themselves.

Yet there was a dark, somewhat disreputable path which ran beside the highway, sometimes close to it, at other times losing itself in tangled woods and swamps. Along this path Mesmer had moved, and behind him more shadowy figures: Van Helmont, Paracelsus, alchemists and astrologers, Egyptian and Assyrian priests, prehistoric shamans. Here went on that exploration of the unconscious, of the vast, unknown forces of the mind, which has been left so often to charlatans and cranks.

This was the path of animal magnetism, as it was still generally called in the 1860s, although many preferred the term mesmerism. Its practitioners for the most part assumed the existence of a magnetic fluid by which one living organism could influence or control another. A classic statement is to be found in the book Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism by J. P. F. Deleuze, who in 1828, three years after the book appeared, was appointed librarian of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Deleuze postulated “a substance [which] emanates  ● ● ●