● ● ● but he was the first to have related it to animal magnetism. Quimby, who doubtless took the idea from him, related it particularly to the principle of clairvoyance on which he based his healing.49
He wrote, for instance, in 1859, “This eternal life was in Jesus, and was Christ,” and even to an orthodox ear the sentence taken by itself sounds reasonably Christian. But the preceding sentence defines this eternal life of Christ as an understanding of the clairvoyant principle; and, just before that, clairvoyance is described as a “higher state entirely disconnected with the natural man, but [which] can communicate information through him while in a dreamy or mesmeric state.”50 Elsewhere he wrote, “As Jesus became clairvoyant He became the son of God.”51
In various places he described the clairvoyant faculty as the ability to perceive directly the aura, odor, or spiritual identity of an individual.52 It also included the ability to condense one’s spiritual identity so that it would be visible to others. Quimby would write his absent patients to think of him at a certain hour when he would give them a treatment and would perhaps mentally rub their heads—and at the appointed hour they would sometimes see him appear before them like a visible ● ● ●
49 Little attention so far has been paid to the crucial importance of clairvoyance to Quimby. In part this may be because most investigators have followed the lead of the Dressers, who could not fit this relic of mesmerism into their metaphysical interpretation of Quimby.
50 Horatio W. Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, p. 189 [bracketed text Peel’s].
51 Horatio W. Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, p. 409. On p. 342 Jesus’ healing of the centurion’s servant is cited as a clear example of clairvoyance.
52 What Quimby means by a “spiritual” identity is disclosed in such a passage as the following, in commenting on a patient:
Her body had an identity apart from the earthly body, and this sick (spiritual) body is the one that tells the trouble. This body seemed to be holding up the natural body, till it was so weak it could barely sit up. This spiritual body is what flows from, or comes from the natural body, and contains all the feelings complained of. It speaks through the natural body, and like the heat from a fire has its bounds, is inclosed by walls or partitions as much as a prison. But the confinement is in our belief, its odor is its identity; its knowledge is in its odor; its misery arises from false ideas, and its ideas are in itself, connected with its natural body. This is all matter, and has an identity. The trouble, like sound, has no locality of itself, but can be directed to any place. Now as this intelligence is around the body, it locates its trouble in the natural body, calls it “pain” or by some other name. Now the sick person is in this prison, with the body, which body feels as though it contained life. But the life is in the spiritual body, which being ignorant of itself places its own identity in the flesh and blood.
Horatio W. Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, pp. 213–214.