“True science has no belief,” says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton’s Strange Story; “true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment.” Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick’s days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!
How often have powerful clairvoyants and adepts in mesmerism described the epidemics and physical (though to others invisible) manifestations which science attributes to epilepsy, haemato-nervous disorders, and what not, of somatic origin, as their lucid vision saw them in the astral light. They affirm that the “electric waves” were in violent perturbation, and that they discerned a direct relation between this ethereal disturbance and the mental or physical epidemic then raging. But
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science has heeded them not, but gone on with her encyclopaedic labor of devising new names for old things.
“History,” says Du Potet, the prince of French mesmerists, “keeps but too well the sad records of sorcery. These facts were but too real, and lent themselves but too readily to dreadful malpractices of the art, to monstrous abuse! . . . But how did I come to find out that art? Where did I learn it? In my thoughts? no; it is nature herself which discovered to me the secret. And how? By producing before my own eyes, without waiting for me to search for it, indisputable facts of sorcery and magic. . . . What is, after all, somnambulistic sleep? A result of the potency of magic. And what is it which determines these attractions, these sudden impulses, these raving epidemics, rages, antipathies, crises; — these convulsions which you can make durable? . . . what is it which determines them, if not the very principle we employ, the agent so decidedly well known to the ancients? What you call nervous fluid or magnetism, the men of old called occult power, or the potency of the soul, subjection, MAGIC!”
“Magic is based on the existence of a mixed world placed without, not within us; and with which we can enter in communication by the use of certain arts and practices. . . . An element existing in nature, unknown to most men, gets hold of a person and withers and breaks him down, as the fearful hurricane does a bulrush; it scatters men far away, it strikes them in a thousand places at the same time, without their perceiving the invisible foe, or being able to protect themselves . . . all this is demonstrated; but that this element could choose friends and select favorites, obey their thoughts, answer to the human voice, and understand the meaning of traced signs, that is what people cannot realize, and what their reason rejects, and that is what I saw; and I say it here most emphatically, that for me it is a fact and a truth demonstrated for ever.”
“If I entered into greater details, one could readily understand that there do exist around us, as in ourselves, mysterious beings who have power and shape, who enter and go out at will, notwithstanding the well-closed doors.” Further, the great mesmerizer teaches us that the faculty of directing this fluid is a “physical property, resulting from our organization . . . it passes through all bodies . . . everything can be used as a conductor for magical operations, and it will retain the power of producing effects in its turn.” This is the theory common to all hermetic philosophers. Such is the power of the fluid, “that no chemical or physical forces are able to destroy it. . . . There is very little analogy between
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the imponderable fluids known to physicists and this animal magnetic fluid.
” If we now refer to mediaeval ages, we find, among others, Cornelius Agrippa telling us precisely the same: “The ever-changing universal force, the ‘soul of the world,’ can fecundate anything by infusing in it its own celestial properties. Arranged according to the formula taught by science, these objects receive the gift of communicating to us their virtue.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
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