The specific phenomena of profound interest to the magnetists of the Renaissance period was later erroneously lumped into one or another of three categories: occultism, spiritualistics and hypnotism.
This indiscriminate lumping served to erase the early contours of energetic magnetism, and subsequent work of its kind, as a clever societal maneuver to place the topic of energetic magnetism into the unscientific category of modernist thought.
DEFINITION OF RENAISSANCE MAGNETISM
To the Renaissance thinkers, MAGNETISM was identified as a vital effluence radiating from every object in the universe, in a greater or lesser degree, and through which all objects might exercise a mutual influence on one another.
From this concept the idea of the “sympathetic system” was formulated. In the case of organic systems, the idea roughly meant that those systems were subject to being influenced by transmission of “vibrations”—although that term had not yet come into the full popular usage it was to acquire much later.
The eventual unfolding of the contrasts between the scientific and the unscientific consigned the Renaissance ideas to the latter category until they were recovered in vague part by the 1960s concept of the interconnectedness of everything working via sympathetic systems.
Since the early magnetists experimented and worked with magnets, especially with regard to healing, it is generally assumed that the term MAGNETISM was derived from the term MAGNET. This derivation is certainly possible.
But it is more likely that the term came from the concept of MAGNES MICROCOSMI, which in Renaissance thought referred to Man as a microcosm of Earth itself, and as such having poles and magnetic properties.
THIS concept also incorporated the MAGNES MACROCOSMI—the planets, stars and cosmos—from which came “subtle effluence” that influenced and affected man’s body, energies, mind and intellect. These macrocosm effluences combined with “earthly substances radiating a grosser emanation,” and the mixed whole of which affected the body.
The MAGNES MACR000SMI and MAGNES MICROCOSMI concepts in principle are magnetic-energetic concepts, and as such can easily be incorporated into the contexts of influences and energetics.
THE SYMPATHETIC SYSTEM OF THE RENAISSANCE EPOCH
The venerable Swiss-born physician, Paracelsus (1493-1541), is probably the best remembered of the Renaissance magnetists. He may have originated the “sympathetic system” concept, and certainly was its most energetic proponent.
But in the modernist historical sense he is more usually pointed up as an alchemist, which attribution tends to stigmatize the whole body of his work. More correctly described, he was a researcher of energetics and sympathetic energy systems.
However, his whole body of work was extraordinarily large. It encompassed many other topics such as chemistry, metallurgy, herbal remedies, and what later came to be known as homeopathic healing.
Paracelsus was noted during his times by his “egotism” and contempt for traditional theories, earning him large doses of enmity from certain of his contemporaries. In the last analysis, however, he had great influence in his own and succeeding centuries. Upon his death, a statue was erected to him in Salzburg.
A later influential magnetist was Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644), a Flemish physician, chemist, and natural philosopher (natural philosophy being later dubbed as physics.) By any measure today, Helmont was a substantial thinker and researcher.
He discovered carbon dioxide, distinguished gases as a class of substances, and is credited with introducing the term GAS in its present scientific sense.
He attributed physiological changes to chemical causes, but, as most official modernist sources stipulate, his conclusions “were colored by his speculative mysticism.”
This “mysticism” is an oblique, stigmatizing reference to the fact that Helmont was an energetic proponent of magnetism and of the sympathetic system.
As he wrote: “Material nature draws her forms through constant magnetism from above, and implores for them the favor of heaven; and as heaven, in like manner, draws something invisible from below, there is established a free and mutual intercourse, and the whole is contained in an individual.”
Further, he established or embellished the concept that magnetism was either composed of a “subtle fluid,” or that the subtle fluid was the medium via which magnetism affected whatever it did.
He then proceeded to offer up an observation of the type that has, as we will see, consistently proved to be a societal faux pas. He indicated that it was possible for the “power of the will to direct the subtle fluid.”
Helmont doesn’t seem to have been the type to offer remarkable observations like this in the complete absence of evidence, and so there must have been veridical and empirical grounds for him to do so.
In any event, this observation can easily be connected to the modern parapsychological issues regarding psychokinesis on the one hand, and healing by sympathetic manipulation of the “subtle fluid” aura of the physical body on the other.
Helmont went on to make public another observation, one certain to embroil societal concerns even of his times. “I have hitherto avoided revealing the great secret—that the strength [of the vital fluid] lies concealed in man, [and that] merely through the suggestion and power of the imagination to work outwardly, and to impress this strength on others, which then continues of itself, and operates on the remotest objects.”
Furthermore, as “proof of the mutual magnetic influence of living creatures,” Helmont asserted that by certain manipulations of the vital fluid during the “ecstasy” of the inner magnetic man, “men may kill animals merely by staring hard at them for a quarter of an hour.”
With this statement is found one of the earliest references to “ecstasy”—which of course has several formats, but among which is sexualizing ecstasy.
Here is also a very early mention that has to do with “learning how” to manipulate the vital fluids—a prospect being viewed forever after with some kind of societal alarm.
VITAL FLUIDS OF REPULSION AND ATTRACTION
The “work of magnetics” was picked up by others, among which was Robert Fludd (1574-1637).
Identified as an English physician, most official historical sources also describe him as a “mystic philosopher educated at Oxford and on the Continent, and strongly influenced by the mystical doctrines of Paracelsus.”
Aside from the misuse of the term “mystical,” Fludd was an exponent of the microcosmic/macrocosmic theory of sympathetic systems, and of the magnetic effluence from man.
Fludd indicated that not only “were these emanations able to cure bodily diseases. They also affected the moral sentiments.
For if radiations from two individuals were, on meeting, flung back or distorted, negative magnetism, or antipathy resulted. Whereas if the radiations from each person passed freely into those from the other, the result was positive magnetism of sympathy.”
Or, as it might be observed, radiations of REPULSION or of ATTRACTION.
HEALING BY MAGNETIC STROKING
It is somewhat difficult to reconstruct the story of magnetic/energetic applications during the Renaissance decades. Magnetics research has been better remembered by its theories. Not much has survived about its practical applications, especially with regard to healing.
None the less, the evidence is clear that the practical side was by no means neglected, and a large number of magnetic healers emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Although not the first, but among the most memorable, was Valentine Greatlakes, an Irishman born in 1628. At some point in 1662, he had a dream, several times repeated, that he could cure by laying on of hands, or by “magnetic stroking” as it came to be called.
Although not always successful, he seems to have performed a surprising number of cures in Ireland and then in London where a number of notables attested to his accumulating status as a “divine healer.”
News of his healing powers, coupled with news about the invisible existence of magnetic energies, spread far and wide, and patients came by the hundreds to seek the benefits of his stroking.
Somewhat later, during the eighteenth century, another famous stroking healer appeared in the form of a Swabian priest named J. J. Gassner.
Biographical details of Gassner are a little hard to come by, but he is noted as a priest of Bludenz (now in Austria), where his many cures gained wide celebrity for him.
He apparently had deep learning and a noble character, and sometimes made use of magnets, “magnetic manipulation,” and stroking or rubbing the affected part. However, according to him, all diseases were caused by “evil spirits,” this idea having a tradition extending back to the ancient Greeks.
However he explained causes, not only could he control “sickness” by whatever means he employed, but the “passions” too were amenable to his means.
Among example “passions” enumerated in various literature were anger, patience, joy, hate, and love, and the “passion” of sexual impotence—each of which, by magnetic stroking, could be brought under control by “carrying each to the highest pitch.”
“Highest pitch” apparently referred to a type of ecstatic catharsis, a purgation or cleansing release of traumatizing physical and/or mental “tensions”—often, but not always, accompanied by transient types of neuromotor convulsions not unlike the ecstasies of sexual orgasm.
The “ecstasies” released, or purged, the “tensions.” And where this worked, Gassner could chalk up another “cure.”
In about 1766, the magnetic stroking of J. J. Gassner attracted the attention of Franz Anton Mesmer, and whose name ultimately was to tower over all others.