In Germany
In Germany, almost all the university towns, public lectures on the subject of mesmerism were given and in this country, mesmerism was fully accepted and practiced. For example, in 1785, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, a medical practitioner living in Weimar – where he became part of Goethe’s intellectual circle – concerns himself with Mesmer und sein Mesmerismus; a quarter of a century later, while he is the medical head at Berlin’s Charité and chief physician of Frederick William III, Hufeland writes about the existence of a Sympathie which, in nature, has "the effect of connecting everything together, in so doing going on to also explain the most unique relationship which holds together magnetizing therapist and magnetized patient. This relationship is portrayed as being so intimate as to turn the pair of such individuals into a single person". Early in the nineteenth century, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert integrated mesmerism into his course of academic lectures. Prof. Ennemoser, one of the main practitioners stated: "Mesmerism is based on experiences that everybody can have. These experiences are solidly grounded in the field of Knowledge." Mesmer's original theory was of the existence of a universal medium or “fluid”. The free and regular circulation of it through a human being produced health, while any obstruction, or impediment to that free circulation, caused disease. Germany naturally adopted the practices or methods of Mesmer's School, namely, the touchings, pressures and pointings, and the baquets, and chains. Ferdinand Koreff and Christian Wolfart, two mesmerists, were inaugurated as professors to the Medicine department of Berlin University. A good friend of Koreff, A. Hoffmann wrote "Der Magnetiseur" (1813) and thereby joined authors like Novalis and Kleist in introducing mesmerisms into German literature. The Science Academy of Berlin, offered a prize consisting of 3,300 francs—for the best explanatory thesis on the science. It is a curious fact that Mesmer, though German-speaking, is mentioned only somewhat rarely in the early German mesmeric literature until 1809. It seems to have widely assumed that he was dead. However, though he had kept out of the public eye for over twenty years, Mesmer was still alive and tolerably robust. In 1812, the Prussian Academy of Science decided to invite Mesmer to lecture in Berlin. It was Wolfart who went to see Mesmer, and although his attempt to persuade him to visit Berlin was unsuccessful he brought back with him a long manuscript of Mesmer's, which Wolfart edited and published in 1814. In 1817, a public hospital was established in Berlin, in which no medicines were used. Only Mesmerism was adopted. The eminent Hufeland, originally an unbeliever, was the principal physician of this hospital; Hufeland was the most eminent practical physician of his time in Germany and fifteen volumes containing the clinical details and statistics of the cases treated magnetically were published. Writing in 1816, Koreff noted that it was not especially in nervous illnesses that Wolfart obtained most beneficial results. He succeeded with ailments ranging from scrofula, ankylosis, and eye problems to haemorroids and bleeding in the womb. In some cases ordinary remedies had failed and no result was anticipated
Relation to magnetic sleep and German literature
In the German Romantic literature on somnambulism, the theory of magnetic sleep was developed into a countermetaphysics directed wholesale against Enlightenment rationalism. In the paradigmatic formulations of Justinus Kerner, the shallow daylight" world of the rationalist, whose hard glass skull (tabula vitrea)" keeps him isolated from intuitions of a higher world, stands against the profoundly meaningful nocturnal" world of the somnambules, who know from direct experience that behind the brutal realities of social and material existence there is a much larger, all-encompassing, and deeply meaningful life. Hence there are two complementary worlds, or levels of reality each with its own specific mode of experience and expression: while the Enlightenment reduces everything to cold logic and discursive prose, its alternative expresses itself through profound symbols and poetic language. When our bodily senses shut down temporarily, and we descend into dream or somnambulic trance, our soul "wakes up" to the larger world whence it has come and where it really belongs. The rationalist, in contrast, is spiritually asleep. He lives in a state of artificial isolation from his own soul and its powers of perception, incapable of understanding the language of symbols and poetry. He naively believes that his brain and his senses show him all there is, never realizing that they are obstacles rather than reliable instruments for discovering the deeper "secrets of nature." Mesmerism and the "knowledge of the hearth". German Romantic intellectuals were defending the scientific superiority of a humanistic worldview with the inner nature and sensitivity of man at its center. This worldview was based on paracelsian and theosophical foundations, the same original basis of Mesmer's doctrine. They saw the "daylight" rational and cerebral knowledge as powerless to grasp the deeper "nightside" and inner truths and intuitions of the soul. These deeper truths were deemed now accessible using the non verbal techniques of animal magnetism and "artificial somnambulism" of Puysegur. Specific techniques (essentially "magnetic passes") were used to activate the "ganglionic system" (centered at the solar plexus, and corresponding to the automous nervous system) presented as the organ of the unconscious soul.(These developments of mesmerism were based upon a medical theory proposed in 1807 be the respected physician Johann Christian Reil and were adopted by Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge in an influential textbook of animal magnetism published in 1811). In the practice, the so called "hearth cavity" was one of the first physical points were passes (movements of the hands near the body accompanied by intention of the operator) were directed. The goal was to awaken a reenergize it. This physical point was in fact in the hypochondrium (the upper region of the abdomen, marked by the lower ribs), now usually linked to the solar plexus but known in ninetheen century Germany as die "Herzgrube": the heart cavity. For Paracelsus and Johannes Baptista von Helmont this was the seat of the archaeus or "life spirit," and it assumed a crucial importance in the practice of German mesmerism as well. An earlier mesmerist, Tardy de Montravel, pointed to this point as the physical location of activation of the "interior sense". And in fact, this zone was constantly highlighted as one the main organ of clairvoyant perception in somnambulist. However, it was only in the artificial state of somnambulistic sleep, or trance, that the ganglionic system was seen as revealing its full potential. Countless observers described how patients in such a condition displayed what was perceived by contemporaries as psychic abilities, including intuitions in general, hypersensitivity, precognition, clairvoyance and supposed mystical visions of higher worlds and divine realities, and a vast literature ensued. In other words: against the cold rational knowledge of the brain associated with the cerebral system the German mesmerists highlighted the superior spiritual "knowledge of the heart" associated with the ganglionic counterpart and in general with the involuntary system, activated by the use of "magnetic" techniques. This "knowledge of the hearth" included what was considered as "paranormal" or clairvoyant perception, but went far beyond it to embrace metaphysical realms (the most famous of all these somnambulistic patients was Friederick Hauffe, known as "the seeress of Prevorst" whose case was described in detail by the poet and physician Justinus Kerner). Ultimately, then, this 'knowledge of the hearth' was understood as a gnosis about divine things coming from the soul, infinitely superior to the merely rational knowledge of the upper brain, and the testimonies of the exterior senses.
Carl Gustav Jung as a successor of some mesmerists' ideologies
The dutch researcher Hanegraaf notes how one century later, very similar concepts of "knowledge of the hearth" would be formulated in all simplicity by one of "their most influential modern successors, carl Gustav Jung." He says: "my soul cannot be the object of my judgement and knowledge – rather, my judgement ad knowledge are objects of my soul"
In German philosophy
Mesmerism was also very developed in Germany under a philosophical point of view. The German mesmerists showed the romanticist attraction to seeking universal truths. They perceived in Mesmer's magnetic fluid the justification for the notion that the Universe was a living organism. Mesmers’ idea of a sixth sense which endowed humans in trance with prophetic abilities and getting in touch with the whole universe, moved them to search how this technique would enable the human mind to communicate with the “World Soul”. Among the most prominent personalities of that age, Schelling detects in the magnetic fluid a tool, placed at man's disposal, which enables him to communicate with the cosmic soul; Fichte, after he attended some sessions of induced somnambulism, reflects upon the extent to which the individuality of the self is relative and modifiable. Arthur Schopenhauer says
"Considered...[from] the philosophical point of view, animal magnetism is the most pregnant of all discoveries that have ever been made, although for the time being it propounds rather than solves riddles. It is really practical metaphysics..[A] time will come when philosophy, animal magnetism, and natural science...will shed so bright a light on one another that truths will be discovered at which we could not otherwise hope to arrive"(Schopenhauer).
