Dossier, Volume 14 #2: A Spiritual Sampler

Mesmer, Swedenborg and Quantum Physics

In nineteenth-century America, the French mesmerist Charles Poyen, who began a lecture tour of New England in 1836, and a host of imitators regularly performed somnambulic feats with subjects before public audiences. Significantly, Poyen emphasized the "magnetized" state in which the entranced subject "awoke," capable of thinking and acting in ways that usually far exceeded normal waking consciousness. Accounts of mesmeric feats and experiences became standard features in newspapers and periodicals of the time.

Behind the striking phenomenon of the magnetized subject lay the theories of the Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who taught of an invisible fluid that acted as medium for all living things. "Between ether and elementary matter," Mesmer had written, "there exist series of matter succeeding each other in fluidity." Mesmer went on to explain that there was one "among these fluid substances...which corresponds essentially and is in continuity with that which animates the nerves of the animal body." It followed, for Mesmer, that "everything which exists can be experienced, and that animated bodies, finding themselves in contact with all of Nature, have the faculty of being sensitive not only to beings, but also to events which succeed one another." It was through this "extension of instinct," Mesmer explained, "that a sleeping man can have an intuition of disease and can distinguish, from among all substances, those which contribute to his preservation and cure."

Mesmer's universal fluid, as specified in the animal body, produced one important source of a habit of mind that eroded the distance between matter and spirit. His vision suggested the empowerment of humans for perfection.

At the same time, from a second quarter came another powerful source of the matter-spirit conflation. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), son of a Lutheran bishop and member of the Swedish nobility, from 1745 claimed to make mystical journeys to heaven and hell. His prolific accounts of conversations with angelic beings blended Christian scripture with occult-metaphysical teaching. Swedenborg revived the ancient doctrine of correspondence, of worlds echoing worlds so that "as above, so below." In the universe he acknowledged, nature corresponded to spirit, and a divine influx permeated the natural world.

Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondence was, significantly, a doctrine of harmony, for earthly and heavenly spheres resonated with each other as did a host of more specific signs and symbols. Hence, both mesmerism and Swedenborgianism agreed in the harmonial model of a universe where the boundaries between matter and nonmatter became fluid. As the manipulations of magnetic operators suggested, one could "manage" the balance in a way favorable to one's personal plans and projects. Knowledge was power, and control of the mind's power was promised by the mesmerist's skill and even by the implicit theology of the Swedenborgian "Divine Human." For if God was Man in the heavenly realm, it followed that a path might be open for humans to become Gods as they walked the earth.

By century's end, small armies of mental healers (mind cure and New Thought) and physiological manipulators (osteopathy and chiropractic) had intuitively drawn some of these connections. But even as these healers flourished, the death knell for the nineteenth-century scientific paradigm congenial to their efforts was sounding.

In the nineteenth-century theory of the ether, Newtonian physicists had reclaimed Mesmer's "invisible fluid" on their own terms, postulating a mysterious and unseeable "subtile fluid" or "jelly" that filled all space and all objects and obstructed the motion of none. The ether could carry optical and gravitational effects as well as electrical and magnetic ones. In fact, in a specification as "luminiferous ether" it acted as medium for the transmission of waves of light. It seemed, in short, the invisible glue that held the world together.

By the turn of the century, though, there were serious holes in the ether theory. In 1900, the German scientist Max Planck presented results that pointed toward light as a particle phenomenon. Light, he was puzzled to report, was emitted and absorbed solely in discrete packets of energy. Planck labeled the energy packets quanta, and in the word and the news of the "misbehavior" of light, quantum theory began to be born. By 1905, Albert Einstein proposed more radically that radiant energy was composed of separate speeding and colliding particles. At the subatomic level, matter--it turned out--was not nearly so solid as it first appeared. Matter dissolved into energy and then reconfigured itself as matter, as later research with mass accelerators showed. Moreover, it proved impossible to predict with certainty the patterns of the transformation, as the "unsharpness principle" of Werner Heisenberg in 1927 attested.

The Newtonian world had been stood on its head, and some physicists found the new cosmology an occasion for metaphysics. Werner Heisenberg thought that a "sharp separation between the world and the I" could no longer be possible. The new physics, he explained, was "part of a general historical process that tends toward a unification and a widening of our present world." Amid the speculation, the irony was that the new physics had generously supplied a metaphoric base that could lead some to the reconstitution of the mesmeric and Swedenborgian worlds. If matter and energy were moments in a continuous natural process, phases or appearances of an essential and dynamic substrate of the world, then--for some--body and mind, substance and spirit, could be construed as part of a single continuum. The pulsing, wavelike motion of the invisible fluid in the old etheric world could be reborn in the vibrating quanta of the twentieth century.

The stage was set for a latter-day synthesis in which the blurring of matter and energy at the subatomic level would be linked in principle to the occult romanticism of the mesmeric-Swedenborgian habit of mind. The manipulative potential of minds that could control self and others would be joined to a matter that followed laws of harmony. Thus, acts of harmony would become, simultaneously, acts of power and control. And the world in which these things would happen by the late twentieth century would belong to the New Age.

Catherine L. Albanese is professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This article is excerpted, with adaptations, from her essay "The Magical Staff: Quantum Healing in the New Age" and reprinted from Perspectives on the New Age edited by James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton by permission of the State University of New York Press. © 1992.