Solomon's Secret Arts (61 page)

In pursuit of this Swedenborgian utopia, Nordenskjöld and Wadström travelled to Sierra Leone, where the former died in 1792. Returning to England, Wadström published
An Essay on Colonization
, to which the abolitionists Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharpe and William Wilberforce, along with Wadström's friend General Rainsford, were subscribers.
¹³
Within a year, however, Wadström had lost a considerable sum of money on a Manchester cotton-spinning venture, and decided to relocate to France. There, in a democratic republic that had recently ended slavery, he joined the leading abolitionist society, the Amis des Noirs, and lobbied the Directory government to oppose slave trading around the world. Having become a French citizen and director of an agricultural credit society, he died in 1799.

Wadström's defection to the side of Britain's mortal enemy can only have increased the suspicions of the authorities regarding West African colonization. Their attention focused on Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vasa), former commissary of the Sierra Leone Company, a freed slave and anti-slavery advocate who had published a popular autobiography in 1789. He had a lot of supporters in occult circles: Wadström, Rainsford, Hugh Percy and Richard Cosway subscribed to his book, which began with a letter from Alexander Tilloch defending the author's veracity.
¹⁴
Equiano's account of growing up in West Africa, which may not have been based on his own experience (evidence suggests that he was born in South Carolina), affirms Swedenborg's opinion of the Africans as a particularly spiritual people. Equiano even calls them
descendants of the Jews.
¹⁵
Government attention was drawn to Equiano when it was discovered that he lodged with Thomas Hardy, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, a radical democratic group sympathetic to the French Revolution. After Hardy was arrested and charged with sedition in 1794, a letter from Equiano was found among his papers, which showed that the famous African was an early member of the Corresponding Society.
¹⁶
Another link between the colonization scheme and radicalism was the printer, engraver and poet William Blake. In his early Swedenborgian phase, he knew Wadström and Nordenskjöld, and even wrote an odd poem about the spirituality of Africans, “The Little Black Boy.” An opponent of slavery, Blake clearly sympathized with radical causes as well as with the French Revolution.
¹⁷
Blake was the quintessential sectarian radical the government was continually searching for in the revolutionary period, but they did not catch up with him until after 1800.

Admittedly, the chain of connections that has been drawn here is circumstantial and mostly trivial: it does not demonstrate the existence of a Swedenborgian conspiracy in favour of French republicanism. What it does show, though, is that anybody who wanted to believe in such a conspiracy did not have to look very far for evidence. Moreover, while, the suspicions of loyalists concerning sectarian movements were exaggerated, the billowing smoke of sedition that they claimed to see did exist—albeit given off by small fires. The jump from occult thinking to radical politics was easy enough to make. In contrast to the anti-democratic impulses of some occult movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the occult revival of the late eighteenth century espoused many of the ideals of human improvement lauded by revolutionaries.

Arguably, the boldest radical voice in the occult circles of the 1790s was that of the
Astrologer's Magazine
. Amid articles on witches and demons, ghosts, magic circles and the moon's effects on madmen, readers of the journal might have noticed in September 1793—eight months after Louis XVI's execution and the subsequent French declaration of war on Britain—an article by “Astrologus,” answering a friend's request for predictions concerning the progress of military operations on the continent. “Astrologus's” reading of the stars was prefaced with the following astonishing words:

This was strong stuff, justifying the fate of King Louis and suggesting that every monarch might learn a salutary lesson from it. In retaliation for similar statements, Joseph Priestley's house had been ransacked by a mob, while effigies of Tom Paine had been hanged, shot and burned by loyalists throughout England.
¹⁹
Other professors of the celestial arts, however, shared the views of “Astrologus.” Henry Andrews wrote a sympathetic account of Napoleon Bonaparte in the
Vox Stellarum
for 1799, and as late as 1805 a dispute broke out between Thomas Orger and John Worsdale as to whether Napoleon's nativity marked him as a great lawgiver or a tyrant.
²⁰

It was not wrong-headed, therefore, for the loyalist public to suspect practitioners of the occult. This chapter explores how that fear emerged: first, through the chequered history of magnetic healing; second, through hardening attitudes towards visionary prophets; third, through the theory that a conspiracy of occult Freemasons had set off the French Revolution. Two individuals who resisted contemporary trends towards loyalism are also considered: Mary Pratt and William Blake. The letters of Pratt, the last Behmenist of the eighteenth century, reveal a remarkable mind, steeped in a feminized version of occult thinking and hostile to every form of power. Blake, the mournful bard of the occult breakdown, left voluminous writings and graphic works in which he criticized occult thinking for being too conformist. He was not a lone visionary cursing at the governing systems of the day, since others experienced the same sense of impending defeat for spiritual forces at the hands of material authority. While Blake's genius may have been more expansive than theirs, other minds were thinking similarly gloomy thoughts amid the maelstrom of the French Revolution.

Magnetic Healing

“The rapid manner in which Magnetists have multiplied upon us, may seem to you [the public], incredible,” wrote John Martin, an entrenched critic of the phenomenon, in 1790.
²¹
At that time, there were about a dozen major practitioners of medical cures by animal magnetism in London, and at least one in Bristol. John Bell, perhaps the most popular proponent of animal magnetism
in England, lectured in London, Bristol, Gloucester, Worcester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Chester, Liverpool and Manchester, as well as Dublin. Between them, the magnetists had many hundreds of students, who paid up to 50 guineas for extended instruction—in fact, lessons in the healing technique, not actual cures, were the main sources of income for most magnetists. Within a few years, however, animal magnetism was virtually defunct in England. Why was its rise so rapid and its fall so sudden?

The researches of Patricia Fara have cast considerable light on the English version of animal magnetism, but its significance remains shrouded in mystery.
²²
We should begin by noting that animal magnetism in England was different from its French, German and Italian counterparts. It had relatively little to do with Dr Anton Mesmer, the famous German promoter of a system of cures that depended on magnetism, baths, a form of hypnosis and a complex theory of “universal fluid,” sensible only to the magnetist. Mesmer's methods created a sensation at the courts of Vienna and Paris, and were widely imitated. While his fame definitely set off the phenomenon of animal magnetism in England, the latter did not follow Mesmer's teachings very closely.
²³
Only one prominent English magnetist, the former male midwife John Bonniot de Mainauduc, had studied magnetism in France. By the time Mainauduc arrived back in London in 1785, a committee of academicians appointed by the French king, including Benjamin Franklin, had issued a condemnation of Mesmer's treatments, arguing that their effects were imaginary. As a result, Mainauduc was compelled to concede that Mesmerism had been “laid aside by those who have gone further,” and was “fallacious.”
²⁴
Mesmer's name was thus seldom mentioned by English devotees of animal magnetism.

Instead, the English magnetists offered in their published writings a simplified version of Mesmerism that emphasized the power of the mind to effect physical changes at a distance. “The
thought
, or soul,” John Bell wrote, “goes to any distance; no obstacles can resist it. It arrives and unites itself, by a sympathetic power, to any object it wishes.”
²⁵
The equivalence of
thought
and
soul
is vital, because it indicates how heavily English magnetism was influenced by religion. Bell, a minister as well as a healer, claimed to be a member of the Philosophical Harmonic Society of Paris, which was dedicated to the preservation of Mesmer's principles, and he announced that his lectures “were entirely grounded on the Mesmerian Principles,” but as the title page of another pamphlet suggested, the “SECRETS and PRACTICE” were Bell's own. He emphasized religious justifications for animal magnetism. “Nothing proves more peremptorily the existence of a Supreme Being, who governs all things,” Bell exulted.
²⁶
Mesmer had famously argued that religious cures, like the exorcisms performed by the priest J.J. Gassner in Bavaria, were forms of
magnetism; in England, conversely, magnetism was often turned into an aspect of religious healing.
²⁷
The anonymous author of
Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed
went so far as to maintain that animal magnetism was known to King Solomon and was a gift from God.
²⁸
Mary Pratt, who wrote a pamphlet praising the “Manuductions” or magnetic cures carried out by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg and his wife, Lucy, described them as “made by the Almighty power of the Lord Jehovah.” She also compared them to the miraculous healings of the French Prophets.
²⁹

The English magnetists, however, were not simply faith healers. They employed a scientific language, borrowed in part from Mesmer, which set them apart from previous marketers of magnetic healing such as Gustavus Katterfelto. They imagined the whole body as a loadstone or magnet, with the nerves following a certain polarity. By means of an invisible attraction similar to gravity, the magnetist could penetrate the universal fluid that surrounded a patient's body and induce a reaction in the internal electric fluid, producing a “Crisis.”
³⁰
Satirists delighted in mocking the “Crisis” as sexual, especially as so many patients of the magnetists were female. Even among practitioners, the “Crisis” was highly controversial. John Holloway accused his rival John Cue of inducing a convulsive state that was “both hysterical and dangerous.”
³¹
Both men were Dissenting ministers, and the charge is reminiscent of those made against French Prophets or Methodist preachers in earlier decades. In his published lectures, Mainauduc barely mentioned the term “Crisis,” which clearly embarrassed him. He alleged that Mesmer had derived the technique from Athanasius Kircher and Robert Fludd, and that it was often confused with “supernatural exaltations,” especially by “impostors” who would “disgrace the Science.”
³²
The particular features of a “Crisis” differed according to the individual. Bell admitted that a general hysteria could result from inducing a “Crisis” in one person. “This phenomenon is often seen in manufactories, schools, and other public places,” Bell observed, and he did not hesitate to compare it to the fits experienced by “the
Trembleurs
” or Shakers in the United States. He argued that patients could be treated without a “Crisis” and, drawing on the hypnotherapy of Mesmer's follower the marquis de Puységur, he recommended somnambulism as an alternative.
³³

The details of this scientific theory may have been of less importance to English magnetists than the basic concept of curing through the
sympathy
of mind and body. On this subject, English medicine had long depended on the writings of George Cheyne and David Hartley, which did not rule out the possibility of carrying out sympathetic cures. Cheyne had even theorized, like Mesmer, that the nervous system was a conduit for the movement of fluid spirits. In addition, the idea of controlling another body through mental action
by a qualified guide was already deeply rooted in contemporary treatments of mental illness.
³⁴
What chiefly distinguished the magnetists was their willingness to extend that type of treatment to physical illness. They did not rely on blood-letting, pills, potions or any of the standard practices of contemporary doctoring. The patient was induced to cure herself (less frequently, himself). A remarkably optimistic view of human physiology underpinned animal magnetism—anyone was capable of physical self-restoration. To be sure, animal magnetism also depended on the almost total power of the (normally male) magnetist over another (usually female) human being, which could be unsettling. Betsy Sheridan reported that when her sister-in-law Elizabeth, wife of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was magnetized by Mainauduc in 1788, she was “thrown into a state which She describes as very distressing. It was a kind of fainting without absolute insensibility. She could hear and feel but had no power to speak or move.”
³⁵
In earlier generations, her “state” might have been equated with demonic possession; by the late eighteenth century, it was emblematic of the power of the enlightened male over women and the ignorant.