Animal Magnetism, Mesmerism, Hypnotism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 50 pages

At 50 pages the longest study in Confusing Words. Animal magnetism, or mesmerism, is identified with the Hermetic Fire, the quintessence of life: magnetism is defined as the intangible spirit and ultimate essence of every atom — animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic — invisible to all but the eyes of another immortal spirit. Theosophy studies such occult laws of nature, the file says, particularly because modern science will have nothing to do with them; and mesmerism is placed as a lesser branch of magic, as old as man, magic itself being indissolubly blended with the religion of every country and inseparable from its origin.

The practical sections make magnetism the key to the mystery of man's nature and to eastern occultism. The mechanism given is that the magnetiser's vital force, intensely concentrated by his will, pours out of his own system into the patient's, after which he can use the sun to make good the loss and rebalance his prana — the power stemming from the vital fluid within and about a human being, which can be projected by the will of one person into another who is differently polarised. Blavatsky's claim for it is unqualified: that magnetism prolongs life and heals the sick far better than modern medicine can, and that it is a most beneficent science, studied and mastered in the temples of ancient Egypt and Greece as it may never be mastered again in an age like her own.

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