IV
THE APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MARY BAKER EDDY
There is, however, another stage in this long line of development which needs to be considered since it supplies a double point of departure; once for the most outstanding healing cult in our time—Christian Science—and once for the greatly enlarged use of suggestion in modern medical practice, and that is mesmerism and "animal magnetism."
Mesmerism a Point of Departure for Modern Healing Cults
Paracelsus[17] may be taken as a starting point just here. He is known in the history of medicine "for the impetus he gave to the development of pharmaceutical chemistry, but he was also the author of a visionary and theosophic system of philosophy." He believed in the influence of the stars upon men, but he enlarged upon the old astrologic faiths. "He believed the human body was endowed with a double magnetism, one portion attracted to itself the planets and was nourished by them, the result of which was the mental powers, the other portion attracted and disintegrated the elements, from which process resulted the body." His world, therefore, was a world of competitive attractions. He believed the well had an influence over the sick through magnetism and used the magnet in his practice.
[17] A German-Swiss physician and alchemist, b. 1493, d. 1541. These quotations, partly from authorities on faith healing and partly from the history of Spiritualism, illustrate the underground connection in this whole region.
"This dual theory of magnetic cures, that of the magnetic influence of men on men and of the magnet on man, was prevalent for over a century." "It is, then, upon these ideas—the radiation from all things, but especially the stars, magnets and human bodies, of a force which would act in all things else, and which was in each case directed by the indwelling spirit, together with the conception of a perpetual contact between reciprocal and opposing forces—that the mysticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly depends."[18]
[18] Podmore, "Modern Spiritualism," Vol. I, p. 45. I am in debt also to Cutten for general information and some quoted paragraphs.
These ideas were adopted by a group of men who are now only names for us. The phenomena of magnetism fascinated them and supplied them analogies. There is, they thought, an all-prevailing magnetic influence which binds together not only celestial and terrestrial bodies, but all living things. Life and death were for them simply the registry of the ebbing and flowing of these immaterial tides and they ended by conceiving a vital fluid which could be communicated from person to person and in the communication of which the sick could be healed—the driftwood of their lore has come down to us on the tides of time; we still speak of magnetic personalities—and they sought in various ways to control and communicate these mysterious forces.