Sister Anne Catherine Emerich (1774-1824), an ecstatica of Westphalia, has expressed herself with considerable precision on the subject of mesmerism. Whilst earnestly warning people against its use as to the last degree dangerous, she admits that the phenomena are objective, and that the power brought into action is substantially natural. What she says is so remarkable that I shall not hesitate to quote at some length.[64]
"My impression in regard to it [mesmerism] was always one of horror, and this sprang less from the thing itself than from the enormous danger to which I saw such as practised it almost always fall a prey.
"The practice of magnetism borders on that of magic; in the former, indeed, there is no invocation of the devil, but he comes of himself. Whoever gives himself up to it plucks from nature something that cannot be lawfully won except in the church of Jesus Christ, and which cannot keep its power of healing, and sanctifying, except in her bosom. Nature, for all such as are not in active union with Jesus Christ by true faith and sanctifying grace, is full of satanic influences. Magnetic subjects see nothing in its essence and in its relation of dependence upon God; they see everything in a state of isolation and separation, as if they were looking through a hole or crack. They see one ray of things; and would to God this ray were pure—that is to say, holy! It is in God's mercy that he has veiled and separated us from one another; that he has raised a wall between us. Since we are all full of sin, and exercise influence one upon the other, it is well that we should be obliged to interpose some preamble before seducing one another and reciprocating the contagious influence of the evil spirit. But in Jesus Christ, God himself made man is given us as our head, in union with whom we can, when purified and sanctified, become one—one body—without bringing into this union our sins and evil inclinations. Whoever would bring to an end in any other way this separation which God has established is uniting himself, after a most dangerous fashion, to fallen nature, in which he reigns with all his allurements who drew it to its fall.
"I see that magnetism is essentially true; but in that veiled light there crouches a thief who has broken his chain. All union amongst sinners is dangerous, interpenetration more especially so. But when this befalls a soul that is altogether cloudless; when a state, the condition of whose clairvoyance is its simplicity and directness, falls a prey to artifice and intrigue, then one of the faculties of man before his fall—a faculty which is not quite dead—is in a certain manner revived, to leave him more unarmed, more mystified, and exposed internally to the assaults of the demon. This state is real—it exists; but it is covered with a veil, because it is a spring poisoned for all except the saints.
"I feel that the state of these persons follows a course in certain respects parallel to mine, but moving in an opposite direction, coming from elsewhere, and having other consequences. The sin of a man with only the faculty of ordinary vision is an act wrought by the senses or in their forum. The inward light is not thereby darkened, but speaks in the conscience, and urges from within, like a judge, to sensible acts of repentance and penance. It leads us to those remedies which the church administers under a sensible form—the sacraments. Then the sensitive part is the sinner, and the inward light the accuser.
"But in the magnetic state, when the senses are dead, when the inward light receives and yields impressions, then that which is holiest in a man, the interior watcher, is exposed to deadly influences, to contagious infection of the evil spirit, such as the soul in the state of ordinary wakefulness can have no consciousness of, owing to the senses, subject as these are to the laws of time and space. At the same time, it cannot free itself of its sins by the purifying remedies of the church. I see, indeed, that a soul altogether pure and reconciled with God, even in the state in which the whole interior life is open, may chance not to be wounded by the devil. But I see that if she has previously consented to the least temptation, as very easily happens, especially to those of the female sex, Satan is free to play his game in the interior of the soul, which he always manages in a way to dazzle her with the semblance of sanctity. The visions become lies, and, if she perchance discover some way of healing the mortal body, she pays a costly price for it in the secret defilement of an immortal soul."
With regard to another kindred phenomenon, viz., the projection of the thinking soul in a visible envelope, there is a remarkable passage in S. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, lib. xviii. 18). He is speaking of a story he heard when in Italy of men being turned into asses by enchantment, and made to carry burdens:
"To say nothing of the soul, I do not believe that a man's body could any how by demons-craft be turned into bestial limbs and lineaments; but the fantastic part of man's nature (which, in the processes of thinking and dreaming, is countlessly specificated, and which, though itself no body, yet with wondrous swiftness, when the man's bodily senses are holden in sleep or bondage, adapts to itself the images of bodies) may be presented in some I know not what ineffable way, under a bodily form, to the senses of others, the while their bodies be elsewhere alive, indeed, but with their senses much more heavily and mightily bound than in sleep. And that fantastic part appears to the eyes of others, as it were, incorporated in the likeness of another creature; and such the man seems to himself to be, and to carry burdens. While burdens, if they be real bodies and not fantastic, the demons carry to deceive spectators, who see on the one hand the burdens, which are real; on the other the beasts, which are mere appearances."
The phenomenon described, or rather suggested, by the saint is substantially identical with that of the wraith, or apparition of the spirit of a living person, when the soul is supposed to be projected in a visible envelope under the influence of some strong emotion, the bonds uniting soul and body being indefinitely stretched, without being broken. Fanciful as this sounds, the apparition of the wraith is perhaps the best authenticated of all ghost phenomena.
Plutarch (De Gen. Soc. p. 266) would seem to indicate the same phenomenon. The Neoplatonic interlocutor, having distinguished the intelligence (νοῦς) from the soul (ψυχή), inasmuch as the former is not properly the body at all, except by reflection, as light in a mirror, but floats above the man's head, bound to the incorporated soul and yielding light for its conduct, says, in respect to the case of one Hermodorus, whose soul was supposed periodically to leave his body: "But this is not true, for his soul did not go forth from his body, but, slackening and loosing the reins to the intelligence (the δαίμων, as the wise call it, regarding it as something external), allowed it circumgyration and circum-frequentation (περιδρομὴν καὶ περιφίτησιν), and, when it had seen or heard anything, to bear in the tidings."