Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [16]
By age sixteen, Davis was apprenticed to a shoemaker, presumably set to follow in his father’s career path. The boy’s new employer considered him kindly and honest—though he wrote in a letter that the lad’s learning “barely amounted to a knowledge of reading, writing and the rudiments of arithmetic.” Nonetheless, if Andrew could avoid his father’s attachment to liquor, life seemed to promise him a stable, if humdrum, existence. But humdrum was the last thing in store for the polite young man. News of a strange practice had begun spreading through the Hudson Valley, one by which men could be induced into a half-conscious condition called a “trance.” Teachers from Europe had begun carrying it to America, laying the events for a wildly unexpected turn in Davis’s life.
Mesmer’s Children
Like many things American, this one began in Paris. In 1778, a Viennese physician and lawyer named Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in the French capital with a controversial and exotic method of healing. Mesmer theorized that unseen ethereal matter—what he termed “animal magnetism”—animated all of life. Mesmer enthralled members of Europe’s aristocracy with a method of entrancement through which he purported to manipulate this substance and cure ailments. News of his practice began to reach the New World.
In a letter to his friend and fellow Freemason George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette wrote from Paris on May 14, 1784: “A German doctor called Mesmer having made the greatest discovery upon Magnetism Animal, he has instructed scholars, among whom your humble servant is called one of the most enthusiastic—I know as much as any conjuror ever did … and before I go, I will get leave to let you into the secret of Mesmer, which you may depend upon, is a grand philosophical discovery.” On a visit to America that summer, the French Revolutionary War hero not only discussed the inner workings of Mesmerism with Washington but gave Washington a personal letter from the magnetic healer. Washington replied to Mesmer with polite caution on November 25, 1784, explaining that the marquis had described his theories and if “the powers of magnetism … should prove as extensively beneficial as it is said it will, must be fortunate indeed for mankind, and redound very highly to the honor of that genius to whom it owes its birth.”
The marquis continued his explorations in America that fall, walking ten miles on foot from Albany to the Shaker colony at Niskayuna several weeks after Mother Ann Lee’s death. He hoped to inquire firsthand whether the Shaker trances had anything in common with Mesmerism. A colleague of the marquis noted that the Shakers seemed able to spin on one leg with “surprising rapidity,” perhaps suggesting some kind of spirit control. The marquis also attempted to entrance one of the Shaker followers, apparently with little effect.
While the marquis and Washington were considering Mesmer’s theories from America in 1784, another American statesman was across the sea tearing them apart. In Paris that same year, Benjamin Franklin sat on a committee of the French Academy of Sciences that blasted Mesmer’s ideas as illusory. The highly anticipated report, commissioned by Louis XVI, turned French public opinion against the once highly feted Mesmer, and he was soon run out of Paris. But history granted the self-styled healer a final victory: His trance-inducing technique began to spread throughout Europe and was soon practiced in America, where its influence touched religion, medicine, and the modern quest to understand the human mind.
Mesmerism began its climb to popularity in America through the efforts of two displaced