The Laying on of Hands: Mesmeric Ritual and
its Portrayal in the Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
Lesley Gray
By 1844, at the age of 35, Edgar Allan Poe was known as a
forthright critic and an experienced editor of East Coast
American magazines. His reputation as a writer of sensational
stories was widespread, having achieved notable success with
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a work published in 1841 and
often cited as the first ‘detective’ story. Therefore, when Poe
published in close succession his three stories centring around
the subject of mesmerism in the years 1844–45, ‘A Tale of the
Ragged Mountains’ (April 1844), ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ (August
1844) and ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (December
1845), 1 he already had an established readership and, through his
reviews on books relating to the ‘New Science’, 2 could be
considered as having some experience on the topic. 3 As
Anthony Enns notes, ‘although Poe’s mesmeric tales were
essentially literary, it is also significant that these works were
written in the style of scientific texts’, 4 which led to some of
them being published in scientific journals and taken to be
factual accounts. Poe himself, as Lind writes, ‘maintained a
certain ambiguity regarding their authenticity’. 5
In these short stories, Poe explores not only the
controversial topic of mesmerism and the strange rituals that
accompanied the healing practice but also, through extrapolating
the fantastic possibilities offered by the ideas that were
percolating around the subject at the time, he experiments with
the boundaries of credibility through the medium of storytelling.
30
This article considers the way that the intense focus of
the mesmerist through a predetermined set of procedures, such
as the laying on of hands or mesmeric passes, can induce a
trance-like state in some patients that can result in a powerful
psychological connection between the healer and the patient.
After examining this ritualistic relationship in Poe’s mesmeric
tales, this investigation extends into how the relationship
between writer and reader affects the reception of the story.
Establishing a bond between the storyteller and the audience
that parallels that of healer and patient creates a platform of
trust from where acceptable cultural boundaries and profound
metaphysical questions may be contemplated, and which may
account for why much of Poe’s mesmeric stories were taken to
be fact rather than fiction.
Mesmer and his use of Ritual
Mesmerism was named after the Austrian physician Anton
Mesmer who, in the late eighteenth century, introduced into
Vienna and then Paris his controversial theories and treatments
that involved harnessing a universal magnetic fluid that would
flow from the healer to the patient in order to restore her or his
magnetic harmony and therefore health. At the time, this
process was known as animal magnetism and patients would
often go into a trance-like state, experiencing a dramatic healing
‘crisis’. 6
Robert Darnton called mesmerism ‘a faith that marked
the end of the Enlightenment, the advent of the Revolution and
the dawning of the nineteenth century’. 7 Certainly, in a time
when steam-powered machinery replaced traditional modes of
working, when scientists challenged the existence of God, and
social tensions grew alongside the dark spectre of nationalism,
men and women in the Western world had to reassess not only
their place in society but also their beliefs. It was, perhaps, this
that led to a renewed interest in mesmerism. The medical
31
fraternity, while dispelling Mesmer’s more outlandish theories,
was becoming increasingly interested in the power of suggestion.
Spiritual organisations questioned conventional religious
teachings and sought answers from the realms of the occult. In
Germany, the concept of a ‘trance state’ supported the sublime
transcendence that was integral to the Romantic movement. In
his ‘Preface to Mesmeric Revelation’, Charles Baudelaire says
‘Animal unity, the unity of a universal fluid, the unity of matter,
all these recent theories, by a strange coincidence, have
somehow entered the minds of poets at the same time that they
have entered the minds of scientists’. 8
In the 1780s, when Mesmer had established a successful
practice in Paris, investigations into his now famous and soughtafter treatments were undertaken by a French Royal
Commission. The Commission was composed of distinguished
members of both the medical and scientific communities
including Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier and JosephIgnace Guillotin. 9 After extensive study, the curative claims of
Mesmer were found to be attributable to the imagination and
susceptible disposition of the patients, rather than to the powers
of any universal fluid. The numerous pamphlets published in
response to these findings and their inferences bore witness to
the many loyal followers that Mesmer had attracted, either
through true belief or because of the potentially large sums of
money that the treatments could generate. Therefore, while
Mesmer himself retired to Switzerland, his theories on animal
magnetism 10 continued to grow, albeit in different guises,
migrating across Europe and into the New World. The Marquis
de Puysegur, one of Mesmer’s students, embraced the theories
of imagination and suggestion, linking mesmerism to the power
of the mind and ultimately to a more psychological
interpretation, which in itself led to moral dilemmas concerning
the intention of hypnotic will. 11
In addition to his healing techniques, another of
Mesmer’s legacies was the use of elaborate, almost mystical
forms of ritual. Crabtree comments on Mesmer as a ‘master
32
psychologist’, whose ‘instincts told him he had to […] enhance
his treatment with drama where possible […] He certainly knew
how to create a mood of mystery and expectation of cure’. 12 In
the crowded treatment salons, soothing music, often from a
glass harmonium, would be played, the rooms were darkened
and mirrors used to enhance the flow of the magnetic fluid, and
special robes were worn by Mesmer himself, who also carried a
metal-tipped wand. 13 Of particular interest is Mesmer’s use of
‘magnetic passes’, which involved a series of precise hand
movements made over the body of the patient, 14 the patient
would then enter a trance-like state and eventually experience a
‘crisis’, a violent reaction like a fit, which Mesmer believed
would ‘lead to the balancing of the [magnetic] currents and
cure’. 15
The magnetic passes used by Mesmer are reminiscent of
the practice of the laying on of hands, a ritual that Albert
Johnson investigated in a paper published in 1911. Johnson’s
findings were that the laying on of hands had its origins in the
smearing of blood or vital fat from sacrificial rites in a ceremony
designed to create a life-giving connection between worshipper,
victim and God. Blood and fat were replaced by oil, as the
‘magical and mechanical’ rites of the Old Testament gave rise to
the ‘sacramental’ where its ‘efficacy was made to depend on
faith and prayer’. 16 In his paper, Johnson noted that his
investigations into ancient religious practices revealed that ‘the
ceremony seems to have its roots in ideas which must have
prevailed almost universally [however] [w]e are justified in
regarding the Bible as the sole source of information’, 17 which
suggests that Mesmer’s passes not only engage with innate
neurological responses to touch 18 but could also be associated
with the profound rituals within religious doctrine that would be
familiar to his patients from the teachings of the Church.
In a more modern consideration of the effect of the
laying on of hands, medical doctor Abraham Verghese and his
colleagues 19 compare the physician’s bedside evaluation to other
rituals in life, such as baptism or marriage, in that it signifies an
33
important rite of passage, sometimes the transition from
sickness to health, or vice versa. They comment on the ‘statusneutralizing gown that signals a transition to a liminal state’ 20 as
the person becomes a patient and implicitly confers a power
over their body to the doctor. Robert Fuller discusses the
popularity of unorthodox medicine in present-day America and
the place of healing as a cultural activity. 21 Fuller cites the use of
‘therapeutic touch’ as ‘the efforts of some medical professionals
to integrate supernatural-cause concepts and techniques into
their healing activities’, describing Dolores Krieger, a nursing
instructor in this art at New York University as ‘the modern
counterpart of Franz Anton Mesmer’. 22 This interest in
alternative methods of healing, such as therapeutic touch, would
seem to point to the patient’s desire to participate in the healing
process and the efficacy of their belief in the ritual that
accompanies such treatments, which endorses the findings of
the French Royal Commission over 200 years earlier. However,
there are also developments, particularly relating to the
psychiatry of trauma, that consider areas such as bodily memory
as an effective form of treatment 23 and offer the possibility that
there is more at work than just the imagination of the patient or
suggestion by the healer.
Poe’s use of Ritual
Mesmerism in antebellum America was a very popular subject, not
just as a form of healing and scientific enquiry but also as a topic
to be explored in fiction. Writers such as Hawthorne, Melville
and Whitman all had stories published that involved some
aspects of mesmerism. Although, as Doris Falk notes, Poe was
unusual in that he ‘chose to emphasise its [mesmerism’s]
physical, cosmic properties rather than its psychological,
interpersonal ones’, 24 although the psychological aspects are still
implied by the interaction between the mesmerist and the
patient and extend out of the fiction into the mind of the reader,
as witnessed by the strong responses to the stories at the time.
34
Sidney Lind comments on Poe’s use of mesmeric
textbooks of the day to provide details and veracity to his
tales, 25 suggesting that by echoing the style adopted in these
textbooks, two of the stories in particular, ‘Mesmeric Revelation’
and ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ were taken to be
true accounts. Lind is, however, of the opinion that they were
not deliberate hoaxes, even if Poe did make capital out of the
supposition that they were. Faivre reports that ‘In fact, the
editor of the New York journal The New World inserted it
[‘Mesmeric Revelations’] into the issue of August 3, 1844, along
with a commentary which stated that this “marvellous article”
was about a very serious subject’. 26
Poe in his mesmeric tales takes a very matter of fact
view of the ritualistic aspects employed by the mesmerist. There
is nothing of the flamboyance of Mesmer, no prayer or fuss; the
‘passes’ are just dropped into the text as part of the normal
procedure in inducing the mesmeric state. However, the
mesmerists often refer to their work as ‘experiments’ and if their
‘subjects’ fail to respond sufficiently, the mesmerists persist until
the patients finally relinquish their will and acquiesce to that of
the mesmerist. As the mesmerised subjects in the Poe tales are
all weakened through illness, this might imply that some
subjugation may be at work, which is at odds with the assertion
of Doris Falk who suggests that ‘it is not the will of the operator
which suggests or determines the action in any of the mesmeric
tales, but rather the union of two wills, releasing the power of
animal magnetism to perform its organising function’. 27 The
potential of mesmerism to work unconsciously without the need
for any ritual at all is explored in ‘A Tale of the Ragged
Mountains’, the first of Poe’s mesmeric tales. 28
‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ is by virtue of its title
signified as a fictional work and therefore did not cause the
sensational response of the later two stories. It is also written in
the third person and so the reader is a little more distanced from
the experience, although Poe uses the conventions of the storytelling ritual to engage the reader with the descriptions of Mr
35
Augustus Bedloe, his wealthy, but mysterious neighbour, a
‘gentleman [who] was remarkable in every respect, and excited
in me a profound interest and curiosity’. Mr Bedloe was without
family, young but seemed at times ‘a hundred years of age’, was
of emaciated appearance and had strange eyes that conveyed the
idea ‘of a long-interred corpse’. 29 The narrator reports the
history of Mr Bedloe and his aged physician Dr Templeton, a
man schooled in the arts of mesmerism and who for many years
had been employed to care exclusively for Mr Bedloe. The
reader learns that the repetition of Dr Templeton’s mesmeric
ritual eventually produced an intense rapport between him and
his patient:
At the first attempt to induce the magnetic
somnolency, the mesmerist entirely failed. In the
fifth or sixth he succeeded very partially, and after
long continued effort. Only at the twelfth was the
triumph complete. After this the will of the
patient succumbed rapidly to that of the physician,
so that, when I first became acquainted with the
two, sleep was brought about almost
instantaneously by the mere volition of the
operator, even when the invalid was unaware of
his presence. 30
Therefore, it seems to take some time for the doctor to establish
this close relationship, although the narrator did not observe
these earlier attempts but appears to have witnessed the extreme
sensitivity of Mr Bedloe to Dr Templeton’s will.
Having set the scene, the plot centres around a
particular occasion when Mr Bedloe sets off for his customary
long walk in the Ragged Mountains. He is out all day and, by
eight in the evening, everyone is worried that he has not
returned. A search is about to be mounted when he strolls back
in high spirits and settles down to tell the narrator and the
doctor of his adventure. Poe colours Mr Bedloe’s descriptions
with lavish detail as Bedloe explains how: ‘[i]n the quivering of a
36
leaf — in the hue of a blade of grass — in the shape of a trefoil
— in the humming of a bee — in the gleaming of a dew-drop
— in the breathing of the wind — in the faint odors that came
from the forest — there came a whole universe of suggestion’. 31
The style of Poe’s prose is notable as repetition of the words ‘in
the’, each time accompanied by different sensuous detail taken
from nature, suggests a rhythmic ritualistic incantation that lulls
the reader into an almost hypnotic state.
As Mr Bedloe walks further a mist surrounds him, the
path becomes unfamiliar and he hears the beating of drums, a
wild man jumps in his path waving ‘an assemblage of steel rings’
and then a hyena darts past. Thinking he is dreaming, he carries
on only to find himself in an Indian city on the banks of a river
and in the middle of a skirmish with natives, where he receives a
fatal wound from an arrow to his right temple. He dies and feels
‘the consciousness of death. At length, there seemed to pass a
violent and sudden shock through [his] soul, as if of
electricity’. 32 After another shock ‘as of a galvanic battery’,
Bedloe reports that ‘the sense of weight, of volition, of
substance, returned. I became my original self’. 33
The narrator smiles and chivvies Bedloe along by saying
that it obviously was just a dream and that surely he is not
maintaining that he is dead. But the reaction is not as expected:
Bedloe trembles and remains silent while Dr Templeton shows
every sign of deep distress with his chattering teeth and staring
eyes. Dr Templeton then shows Bedloe a miniature likeness
dated 1780 of his dear but dead friend, Mr Oldeb, this portrait
bears an uncanny resemblance to Bedloe and Dr Templeton
explains that it was this likeness that drew him to Bedloe in the
first place. It also transpires that at the time of Mr Bedloe’s
experience, Dr Templeton was writing the account of Oldeb’s
death, the details of which were in every detail as Mr Bedloe
described them except that Mr Bedloe’s recollections extended
beyond Dr Templeton’s narrative, as Bedloe tells how
Bedloe/Oldeb rises from the ground and observes his dead
body.
37
The story ends with Bedloe dying soon after the day on
the mountains: a poisoned leech, administered by Dr Templeton
himself, was inadvertently applied to his right temple. This
echoes Oldeb’s fatal injury to the same spot and the arrow that
killed him was, like the poisonous leech, black and resembling
‘the body of a creeping serpent’. 34 In a further twist, the
narrator, while discussing Mr Bedloe’s printed obituary with the
newspaper editor, comments on the spelling of Bedloe without
the ‘e’. This turns out to be a typographical error but the
narrator comments that now mysteriously Bedlo is the reverse
spelling of Oldeb.
‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ suggests a more
complex aspect to the relationship between physician and
patient. The inference is perhaps that the psychic connection
between Bedloe and his mesmerist physician becomes so strong
that Bedloe can experience the memories of Dr Templeton as
the doctor writes about the death of his old friend Oldeb, but
Bedloe’s story goes beyond Templeton’s memory of what
happened to his friend.
Lind suggests that here Poe was not only considering
this controversial contemporary topic of mesmerism but at the
same time was exploring one of his own concerns, that of
metempsychosis or the transmigration of the soul. 35 Doris Falk,
on the other hand, suggests that this is an instance of
mesmerism suspending death, that unwittingly and unknowingly
Dr Templeton’s mesmeric powers were so strong that they were
already operating between him and his friend, so that his desire
to keep his friend alive had in fact succeeded. This would
explain why Dr Templeton was so horrified when he realises
that Mr Bedloe is indeed his old friend who has somehow
cheated death. Templeton then acts to restore the natural order
of things by breaking the mesmeric link and releasing Oldeb
from his liminal state. 36 Dr Templeton is able to put Mr Oldeb
into a mesmeric state without either of them being aware of it,
Templeton’s will that Oldeb escapes death seems to have been
all that was required. In this case, no preparative ritual, whether
38
in the form of hand passes or focused gaze, is required, although
later when trying to mesmerise Mr Bedloe this does prove
necessary, a difficulty also experienced in the later story ‘The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ when the subject is in a state
of suspended death and the mesmerist tries to bring him out of
the trance.
The prospect of mesmerism without ritual points to the
fact that if the will or the bond between certain individuals is of
sufficient strength then this formality is not necessary. Without
this established empathy, though, the mesmeric ritual is needed
as a signifier to suggest to both the healer and the patient that
they are about to enter a different state, mesmeric or otherwise.
After all, the rites of passage that we go through in life, such as
baptism or marriage, do not, in themselves, materially affect us,
but they do change our own and others’ perceptions of the self
and perhaps cause changes in our behaviours.
As Falk points out, the power of animal magnetism to
suspend animation is a theme in the two other stories on the
subject, ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ 37 and ‘The Facts in the Case of
M. Valdemar’, written a year later. 38 ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ was
first published in Columbia Magazine in 1844, then reprinted
several times, including in the American Phrenological Journal with
an introduction that explained that ‘[i]t was written by Edgar
Allan Poe, a man favourable [sic] known in the literary world; so
it may be relied on as authentic’. 39
In ‘Mesmeric Revelation’, the seriously ill Mr Vankirk asks
the narrator, P, who is also a mesmerist, to mesmerise him not
so much to heal him but to help him to understand the
immortality of the souls by posing ‘a series of well[-]directed
questions’ to him, as he believes that ‘the profound selfcognisance evinced by the sleep-waker, 40 the extensive
knowledge he [Vankirk] displays upon all points relating to the
mesmeric condition itself; and from this self-cognisance may be
deduced hints for the proper conduct of a catechism’. 41 The
term catechism is generally associated with religious instruction,
39
taking the form of questions and answers. Mesmer himself
wrote his Catechism on Animal Magnetism which appears in George
Bloch’s translation of Mesmer’s original scientific and medical
writings, 42 intentionally or otherwise, linking the secular with the
religious in the mind of the reader.
According to Vankirk, the replies of the mesmerised
person ‘will be able to determine the actuality of the soul’s
immortality’ and, sure enough, a profound discussion on ‘God,
materiality, and the nature of man’s soul’ is provided in the
exchange between P and Vankirk. 43 Antoine Faivre gives the
term, ‘magical eloquence’ to these ‘discourses by magnetised
people which contain accounts of visions, prophecies and
revelations from worlds beyond, and thus reveal the mysteries of
hidden things in the universe, even in the divine world’. 44 As
Falk concludes, ‘the purpose of the magnetist had been neither
to heal pain nor to prevent the encroachments of death, but
rather to raise to clairvoyant powers a consciousness upon the
verge of death’. 45 It is the power of the mesmerist to facilitate
this transcendent state that puts him above the traditional
medical doctor and elevates him into a magician, although of
course, many would explain this as the patient’s imagination and
susceptible disposition, just as the French Royal Commission
did when studying Mesmer’s work in eighteenth-century Paris.
The heightened sensory perceptions that both Vankirk
and Bedloe experience are akin to Antoine Faivre’s ‘magical
eloquence’ 46 and are reminiscent of the mesmeric sublime.
David Zimmerman discusses the mesmeric sublime in his paper
on Frank Norris’s work, albeit that Norris was writing some fifty
years later. Norris’s experience of ‘the Burkean terror, the
inability of the single mind to master and recuperate such
sensory excess in language, the engulfment and absorption, the
contagion of rhetorical effects’, 47 are similar to the
overwhelming feelings of fear and awe experienced by Bedloe in
the mountains, although Vankirk’s experiences are more
reassuring in their revelations of a more benign universe.
40
Vankirk asks to be mesmerised on his deathbed, foregoing the
traditional rites of passage of the dying.
The publication of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in
1757, ‘presented imaginative transport not only as desirable …
but as a necessity’. 48 Morris describes Burke’s illustration of the
sublime as ‘something like a readers’ guide to the Gothic
novel’, 49 and quotes Burke’s summary of his theory, ‘terror is in
all cases whatsoever, … the ruling principle of the sublime’. 50 As
if to echo this, Walpole says in his Preface to The Castle of
Otranto, ‘terror is the author’s principal engine’, so linking the
Burkean model of the sublime to his own ‘Gothic story’. 51
Burke was also well known to the eighteenth-century French
philosopher, Denis Diderot. Gita May discusses Diderot’s Salon
de 1767, which provides a synthesis of Burke’s theories in ‘a
creative and masterful reworking of the original text’ and his
particular interest in Burke’s association of the ‘compelling
emotions evoked by the idea of pain and danger, which in turn
directly affect the egotistic instinct of self-preservation’. 52 This
perhaps links to Poe’s intense, voyeuristic and often grotesque
scenes in ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ that,
particularly as they are written using the first-person narrative,
bring the reader close to the experience of the soul being
trapped within the dead body, but without fear of personal
harm. The use of the first person in fiction, as Jonathan
Auerbach notes, ‘encourages a special kind of intimacy to
develop between author and narrator’. 53
As in ‘Mesmeric Revelation’, ‘The Facts in the Case of
M. Valdemar’ concerns a narrator who is a mesmerist attending
a male patient close to death, although in this case this story
appears to be a more extreme, grotesque version of the first. It
is as if Poe, spurred on by the sensational reception of
‘Mesmeric Revelation’, decided to extend these ideas in ‘The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ to see how far he could push
the boundaries of fictional credibility.
41
In ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, the
mesmerist is seen among ‘professional’ doctors and, as Willis
notes, ‘claiming textual, evidentiary, and scientific authority, it is
difficult to see the narrator as anything other than the primary
scientific figure in the tale’. 54 Poe positions the role of the
mesmerist as scientific enquirer rather than dubious quack.
Addressing M(onsieur) Valdemar respectfully also socialises the
situation and implies a degree of respectability to what is
occurring. However, the mesmerist notes that no one has yet
been mesmerised in articulo mortis, and goes on to use the words
‘subject’ and ‘experiment’, all adding to the unnerving feeling
that the narrator is perhaps more Frankensteinian in his
intensions, with all the associations of the ruthless scientist
concerned only with obtaining the results of his work. This is
reinforced by the fact that the mesmerist has identified that
M. Valdemar has no family and therefore has no one likely to
cause trouble.
When, as agreed, the narrator is summoned to the
deathbed of M. Valdemar, the narrator provides a very precise
description of M. Valdemar’s illness and takes the attending
doctors, ‘D – – and F – – ’, ‘aside and obtained from them a
minute account of the patient’s condition’. 55 The narrator then
elicits the assistance of a medical student to take notes and
comments that ‘Doctors D – – and F – – … opposed no
objection’ to his proposed experiment, seeming to be carrying
out his own professional ritual of consultation between
colleagues, record-keeping, using formal and factual language in
keeping with a medical case. M. Valdemar is then put into a
mesmerised state and the doctors agree that he should ‘remain
undisturbed in his present apparently tranquil condition, until
death should supervene — and this, it was generally agreed,
must now take place within a few minutes.’
Later, even though the body of M. Valdemar gives
every sign that life has been extinguished, it seems that some
sort of consciousness still exists. At this point, the tone of Poe’s
writing becomes more extreme in terms of the descriptions used
42
to describe the strange events, for example, when a ‘vibratory
movement was observable in the tongue’ and a voice answered
‘from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the
earth’ when addressed by the mesmeriser. M. Valdemar
pronounces himself dead and it is concluded that, ‘so far, death
(or what is usually termed death) had been arrested by the
mesmeric process’. 56 M. Valdemar remains in this state for a
further seven months until a decision is made to ‘awaken him’.
As the mesmeric state is lifted, after some considerable efforts
on the part of P, so the body of M. Valdemar instantly
disintegrates in a gory manner, with the inference that once the
spirit was released, the body could be discarded and follow the
natural process of decay.
The use of the phrase, in articulo mortis, at the moment
of death or a moment before death, could apply to the medical
state or equally to a religious statement of confession or request
for absolution associated with the rituals of death, for example a
priest administering the last rites. 57 Roland Barthes in his textual
analysis of this story, notes that:
[…] the language of law and medicine, produces an
effect of scientificity (scientific code), but also, by
the intermediary of a euphemism (to say in a little
known language something one dares not say in
everyday language), designates a taboo (symbolic
code). 58
By taking this moment of profound transition as the subject for
experimentation and then couching it in the language of science
and theology implies a transgression of the traditional rites of
passage, which is likely to evoke both curiosity and horror for
the reader.
Catherine Wynne in her article on Bram Stoker’s fiction
comments that ‘Stoker endorses mesmerism as a science, but
deplores its creator’s [Mesmer’s] employment of crude pseudoreligiosity’ 59 in terms of the sometimes extreme ritualism used,
43
as discussed earlier. While Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula ‘features a
battle for the control of mesmerism, wresting it back from its
occultist associations and retrieving it for science’, 60 it could be
argued that fifty years earlier Poe, even though presenting the
mesmeric tales as scientific record, ventures into the fantastic
and puts mesmerism back into the realm of the imagination.
Role of Ritual in Storytelling
It is notable that in ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’,
M. Valdemar’s voice changes during the story from a weak
whisper to, when he makes the pronouncement ‘I am dead’, an
‘unearthly peculiarity […] from a deep cavern within the earth
[that] impressed [the narrator] as gelatinous or glutinous matters
impress the sense of touch’. 61 It is through this representation of
the voice, however distorted or grotesque, as Jonathan
Auerbach notes ‘that Poe continually reminds us […] of the
power of the speaking voice. […] Poe’s sign of a storyteller’s
vanishing authority to move a close circle of listeners’. 62 But
even though he is not talking in person to his audience, Poe can
still captivate his readers through the written word, even to the
point where they consider that his fantastic tale may be true.
Poe parodied the formulaic devices used in the fiction
that appeared in popular magazines, for example in an earlier
story ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’, which was a satire on
the sensational material that appeared in the very successful
Scottish Blackwood’s Magazine. 63 Nonetheless, this did not
prevent Poe adopting many of the conventions himself in his
works of horror and mystery, a style that led to success both in
the USA and Europe.
In his review of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s Twice-Told Tales,
Poe says of the short story form that ‘the author is enabled to
carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During
the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s
44
control’. 64 Like his narrators, ‘Poe sought to assert control over
his own mind by manipulating ours’, 65 and as the terrors that
might weigh heavily on Poe, such as dying and death itself, are
universal concerns, this would draw the reader into the often
dark worlds that Poe creates. In ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ and ‘The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, Poe further confuses the
reader by blurring the lines between the identity of the author
and first-person narrator by using ‘P’ to identify the narrator in
the dialogues that take place with the mesmerised subjects, so
adding to the sense that the author is writing from experience.
Jonathan Auerbach suggests that in the same way that the
mesmerist suspends death in the mesmeric tales, so the author
uses narrative suspense in the story. In this way the readers
become, what Auerbach terms ‘Poe’s intimate accomplices in
this vaudeville performance’ and are mesmerised by the writer in
much the same way that M. Valdemar is mesmerised by P. 66
Life’s rites of passage and the rituals associated with them reveal
much about the way we think and what we believe. Sometimes,
these rituals mark great events such as birth or death, and
sometimes just a change of state, such as from being healthy to
becoming sick, but these rituals do not have to be elaborate
ceremonies such as those adopted by Franz Mesmer in his
theatres of healing, even just little things like making tea or
reading a story can make a difference. The behavioural scientists
Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton note that a series of
investigations by psychologists have revealed intriguing new
results demonstrating that rituals can have a causal impact on
people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and may induce ‘a
feeling of being back in control and reducing uncertainty’. 67 So
the reader can settle down to enter the reassuring ‘once upon a
time’ land of the storyteller, which even if it is full of horror, can
excite and possibly even inform the mind but within the safe
framework of fiction. In his mesmeric tales, Poe’s narrator takes
the reader to that most fearsome place, the threshold of life and
death, exploring the light as well as the dark aspects of this
45
liminal world. Bruce Mills describes Poe’s preoccupation with
internal perception and its impact on the writer and the reader,
alluding to the imaginative process and the ‘borderland between
the physical and metaphysical’. 68 This suggests that Poe is not
only exploring his own ideas on the soul and its place in the
mind-body problem, but also is using the medium of
mesmerism and its rituals to explore the psychological interplay
between writers and readers.
Writers will always explore the obsessions of their time,
either directly or indirectly. In his mesmeric stories, Poe was
considering the manner in which one person can influence the
will of others, using the cultural symbols that his society knew
and understood, such as the power of mesmeric passes to reveal
a mysterious world of possibility, the value of the laying on of
hands to heal as well as the ritual of religious catechism as a way
of seeking answers to life’s great mysteries. Just as the patient
surrenders to the healer, so the reader gives their mind and
imagination over to the storyteller, and Poe’s mesmeric stories
are concerned as much with this exchange of power as they are
with the mysterious phenomenon of mesmerism.
Notes
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’: first
published in Godey’s in April 1844, although the version
consulted was the one appearing in Broadway Journal, 29
November 1844, 2, pp. 315–18. E-version on website of Edgar
Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggedc.htm (accessed 1
December 2014); ‘Mesmeric Revelation’. Columbian Magazine,
1
46
August 1844, 2, pp. 67–70. E-version on website of Edgar Allan
Poe Society of Baltimore.
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/mesmera.htm (accessed 1
December 2014); ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’: first
published in American Review in December 1845, although the
version consulted was the one reprinted in Broadway Journal, 20
December 1845, 2, pp. 365–8. E-version on website of Edgar
Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/vldmarb.htm (accessed 1
December 2014).
A term used in Alison Winter’s Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in
Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1998), p. 110, to describe the interest in and reception of
mesmerism at this time.
2
See, for example, Sidney E. Lind, 1947. ‘Poe and Mesmerism’.
PMLA, 62.4 (1947), pp. 1077–94 (pp. 1085–6), where some of
Poe’s reviews of relevant publications are discussed.
3
Anthony Enns, ‘Mesmerism and the Electric Age: from Poe to
Edison’ in Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne, eds. Victorian
Literary Mesmerism (Amsterdam: Rodopi BV, 2006), p. 65.
4
5 Sidney E. Lind, ‘Poe and Mesmerism’. PMLA, 62.4 (1947),
pp. 1077–94 (p. 1094) This also mentions Poe’s annoyance at
the London Popular Record of Modern Science for changing the title
‘Mesmeric Revelations’ to ‘The Last Conversation of a
Somnambule’, which was in Poe’s view ‘nothing at all with the
purpose’ (p. 1089).
E.R. Hilgard’s introduction to George Bloch’s compilation and
translation of Mesmer’s work, Mesmerism: a translation of the
original scientific and medical writings of F.A. Mesmer, translated and
compiled by George Bloch (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann,
1980), pp. xi–xxiii.
6
7 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in
France (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 165.
47
Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire on Poe. Critical Papers. Translated
and edited by Lois and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr (State College, PA:
Bald Eagle Press, 1952, originally in French, 1848), p. 148.
8
9 IML Donaldson (translator), The Reports of the Royal
Commission of 1784 on Mesmer’s System of Animal
Magnetism. http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/library-archives/animalmagnetism (accessed 1 March 2015).
Note: The terms animal magnetism, magnetism and
mesmerism for Mesmer’s techniques and the techniques that
derived from them became interchangeable, with mesmerism
becoming the most common.
10
Tim Fulford, ‘Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and
Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s’. Studies in Romanticism, 43.1,
Romanticism and the Sciences of Life (Spring, 2004), pp. 57–78
(p. 65).
11
Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the
Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1993), p. 52.
12
Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the
Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1993), pp. 13–14; Tim Fulford, Conducting the Vital
Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s.
Studies in Romanticism, 43.1, Romanticism and the Sciences of
Life (Spring, 2004), pp. 57–78 (p. 62). Judith Pintar and Stephen
Lynn, Hypnosis: A Brief History (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008),
p. 20; Maria Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
13
Adam Crabtree provides a detailed description of Mesmer’s
system of magnetic passes in From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep
and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1993), p. 14.
14
48
Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the
Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1993), p. 14.
15
Albert Edward Johnston, ‘The Laying on of Hands: Its Origin
and Meaning’. The Irish Church Quarterly, 4.16 (Oct., 1911),
pp. 312–23 (p. 323).
16
17
Ibid., p. 312.
Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, The Archaeology of Mind:
Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion: Neuroevolutionary Origins
of Human Emotions (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology).
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), pp. 30–1.
18
Abraham Verghese et al., ‘The Bedside Evaluation: Ritual and
Reason’. Annals of Internal Medicine 155.8 (2011), pp. 550–3.
19
20
Ibid., p. 551.
Robert C. Fuller, ‘Unorthodox Medicine and American
Religious Life’. The Journal of Religion, 67.1 (Jan. 1987), pp. 50–65
(p. 50).
21
22
Ibid., p. 56.
Bessel van der Kolk’s 1994 article ‘The body keeps the score:
Memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress’
(Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 5, 253–65), discusses the activation
of bodily awareness might be a way of treating a variety of
trauma-induced illnesses. Van der Kolk’s extensive research in
this area has now been compiled into a book, The Body Keeps the
Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York:
Viking Books, 2015).
23
Here Doris Falk is keen to dispel Lind’s assumption that Poe
interpreted mesmerism as hypnotism. ‘Poe and the power of
animal magnetism’. PMLA, 84.3 (1969), pp. 536–46 (p. 537).
24
25
Sidney Lind, 1947. ‘Poe and Mesmerism’. PMLA, 62.4, (1947)
pp. 1077–94. (pp. 1086–7).
49
Antoine Faivre, ‘Borrowings and Misreading: Edgar Allan
Poe’s “Mesmeric” Tales and the Strange Case of their
Reception’. Aries, 7 (2007): 21–62 (pp. 35–6).
26
Doris Falk, ‘Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism’.
PMLA, 84.3 (1969), pp. 536–46 (p. 545).
27
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’: first
published in Godey’s in April 1844 and later in Broadway Journal,
29 November 1844, 2, pp. 315–18. The E-version on the
website of Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore reproduced the
story from The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850), 2:
311–21. http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/raggedc.htm
(accessed 1 December 2014).
28
29
Ibid., p. 311.
30
Ibid., pp. 312–13.
31
Ibid., p. 314.
32
Ibid., p. 318.
33
Ibid., p. 319.
34
Ibid., p. 320.
Sidney E. Lind, 1947. ‘Poe and Mesmerism’. PMLA, 62.4
(1947), pp. 1077–94 (p. 1081).
35
Doris Falk, ‘Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism’.
PMLA, 84.3 (1969), pp. 536–46 (p. 543).
36
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Mesmeric Revelation’. Columbian Magazine,
August 1844, 2, pp. 67–70. E-version on website of Edgar Allan
Poe Society of Baltimore.
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/mesmera.htm (accessed 1
December 2014).
37
‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’: first published in
American Review in December 1845, although the version
consulted was the one reprinted in Broadway Journal, 20
38
50
December 1845, 2, pp. 365–8. E-version on website of Edgar
Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/vldmarb.htm (accessed 1
December 2014).
39 Thomas Ollive Mabbott (ed.) Edgar Allan Poe Tales and
Sketches, Volume 2, Urbana, MI: University of Illinois Press,
1978, p. 1027; Barger, Andrew (ed.) Edgar Allan Poe: Annotated
and Illustrated (Bottletree Books 2008), p. 323.
Someone in a mesmeric state. Sidney Lind discusses Poe’s use
of ‘sleepwaker’ rather than somnambule (1947: 1089), perhaps
suggesting the awakening of the mind while under the influence
of the mesmerist rather than the sleepwalk implied by
somnambule.
40
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Mesmeric Revelation’. The Works of the Late
Edgar Allan Poe (1850), pp. 110–120 (p. 112).
41
George Bloch’s compilation and translation of Mesmer’s
work, Mesmerism: a translation of the original scientific and medical
writings of F.A. Mesmer, translated and compiled by George
Bloch; with an introduction by E.R. Hilgard. (Los Altos, CA:
William Kaufmann, 1980), Chapter V Catechism on Animal
Magnetism.
42
Sidney E. Lind, 1947. ‘Poe and Mesmerism’. PMLA, 62.4
(1947), pp. 1077–94 (p. 1088).
43
Antoine Faivre, ‘Borrowings and Misreading: Edgar Allan
Poe’s “Mesmeric” Tales and the Strange Case of their
Reception’. Aries, 7 (2007): 21–62 (p. 33).
44
Doris Falk, ‘Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism’.
PMLA, Vol. 84, No. 3 (1969), pp. 536–46 (p. 543).
45
Antoine Faivre, ‘Borrowings and Misreading: Edgar Allan
Poe’s “Mesmeric” Tales and the Strange Case of their
Reception’. Aries, 7 (2007): 21–62 (p. 33).
46
51
David A. Zimmerman. ‘Frank Norris, Market Panic, and the
Mesmeric Sublime’. American Literature 75.1 (2003): 61–90 (63–
4).
47
Clery, E. J., The genesis of Gothic fiction. The Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction edited by Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge
Collections Online. (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), p. 28.
48
Morris, David B., Gothic sublimity. New Literary History, 16.2,
The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations (Winter 1985),
299–319.
49
50
Ibid., p. 300.
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2008). p. 3.
51
Gita May, Diderot and Burke: a study in aesthetic affinity.
PMLA, 75.5 (Dec. 1960), 527–539 (pp. 539; 530).
52
Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions
of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), p. 8.
53
Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines. Science Fiction
and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 2006), p. 119.
54
55 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’. The
Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. 1 (1850) pp. 121–130 (p. 122).
56
Ibid., p. 129.
Quoted from Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary,
cited by
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/ind
ex.cfm?id=34139 (accessed 1 March 2015).
57
Roland Barthes (translated by Donald G. Marshall), ‘Textual
analysis of a tale by Edgar Poe’. Poe Studies, June 1977, Vol. X,
No. 1, 10:1–12.
58
52
http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/index.htm#ps19771
(accessed 1 March 2015).
59 Catherine Wynne, ‘Mesmeric Exorcism, Idolatrous Beliefs,
and Bloody Rituals: Mesmerism, Catholicism, and Second Sight
in Bram Stoker's Fiction’. Victorian Review, 26.1 (2000), pp. 43–
63 (p. 47).
Catherine Wynne, ‘Mesmeric Exorcism, Idolatrous Beliefs,
and Bloody Rituals: Mesmerism, Catholicism, and Second Sight
in Bram Stoker's Fiction’. Victorian Review, 26.1 (2000), pp. 43–
63 (p. 47).
60
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’. The
Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. 1 (1850) pp. 121–130 (p. 128).
61
Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions
of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), p. 58.
62
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article and A
Predicament’, Phantasy Pieces, 1 (1842) pp. 213–27. It concerns
the transference of advice from the publisher, Blackwood, to the
writer Miss Psyche Zenobia and commended the use of ‘tact,
taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition’. In a followup story, ‘A Predicament’, Miss Psyche Zenobia attempts to
follow the advice, which leads to her disembodied head trying to
record the sensation of being beheaded by a clock.
63
From a review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, which
originally appeared in Graham’s Magazine, published in
Philadelphia, in May, 1842 and reproduced in Appendix C: Poe
on Writers and Writing. In Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and
Tales, edited by James M. Hutchinson (Peterborough, ON:
Broadview Press, 2012), p. 526.
64
Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in
the American Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2014), p. 140.
65
53
Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions
of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), pp. 58, 66–7.
66
Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton. ‘Why rituals work’.
Scientific American, 14 May 2013.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-rituals-work/
(accessed 1 March 2015).
67
68 Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in
the American Renaissance (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press, 2006), p. 45.
54