Entertaining the Supernatural: Animal Magnetism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science

Professor Peter Otto, Chair of English Literary Studies, University of Melbourne

Loss of belief in the supernatural and its replacement by faith in reason are often thought to be clear signs that a society has left its traditional forms and become modern. ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’, Kant announces in An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”(1784), and ‘immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another’. [1] The use of one’s understanding, it is assumed, brings secularization and disenchantment in its wake, throwing into disrepute a host of fictitious entities (fairies, ghosts, spirits, demons, souls, gods), pseudo-sciences (alchemy, astrology, magic, divination, numerology, palmistry, Mesmerism), and paranormal powers (extra-sensory perception, second-sight, telepathy, pre-cognition, clairvoyance, prophecy, a sixth sense). This triumphal narrative is such an important part of the way contemporary western cultures understand themselves that many are surprised to discover the extent to which the modern world has been haunted by its supernatural others.

The Enlightenment (the Age of Reason) is usually associated with figures such as the father of British empiricism John Locke (1632-1704), the mathematician and natural philosopher Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and the sceptical philosopher and author Voltaire (1698-1778); but the Age of Reason is also the age of the visionary and spirit-seer Immanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the evangelist John Wesley (1703-91), and the father of Mesmerism or animal magnetism Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815).