A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

American fantasies of the godless Enlightened rogue.” 33
Mesmerism needed to be stripped of
this taint of continental libertinism for it to find a willing American constituency. It was in its
more acceptable manifestation as hypnotism and in the latter’s ultimate adoption by Spiritualism
that it would do so.
Following the work of Puységur, French researches into the uses of animal magnetism
pursued primarily therapeutic goals. By 1825 French magnetists had observed all of the primary
effects of hypnotism recognized by the current understanding of the process: hypnotic analgesia
and anesthesia, posthypnotic suggestion, hypnotic catalepsy, as well as positive and negative
hallucinations. 34
Along with the curative powers of the magnetic trance however, certain
secondary effects continued to occur. In the case of Victor, Puységur was struck in further
iterations of his experiment by the marked difference between his subjects' personality,
intelligence and demeanor in a waking state and the same components of personality in the
trance state. Victor, who according to the Marquis was quite a dullard, became under hypnosis a
man about whom Puységur observed, “I have met no one more profound, wiser or more clearsighted
than he.” 35
While one wonders how much of this transformation might have been based
upon a momentary abeyance of the traditional subaltern strategy of “playing dumb,” the
magnification of intellect and knowledge in the trance state is commonly noted in the literature
of mesmerism and Spiritualism. Victor’s apparent increase in intelligence might be viewed as
part of what came to be called “higher phenomena.” These so-called higher phenomena included
telepathy, medical clairvoyance (the ability to diagnose illness and prescribe treatment via
“second sight”), traveling clairvoyance (which has come to be known as “astral projection,” or
“remote viewing” in the language of military intelligence), seeing while blindfolded and rapport
or “community of sensation” in which the subject experiences the stimuli encountered by the
hypnotist. A picture emerges from this catalogue of higher phenomena of a state of
33 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books,
1994) 61.
34 Brown; Alan Gauld, “Mesmer” in Man, Myth and Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural, ed.
Richard Cavendish (New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1970) 1815-1817.
35 Brown, 3.
31