Joseph Ennemoser and Magnetic Historiography

The origins of this specific development can be located very clearly: it all began with a medical theory proposed in 1807 by the respected physician Johann Christian Reil, and adopted by Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge in his influential textbook of animal magnetism published in 1811.
This theory distinguished between two separate but mutually complementary nerve systems, the “cerebral system” (brain and spinal marrow) and the “ganglion system” (centered on the solar plexus), which were presented as the organs of the conscious and the unconscious soul. The basic concept was quickly adopted by a whole series of major authors, including Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Joseph Ennemoser, Johann Carl Passavant, Dietrich Georg Kieser, Carl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann, and Justinus Kerner. They appear to have agreed that through the ganglion system, we have access, in Schubert’s influential formulation, to the mysterious “nightside” of nature.

In this lecture, Wounter J Hanegraaf emphasizes Ennemoser's three innovative features: (1) his use of mesmerism/somnambulism as the heuristic “key” for tracing the history of magic, (2) his evolutionist/providentialist vision, and (3) the religionist nature of his approach in general.
Far from the conflicts between pagan or heretical concepts and biblical theology, Ennemoser's concern was, quite simply, to show that the phenomena of magnetism and somnambulic trance were nothing new but had existed since the earliest childhood of humanity. In making that claim, Ennemoser became the chief pioneer of a new genre of “occult historiography.” 
Are you akeen to discover the hidden face of Man and Nature ?  Response of the autor in his 41-min lecture filmed at La Sorbonne (Paris). Please note that this conference was organised by Jean-Pierre Laurant on behalf of  Politica Hermetica.

Extrait de la vidéo

I would like to focus on the somewhat neglected history of mesmerism of animal magnetism in German romantic culture, German romantic culture, and more specifically, on its even more neglected impact on the historiography of Western esotericism.

The central figure in my story is Josef Annenmoser, and in order to explain his significance, I will have to begin with some general observations first.

In the context of German romanticism, mesmerism or magnetism developed into a direction that was strongly different from what we find in other countries such as France or England.

The origins of this specifically German development can be located very clearly.

It all began with a medical theory proposed in 1807 by the respected physician Johan Christian Reihl and adopted by Karl-Alexander Ferdinand Kluge in his influential textbook of animal magnetism published in 1811.

This theory distinguished between two separate but mutually complementary nerve systems, the cerebral system, brain and a spiral marrow, and the so-called ganglion system, centered on the solar plexus, which were presented as the organs of the conscious and the unconscious soul.

The basic concept was quickly adopted by a whole series of major authors, including Gotthild Heinrich von Schubert, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Josef Annenmoser himself, Johan Karl Passavant, Dietrich Georg Kiesel, Karl Josef Hieronymus Windischmann, and Justinus Kerner.

They appear to have agreed that through the ganglion system, we have access in Schubert's influential formulation to the mysterious night sight of nature.

The cerebral system, associated with rational thinking and discursive language, is dominant during our waking life, but its ganglionic counterpart takes over when we fall asleep, and our soul then starts speaking to us in its own hieroglyphic and poetic language of images and symbols.

However, it was only in the artificial state of somnambulic sleep, or trance, that the ganglion system was seen as revealing its full potential.

Countless contemporary observers described how patients in such a condition displayed a range of spectacular occult or psychic abilities, including action at a distance, hypersensitivity, perception by a sixth or inner sense, quick recognition, clairvoyance, the perception of spirits and angelic beings, speaking and writing in archaic or unknown languages and scripts, and mystical visions of higher worlds and divine realities.

The most famous of all these somnambulic patients was Friederike Hauver, known as the Seeress of Prevorst, whose case was described in detail by the poet and physician Justinus Kerner in the best-selling book of 1829.

But similar phenomena appear to have been observed in countless other patients, almost all of them female, leading to a copious literature and intense discussions among physicians and philosophers.

In the German romantic literature on somnambulism, the theory of the two complementary nerve systems was developed into a full-blown counter-metaphysics, directed wholesale against enlightenment rationalism.

In the paradigmatic formulations of Justinus Kerner, the shallow daylight world of the rationalist whose heart-glass skull, tabula vitrea, keeps him isolated from intuitions of a higher world, stands against the profoundly meaningful night-side world of the somnambules, who know from direct experience that behind the brutal realities of social and material existence, there is a much larger, all-encompassing and deeply meaningful life.

Hence, there are two complementary worlds, or levels of reality, each with its own specific mode of experience and expression.

While the enlightenment reduces everything to cold logic and discursive prose, its alternative expresses itself through profound symbols and poetic language.

While our bodily senses shut down temporarily and we descend into dream or somnambulic trance, our soul wakes up to the larger world from which it has come and where it really belongs.

The rationalist, in contrast, is spiritually asleep.

He lives in a state of artificial isolation from his own soul and its powers of perception, incapable of understanding the language of symbols and poetry.

He naively believes that his brain and his senses show him all there is, never realising that they are obstacles rather than reliable instruments for discovering the deeper secrets of nature.

Blind as he is to her spiritual dimensions, he can only dismiss belief in occult powers and supernormal abilities as irrational superstition.

Such abilities are, however, neither miraculous nor supernatural.

They are natural human faculties, potentially available to us all.

Hence, the remarkable feats of somnambulism reveal the powers that are latent in humanity, and the first step towards developing them is to reject the limited and limiting reductionist superstitions that have claimed the nature of science and reason for themselves.

This was a summary of the theory as it was developed.

In appealing to recent medical theories and discoveries, and insisting that these were grounded in empirical facts, ignored by Enlightenment thinkers, German Romantic intellectuals were defending the scientific superiority of an enchanted and poetic worldview on Paracelsian and theosophical foundations.

The organic centre of the ganglion system was in the hypochondrium, that is, the upper region of the abdomen marked by the lower ribs, now usually linked to the solar plexus, but known in 19th century Germany as the Herzgrube, the heart cavity.

For Paracelsus and Johannes Baptista van Helmond, this was the seat of the Archaeus, or life spirits, and it assumed a crucial importance in German Romantic mesmerism as well.

An earlier mesmerist, Tardy de Montravel, pointed to the Herzgrube as the location of the interior sense, through which direct perception was possible, independent of the five exterior senses.

And in fact, this region was constantly highlighted as the main organ of clairvoyant perception in virtuoso somnambulists, such as Friederike Hauver.

In other words, against the cold rational knowledge of the brain, associated with the cerebral system, the German Romantic mesmerists highlighted the superior spiritual knowledge of the heart, associated with its ganglionic counterpart.

This knowledge included paranormal or clairvoyant perception, but it went far beyond it to embrace metaphysical realms.

Following the micro-macrocosmos correspondent thinking of Paracelsus, Paracelsian and Swedenborgian theory, the heart is the center of the human organism, corresponded with the sun as the center of the solar system, and this center in turn corresponded with the unfathomable light of divinity at the heart of all creation.

And ultimately then, the somnambulic knowledge of the heart was understood as a gnosis about divine things, infinitely superior to the merely rational knowledge of the brain and a testimony of the exterior senses.

By presenting daylight rationality as a limited instrument, powerless to grasp the deeper night-side truths accessible to the soul, or to explain the empirical facts of consciousness revealed by somnambulic trance, the Romantic mesmerists had discovered a line of argumentation that stood all the principles of enlightenment philosophy and science on their head.