What exactly is magnetism?

For almost as long as humanity can remember, magnetism has fascinated people as an invisible force linking the material and spiritual worlds. First observed through lodestone, which could attract iron, this phenomenon nourished myths and sacred practices. From priests of antiquity to healers in our countryside, this energy was attributed with strange powers, sometimes to heal, sometimes to enchant. But what is it really? And where does it come from? Here are the answers.

Magnetic Stones and Invisible Power

The earliest accounts of magnetism in the Western world date back to Greco-Roman antiquity. The Greeks discovered particular stones in Asia Minor - magnetite - capable of attracting iron. A legendary account reported by Pliny the Elder tells of a young shepherd named Magnes, whose studded sandals and iron staff were drawn toward an unseen rock: this is supposedly how he discovered the first lodestone. This “magnes” - named after the region of Magnesia - gave its name to the phenomenon. Ancient thinkers saw it as more than a mineral curiosity. The philosopher Thales of Miletus, in the 6th century BCE, claimed that the magnet was endowed with a soul because it could move inanimate objects. In this way, he gave a living and spiritual dimension to this stone, which seemed to act according to its own will.

This wonder at the powers of the magnet can be seen in the many names and symbols with which it was adorned. The Greeks nicknamed it the “stone of Hercules,” referring to the hero renowned for his strength, so impressed were they by the magnet’s attractive force. Indeed, an entire mythology surrounds the magnet: it was said that magnetic islands existed, capable of drawing iron-laden ships toward them, or that men could find themselves pinned to the ground by their iron-shod footwear when the soil was rich in magnetite. Serious authors of antiquity, such as Plutarch and Ptolemy, also circulated strange recipes involving the magnet: rubbing a magnet with garlic was supposedly enough to make it lose its power, while immersing it in goat’s blood would immediately restore it. These beliefs, reported centuries later by scholars, show how deeply the magnetism of the stone nourished the imagination and mysterious practices from antiquity onward.

Magnetite

Alongside these legends, the magnet was credited with very tangible virtues, particularly therapeutic ones. Ancient physicians used the magnetic stone to relieve certain ailments. Aristotle himself mentions the magnet’s analgesic and healing effects, capable not only of soothing pain but also of extracting iron fragments from the body, such as arrowheads from wounds. Similarly, the healing god Asclepius (Aesculapius) was associated with these beneficial properties of the stone of Hercules. In ancient Egypt, magnetite was used as a protective amulet, with priests viewing it as a talisman that captured beneficial forces and warded off malign influences.

This dual purpose of the magnet - both magical and curative - is reflected in numerous historical anecdotes. Queen Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Egypt, was renowned for her interest in the occult sciences of her time. Tradition holds that she wore a magnetic jewel on her forehead to preserve her beauty and prevent wrinkles, convinced that the stone could help maintain the youthfulness of her skin. Better still, it is said that she slept on a bed inlaid with lodestones in order to bathe her body in this beneficial magnetic influence. Likewise, Hippocrates - the father of Greek medicine - is said to have used magnetite to treat certain disorders, such as infertility, demonstrating that the idea of healing magnetism was already present among the scholars of antiquity.

Thus, in the ancient Western world, the magnet appears as a point of contact between the visible and the invisible. Sometimes an instrument of myth (guiding sailors and protecting against occult forces), sometimes a remedy, it symbolizes a universal energy of attraction and harmony. What the Greeks vaguely sensed - a single force capable of acting at a distance, healing the body, and influencing the soul - would endure through the ages and grow richer through esoteric traditions.

The Rediscovery of Magnetism during the Renaissance

After the Middle Ages, which mainly retained the magnet’s usefulness for the compass and navigation, the Renaissance saw renewed interest in magnetism as an occult force. Sixteenth-century Hermetic thinkers and alchemists incorporated the magnet and its strange power into their vision of the cosmos. Among them, the Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus (1493-1541) played a major role. Convinced that humanity is a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, Paracelsus described nature as traversed by an invisible universal fluid linking the stars, the Earth, and living beings. He explicitly named this energy magnetism. According to him, every human being is imbued with a magnetic fluid that emanates from the cosmos and circulates through the body, creating polarities in the manner of a magnet. The human body would therefore possess a positive pole (linked to celestial influences) and a negative pole (anchored in the earthly elements), with health resulting from the balance of these forces. Paracelsus stated: “Man is endowed with this particular fluid emanating from the macrocosm... an energy known by the name of magnetism”. He even sought to explain certain curses or enchantments through this magnetic action: a sorcerer’s will could influence a victim’s “spiritual body” from a distance, as though magnetizing an object, producing real effects without physical contact. For him, this invisible link between beings belonged to the same natural science that physicians must not neglect, because understanding magnetism meant understanding one of the keys to life.

In this Renaissance century, magnetism thus became a bridge between emerging science and ancient magic. Scholars explored its physical manifestations while preserving a mystical perspective. In 1600, the English physician William Gilbert rigorously studied magnets and proposed that the Earth itself was a gigantic magnet. But he went further, speculating that this “magnetic breath” might explain the movements of the planets better than gravity. In his work De Magnete, Gilbert spoke of “magnetic spirits” emanating from the sun and stars, animating the cosmos like a living organism. This quasi-animistic conception of cosmic magnetism sparked passionate debate. The Church, wary of the idea, feared that the laws of nature might be confused with pagan souls. In 1667, the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published The Magnetic Kingdom of Nature to offer a Christian vision of the phenomenon. He accepted the idea of a magnetic movement in the heavens, linking the stars to one another, but refused to grant the Earth a “magnetic soul” in order to preserve orthodoxy. Kircher nevertheless celebrated magnetism as a symbol of universal harmony: the frontispiece of his book depicts a great magnetic chain of beings held at one end by God in the clouds, with its lower end touching the Earth. The links of this chain are not attached to one another but hold together through their own attractive force, illustrating the idea that divine will magnetizes the world to ensure its cohesion. This powerful image of the “magnetic chain” reflects the mentality of the era: magnetism was perceived as the universe’s secret glue, the subtle fluid through which the Creator linked every thing within the great hierarchy of Creation.

Alongside these cosmic speculations, magnetism remained a concrete tool of healing and mystery. In the 17th century, the Flemish physician Jan Baptista van Helmont took up Paracelsus’s legacy. In 1621, he published a treatise on cura magnetica - the “magnetic healing of wounds” - in which he defended the effectiveness of treating a wound from a distance by applying an ointment to the weapon that had caused it rather than to the wound itself. This famous sympathetic balm, he claimed, worked through magnetic action: the wound and the weapon remained connected by an invisible fluid. Van Helmont shocked the Inquisition by daring to suggest that even saints’ relics might heal not through divine miracles, but through a natural magnetic influence they exerted on the faithful. His writings, tainted by criticism of Jesuit scholastics, led to his prosecution for twenty years by ecclesiastical courts. This clearly shows how magnetism, as a “natural” force with extraordinary effects, challenged the boundaries between science, faith, and magic. As the Enlightenment approached, the idea that an invisible fluid passed through the world and the human body was both exhilarating to innovators and unsettling to religious authorities. This magnetic fluid, it was beginning to be suspected, might be life’s very energy, a key to nature’s secrets - a prospect that opened the way to discoveries as well as controversies.

Mesmer and “Animal Magnetism” in the Age of Enlightenment

In the 18th century, magnetism emerged from esoteric circles to become a genuine social craze, embodied by the charismatic Franz-Anton Mesmer. A physician of Viennese origin who settled in Paris, Mesmer drew on the legacy of earlier ideas (Paracelsus’s fluids and Van Helmont’s experiments) to develop his own theory, which he called animal magnetism (as opposed to the purely mineral magnetism of the magnet). According to Mesmer, a universal magnetic fluid permeated the air, the stars, and living beings, and imbalances in the human body caused illness. The healer’s role was therefore to restore the harmonious circulation of this vital fluid through the patient’s body. Mesmer proposed that certain individuals - including himself - possessed a powerful natural magnetic force and could, through willpower alone and the laying on of hands, direct this fluid through another person in order to heal them.

Franz-Anton Mesmer

From the 1770s to the 1780s, Mesmer put his ideas into practice in Paris and sparked extraordinary enthusiasm. In luxurious salons, he organized group sessions around a strange device: the famous Mesmer tub. It was a large circular tub filled with water mixed with iron filings, connected by curved iron rods that patients seated around it held or applied to the affected parts of their bodies. Mesmer claimed to “magnetize” the tub by infusing it with his personal fluid, thereby transforming the water and metal into reservoirs of magnetism. To the sound of a glass harmonica (a musical instrument producing enchanting vibrations), the therapist moved among the patients, performing magnetic passes - broad hand movements a few centimeters from their bodies - to distribute the fluid and dissolve energetic blockages. The effects soon appeared: many patients entered a magnetic crisis, a kind of convulsive trance accompanied by sweating, laughter, or cathartic tears. Mesmer saw these crises as proof that the fluid was realigning vital forces and expelling illness. Accounts reported spectacular recoveries from paralysis, hysterical blindness, and chronic pain, attributed to the action of this healing magnetism.

Mesmer’s magnetic tub (engraving, 1780)

Mesmer’s social success was so great that people flocked to his sessions as though they were performances. Members of the aristocracy and high society took part in the tub ritual, delighted to experience something on the border between science and wonder. For many, Mesmer had restored prestige to a natural magic they thought forgotten. He described his system in scholarly terms, seeking to persuade people that this magnetic fluid was ultimately nothing more than a subtle physical force, analogous to electricity or gravity, which science would eventually measure. Yet in secret, the entire city whispered about the doctor’s mage-like appearance, piercing gaze, and almost incantatory hand movements. Mesmer himself, wrapped in the trappings of success, seemed to oscillate between the role of enlightened physician and thaumaturge. He advised his patients to place themselves in a receptive, almost faith-like state in order to absorb the fluid more effectively - an approach closer to spiritual healing than to conventional medical treatment.

Animal magnetism. Source: SSEDS

His students and successors would further deepen the mystical dimension of magnetism. In 1784, the Marquis de Puységur, one of his disciples, accidentally discovered that magnetizing a young peasant could plunge him into a state of lucid somnambulism. The patient Victor, apparently asleep, began to speak, answer questions, and display strange insights into his own illness - as though he could see within himself. This “magnetic sleep,” without convulsions, in which the subject acted like a medium, opened up new possibilities. Puységur and other magnetists explored this trance phenomenon, which supposedly allowed access to the patient’s mind and perhaps to hidden knowledge. It soon became apparent that magnetism was not used only to heal the body: it could also awaken unexplained psychic faculties, such as clairvoyance or mind-reading. Thus, by the end of the 18th century, animal magnetism had become a bridge toward the study of the soul and the paranormal.

Of course, this rise of magnetism did not occur without criticism. University physicians and advocates of the triumphant reason of the Enlightenment viewed these experiments unfavorably, as they combined theatrical crises, mysticism, and a complete lack of tangible evidence. On the orders of King Louis XVI, a royal commission, whose members included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, investigated Mesmer’s practices. Their report, published in 1784, concluded that the effects observed were real but were caused by imagination and the power of suggestion rather than by any new fluid. Mesmer, stung by the criticism, left France soon afterward. It did not matter: animal magnetism had taken root in popular and scholarly culture, and a host of magnetists continued his work throughout Europe. In France, at the turn of the 19th century, followers such as Baron Du Potet, Dr. Deleuze, and Abbé Faria perpetuated and transformed the Mesmerian legacy. Magnetic fluid entered medical and occult literature, sometimes to praise its wonders, sometimes to ridicule it. In any case, it became impossible to ignore this strange force that aroused passions and seemed to defy conventional explanations.

Magnetism, Magic, and Esotericism

The 19th century in France was a pivotal period in which magnetism stood at the crossroads of the emerging science of the psyche, unconventional medicine, and magical tradition. While the first hypnotists (James Braid would rename the practice “hypnosis” around 1843) sought to provide a rational explanation for magnetic sleep, a powerful esoteric current seized upon magnetism and incorporated it into a broader vision of occultism. This was the period when magnetism openly flirted with spirituality: people no longer spoke only of healing bodies, but also of initiating souls and exploring invisible worlds.

Book Dogma and Ritual of High Magic, Éliphas Lévi

In 1853, the French esotericist Éliphas Lévi published his work Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. Familiar with magnetic ideas, Lévi identified Mesmer’s magnetic fluid with the “Astral Light,” the omnipresent occult energy he regarded as the great universal magical agent. According to him, the astral light was a subtle ether that stored every image and influence, and through which both ceremonial magic and magnetic phenomena operated. He wrote in vivid terms: “The world is magnetized by the light of the sun, and we are magnetized by the astral light of the world. ... We have within us three centers of fluidic attraction: the brain, the heart, and the genital organ... it is through these organs that we communicate with the universal fluid transmitted into us by the nervous system”. Lévi’s discourse clearly merged the vocabulary of magnetism with that of Kabbalistic magic. In his writing, magnetism was nothing less than a primordial cosmic force that the mage could capture and direct through willpower in order to produce what were once called miracles. Other occultists, such as Baron du Potet (who directed the Revue du Magnétisme), and later Papus, extended this idea by making magnetism the cornerstone of a recovered “sacred science.” Magnetism thus became an initiatory tool: the aim was not only to heal, but to raise the magnetized person toward higher planes of consciousness.

This assimilation of magnetism to ancient magic did not please everyone. Religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, became alarmed. Nineteenth-century Catholic authors wrote vehement pamphlets against magnetism and the emerging spiritism. For an apologist such as Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, the magnetic fluid was merely a new manifestation of the occult: “Magnetism is the modern form of magic. The immediate cause of both table-turning and mediumistic phenomena, it allows the magnetized person to acquire extraordinary powers,” he declared indignantly, concluding that such powers necessarily implied demonic intervention. This extreme viewpoint - seeing every magnetist as a sorcerer unaware of what they were - illustrates the persistence of fear surrounding magnetism. It is true that certain demonstrations of the period blurred the boundary between science and the supernatural. For example, during table-turning sessions (precursors to spiritism around 1850), many observed that the presence of a magnetized medium greatly facilitated unexplained movements and communications from beyond the grave. People even spoke of “odic force” or “psychic fluid” to describe this bewildering energy produced by magnetists and mediums. In the eyes of believers, this force could just as readily be a divine gift (if seen as a means of relieving suffering and enlightening the soul) as a diabolical temptation (if feared as a means of invoking harmful spirits). In any case, magnetism became firmly established in the cultural landscape: it was studied by curious physicians, practiced by fashionable healers, invoked by spiritualists, and opposed by moralists - a sign that it had become a true social phenomenon.

At the end of the 19th century, some sought to reconcile magnetism with science by stripping it of its supernatural aura. In France, figures such as Hector Durville and his family founded schools of magnetism. They proposed an “experimental and therapeutic” approach to magnetism, attempting to integrate it as an auxiliary to official medicine without resorting to spiritualist explanations. However, even Durville ultimately acknowledged the existence of a “transcendental magnetism” extending beyond the merely physical framework: an occult aspect of magnetic fluid touching on “higher life, the immutable infinite,” belonging more to a sacred science than to material science. Despite every effort to “rationalize” magnetism, its mystery persisted. This force remained elusive: at times measured in mesmerisms, passes, and perhaps dynes, at other times regarded as the very fabric of dreams and the soul of the world.

What Kind of Magnetism Exists Today?

Magnetism, as a practice, survived every shift in fashion and every criticism to become firmly rooted in Western folk traditions. In France in particular, it remains part of the landscape of traditional healing to this day. In rural areas, the figure of the magnetist-healer remains familiar and respected. Since the 19th century and long before, people gifted with the “gift” have devoted themselves to relieving others through the laying on of hands, prayer, and the transmission of vital fluid. Depending on the region, they are called toucheurs, healers, or specialists such as fire cutters (those who instantly soothe burns). These generally discreet practitioners embody the direct legacy of Mesmer’s animal magnetism, enriched by local influences. They do not always explicitly speak of “magnetism,” but readily refer to a universal energy or divine force passing through their hands.

Even today, it is not unusual to encounter, in a Breton village or a small town in the Massif Central, a magnetist whom people turn to when conventional medicine is powerless or takes too long. Thousands of French people consult them to cut the fire of radiotherapy, soothe shingles, calm stubborn pain, or rebalance the nerves. Far from being relegated to the status of superstition, magnetism continues to be practiced with fervor and humility. It adapts to modern needs while retaining its spiritual essence. Practitioners can be found throughout the country, each with their own sensitivity: one may soothe burns, another may realign “the magnetism of the joints,” while elsewhere someone may purify the “fluids” of a depressed person. This diversity reflects the richness of a tradition that has endured through the centuries. Above all, the continuing success of these practices shows that, for many of our contemporaries, there is something more than tangible matter: an invisible energetic principle, of which magnetism is one expression, upon which one can act to restore harmony.

It is remarkable that the public’s trust in these magnetists remains strong. Very often, they work alongside or in addition to physicians: people may “see the bonesetter” for back pain while continuing their medical treatment, or ask a fire cutter to intervene on a burn while waiting for emergency care. This pragmatic coexistence between scientific medicine and magnetic healing illustrates a popular wisdom: why refuse help, even if it is inexplicable, if it provides relief? Ultimately, for many people, magnetism is less a belief than a lived experience - the beneficial warmth of a hand on a fevered forehead, pain fading without knowing how, sleep returning after a magnetic pass.

At the beginning of the 21st century, magnetism is also becoming part of new forms of spirituality and well-being. Bridges are being built between the Western tradition of the magnetist and Eastern practices such as Reiki (which likewise relies on the transmission of universal energy through the laying on of hands). The language changes: people speak of “biomagnetic energy,” chakras, and the aura - terms borrowed from India or contemporary esotericism - but the essence remains the same. The aim is to open the channels of vital energy and restore balance to body and mind. Many modern magnetists explain their gift in educational terms: every living being is traversed by a subtle current, comparable to an electrical network, which must be rebalanced in the event of a “short circuit” or blockage. These analogies aim to make magnetism understandable to people today without dispelling its enchantment. For the spiritual dimension is never far away: many practitioners invoke an energy of love, a grace that passes through them. Magnetism thus retains a sacred or divine character - people speak of a gift from Heaven - even when it is presented in modern language.

Thus, magnetism as a spiritual and magical force has accompanied the West throughout the ages, constantly transforming yet never disappearing. Its symbolic role is powerful: it represents universal attraction, the mysterious correspondence between all things, the life force that unites soul and body, humanity and nature. And even today, when a magnetist’s hands relieve pain or soothe a troubled mind, a little of that wisdom comes back to life: the wisdom that says the invisible is part of reality, and that magnetism is a path toward touching the mystery of life.

Sources:

• On the Influence of the Stars on Living Bodies, Franz Anton Mesmer, 1776

• Memoir on Animal Magnetism, Marquis de Puységur, 1784

• Magnetism and Mesmerism in the Enlightenment, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2015

• The Discovery of the Unconscious, Henri F. Ellenberger, Basic Books, 1970

• The Doctrine of Animal Magnetism, Charles Lafontaine, 1851

• From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, Adam Crabtree, Yale University Press, 1993

• Medical Archives on Magnetism, Paris, 19th Century

• Manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, sections on Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism