Since almost the dawn of time, magnetism has fascinated humans as an invisible force connecting the material world and the spiritual world. First observed through the lodestone capable of attracting iron, this phenomenon has inspired myths and sacred practices. From ancient priests to rural healers, this energy was attributed strange powers, sometimes to heal, sometimes to enchant. But what is it really? And where does it come from? Answers.
1. Magnetic stones and invisible power
The earliest records of magnetism in the West date back to Greco-Roman Antiquity. The Greeks had discovered in Asia Minor particular stones – magnetite – capable of attracting iron. A legendary story reported by Pliny the Elder tells of a young shepherd named Magnes, whose hobnailed sandals and iron staff were attracted by an invisible rock: thus he supposedly discovered the first lodestone. This “magnes” – named after the region of Magnesia – gave its name to the phenomenon. Ancient thinkers saw more than a mineral curiosity in it. The philosopher Thales of Miletus, in the 6th century BC, claimed that the magnet was endowed with a soul because it could move inanimate objects. By this, he gave a living and spiritual dimension to this stone that seemed to act by its own will.
This wonder at the powers of the magnet is reflected in the many names and symbols it was given. The Greeks nicknamed it the “stone of Hercules,” referring to the hero famed for his strength, so impressed were they by the magnet’s attractive force. Indeed, a whole mythology surrounds the magnet: it is said that magnetic islands exist that can attract iron-laden ships, or that men were pinned to the ground by their iron-shod shoes when the soil was rich in magnetite. Serious ancient authors such as Plutarch or Ptolemy also passed on strange recipes related to the magnet: for example, rubbing a magnet with garlic was said to make it lose its power, while dipping it in goat’s blood would immediately restore it. These beliefs, reported centuries later by scholars, show how the magnet’s magnetism fueled imagination and mysterious practices since Antiquity.
Magnetite
Alongside the legends, the magnet was credited with very concrete virtues, notably therapeutic ones. Ancient physicians used the magnetic stone to relieve certain ailments. Aristotle himself mentioned the analgesic and healing effect of the magnet, 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 served as a protective amulet, priests considering it a talisman that captured beneficial forces and warded off evil influences.
This dual role of the magnet – both magical and curative – is embodied in many historical anecdotes. Queen Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Egypt, was reputed for her interest in the occult sciences of her time. Tradition holds that she wore a magnet jewel on her forehead to preserve her beauty and prevent wrinkles, convinced of the stone’s ability to maintain youthful skin. Even more, it is said she slept on a bed inlaid with lodestones 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, showing that the idea of healing magnetism was already present among ancient scholars.
Thus, in the ancient Western world, the magnet appears as a point of contact between the visible and the invisible. Sometimes an instrument of myths (guiding sailors, protecting from occult forces), sometimes a remedy, it symbolizes a universal energy of attraction and harmony. What the Greeks vaguely sensed – a unique force capable of acting at a distance, healing the body, and influencing the soul – would endure through the ages and be enriched by esoteric traditions.
2. The rediscovery of magnetism during the Renaissance
After the Middle Ages, which mainly remembered the magnet for its use in the compass and navigation, the Renaissance saw a renewed interest in magnetism as an occult force. Hermetic thinkers and alchemists of the 16th century incorporated the magnet and its strange power into their cosmic vision. Among them, the Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus (1493-1541) played a major role. Convinced that man is a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, Paracelsus described nature as traversed by an invisible universal fluid connecting the stars, Earth, and living beings. He explicitly named this energy magnetism. According to him, every human being is imbued with a magnetic fluid emanating from the cosmos and circulating in the body, creating polarities like a magnet. The human body thus has a positive pole (linked to celestial influences) and a negative pole (rooted in earthly elements), and health results from the balance of these forces. Paracelsus stated: “Man is endowed with this particular fluid emanating from the macrocosm... an energy called magnetism.” He even considered explaining certain spells or enchantments by this magnetic action: a sorcerer’s will could influence the “spiritual body” of a victim at a distance, as one would magnetize an object, causing real effects without physical contact. For him, this invisible link between beings belonged to the same natural science that doctors should not neglect, because knowing magnetism is knowing one of the keys to life.
In this Renaissance century, magnetism thus became a bridge concept between emerging science and ancient magic. Scholars explored its physical manifestations while preserving a mystical outlook. The English physician William Gilbert, in 1600, rigorously studied magnets and proposed that the Earth itself is a gigantic magnet. But he went further by speculating that this “magnetic breath” could explain planetary movements 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 almost animistic conception of cosmic magnetism sparked passionate debates. The Church, wary, feared confusion between natural laws and pagan souls. A German Jesuit scholar, Athanasius Kircher, published in 1667 The Magnetic Kingdom of Nature to propose a Christian vision of the phenomenon. He admitted the idea of a magnetic movement in the heavens connecting the stars but refused to grant the Earth a “magnetic soul” 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 by God’s hand in the clouds, with its lower end touching the Earth. The links of this chain are not hooked to each other but held by their attraction alone, illustrating the idea that divine will magnetizes the world to ensure cohesion. This powerful image of the “magnetic chain” reflects the mentality of the time: magnetism was seen as the secret glue of the universe, the subtle fluid by which the Creator connects everything in the great hierarchy of Creation.
Alongside 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 – “magnetic healing of wounds” – where he defended the effectiveness of healing at a distance by applying an ointment to the weapon that caused the wound rather than the wound itself. This famous sympathetic balm was, according to him, a magnetic action: the wound and the weapon remain connected by an invisible fluid. Van Helmont shocked the Inquisition by daring to suggest that even saints’ relics could heal not by divine miracle but thanks to a natural magnetic influence they exert on believers. His writings, critical of Jesuit scholastics, led to twenty years of ecclesiastical prosecution. This shows how magnetism, as a “natural” force with extraordinary effects, challenged the boundaries between science, faith, and magic. On the eve of the Enlightenment, the idea that an invisible fluid flows through the world and the human body was both exciting for innovators and worrying for religious authorities. This magnetic fluid was beginning to be sensed as the very energy of life, a key to nature’s secrets – a prospect opening the way to discoveries but also controversies.
3. Mesmer and "animal magnetism" in the Age of Enlightenment
In the 18th century, magnetism left esoteric circles to enjoy a true fashionable vogue, embodied by the charismatic Franz-Anton Mesmer. A Viennese-born physician established in Paris, Mesmer built on previous ideas (Paracelsus’s fluids, Van Helmont’s experiments) to forge his own theory he called animal magnetism (as opposed to the purely mineral magnetism of the lodestone). According to Mesmer, there is a universal magnetic fluid permeating the air, stars, and living beings, and imbalances of this fluid in the human body cause diseases. The healer’s role is thus to restore the harmonious circulation of this vital fluid in the patient’s body. Mesmer postulated that some individuals – including himself – possess a strong natural magnetic power and can, by their will and laying on of hands, direct this fluid in others to heal.
Franz-Anton Mesmer
From the 1770s-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’s baquet. It was a large circular tub filled with water mixed with iron filings, connected by curved iron rods that patients sitting around held or applied to the sick parts of their bodies. Mesmer claimed to “magnetize” this baquet by infusing it with his personal fluid, thus transforming the water and metal into magnetism accumulators. To the sound of a glass harmonica (a musical instrument producing enchanting vibrations), the therapist moved among patients, making magnetic passes – large hand movements a few centimeters from their bodies – to distribute the fluid and dissolve energetic blockages. The effects were quick: many patients entered a magnetic crisis, a kind of convulsive trance accompanied by sweating, laughter, or cathartic tears. Mesmer saw in these crises proof that the fluid was realigning vital forces and expelling diseases. Reports tell of spectacular cures of paralysis, hysterical blindness, chronic pain, attributed to this healing magnetism.
Mesmer’s magnetic baquet (engraving, 1780)
Mesmer’s social success was such that his sessions were attended like spectacles. Aristocratic and high society personalities participated in the baquet ritual, delighted to experience something at the boundary of science and wonder. For many, Mesmer restored natural magic’s prestige, thought lost. He spoke of his system in scholarly terms, trying to convince that this magnetic fluid was essentially a subtle physical force, analogous to electricity or gravitation, which science would eventually measure. Yet secretly, the whole city whispered about the doctor’s mage-like demeanor, his piercing gaze, and the almost incantatory passes of his hands. Mesmer himself, wrapped in his success, seemed to oscillate between the role of enlightened physician and thaumaturge. He advised patients to enter a receptive, almost faith-like state to better absorb the fluid – a process closer to spiritual healing than conventional medical treatment.
Animal magnetism. Source: SSEDS
His students and successors further deepened the mystical dimension of magnetism. In 1784, the Marquis de Puységur, one of his disciples, accidentally discovered that by magnetizing a young peasant, he could induce a state of lucid somnambulism. The patient Victor, apparently asleep, began to speak, answer questions, and showed strange insights about his own illness – as if he could see inside himself. This “magnetic sleep,” without convulsions, where the subject acts like a medium, opened new perspectives. Puységur and other magnetizers explored this trance phenomenon that might allow access to the patient’s spirit or hidden knowledge. It quickly became clear that magnetism was not only for healing the body: it could also awaken unexplained psychic faculties, such as clairvoyance or thought reading. Animal magnetism thus became, by the late 18th century, a bridge to the study of the soul and the paranormal.
Of course, this rise of magnetism was not without criticism. University doctors and proponents of Enlightenment reason viewed these experiments, mixing theatrical crises, mysticism, and lack of tangible proof, with suspicion. By order of King Louis XVI, a royal commission (including Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier) investigated Mesmer’s practices. Their 1784 report concluded that the observed effects were real but due to imagination and suggestion rather than a new fluid. Mesmer, stung, left France soon after. No matter: animal magnetism had taken root in popular and scholarly culture, and many magnetizers continued his work across Europe. In France, around the 19th century, followers like Baron Du Potet, Dr. Deleuze, and Abbé Faria perpetuated and transformed Mesmer’s legacy. The magnetic fluid entered medical and occult literature, sometimes praised for its wonders, sometimes mocked. In any case, it became impossible to ignore this strange force that stirred passions and seemed to defy classical explanations.
4. Magnetism, magic, and esotericism
The 19th century in France was a pivotal time when magnetism stood at the crossroads of emerging psychology, unconventional medicine, and magical tradition. While early hypnotists (James Braid would rename the practice “hypnosis” around 1843) sought rational explanations for magnetic sleep, a strong esoteric current embraced magnetism and integrated it into a broader occult vision. It was a time when magnetism openly flirted with spirituality: healing bodies was no longer the only goal, but also initiating souls and exploring invisible worlds.
Book Dogma and Ritual of High Magic, Éliphas Lévi
In 1853, a French esotericist, Éliphas Lévi, published his work Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. Initiated into magnetic ideas, Lévi identified Mesmer’s magnetic fluid with the “Astral Light,” this omnipresent occult energy he considered the great universal magical agent. According to him, the astral light is a subtle ether that stores all images and influences, through which both ceremonial magic and magnetism phenomena operate. He wrote figuratively: “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 to us by the nervous system.” As we see, Lévi’s discourse blends magnetism vocabulary with that of Kabbalistic magic. Under his pen, magnetism is nothing less than a primordial cosmic force that the mage can capture and direct by will to produce what were once called miracles. Other occultists, such as Baron du Potet (who directed the Revue du Magnétisme), or later Papus, extended this idea by making magnetism the cornerstone of a “sacred science” recovered. Magnetism thus became an initiatory tool: not only to heal but to elevate the magnetized toward higher planes of consciousness.
This assimilation of magnetism to ancient magic did not please everyone. Religious institutions, especially the Catholic Church, were alarmed. 19th-century Catholic authors wrote virulent pamphlets against magnetism and emerging spiritism. For an apologist like Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, the magnetic fluid was just a new avatar of the occult: “Magnetism is the modern form of magic. The immediate cause of table-turning and mediumistic phenomena, it allows the magnetized to acquire extraordinary powers,” he protested, concluding that such powers necessarily imply the devil’s intervention. This extreme view – seeing every magnetizer as an unwitting sorcerer – illustrates the persistent fear of magnetism. It is true that some demonstrations of the time blurred the line between science and the supernatural. For example, during table-turning sessions (precursors to spiritism around 1850), many noticed that the presence of a magnetized medium greatly facilitated unexplained movements and communications from beyond the grave. They even spoke of “odic force” or “psychic fluid” to describe this puzzling energy produced by magnetizers and mediums. To believers, this force could be either a divine gift (if seen as a way to relieve and enlighten the soul) or a diabolical temptation (if feared to summon unhealthy spirits). In any case, magnetism firmly established itself in the cultural landscape: studied by curious doctors, practiced by fashionable healers, invoked by spiritists, and opposed by moralists – a sign 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 like Hector Durville and his family founded magnetism schools. They proposed an “experimental and therapeutic” approach to magnetism, trying to integrate it as an auxiliary to official medicine without resorting to spiritist explanations. However, even Durville eventually acknowledged a “transcendental magnetism” beyond the physical realm: an occult aspect of the magnetic fluid touching “higher life, immutable infinity,” belonging more to sacred science than material science. Despite all efforts to “rationalize” magnetism, its mystery persists. This force remains elusive: sometimes measured in mesmerisms, passes, or perhaps dynes, sometimes seen as the very fabric of dreams and the world’s soul.
5. What magnetism today?
Magnetism, as a practice, has survived all fashion fluctuations and criticisms to firmly root itself in Western popular traditions. In France especially, it remains part of the traditional healing landscape to this day. In rural areas, the figure of the magnetizer-healer remains familiar and respected. Since the 19th century and long before, gifted individuals have devoted themselves to relieving others by laying on hands, prayer, and transmitting vital fluid. They are called, depending on the region, touchers, healers, or specialized as fire blockers (those who instantly soothe burns). These practitioners, usually discreet, embody the direct heritage of Mesmer’s animal magnetism enriched by local influences. They do not always explicitly speak of “magnetism” but readily evoke a universal energy or divine force flowing through their hands.
Even today, it is not uncommon to meet, in a Breton village or a town in the Massif Central, a magnetizer to whom people turn when conventional medicine is powerless or too slow. Thousands of French people consult them to cut the fire of radiotherapy, soothe shingles, calm stubborn pain, or rebalance nerves. Far from being relegated to superstition, magnetism continues to be practiced with fervor and humility. It adapts to modern needs while keeping its spiritual essence. Practitioners are found across the country, each with their sensitivity: here burns will be soothed, there “joint magnetism” restored, elsewhere “fluids” purified in a depressed person. This diversity testifies to the richness of a tradition that has crossed centuries. Above all, the continued success of these practices proves that, for many today, there is something more than tangible matter: an invisible energetic principle, of which magnetism is one expression, on which one can act to regain harmony.
It is remarkable to note that the public’s trust in these magnetizers remains strong. Often, they work alongside or complement doctors: one might “see the bonesetter” for back pain while following medical treatment, or ask the fire blocker to intervene on a burn while waiting for emergency care. This pragmatic coexistence between scientific medicine and magnetic healing illustrates popular wisdom: why refuse help, even if inexplicable, if it brings relief? Ultimately, for many, magnetism is less a belief than a lived experience – the warmth of a hand on a fevered forehead, pain fading without explanation, sleep restored after a magnetic pass.
At the start of the 21st century, magnetism also integrates new forms of spirituality and well-being. Bridges are built between the Western tradition of the magnetizer and Eastern practices like Reiki (which also relies on transmitting universal energy by laying on hands). The language changes, speaking of “bio-magnetic energy,” chakras, and aura – terms borrowed from India or contemporary esotericism – but the essence remains the same. It is about opening the channels of vital energy and restoring balance to body and mind. Many modern magnetizers explain their gift pedagogically: every living being is traversed by a subtle current, comparable to an electrical network, which must be rebalanced in case of “short-circuit” or blockage. These analogies aim to make magnetism understandable to today’s person without disenchanting it. Because the spiritual dimension is never far: many practitioners invoke an energy of love, a grace flowing through them. Magnetism thus retains a sacred or divine character – it is called a gift from Heaven – even if presented in modern terms.
Thus, magnetism as a spiritual and magical force has accompanied the West through the ages, constantly transforming but never disappearing. Its symbolic role is powerful: it represents universal attraction, the mysterious correspondence between all things, the life fluid uniting soul and body, man and nature. And even today, when a magnetizer’s hands relieve pain or soothe a spirit, a bit of that wisdom lives on: the one affirming that the invisible is part of reality, and that magnetism is a way to touch the mystery of life.
Sources:
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On the Influence of the Stars on Living Bodies, Franz Anton Mesmer, 1776
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Memoir on Animal Magnetism, Marquis de Puységur, 1784
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Magnetism and Mesmerism in the Enlightenment, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2015
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The Discovery of the Unconscious, Henri F. Ellenberger, Basic Books, 1970
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The Doctrine of Animal Magnetism, Charles Lafontaine, 1851
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From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, Adam Crabtree, Yale University Press, 1993
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Medical Archives on Magnetism, Paris, 19th century
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Manuscripts of the National Library of France, sections on mesmerism and animal magnetism
