ecosophia | Etheric Technology 1: Mesmer's Baquet

A post I made here a little while back on the subject of radionics got quite a bit of interest, so it occurred to me that a few other historical tidbits on etheric technologies might be worth sharing here. The device to the left is a classic etheric device, and it's also a good beginning place for our story. It's the only surviving example of Franz Anton Mesmer's baquet -- his device for storing and transmitting animal magnetism.

Franz Anton Mesmer Mesmer was a medical doctor from Austria -- that's him on the right. Like a lot of physicians with scientific interests in his day, he experimented with the medical applications of magnetism, but his experiments convinced him that there was a different force -- like magnetism in some ways, like electricity in others -- that was generated by living things. It obeyed straightforward physical laws, comparable to those that govern the behavior of electricity and light; it could be stored, directed, and made to flow along conductive materials -- and it could heal. He called it "animal magnetism." His experiments in Vienna were successful enough to win him a very substantial clientele and make him enough money that he could hire a talented kid named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write a one-act operetta for a garden party. (Bastian und Bastienne, the operetta, was Mozart's first operatic work, written when he was twelve.)

Mesmer ended up moving to Paris, the center of European culture in the years before the French Revolution, where he set up shop, cured a great many people of various illnesses, and became the target of frenzied denunciations by rationalists. A panel was duly convened, including Benjamin Franklin (then in residence in Paris), which proceeded to write its report without ever getting around to talking to Mesmer, and proceeded to insist that he was a fraud. (The spirit of James Randi was already well entrenched in mainstream science by then). Mesmer eventually left Paris in time to escape the political convulsions that overwhelmed it, and settled in Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life.
baquet

The baquet shown above is a very straightforward device, and the diagram to the left shows how it worked. The heart of it was a large Leyden jar. Leyden jar? That's called a capacitor nowadays; it's a glass jar with a layer of foil inside and outside, which was used in electrical research in Mesmer's time as a way to store electric charges. In the baquet, the Leyden jar was surrounded by a thick layer of insulation -- Mesmer used straw -- with bottles of water interspersed with the insulation. At intervals, metal rods descended through the insulation well away from the outside of the Leyden jar, and to the top of each of the rods was fixed a jointed rod that patients held when they were being treated. The baquet was charged by Mesmer himself -- I have not been able to track down the exact method, but it probably involved breathing and concentration, while Mesmer put one hand on the central "double bell" and the other on the ring of metal to which the rods were connected. The baquet may also have gathered animal magnetism on its own account -- as we'll see when we get to Wilhelm Reich, there were fascinating parallels between his technology and Mesmer's.

It would be quite easy to build a small baquet these days -- there are commercial capacitors with the level of capacitance found in a large Leyden jar, and you can also make the latter with a canning jar, aluminum foil, and rubber cement, and you can also make a sufficiently robust capacitor using sheets of metal and insulation. That I know of, nobody in the current renaissance of etheric technologies has yet done so, but here's hoping.

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From: (Anonymous)

Not to dispute the overall theme of the post, but (according to Wikipedia) a typical 1 pint Leyden jar capacitor would have a capacitance value of about 1 nanoFarad. Now, nanoFarads might sound very small, but many useful capacitors used in radio circuits have capacitances measured in picoFarads (of which it takes a thousand to make a nanoFarad). On the other hand, ridiculously high-powered automobile sound systems often include a big capacitor to supply surges of power too much for the regular electrical system of the car to handle. Those are measured in Farads.

The electrical energy stored in a capacitor is the voltage, squared, times half of the capacitance. Charged to 1 kV, a 1nF capacitor would get your attention if discharged through your fingers.

A Leyden jar, with about 1/10th inch of glass jar wall separating the inner metal cylinder from the outer cylinder, could be charged to thousands of volts (perhaps from a Wimshurst machine, or van deGraff generator), without risk of breakdown discharge. Low-voltage capacitors can be made with alternating layers of aluminum foil and waxed paper. Whether such capacitors could withstand animal magnetism experiments or not remains to be seen.

Lathechuck

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Etheric Technology 1: Mesmer's Baquet

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