A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

servants in his household. After relieving his gamekeeper’s wife and steward’s daughter of
toothaches, on the evening of May 4, 1784, he brought his powers to bear on a local peasant,
Victor, who suffered from pleurisy. Employing standard gestures - the passage of hands (or a
wand, or magnets) in front of the subject’s face and behind his head, accompanied by the intense
gaze of the operator - Puységur found to his surprise, that after ten minutes of such induction his
subject had fallen asleep in his arms. Upon falling asleep, Victor began to pursue a
somnambulant discourse on some matters that currently troubled him. The Marquis feared that
this focus on current woes would mitigate the curative powers he was struggling to magnetically
transfer. Puységur suggested that Victor think of something more pleasant, following which his
subject, in turn, mimed his participation in a shooting match and began to dance in time to a tune
that the Marquis “sang mentally.” 31
Victor danced for an hour and then was quieted and awoken
by Puységur. On the following day Victor professed to feel much better, but could recall nothing
of his somnambulant experience.
Puységur’s practice, which, as we shall see, was to prove more influential in the spread of
Mesmerism than the work of Mesmer himself, constituted both an extension and modification of
his teacher’s methods. The Marquis’ work was continuous with that of Mesmer in that its
primary focus was on the curative powers of animal magnetism. It departed from Mesmer in a
number of ways. Puységur disposed of the baquet, so central to the performances in which the
Viennese healer had impressed his powers upon his fashionable Parisian patients. The baquet
was a wooden tub filled with iron filings, water and numerous bottles of “magnetized” water.
Protruding from the tub was a series of iron rods which could be applied to the afflicted parts of
the supplicant. The therapies pursued by Puységur required no such accoutrements but depended
solely upon the primal energies of magnétisme animal accompanied by, as the legend on the title
page of his first book proclaimed, croyez et veuillez (belief and will).
It is interesting to note that the latter formulation tidily captures the continuum (albeit in
31 Slater Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism (New York: Pocket Books, 1972) 2.
29