Many mainstream sciences are mirrored by scientistic theories, controversial doctrines vigorously defended by proponents of the cultic milieu. Life sciences are complemented by more or less vitalistic theories such as that proposed by Rupert Sheldrake, a counterpart to mainstream botany are theories claiming an emotional life for plants or correlating the growth cycles of crops with astrological events, Chemistry is found in an occult version, (for example Leadbeater, Occult Chemistry), Geologists have Esoteric counterparts among those who believe in sunken continents or prophecies of cataclysmic earth changes. Perhaps best known, physics has its other in what might be called quantum metaphysics, the syncretism between mysticism and physics. Other fringe sciences are crypto zoology (Bigfoot), evidence suggestive of reincarnation, astrological claims, healing, crop circles, chemical or biological transmutation, tachyons, free energy, and many others.

Other, more patchy means of forging a creolization between science and religion are quite common. Firstly, the Esoteric Tradition does not only construct complete versions of physics, chemistry or biology, as illustrated above. It also appropriates contemporary legends that circulate in the cultic milieu, creating more or less disconnected scientistic theories around a large number of popular claims. "Fringe" archeology" may incorporate legends or legend elements concerning Atlantis, crystal skulls from Mesoamerica or ancient astronauts.

Fringe astronomy variously incorporates UFO lore, legends that claim that there is a giant human face on Mars or that the earth will pass through a large photon belt. Fringe medicine includes legends concerning mysterious forces in the ground that affect human health, and which can be detected by dowsers.

Secondly, there is what one might call the "cargo cult" approach to science. These are cases in which the external trappings of science are used and invoked, often in an isolated attempt to adapt scientific vocabulary or build pseudo-technical cult objects or perform quasi rational calculations to buttress specific articles of Esoteric belief.

 

Historical Background.

Hermetic philosophy was espoused by the intellectual elite during the early Renaissance. Divination, notably in the form of astrology (an earlier numerology), where once common practiced. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a gradual weakening of the cultural status of esotericism. Herracticism slowly began to erode, in part due to the philological scholarship of Isaac Casaubon. Political moves also served to deal a near-fatal blow to divination. Thus, the French authorities forbade the printing of ephemerides in 1710.

However, esotericism never died out. Quite to the contrary, there were strong theosophical and speculative currents during the 18th century within Rosicrucian and Masonic groups throughout Europe. (1)

When esotericism met Enlightenment thought and the development of a new natural science, several new syncretisms arose. In the Behmenist lineage, for instance, Friedrich Christoph Octinger (1702-1782) was an early exponent of such a view. By the second half of the 18th century, Oetinger constructed what has been named a theology of electricity by adapting Boehme's theosophy to the scientific worldview. 

Another was Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738), so medicine in Vienna was strongly influenced by the Leyden school, since several disciples of Boerhaave had been contracted to teach there. When Mesmer entered medical school in 1760, the boundaries between "scientific" and "superstitious" were fluid as well as hotly contested. 

Whereas the French and Scottish Enlightenments were anti-clerical and skeptical, Wolff attempted to forge a series of grand syntheses between intellectualist versions of Christian theology and rationalism. 

It has been argued that Mesmer, who studied under the Wolfian scholar Johann Adam Ickstatt in the mid-1750‘s, received the main impetus to adopt a rationalist vocabulary and a predisposition for appealing to rationalist explanations during this formative period.

Paracelsus however, like Mesmer in his thesis De planetarum influxu, had rejected traditional astrology, but nevertheless believed that the planets exercised an influence on man. Paracelsians also used magnets therapeutically.

Mesmer developed a cultic object with a distinctly scientistic touch. A primitive form of electric accumulator, the Leyden flask, had been invented during the 1740s. The Leyden flask consists of a glass bottle insulated with metal foil. This bottle is filled with water, and a bundle of conductive metal wires are suspended in the liquid. Mesmer's invention, the baquet, was similarly constructed, and was designed as an accumulator of animal magnetism. 

Mesmer's attempts to formulate a theory of magnetic healing however reveal the complex interplay between ritual healing and scientistic formulation. In 1779, he published his best-known explanation of animal magnetism, Memoire sur la dicouverte du magnetisme animal, in which the method is described and given a theoretical background. 

But Mesmer's cures were not all that novel. If one disregards the scientistic explanations, mesmeric healing was very much part of a folk tradition of exorcism and laying on of hands. So a more direct influence is the religious folk healing practiced in the southern German-speaking world in the mid- to late eighteenth century.

Exorcism, however, was a craft on the wane, having neither the scientific legitimacy to gain academic respect nor the scientistic trappings to survive the disdain of Enlightenment critics.

There is a distinct risk involved in the use of scientistic strategies. The significant Others are actively constructing their own version of the events in question. To the extent that these versions are incompatible, the construction of legends gives rise to conflicts in the real world. With traditional exorcism eliminated and defined as non science, Mesmer became the next target of the very same accusations that he had previously leveled at Gassner a faith healer. 

Several scientific bodies confronted Mesmer, claiming that he had, in reality, influenced the imagination of his patients, while falsely attributing his successes to animal magnetism due to ignorance. The parallels with the Gassner case are obvious.

The most famous of these scientific bodies was the commission led by Benjamin Franklin. 

The members of this commission included several luminaries of contemporary science: the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly and the polymath and naturalist Antoine Lavoisier. Their report was published on August 11, 1784. The baquet had been carefully examined for electric and magnetic properties, and was pronounced to possess neither. Furthermore "not one of the commissioners felt any sensation, or at least none which ought to be ascribed to the action of magnetism." (The full report is on the internet)

The report concludes that the effects so clearly visible on the patients are in fact due to imagination, the touch of the magnetizer and imitation of the behavior of other affected patients.

If one sectarian schism enabled Mesmer to profit from Gassner's method and distance himself from his role model, the same strategy made it possible for some of Mesmer's pupils to avoid being contaminated by the charges of lacking a scientific basis that now beset Mesmer himself.

The most successful of these schismatics was the Marquis de Puysegur (1751-1825). At first he copied one of Mesmer's rituals, a form of healing that had been developed for the simultaneous treatment of many patients. Each patient would hold the end of a rope, attached to the branches of a large elm which was supposed to conduct magnetism efficiently.

Experiences with a highly suggestible subject, a servant by the name of Victor Race, led him to take yet another step toward secularizing and psychologizing mesmerism. Victor did not experience the usual crisis, but acted as a somnambulist. Any resulting cures were effected during such trancelike states.

No baquet was needed, and no crisis was required. The true cause of a successful cure was declared to be the will of the mesmerist. In 1785, the marquis finally formulated a theory of mesmerism largely stripped of its hermetic cosmology.

The Societe de l‘Harmonie, i.e. the organization which had served as a focal point for the mesmerists, split in two. The orthodox mesmerists remained in one camp, while the reformists who followed Puysegur founded their own branch based in Strasbourg.

This schism would eventually be followed by many others in the creation of various positions regarding the existence and nature of controversial phenomena. 

Successive generations of spokespersons could create their own versions of healing praxis and theory, on the existence of an afterlife or on supernatural phenomena, not according to traditional schismatic "holier/more authentic/more traditional-than-thou" lines, but by employing a new strategy: they could claim to be, in some sense, more scientific and less irrational than their negative Others.

Spiritualists tended to understand their own project as a scientific investigation of the afterlife. Parapsychologists distanced themselves from their spiritualist roots by attempting to define themselves as more scientific. They did so e.g. by attempting to professionalize and institutionalize their activities .

The first generations of parapsychologists emulated the practices of mainstream science, created journals for the peer-reviewed dissemination of their ideas and affirmed their ties to mainstream values of their times. However, in a manner reminiscent of the Esoteric. (See Parallel article series on the right)
 

From Esotericism to Pseudo-Scientific Pop Culture P.1

 

For updates click homepage here