"Animal Magnetism": The "Cotemporary" Roots of Whitman's "Is Mesmerism True?"

Long before he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman was invested in mesmerism, which at that time was also known as "animal magnetism," a term coined by its founder Franz Anton Mesmer. Only six years after Charles Poyen, mesmerism's most successful evangelist in antebellum America, first began lecturing in the United States, Whitman already had publicly admitted his "belief" in mesmerism. He did so in an August 1842 New York Sunday Times editorial that was first cited by Harold Aspiz in 1980. Aspiz's use of the editorial is worth quoting in full:During these years, Whitman had already accepted the teachings of mesmerism. In August, 1842, he informed the readers of the New York Sunday Times that "[s]ome seasons ago" he had ceased to be "a devout disbeliever in the science of Animal Magnetism," a few lectures and demonstrations having convinced him that "there is such a thing as Mesmeric sleep" and that the "strange things done by the subject at the will of the Magnetizer" are not the result of collusion or fraud, but that hypnotic manipulation and "Mesmeric somnambulism" are beneficial. He was excited by the artistic implications of mesmerism, declaring that it "reveals at once the existence of a whole new world of truth, grand, fearful, profound, relating to that great mystery, in the shadows of which we live and move and have our being, the mystery of our Humanity." Thereafter he remained interested in this half-science, and he utilized it in his poems, particularly in characterizing the Whitman persona.1Given Whitman's language as described by Aspiz here, it is no surprise that the 1842 editorial, titled "Is Mesmerism True?," has loomed large in the limited literature to date on Whitman and mesmerism. Aspiz, an excellent reader of the mesmeric Whitman, was canny in underlining the importance of this editorial, the content of which establishes a great deal about Whitman's early relationship to mesmerism. As Aspiz's excerpting suggests, it would have been one thing for Whitman to have claimed that he found mesmerism intriguing or baffling or unsettling or even, possibly, potentially meaningful. It was another altogether for him to have reported his belief in it-that it was true- and that it provided deep insight into the "mystery" of human life. It is worth noting, too, that the August 1842 issue of the Sunday Times was Whitman's first as the Times's new editor: that is, he used the first page of his first issue to highlight the question, "Is Mesmerism True?"For decades, scholars following Aspiz have confirmed the importance of Aspiz's excerpted lines. David S. Reynolds in Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography and Walt Whitman (2005) cites the New York Sunday Times as his source, but he quotes only passages that Aspiz already had used in his 1980 discussion of the editorial.2The same observation holds true for Arthur Versluis's analysis of Whitman's grasp on mesmerism in his The Esoteric Roots of the American Renaissance (2001).3 Versluis, like Reynolds, cites the New York Sunday Times in his footnote as the source of this quote, but, again like Reynolds, he excerpts only language that Aspiz already had quoted. I note this discrepancy between Reynolds's and Versluis's cited source (the New York Sunday Times) and, apparently, actual source (Aspiz) not to nitpick the clearly extensive research performed by these scholars, but instead to point out that the Sunday Times editorial is very difficult to find, and that Aspiz has been its mouthpiece for decades. It appears that Aspiz is the last person on record to have read the editorial in full, until now.I have discovered that Aspiz and those following him quoted many, but certainly not all, of the most interesting parts of the editorial. Also, they in fact repeatedly misquoted the original, which actually states that "the very first fact of Mesmerism" reveals not "a whole new world of truth"-as all of these scholars put it-but, instead and intriguingly, "a whole world of new truth" (emphases added). …