Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/166

166 of the great French industrialists had been briefly his patient. He had been puzzled, he said, by the Frenchman's insistent attempts to talk to him about magnetism at the office and at dinners where they met. The doctor, who had no clue to this interest, had shunted him off. After seeing the pendulum perform he said he intended to get in touch with him as soon as war permitted and learn what he could. He thought the French had something in this odd magnetic device, and he mentioned what a boon it would be, if it worked, in diagnosing allergies.

I heard, from a friend, of one doctor on the staff of a New York hospital who is now using the pendulum experimentally, but I was refused his name and that of the hospital because he was unwilling to have anything known about it at that stage. But I was told that he had been successful in diagnosing the sex of unborn children in this way. So it may be that while the physicists have been tracking down magnetism in their laboratories, the doctors have not been wholly unmindful of its presence in their field. They, too, in time may have sensational findings to report.

When I was fourteen and visiting in New England, my host introduced me to the forked witch-hazel and I discovered proudly that I was a water witch. I did not think of this as a magnetic sensitivity then. But years later I developed an agonizing neuritis in my right arm which did not yield to treatment. I happened on a book which gave an account of Baines experiments with magnets, and believe it or not, with a Ten Cent store magnet I cured myself in a few days and never had a return. I found then that I could tell by touch the magnetically positive from the negative side of any piece of wood or metal. There is as much difference to me as between smooth and rough faced cloth.

Still later, again in a New England summer, someone gave me Fersen's book—I forget its title—which is about therapeutic positions for replenishment and intake of the body's magnetic needs. I found that these postures did exactly what the magnet did. The sensation of a delicate current, different according to whether positive or negative, was precisely the same, and so was the strength of it. Fersen said he got his knowledge in Tibet where I believe he spent some time. All of which predisposed me to interest in the pendulum when it came along.

At the bookshop which I mentioned I found a copy of La Magie Dévoilée by Baron du Potet who was in some ways a more spectacular figure than Mesmer. He performed notable magnetic cures till the year before he died at eighty-four. After that magnetism declined and was replaced as a therapy by the school of the Salpetriére which developed along purely psychological lines, except for a limited use of hypnosis. When this school discovered that no magnetic wands were needed to put people to sleep they were gleeful. Medicine had all along fought the idea of a magnetic force which physics said was non existent. The new method of hypnosis, they said proved that it was all in the mind. But now comes Ehrenhaft to prove that there is a magnetic "fluid." Baron du Potet did not use a magnetic rod, either, but he makes it very clear that it was the same force which he used. He writes:

"By an act of understanding I separate from myself a force—real, though invisible. Deposited upon anything it fixes itself there as an essence. Soon it influences its surroundings. Magic begins. That is to say extraordinary phenomena occur.

"The agent (magnetism) has its inherent properties. Left to itself, when not impregnated by the soul, it acts conformably to the laws of physics and analogous to the magnet. We have to learn first what are its natural and fixed properties, secondly to understand those we can impart to it by our will."

The book contains reproductions of the magnetic diagrams which he traced, impregnated with his force, on the floor and then used in his experiments with people. Eliphas Levi said that they were the same in principle, though not in use, as those in the old Grimoires. I found that I could duplicate du Potet's results on two of them with the pendulum. I couldn't with the others because you can't give a pendulum a moral conflict, which was required. Du Potet says of the effect of these experiments upon himself:

"I do undoubtedly feel a certain shock throughout my being. I experience an unusual sensation." (Some people experience this with the Fersen technique.) And again.

"Everywhere and at all times an unknown element tosses men about, as the wind sways the reed. I have felt the strokes of this formidable agent."

A last quotation from du Potet makes a fitting close to this article. His book was published in 1852, but his words apply prophetically to 1945, and to the contributions which science has made to the horrors of war. He says:

"Now science has some inkling of these mysterious workings (magnetism) but only according to the physical order. She only arrives at her results by destroying the affinity between bodies and separating their elements. … It may be that she understands her agents better than we do ours. Yet our phenomena are real and cannot be explained away by 'imagination' … Science inoculates with doubts, sophisms, contempt for truth, and so clears the path for the tyrant. This is also magic—of an evil kind, for it turns God's handiwork into something unrecognizable and base. The true magic agent is—the soul."