International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals

   

Periodical: Magnetiseur Spiritualiste

Summary:  From Pat Deveney's database:

Magnetiseur Spiritualiste, Le.
Journal Redige par les Membres de la Societe des Magnetiseurs Spiritualistes de Paris.
1849-1851 Monthly
Paris, France. Language: French. Publisher: Societe des Magnetiseurs Spiritualistes de Paris chez M. Alp. Cahagnet; Germer Bailliere. Editor: Louis Alphonse Cahagnet.
1/1, 1849-October 1851.

Cahagnet discusses the founding of this journal in his The Celestial Telegraph: Or, Secrets of the Life to Come, Revealed through Magnetism (New York: J.S. Redfield, Clinton Hall, 1851), 225-226. It was the organ of his Societe des Magnetiseurs Spiritualistes de Paris which featured the lucid revelations of Adele Maginot about the spirits of the dead and their universe—which bore a marked Swedenborgian tinge—as well as studies of magnetic healing, dreams, homeopathy, apparitions, magic mirrors, immortality of the soul, ecstasy, somnambulism, etc. The title of the journal marks an early example of the process in which "spiritualism" and its cognates changed from a generic emphasis on the spiritual nature of man to the a specific focus on communication with the dead. Crabtree 577; National Library of Medicine; BNF.

Other Sources:
Issues:Magnetiseur Spiritualiste V1 1849-1850
Magnetiseur Spiritualiste V2 1851-1852 Partial
Claude-Generated Themes:   Le Magnétiseur Spiritualiste was published between 1849 and 1851, and its title needs translating before it can be read. In French usage of that decade spiritualiste is the opposite of matérialiste: it names a philosophical position holding that mind or soul is real and irreducible, not a practice of communicating with the dead. The journal is accordingly a magnetic one, and the surviving issues are dense with the working vocabulary of French animal magnetism — the magnetizer, the magnetic fluid, magnetic sleep, somnambulism and the lucidity attributed to the somnambule. One passage defends Mesmer himself as a savant who understood a sublime property of human beings and declined to cast his pearl before ignorant opponents. Another turns antiquarian, discussing a rare quarto and Mallet's Antiquités du Nord on the formulas by which the ancient northern peoples were said to work prodigies, cause illness and restore health. The journal belongs to the magnetic tradition in the last years before Allan Kardec gave French spiritism its doctrine and its name.

Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:Health Reform and Alternative Medicine | Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism | Spiritism (Kardecist) | Spiritualism | Survival After Death and Immortality | Swedenborgian and New Church