Organon §289

All of the above-mentioned modes of practicing mesmerism are based on a dynamic influx into the sufferer of more or less life force, and are therefore called positive mesmerism. 236

Negative mesmerism

Negative mesmerism deserves such a name because it has the opposite effect. The passes that are needed to waken people out of a somnabulistic sleep belong to this category, as well as all the manual executions covered under the names calming and ventilating. With undebilitated persons, this discharge of the life force which has excessively accumulated in a single part is most surely and simply produced, through negative mesmerism, by means of a very rapid movement of the flat out-stretched right hand, held parallel to and about an inch from the body, going from the top of the head down over the tips of the toes. 237 The more rapidly this pass is executed, the stronger the discharge it produces. For example, in one case of apparent death, a woman who was previously healthy, 238 received a violent emotional shock which suppressed her menstruation just prior to its onset. This probably resulted in an accumulation of energy in the precordial region. This was discharged and the entire organism was restored to homeostasis by a rapid negative pass, and she was revived. With such treatment, revival usually ensues immediately. 239 In cases of very irritable persons, a gentle, less rapid negative pass occasionally relieves the excessive restlessness and anxious insomnia that sometimes stems from an all-too-powerfully given positive pass, etc.

Comment

236 When I speak of the decided and sure curative power of positive mesmerists, I certainly do not mean that most deplorable exaggeration of it (called somnambulism or clairvoyance) in which repeated passes are made for half an hour or even a whole hour at a time, day after day, on patients with a weak nervous system in order to induce that monstrous alteration in the tunement of the entire human wesen. This is a highly unnatural and dangerous state in which the person is transported from the world of the senses and appears to belong more to the spirit world. It has been used in vain attempts to cure chronic diseases.

237 It is an already-known rule that a person that is to be mesmerized, either positively or negatively, must not wear silk on any part of the body. It is less well known, however, that the mesmerist can communicate his life force to the patient in fulle

238 Thus, a negative pass, especially a very rapid one, is extremely detrimental to a chronically weak person with low vitality.r measure if he stands on silk instead of standing on the bare floor.

239 A robust ten year-old country lad, due to a minor indisposition, was treated one morning by a so-called strokestress who repeatedly passed both tips of her thumbs very powerfully from the pit of his stomach out under his ribs, and he fell at once, deathly pale, into such an unconsciousness and immobility that, with all due exertion, one could not awaken him and he was almost taken for dead. I then had his older brother give him as rapid a negative pass as possible from the top of his head down over his feet, and he immediately regained consciousness and became lively and well.