Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet (1805-1885)

Cahagnet was one of the great magnetizers of the 19th century, among a group of French Spiritualists who used mesmerism to investigate the nature of the afterlife.

Cahagnet was attracted to the study of somnambulism in 1845, and three years later published Magnétisme: Arcanes de la vie future dévoilé (Magnetism: Mysteries of the Future Life Revealed), summarizing his experiments with somnambulists and spirit communications. This was followed by second and third volumes in 1849 and 1860, respectively. He also published the journal Le Magnetiseur spiritualiste from 1949-1851.

Cahagnet was an adept of magic of every kind (extending to talismans, cabalistic mirrors, and necromancy, among much else). He championed the idea that the soul is immortal, and that spirits in the afterlife can be contacted in the trance state of exstasis. In this state his subjects exhibited clairvoyance and described the spiritual world. This was the distinguishing feature of exstasis.1

Cahagnet produced exstasis by making magnetic passes over the subject with his hands. Once the subject entered ecstatic sleep, Cahagnet would ask questions, which the subject answered. Some could also prescribe treatment for illness. Cahagnet’s subjects held long conversations with spirits.

“The remarks and answers of these visionary beings are reported by the ecstatics. Some of them affirm that every man has an attendant good spirit, perhaps also an evil one of inferior power. Some can summon, either of themselves or with the aid of their attendance spirit, the spirit or vision of any dead relation or friend, and even of persons also dead, whom neither they nor the mesmerist have ever seen, whom perhaps no one present has seen; and the minute descriptions given in all these cases, of the person seen or summoned, is afterwards found to be correct.”2

From the late 1840s Cahagnet became an object of frightened curiosity, first in England and then his native France. Denunciations of his ideas, including opposition of the Church, only served to heighten his reputation.1

Sources: 

1. Fox, R. The Savant and the state: Science and Cultural Politics in nineteenth-century France. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2012.

2. Gregory, William. Animal Magnetism, or, Mesmerism and its Phenomena. 1884.