Poe as Hypnotist

Edgar Allan Poe was not only gifted, he was versatile. In a short paper called Mesmeric Revelation, he appears as an indifferent writer but as an excellent observer and reporter. Inasmuch as this momentary interest in Poe does not revolve around his stylistic ups and downs, it is permissible to dismiss them at once and to proceed with an examination of an example of his intellectual variety. Mesmerism preceded hypnotism by many years. The scientific depersonalization and purification of a name for the same series of phenomena required almost a century. I have found post-hypnotic suggestion perfectly described by a very early American writer who lived about the time Bernheim was born. However, in the typically slavish American manner, American ideas have required a baptismal toss over the Atlantic before they are deemed meritorious. Even Poe had to be reflected back to us from the mirror polish of Baudelaire. Americans still live in the times of the Boston tea party and are somewhat fearful of papa Europe who seems wholly immature himself.

Let me quote Poe's somewhat Teutonic sentence. “There can be no more absolute waste of time than the attempt to prove, at the present day, that man, by mere exercise of will, can so impress his fellow as to cast him into an abnormal condition, in which the phenomena resemble very closely those of death, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the phenomena of any other normal condition within our cognizance; that, while in this state, the person so impressed employs only with effort, and then feebly, the external organs of sense, yet perceives, with keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown, matters beyond the scope of the physical organs; that moreover, his intellectual faculties are wonderfully exalted and invigorated; that his sympathies with the person so impressing him are profound; and, finally, that his susceptibility to the impression increases with its frequency, while in the same proportio