A Teacher
Charles Poyen
Animal magnetism brought to America
The transmission
Charles Poyen St. Sauveur was a French practitioner of mesmerism whose lecture tours across New England in the 1830s carried European animal magnetism to the United States and lit the spark from which American mental healing and, ultimately, the New Thought movement grew.
Born into a family with sugar plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, Poyen studied medicine in Paris, where during a nervous illness as a student he encountered the mesmerist Dr. Chapelain and a somnambulist named Madame Villetard, an experience that converted him to belief in animal magnetism.
He sailed from Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and arrived at Portland, Maine in 1834, staying with relatives in Haverhill, Massachusetts and teaching French and drawing in Lowell before launching his public career. In January 1836 Poyen began lecturing on mesmerism in and around Boston, and in 1837 he and his entranced assistant Cynthia Gleason toured New England giving demonstrations in which subjects appeared insensible to pain, diagnosed illnesses, and performed feats of apparent clairvoyance.
He documented the campaign in his 1837 book Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, the first substantial American treatise advocating the practice. Among the many who attended his lectures was the Maine clockmaker Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who was drawn to experiment with magnetic healing and went on to develop the mental-healing theories that seeded New Thought. Poyen returned to France and died at Bordeaux in 1844.
What they gave
Introduced systematic mesmerism / animal magnetism to the United States through public lectures across New England beginning in 1836,Authored Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England (1837), the first major American treatise advocating animal magnetism, compiling experiments, reports and testimonials,Toured with the entranced subject Cynthia Gleason, staging demonstrations of trance analgesia, medical diagnosis, and clairvoyance that popularised the phenomena,Directly inspired Phineas Quimby to take up magnetic healing, forming the practical bridge from European mesmerism to the American mental-healing tradition and New Thought,Helped trigger the wave of New England mesmerists (20-30 lecturing by the early 1840s) that made the region a centre of animal-magnetism enthusiasm
In their words
You have been amply compensated, I hope, by the conviction that you have gained of the entire truth of an order of phenomena so important to science and so glorious to human nature!
The line they stand in
Poyen stood downstream of Franz Anton Mesmer and the French magnetic tradition, having been converted to the doctrine of animal magnetism by the Parisian mesmerist Dr.
Chapelain and the somnambulist Madame Villetard during his medical studies. Carrying that French lineage across the Atlantic, he transplanted it into New England soil, where his lectures and his 1837 book seeded a generation of American magnetisers.
The most consequential of those he reached was Phineas Quimby, whose subsequent reframing of magnetic healing as a matter of belief and mind passed the impulse onward to the founders of New Thought.
Poyen is thus the hinge between continental mesmerism and the distinctively American mind-cure movement.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
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