¹ H. Bruce Franklin in his anthology, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1966), so classifies “Mesmeric Revelation” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” but does not attempt to explain the underlying “scientific” assumptions. His choice of a trio of representative science fiction tales by Poe includes also “Mellonta Tauta,” which is more of an April Fool's joke (dated 1 April 1848) on Poe's contemporaries than it is a projection of future science. It is also indirectly related to mesmerism, however, since it is a satire on the “mesmeric” revelations of Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Seer of Pough-keepsie.” See Poe's letter to the editors of Godey's Lady's Book which prefaces the first printing of “Mellonta Tauta” (Feb. 1849) and Kendall B. Taft, “The Identity of Poe's Martin Van Buren Mavis,” AL, xxvi (1955), 562–563.

² Lxii, 1077–94.

³ F. A. Mesmer, “Proposition 1,” Precis historique des faits relatifs au Magnétisme-Animal (London, 1781), p. 83.

⁴ Historical materials not given specific citation in this paper may be found in such standard references as the following: J. Milne Bramwell, Hypnotism, Its History, Practice and Theory (New York, 1960); Frank Podmore, From Mesmer to Christian Science (New Hyde Park, N. Y., 1963) and Mediums of the Nineteenth Century (New Hyde Park, N. Y., 1963), i, 44–176 (originally published as Modern Spiritualism, London, 1902); Margaret Goldsmith, Franz Anton Mesmer, A History of Mesmerism (Garden City, N. Y., 1934). An interesting mid-nineteenth-century account, from a rather biased medical point of view, is a long essay in several installments by Charles Radclyffe Hall, “On the Rise, Progress, and Mysteries of Mesmerism,” The London Lancet, N.S., i (1845). Poe is known to have read this volume of the Lancet bound and printed in New York by Burgess and Stringer.

⁵ Lind, pp. 1085, 1086, et passim.

⁶ Baudelaire on Poe, ed. and trans. Lois and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (State CoUege, Pa., 1952), p. 148.

⁷ Coleridge's essay was posthumously published as “Hints toward the Formation of a more comprehensive Theory of Life,” ed. S. B. Watson (London, 1848). That same year, curiously enough, George Bush published a Swedenborgian version of Coleridge's essay entitled “Life: Its Origins, Gradations, Forms, and Issues” (New York and London, 1848) in which he substituted the influx of “spirit” for the “imponderables” as the dynamic vital principle.

⁸ Margaret Alterton long ago pointed out some possible sources of Poe's interest in suspended animation and galvanism in British literary and medical journals (Origins of Poe's Critical Theory, Iowa City, 1925, pp. 18–25). Additional sources, such as an account of an experiment with galvanic current on the body of an executed murderer, in the Medical Repository for 1820, have since been discovered. (See also n. 21 below.)

⁹ Since the dates of publication, and probably of composition, cover such a short period of time, I have not considered the tales in chronological order. “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” was first published in Godey's Lady's Book, xxviii (April 1844), 177–181; “Mesmeric Revelation” in Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, ii (Aug. 1844), 67–70; and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” in American Review, ii (Dec. 1845), 561–565 (as “The Facts of M. Valdemar's Case”).

¹⁰ The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, pp. 57–58.

¹¹ The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism, p. 35.

¹² The experimentation with anaesthetics, especially nitrous oxide, served as a step between opium and hashish and modem hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline, whose users claim to have discovered a hidden reality or universal order. A philosophical discourse (which impressed William James) on the truths revealed under the influence of nitrous oxide was Benjamin Paul Blood's The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874).

¹³ “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O'Neill, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), p. 656. Since the pages are numbered consecutively through both volumes, only the page numbers will be referred to in this paper. If several quotations come from one page that number will appear in parentheses after the last quotation.

¹⁴ Lind, p. 1093.

¹⁵ Poe knew, of course, that mesmerism, like electrotherapy, could relieve pain and help a sick patient toward recovery. He never believed, however, that it could heal actual lesions or effect a real cure of organic disease—Harriet Martineau's case and her letters notwithstanding. See his review of W. Newnham's Human Magnetism, in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902), xii, 123.

¹⁶ The “etherium” theory was expounded by J. Stanley Grimes in his lectures and his book, Etherology: or, The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology (New York and Boston, 1845). (See also n. 26 below.) The “od” or “odyllic force” theory was made famous by the researches of Karl von Reichenbach in Germany in the 1840's on the relationship of mesmerism to other physical forces. His book on the subject was published in 1845 and introduced into England in 1846. The English version, Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attraction, appeared first in parts, then in complete translation by William Gregory in 1850.

¹⁷ A good example of a similar confusion between real electricity, “animal electricity,” and mesmerism is to be found in “Dr.” Gershom Huff's Electro-Physiology: A Scientific, Popular and Practical Treatise on the Prevention, causes and cure of Disease; or Electricity as a curative Agent, supported by theory and fact (New York, 1853).

¹⁸ The Forlorn Demon (Chicago, 1953), p. 58. 19 P. 1085. 20 P. 1085.

²¹ John Cuthbertson's Practical Electricity and Galvanism (London, 1821), pp. 270–272, a handbook which went through many printings, beginning in 1807, contains illustrations of the devices for applying a mild galvanic shock and detailed directions for their construction. Cuthbertson also expressed the hope that efforts to suspend animation through galvanism would soon be successful, although his own experiments on two dead “malefactors” were failures.

²² The entire passage from which this fragment is quoted inspired Baudelaire to call Poe “The master of horror, the Prince of mystery (”Le Poëme du haschisch,“ Œuvres complètes de Baudelaire, Paris, 1963, p. 373).

²³ P. 1084.

²⁴ P. 1084.

²⁵ One thinks inevitably of Ligeia's doctrine, supposedly quoted from Glanvill, that “Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

²⁶ J. Stanley Grimes's Etherology (n. 16 above) was revised and reissued under the title of Etherology and the Phreno-Philosophy of Mesmerism and Magic Eloquence (Boston and London, 1850). In spite of its position in the title and its minor role in the book, “Magic Eloquence” appears prominently on the jacket and spine. Grimes is generally credited with having inspired Andrew Jackson Davis to visit the spirit world through mesmerism and to expound his eloquent Revelations—ultimately in some thirty-odd volumes.

²⁷ Probably the best known of these were Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Mary Gove Nichols (whose “revelation,” “The Gift of Prophecy,” Poe published in The Broadway Journal, 4 Oct. 1845).

²⁸ “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” The Complete Poems and Stories, p. 318. For a different but corollary discussion of the relationship between alterations in, or annihilation of, consciousness in Poe's work and poetic creativity see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision,” P M LA, lxxxiii (May 1968), 284–297.

²⁹ Pierre (Grove Press: New York, 1957), pp. 123–126.

³⁰ The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols., ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), Nos. 179 (i, 256–258), 180 (i, 259–260), 188 (i, 273). The letters to Lowell and Chivers set forth the philosophy of “Mesmeric Revelation.” The one to Lowell includes the following passage: “At death, the worm is the butterfly—still material, but of a matter unrecognized by our organs—recognized, occasionally, perhaps, by the sleep-waker, directly—without organs—through the mesmeric medium” (Letters, i, 257).

³¹ PMLA, lxxvii (1962), 85–96.

³² P. 87.