Mesmerising and its origins

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My guess would be that we’ve all heard of the word ‘mesmerise’ but did you know that Franz Anton Mesmer was an 18th century German physician who founded a therapeutic movement which was called mesmerism? Part of his belief was that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects. He believed there was an invisible fluid n the body that reacts to the gravitational force of the planets. Mesmer felt he could heal people using magnets. The use of trance in Mesmer’s ‘healing’ of people was a forerunner of hypnotism. And a nice little story about Mesmer was that he arranged, in his garden, a performance of a one-act opera, Bastien and Bastienne, following the cancellation of the performance elsewhere. The 12-year-old performer of the opera was none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Some years later, Mozart included a reference to Mesmer in his opera Cosi fan tutte. I hope this sunset is sufficiently mesmerising to fit with the post.