Free manuals of magnetism and hypnotism

This page gathers sixteen old manuals of animal magnetism and hypnotism that anyone can read for free. They were written between 1784 and 1889 by the people who first observed trance, somnambulism and suggestion. Their authors died long ago, so the books are in the public domain, and the copies we link are kept by public libraries and digitised for everyone.

Most of them are in French, because France was where magnetism was studied most in the 19th century. They are the books that came after Mesmer and Faria, and before the modern manuals of hypnosis and NLP that you find in our free library.

In plain words: the first teachers of trance left their notes, and the notes are still readable today.

Why do we put them here? Our School, ISI-CNV, works on the non-verbal side of influence, which in our courses becomes fascination and Mesmerismus®, the method developed by Dr. Marco Paret. These manuals are where many of the gestures, the gazes and the precautions we teach were first written down. Reading them, you will notice how carefully the magnetisers described what happened between two people, and how much of it modern psychology is only now measuring again.

Copies hosted by the Internet Archive, from the collections of the Wellcome Library, the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé), the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the U.S. National Library of Medicine and university libraries. Many more titles are on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. To suggest a manual for this list, write to info@neurolinguistic.com.