Enjoy the First Seven Minutes of this Eleventh Episode of THE WIDE MASONIC WORLD - Join hosts Robert Cooper and Mark Tabbert for a in-depth conversation with Prof. Rob Collis, Ph.D.. He is an Assistant Professor of History at Drake University, Des Moines.

Prof. Collis teaches European and global history, specializing in Russian history (particularly in the eighteenth century) and the history of Western esotericism. He also teaches a course on world history since 1750 and a Cold War Through Film class that examines movies from the 1940s to the 1980s from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Since 2023, Collis has also been supervising students in their Capstone research papers on European history.

On 18 August 1784, Ivan Sergeevich Bariatinskii, the Russian ambassador

to France, wrote a report to Empress Catherine II, on her orders, about

Franz Anton Mesmer and animal magnetism.1 The ambassador’s despatch

was written a mere seven days after the presentation of a report to King

Louis XVI by a specially-appointed Royal Commission composed of

five scientists of the French Academy of Sciences (Benjamin Franklin,

Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Jean d’Arcet and Michel-

Joseph Majault). These five eminent figures signed their names to a report

that largely dismissed the purported curative powers touted by Mesmer.

. . . . the brief dalliance with forms of animal magnetism in 1786

foreshadowed (as did early expressions of romanticism) the more sustained

challenge to Enlightenment ideals that occurred in the post-Napoleonic

era in the Russian Empire and Europe as a whole: a spiritual curiosity and

anxiety that emboldened individuals to seek unorthodox and personal

channels to the divine; a heightened sense of the unexplored potential of

the realm of the unconscious within the human mind; and a willingness

to embrace unconventional methods of healing that drew on older theories

of occult philosophy. An understanding of this initial, albeit fleeting,

attraction to animal magnetism among the Russian nobility in the 1780s

provides an essential grounding for further studies that can examine the

resurgence of interest in the varied forms of animal magnetism in the

decades after 1815, which has yet to receive in-depth scholarly attention.