MAGNETISM is a scientific mystery with an occult aura because the "Stone," "Fire," "Agent," as the alchemists knew it, is the only known force which is truly pyscho-physical. As such, its influence and importance to man is beyond all others. It is why the alchemists believed it to be the medium between man and God.
There is a vast stir of interest in the properties of magnetism. New facts are being sought, new research is being done. A New York bookseller, whose shop boasts the largest collection of works by and on magnetists (all out-of-print and expensive), told me that this was in response to demands from doctors! No day, he said, went by without such a call.
My own interest in magnetism which had taken me there in search of books about it had been aroused by meeting at a tea a woman who showed me a magnetic pendulum that she had gotten in Paris before the war. She told me fascinating things about the way the French use it which were quite new to me. The pendulum was an exotic-looking trinket that appealed to my imagination. Its thin, longish emerald silk cord was so delicately flexible that I should never have suspected it of enclosing, as she said it did, threadlike segments of steel for its entire length. At one end was a little bar of what looked like tortoiseshell with four tiny shelves or "holders." At the other end was a weighted tip, shell and gilded metal, about an inch long, tapered to a point.
The French are themselves a magnetic people. And it was they who gave Mesmer his opportunity and most of his followers. Whether their use of the magnetic pendulum is a kind of off-shoot of the Mesmeric cult I don't know, but at least it is natural that this intriguing gadget should find a home in France. Its function there, according to my informant, is twofold. It works for the doctor, and for the detective.
In the latter role it is used to spot smuggled goods for the Customs. It acts as a kind of Geiger counter, but is superior in that its response is not limited to metals and minerals. It can indicate where the opium is hidden, the brandy and cigarettes, jewels or whatever it is desired to locate.
The method is to place a pinch or a sliver of the substance to be found in one of the "holders." The operator then holds the bar in steady fingers letting the cord with its weighted tip hang motionless. In a few minutes the point stirs, then a few small whirlings like a good bird dog finding the scent. Next the movement straightens and swings in a straight line in a definite direction, it is off toward the quarry. The operator follows in the indicated direction, walking carefully so as not to disturb the motion of the pendulum. When he has reached the spot directly above or below the cache the pendulum stops moving and again hangs motionless.
Besides this, I was told, many French doctors make use of the pendulum in dietetics and diagnosis. It also plays an occasional part in such legal cases as in this country would come before the court of Domestic Relations.
The pendulum distinguishes between positive and negative in the object over which it is swung. It also gives the basic numerical vibratory count of the object, color or person. Since the turn of the century the French have done a large amount of research in this field listing and classifying vibratory rates, and a considerable body of literature has been published on the subject, none of which has been translated, nor so far as I know is available over here. Some of these books are reference tables and include summaries of harmonious and discordant counts.
The doctor, supposing it is a matter of diet, takes first the patient's personal vibratory count. Then he consults his tables to find what foods are in harmony with this and what she must avoid, and in this way a diet list is made up. Not much of that is, I imagine, done today, but before the war, I was told, one occasionally saw in a restaurant the gadget produced by a customer, and the food tested and perhaps sent back.
In legal cases the pendulum gives its evidence of incompatability due to imbalance of positive and negative qualities in marital situations. Can't you just hear the horse laugh that would greet such a demonstration in the U. S. A.?
Anyone can test something of this with a home-made pendulum. A bead, preferably an amber one, or a gold ring, on a string will do it. In the normally polarized individual, the swing is circular above the back of a woman's right hand, and straight over the palm. This is in reverse for a man. In each sex the movement over the right hand reverses over the left. Held over the photograph of a woman the pendulum swings in a circle, over that of a man the stroke is straight.
I showed this to a doctor in New York and he recalled that just before we went in the war one
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