Thesis (PhD)-Open University. BLDSC no.DX94698.

This dissertation examines the cultural role of three controversial yet popular heterodox sciences of nineteenth century Spain: phrenology; animal magnetism and hypnosis; and spiritualism or spiritism. It assesses the relationship between the development of phrenology and early Catalanism, the connection of animal magnetism and hypnosis to both Catholicism and emergent medical discourse, and the flourishing of spiritism in the context of the production of a national genealogy. The project draws on myriad sources like literary works, daily newspapers, specialized journals, dissemination pamphlets, and case histories, to argue that these heterodox sciences were an integral part of the social and cultural history of the nineteenth century. It rethinks not just the relationship between science and cultural production that scholars like James Secord, Gillian Beer, and others have studied but also what we understand as nineteenth-century scientific heterodoxies, seeking to understand them as a broad socio-cultural phenomenon in the way they helped construct cultural practices of the time. Alternative Presence contends that phrenology, animal magnetism and hypnosis, and spiritism expanded rhizomatically away from the confines of canonical institutions and yet contributed to early political regionalism, practices of medical and religious healing, and national historiography. To study such mediations, I look both at these sciences’ main actors — heterogeneous individuals and groups who disseminated them — and at a series of narrative and expressive strategies visible in the discourse through which they flourished. As the term “science” evolved and gained social authority through the appearance of increasingly demarcated fields of expertise, heterodox sciences’ tessellated networks lost ground and were ultimately relegated to the sphere of pseudoscience or popular belief. However, during their lifetime they served to generate alternative ideas of the subject and the nation. Their crucial role in the nineteenth-century Spanish cultural field has been ripe for rediscovery, and this dissertation probes their imbrication with mainstream ways of imagining the paths to modernity.

Where does the soul go after death? This question is based on my ‘fear of ghosts’ and became the starting point of my degree project, which most obviously stems from our fear of the unknown.   In the age of technology, many people claim that they are atheists and think that everything has or will have a physical explanation. But the fact is that definitions of reality are always provisional. We can only have an imaginary concept of this mysterious land and open up to all possibilities of the afterlife. This project include ideas from mesmerism and use substitutes to represent paranormal ectoplasm in order to materialise immaterial ghosts. The installation represents scientific experiments by including laboratory features. I intend to discuss contemporary attitudes to the afterlife.

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L’étude des disciples de Philippe permet de souligner l’importance de la fonction « pharmakologique » du religieux : le magnétisme était la force mystérieuse et parfois inquiétante qui permettait de rétablir l’équilibre des fluides. Le christianisme des disciples de Philippe les portait à souligner l’importance de la prière et à imaginer un magnétisme supérieur, un « magnétisme spirituel », mais ils gardaient souvent la terminologie magnétique : il était encore question de « fluides », de « rayons » et d’ « énergies ». Les différents acteurs, très influencés par l’occultisme de leur temps, importèrent en fait des éléments exogènes au sein d’un ésotérisme occidental originellement chrétien, tels le magnétisme animal et les spéculations orientalisantes des Théosophistes anglo-saxons pour préfigurer, en fin de compte, la nébuleuse « mystique ésotérique » des courants plus ou moins liés au New Age de la deuxième partie du XXe siècle. / Studying the disciples of Philippe makes it possible to underline the importance of the "pharmakologic" function in religion: magnetism was the mysterious and sometimes troubling force that made it possible to restore balance to the fluids. The Christianism of the disciples of Philippe led them to underline the importance of prayer and to imagine a superior magnetism, a "spiritual magnetism", but they often retained the magnetic oriented terminology: there were still "fluids", "rays" and "energies". The various actors, highly influenced by the occultism of their time, actually imported exogenous elements into a Western esotericism that was originally Christian, such as animal magnetism and the Easternising speculations of the Anglo-Saxon Theosophists in order to foreshadow, in the end, the "mystic-esoteric nebulous" of trends more or less tied to the "New Age" of the second half of the 20th century.

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This study explores the western Romantic period as a transition between the medieval “open body” and the modern “closed body.” It focuses on “closing body” phenomena such as “mesmerism” (i.e. animal magnetism), somnambulism, substance abuse, and the “second-self,” including notions of the subconscious and the trope of gothic Doppelgängers. This study draws from many pieces of western Romantic literature but is most centered around James Hogg’s 1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This new reading of Hogg’s novel suggests a core theme of body anxiety, rather than theological dispute.

My research on Victor Brauner’s work in the first two decades of his affiliation with the Surrealist group in Paris re-establishes the role played by the Romanian Jewish artist in the definition of automatic Surrealist procedures of painting and mixed-technique objects that relied upon a new and unconventional understanding of the occult. In the three chapters of this study of Victor Brauner’s work in the 1930s and early 1940s, I analyse key notions, such as the fantastic, animal magnetism, and the occult practices of art making in a Surrealist context. The fantastic is discussed in the first chapter of the thesis from a literary perspective with political connotations in Surrealism, which resulted from a debate engaged in nineteenth-century French literature on the issue of the marvellous versus the fantastic. Due to the Surrealists’ interest in the fantastic a new category emerged, the fantastic art, which is examined in this first chapter in connection with Brauner’s artworks in the 1930s. The incursion into the fantastic, with focus on the premonition of the painter’s left eye loss in his artworks of the 1930s is completed with an approach to spiritualism that had a revival at the time. The second chapter of the thesis investigates the doctrine of animal magnetism and the state of magnetic somnambulism in eighteenth-century scholarship and shows how this experimentation had influenced the development of a new branch of the science, metapsychics or psychical research at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth one. I take into account and demonstrate that these outdated and modern domains of enquiry into the unknown and beyond reality were appealing to Surrealists, in particular to Brauner, due to their research into unconscious processes of the mind. I argue that through the attainment of a condition similar to the one of the somnambulist in sessions of magnetic sleep, the Surrealists aimed to generate automatic procedures of painting and object making. In the third chapter of the thesis I discuss Victor Brauner’s technique of drawing with a candle, or le cirage, as an automatic procedure of art developed in connection with the occult. This final part of the thesis makes also manifest the association of Brauner’s artworks in the early 1940s with practices of the occult in the near and centuries before past.

Submitted by Caroline Falcao (caroline.rfalcao@ufpe.br) on 2017-05-22T17:45:56Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) TESE FINAL Carlos Geraldo-PPGO.pdf: 10438439 bytes, checksum: 846645d0ef9edecba48513889f2c3692 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-22T17:45:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) TESE FINAL Carlos Geraldo-PPGO.pdf: 10438439 bytes, checksum: 846645d0ef9edecba48513889f2c3692 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-09-29 / O campo magnético é uma fonte acessível de informação direcional passível de ser utilizada pelos seres vivos para orientação e navegação. Animais como mamíferos, aves, peixes, répteis marinhos, anfíbios, moluscos, insetos e crustáceos são sensíveis ao campo geomagnético. O presente estudo enfocou uma avaliação do efeito do campo magnético sobre peixes e crustáceos marinhos em condições naturais (área costeira) e sobre camarões Litopennaeus vannamei em condições controladas (laboratório). Os experimentos com peixes e crustáceos em condições naturais consistiram de sete a oito pescarias independentes, empregando-se armadilhas tipo covo distribuídos em cinco grupos de três a quatro unidades. Magnetos permanentes de 2000 Gauss em um raio de 2m foram fixados próximos à abertura de seis dos dezesete covos empregados. Ao final de cada pescaria os peixes e crustáceos capturados em cada covo foram identificados e contabilizados. Os níveis de capturas de peixes e crustáceos foram significativamente mais elevados nos covos com magneto. Dezessete espécies de crustáceos estiveram presentes nas capturas com os covos, dentre as quais as duas espécies mais frequentes foram Coryrhynchus riisei e Stenorhynchus seticornis. Trinta e duas espécies de peixes ocorreram nas capturas com os covos, com a espécie Haemulon aurolineatum (Xira branca) apresentando uma frequência de ocorrência uma a duas ordens de magnitude superior as demais espécies capturadas, principalmente nos covos com magneto. Ante este resultado, otólitos e tecidos da linha lateral, mancha ocelar, narina e área abdominal (controle) foram extraídos de cinco indivíduos jovens e de cinco indivíduos adultos de H. aurolineatum para investigar a presença de material magnético nessas estruturas. As amostras foram coletadas de indivíduos recém-capturados, secas em estufa e submetidas a medidas de ressonância ferromagnética (RFM) com uso de um espectrômetro Bruker ESP300E. Os espectros obtidos indicaram presença de material magnético nos otólitos, narinas e mancha ocelar e ausência de material magnético nos tecidos da área abdominal de todos os espécimes analisados. Nas amostras da linha lateral, a presença de material magnético pareceu estar relacionada ao desenvolvimento ontogenético, tendo sido detectado principalmente em espécimes adultos. Os experimentos em condições controladas foram realizados com camarões Litopenaeus vannamei considerando-se sexos e fases do seu ciclo ontogenético (machos e fêmeas adultos; machos e fêmeas juvenis e pós-larvas). Um par de bobinas circulares na configuração de Helmholtz, conectada a uma fonte regulável, foi empregado para a geração de diferentes intensidades (0, 25, 30, 35 e 40 μT) de campo magnético artificial uniforme. Os testes foram realizados de forma acumulativa e não acumulativa. No primeiro caso, um mesmo grupo de 15 camarões foi sequencialmente submetido aos cinco níveis de intensidade de campo magnético, com um intervalo de 24h entre exposições. No segundo caso, empregando- se novos grupos de 15 camarões para cada nível de exposição. Todos os testes foram realizados em triplicata. Os resultados evidenciaram a redução da atividade do L. vannamei quando expostos a campos de 35μT e 40 μT e sua paralisia total a campo de 40μT, assim como a preferência na ocupação do polo sul por fêmeas e machos adultos e juvenis e do polo norte por pós-larvas. / The magnetic field is a handy source of directional information that can be used by living things for orientation and navigation. Animals such as mammals, birds, fishes, marine reptiles, amphibians, molluscs, insects and crustaceans are sensitive to the geomagnetic field. The present study focused on an evaluation of the response of marine fishes and shellfishes subjected to an artificial magnetic field under natural conditions (coastal area) and under controlled conditions (laboratory). The experiments with fishes and crustaceans in natural conditions consisted of seven to eight independent fisheries employing creels traps distributed into five groups of three to four units. Permanent magnets of 2000 Gauss in a 2m radius were tied next to the opening of six of the seventeen creels employees. At the end of each fishery, fish and crustaceans caught in each trap were identified and accounted for. The levels of catches of fish and crustaceans were significantly higher in creels with magnet. Seventeen species of crustaceans were present in the catches with the creels, among which the two species most frequently were Coryrhynchus riisei and Stenorhynchus seticorni. Thirty-two species of fish were present in the catchs with the creels. The frequence of occurrence of the speciie Haemulon aurolineatum (Tomtate grunt) was one to two orders of magnitude higher than the other species caught, mainly in creels with magneto. Given this results, Otoliths and tissues of the lateral line, ocelar spot, nostril and abdomen (control) were extracted from five young individuals and five adult individuals of H. aurolineatum to investigate the presence of magnetic material in these structures. The samples were collected from newly captured individuals, oven-dried and subjected to measures of ferromagnetic resonance (RFM) using a Bruker ESP300E spectrometer. The spectra obtained indicated presence of magnetic material in otoliths, nostrils and ocelar spot and absence of magnetic material in the tissues of the abdominal area of all specimens examined. In the samples of the lateral line, the presence of magnetic material seems to be related to the ontogenetic development, having been detected mainly among adult specimens. The experiments under controlled conditions were performed with the shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei considering different sexes and stages of their ontogenetic cycle (adult males and females; juvenils males and females and post-larvae). A pair of circular coils in Helmholtz configuration, connected to an adjustable power source was used to generate different intensities (0, 25, 30, 35 and 40 μT) of uniform artificial magnetic field. The tests were carried out in accumulative and non accumulative manners. In the first case, a group of 15 shrimps was sequentially exposed to the five levels of magnetic field intensity, with a 24 hours interval between exposures. In the second case, using new groups of 15 shrimps for each level of exposure. All tests were performed in triplicate. The results showed a reduction in activity of L. vannamei when exposed to fields of 35 μT and higher and their total paralysis to levels of 40 μT, as well as the preference in the occupation of the South Pole by females and males juvenils and adults and of the North Pole by post-lavae.