Ancient Magic, Magnetism & Psychic Forces: The Key to Power

In 1895, from an office in the Masonic Temple in Chicago, Prof. L. H. Anderson published what he called the key to power.

His subject was magnetism. Not the iron filings kind, but the force he believed passed between people, carried by the hand, the eye and the trained will. This book is his attempt to set his system down, and it comes from the strange moment when mesmerism, mental science and the young New Thought movement all ran together. Anderson argues from scripture as readily as from the medical science of his own day, and he is never once in doubt.

Over seventeen chapters he moves from the magnetic hand and eye to the training of the will, from the states between sleep and waking to what he believed the Egyptian priesthood and the Kabbalists had known of the same power. He is interested in healing, in influence, in who has this force and who does not, and in whether a person acting under another's will can be held responsible for what they do.

The summaries the original printed for each chapter give the flavor better than any description could:

• Miracles not Necessary
• The Magnetic Hand and Eye
• None so Blind as Those Who Will Not See
• How Personal Magnetic Influence Operates
• Magnetism a new Medical Science
• How Certain Persons Make Themselves Invisible
• Trances of the Indian Fakir
• Man Blind to the Wealth Within Him
• There is no Death, it is but a Change of Condition

He writes among the people who shaped early New Thought, naming Helen Wilmans, Prentice Mulford, W. J. Colville, and A. J. Davis among his seers. Anyone who knows the law of attraction from its modern books will recognize a great deal here, said a century earlier and in blunter language. Anyone who does not will find a Victorian professor explaining, with total confidence, how to make a stranger turn around.

About this edition. The 1895 text has been reset as type and followed closely, down to the ornaments:

• All seventeen chapters
• The original analytical contents, its page ranges renumbered to this edition so they point at the right pages
• Thirteen engravings and printer's devices taken from the original plates
• Decorated initials, and six display quotations each given its own page
• Running heads, chapter openings and the closing device kept as printed

For readers of Victorian occultism and the history of mesmerism, for readers of early New Thought sources, and for anyone curious to see how much of the later language of mind power was already in place.