Mesmerism spread beyond Mesmer. Across France, in many towns, "'Societies of Harmony' sprang up to experiment with magnetism."
And then Greene's next sentence: *"These societies eventually became notorious: They tended to be led by libertines who would turn their sessions into a kind of group orgy."*1
He reports it as a fact about what happened and moves on. Twelve lines later he returns to it as the mechanism of the entire law.
The observation is worth taking seriously and worth handling carefully, because it is the one place in Law 27 where Greene names something happening in bodies rather than in beliefs — and it is also a nineteenth- and twentieth-century commonplace about spiritual movements that has been used badly for a long time.
The claim, in full:
"The biggest trick of all was to play on the repressed sexuality that bubbles under the surface of any group setting. In a group, a longing for social unity, a longing older than civilization, cries out to be awakened. This desire may be subsumed under a unifying cause, but beneath it is a repressed sexuality that the charlatan knows how to exploit and manipulate for his own purposes."2
Two claims are stacked there and they are not the same strength.
The first is broad and defensible. Groups generate a longing for unity — for dissolved separateness, for being part of something. That is observable at football matches, at funerals, in choirs, and in every religious tradition that has ever had a congregation.
The second is narrower and much less supported. That beneath the longing for unity lies specifically repressed sexuality, as its true content. That is a psychoanalytic reduction of the period, stated here without argument, evidence or citation.
Greene needs the second because the first alone would not give him a lever. A longing for unity is satisfied by the group itself; only if the longing is sexual and repressed does it become a stored charge available to an operator.
The operational sentence is the one that matters, and it is precise about what the technique actually does.
"by playing on people's repressed sexuality, you lead them into mistaking their excited feelings for signs of your mystical strength."3
Not arousal. Misattribution of arousal.
The follower's physiological state is real — that is not in dispute, and Mesmer's salon produced it reliably. What is manufactured is the explanation: the excitement is caused by proximity, touch, music, scent, a crowd and a handsome young assistant, and it is attributed to the man in the gold-embroidered robe.
This is the same structure the whole cluster keeps producing. Schüppach's patients recovered because of the walk and the rest and attributed it to him. Borri's disciples funded a coach and read it as evidence of the philosopher's stone. The real effect is produced by the environment and credited to the operator, and the crediting is the entire manipulation.
Which locates this page's mechanism precisely. It is not seduction. It is an attribution error running on a genuine bodily state, and the state was generated by the room's design.
Here is what Greene does not ask, and it is the question the chapter's own material raises.
If the technique runs on repressed sexuality, then the fuel supply depends on the repression. And the repression is not a natural constant in these groups — it is produced by step three.
Borri demanded "the strictest vows of poverty."4 The hierarchy is graded in sanctity. Religious forms are borrowed precisely for their "lofty and holy associations", and lofty and holy associations come with continence attached.
So the cult creates the conditions and then harvests them. The renunciation the members undertake as devotion is the same renunciation that generates the charge the operator is described as exploiting.
Greene presents step three and this mechanism as separate items in a sequence. Read together they are one loop, and it is self-feeding: more devotion produces more renunciation produces more available charge produces more evidence of the leader's power.
Look at what the Paris salon actually did, in order, without the theory.
Patients are seated close together around a tub, hands joined, sometimes corded together. Orange blossom and incense through vents. A woman's voice singing from a room they cannot see.
Mesmer leaves.
"'Assistant magnetizers'—all handsome and strapping young men—would enter with jars of magnetized water that they would sprinkle on the patients, rubbing the healing fluid on their bodies, massaging it into their skin, moving them toward a trancelike state. And after a few minutes a kind of delirium would overcome the women. Some would sob, some would shriek and tear their hair, others would laugh hysterically."5
Then Mesmer returns, in silk embroidered with golden flowers, carrying a white rod, and "stroke[s] and soothe[s] the patients until calm was restored."5
Every element that produces the state is delegated. Every element that ends it is his.
And Greene records the followers' own account: many women "attribute[d] the strange power he had on them to his piercing look, which, they thought, was exciting or quieting the magnetic fluids in their bodies."5
The attribution is exact — exciting or quieting — and it names the wrong agent for both.
You are in a room that has become unexpectedly charged.
A workshop, a retreat, a late session, a group that has been together for three days. The conversation has gone somewhere raw, people are crying or laughing too easily, and there is a quality in the air that everyone can feel and nobody is naming.
The first useful thing is to notice that this is a normal property of groups under those conditions and not evidence of anything. Physical proximity, sustained attention, shared vulnerability, fatigue, disrupted routine — these reliably produce heightened states in ordinary humans with no mystical content whatever.
The second thing is to watch the attribution, and this is where it goes wrong. Somebody will say, sincerely, that the facilitator has something. That the room does this because of them. And the facilitator will feel it land, and the landing is pleasant, and there is now an incentive that was not there an hour ago.
The corrective is one sentence and it costs a great deal to say. This happens when people are in a room together for three days. Say it, out loud, and watch the temperature drop — the same drop as the exhaustion version of a conversion story, and the same reason.
And if you are the participant: notice the difference between I feel enormously connected to these people — which is true and worth having — and this person has a power over me. The first is a description of your state. The second is a theory about its cause, and it is the theory the room was arranged to produce.
The practical test is separation. Does the state survive the car park? Genuine change follows you home. A room effect does not, and its dissipation on the drive back is not a failure of your commitment — it is information about what produced it.
Some precision is owed here, because the claim is easy to overstate in either direction.
He is not claiming the followers were seduced. The Societies of Harmony passage describes libertine leaders and group orgies; the salon passage describes misattributed arousal, which is a different and much more general phenomenon.
He is not claiming the operator must be aware of it. "The charlatan knows how to exploit and manipulate" implies awareness, but nothing in the Mesmer material shows him designing for this specifically. The room he built produces it whether or not that was the intent.
And he is not distinguishing men from women in the mechanism, though his evidence does. The salon's attendance was "mostly women"; the assistants were young men; the delirium is described entirely in women. Greene draws a universal conclusion from a gendered arrangement and does not remark on it. That asymmetry is in the evidence and is unexamined, and it is the point at which this passage most needs a source and has none.
Three flags, stated plainly rather than smoothed.
🚩 The psychoanalytic reduction is of its period and is not established. Beneath [the longing for unity] is a repressed sexuality is a specific twentieth-century theoretical commitment presented as a fact about groups. The broad claim about longing for unity survives without it; the reduction does not follow from anything Greene offers.
🚩 The trope has a bad history. Spiritual movement is really sexual underneath has been used, repeatedly, to discredit unfamiliar religious groups — particularly minority and non-European ones — by people who were not investigating anything. The vault holds this page as documentation of Greene's claim, not as a general instrument for reading movements.
🚩 SINGLE SOURCE throughout. No citation for the Societies of Harmony, for the orgies, for the composition of the salon, or for the psychological claim.
What survives all three, and is worth keeping, is the narrow and checkable part: groups under sustained proximity produce heightened physiological states, and those states get attributed to whoever is standing at the front.
The strongest element is the misattribution mechanism, which is consistent with everything else in the cluster and does not depend on the psychoanalytic claim at all. Arousal produced by an environment and credited to a person is the same structure as recovery produced by a walk and credited to a doctor.
The weakest element is the universal claim. Any group setting is doing a lot of work in a sentence supported by one case in one city.
Tension with the chapter's other cases. Neither Borri's six degrees nor Schüppach's pharmacy is described in these terms. The mechanism is drawn from Mesmer alone and generalised to the law.
Open question, and it is the one Greene's own material raises. If the fuel is repressed sexuality, and the repression is produced by the group's own borrowed religious forms, then the technique manufactures its own supply. Does that predict that the most continence-demanding groups generate the most of this — and is that testable against anything other than anecdote?
Greene's own Law 27 step three instructs the operator to borrow religious forms and ask for sacrifices; the vault's page on that step notes that borrowed forms bring native expectations with them, including poverty and continence.
Set that against this page and the two steps are in a loop the chapter presents as a sequence. Step three generates the repression; this mechanism burns it. The devotion the members offer and the charge the operator harvests are the same act seen twice.
There is a second tension with Greene's Law 25 material on self-creation. There the operator's protean adaptability is described as removable — "it is not 'you'… You need not take it personally." Here the operator is credited with a "mystical strength" by followers whose bodies are supplying the evidence, and the chapter offers no equivalent reassurance that he can decline the role. Borri's twenty years in a cell suggest he could not.
Behavioral mechanics — The Group Dissolves Doubt (mandatory psychology → behavioral-mechanics handshake)
That page holds Greene's central mechanical claim: "the distance that allows us to reason, is broken down when we join a group." Doubt is not a trait but a spatial condition, and it is removed with chairs, proximity and timing.
This page supplies what fills the space, and the pair completes a mechanism neither states alone.
The group page explains the removal — why nobody in the salon steps back and evaluates. It does not explain why the resulting experience is attributed to a person rather than simply enjoyed. A warm room does not, by itself, produce a conviction that the man in the silk robe has powers.
The misattribution does. A body in a strongly aroused state generates a demand for a cause, and the room has been arranged so that only one cause is available: the operator arrives at the moment of maximum intensity and visibly ends it.
So the tactical counterpart runs in two stages. First remove the distance, so that no alternative account can be assembled. Then supply the only candidate cause, at the peak, in gold. Greene teaches the first as architecture and the second as timing, and never joins them.
And it names the defence in the same two stages. Restoring distance — leaving the room, waiting a day — is necessary but not sufficient, because the memory of the state survives and still demands a cause. The second half is supplying the true one: three days, close quarters, no sleep, forty strangers. A person who has an accurate account of their own arousal cannot have it re-attributed.
Eastern spirituality — Repression as Spiritual Failure: When Transcendence Becomes Pathology
The illustration on that page is deliberately mundane. You decide to stop eating sugar. Three days of clarity and purpose. By day four you dream about cake; by day five you see sugar in every advertisement and shop window; by day seven you are thinking about sugar more than when you were eating it. The energy did not disappear. Suppression amplified its presence.
Greene's mechanism depends entirely on that being true and never says so.
His operator needs a stored charge — repressed sexuality bubbling under the surface, available to be worked on. Where the charge does not exist, the technique has nothing to run on. And the tradition's finding is that repression does not reduce the charge; it concentrates and displaces it, so that the suppressed thing becomes the most present thing in the room.
Put together, the loop closes and it is worse than either text describes. The group's ascetic demands are not incidental to the mechanism; they are its fuel supply. Vows of poverty, grades of sanctity, sacrifice, continence — every device that makes a following look serious is also a device that increases the pressure the operator is credited with relieving.
Which yields a prediction that neither Greene nor the contemplative account states, and that is at least in principle checkable. The intensity of the devotional experience should track the severity of the renunciation, not the truth of the doctrine — and a group that demands little should generate little of this regardless of what it teaches.
It also names what the tradition offers in place of the loop, which the chapter has no version of at all: not suppression and not indulgence, but the energy being worked with in the open, where it does not need to be attributed to anybody.
Sharpest implication. Nothing in the salon is faked. The arousal is real, the delirium is real, the bodies are doing exactly what bodies do at close quarters under sustained attention. The only manufactured element is the cause — and the operator's entire contribution is to leave before the state and return in gold to end it. Which means the technique's product is not an experience but an attribution, and the person who can accurately name what produced their own state is, on this account, immune to the whole of Law 27.
Generative questions