THE BREAKFAST QUESTION
Instantaneous Personal Magnetism – Edmund Shaftesbury
Good morning! And welcome to another delicious and nutritious serving of Cosmic Pancakes! If you’re hungry for a second bowlful of cereal-based mesmeric madness, then grab a spoon and open w-i-d-e!
This book came into our possession via an eBay splurge. The necessary purchasing of credible academic works gets anyone’s ‘inner hypnotist’ scrolling the latest hypnotic listings, which then get snapped up for their notable aesthetics, titles, and claims. I picked this 1961 reprint of Instantaneous Personal Magnetism off the stacks accumulating upon our kitchen table without knowing anything about the author. It’s actually rather good, mesmerically. BUT!
‘Edmund Shaftesbury’ is the pen name of Albert Webster Edgerly (1852-1926), an “American social reform activist,” according to Wikipedia. I guess that’s a polite way of saying: a man so hopelessly racist that he advocated for euthanasia and castration of all non-Caucasians… but he made damned fine breakfast cereal, folks, so it’s not something the modern Nestlé Purina people likely care to mention in their corporate brand narratives. But – *shrug* – that’s what America gets for turning everything into tacky television these days.
Onwards! Edgerly was lauded as a health guru; an ambiguous social status that opens many doors still. The Salem, Massachusetts, native founded the Ralston Health Club upon graduating from Boston University School of Law in 1876, and wrote many self-help texts on healthy diet and mind. His success, in 1900, on joining forces with the founder of an animal feed manufacturer to create his blessed own-brand human cereal legitimised, yet disguised, the extremeness of his beliefs.
The Ralstonism pseudoscientific personal ‘mastery’ movement was organised around a hierarchical ranking system – much like masonic and other ‘class-mixer’ cults (and let’s all just appreciate safeguarding social mixer clubs; humans do need them) – with Ralstonite offshoot The Magnetism Club of America bestowing members with supposed ‘mind control’ powers. Edgerly also produced utopian religious text-rants/‘rants’ (anything over circa one vocal minute or the words of a longish text message qualifies for that here), created his own language called ‘Adam-Man-Tongue’, and preached that young men form a probationary marriage with a woman old enough to be their grandmother. Ew. Strangely, his Ralston Heights 1905 estate, from where his small yet ‘pure’ community would repopulate the Earth, did not manifest as planned. It fell into disrepair, before being sold by his wife a year after his death in 1926. Legend has it that the estate is now haunted by the “invisible leaks in vital forces” that Edgerly sought to marshal and manipulate.
I don’t wish to know why a British publisher saw fit to pump out a 36th edition of the 1902 original in this 1961 reprint. As I’ve admitted, there are some worthwhile vintage mesmeric tips amidst the booming religious declarations and myriad dietary guides. The banality of ‘self-help’ means much of the content can be read as a generic confidence-booster for the amateur hypnotist; Edgerly’s ‘Adam 2.0’ messiah-patriarch role was a single-mindedness that remains aspirational for many still today. Eloquent entries on using one’s eyes and voice, for instance, feel musical, uplifting, wondrous; accurately “magnetic” in transference from page to spirit – the fire of the eye speaks; the human voice is a colour palette… One can see the connective flow of ‘gospel’, I suppose.
There is plentiful marital-lady advice, too; breakfast bores of big households can tend to treat females and dependents as specimens, curiosities, projects, so it’s always fun to pick up vintage, random insights. I also found an old pressed rose stem for completing an exercise in developing magnetic “smoothness” – I used to be heavy into flower pressing as a child and it was quite the thrill to find this homemade mesmeric treasure! What else..? Poetry interludes. (I’m so over poetry – how many more times must I state this?!) Ah, then – what’s this..? Oh! A, um, handy instructional on how to drive a man insane and stop his heart using select musical notes.
Why, it’s enough to inspire Satan Himself to fire up Mesmer’s famed glass harmonica…
Someone hold my bowl of Shredded Ralston cereal before I get too old for this shit?!
