R. Encyclical Letter of the Holy Roman Inquisition to all Bishops against the abuses of Magnetism

Wednesday, July 30, 1856.

"... It has been found that a certain new kind of superstition is being introduced from magnetic phenomena, by which several moderns are intent not, as would be fitting, on explaining physical sciences, but on deceiving and seducing men, thinking that hidden, remote, and future things can be detected by the art or pretense of magnetism, especially by the aid of little women who depend solely on the nod of the magnetizer." (The response already given on July 28, 1847, moreover, having been related, whose tenor here was: "Every error, sortilege, and explicit or implicit invocation of the demon having been removed, the use of magnetism, namely the mere act of applying physical means otherwise licit, is not morally forbidden, provided it does not tend to an illicit or in any way depraved end. But the application of purely physical principles and means to truly supernatural things and effects, so that they may be explained physically, is nothing but a deception altogether illicit and heretical." - The Holy Congregation adds):

"Although by this general decree the licitness or illicitness in the use or abuse of magnetism is sufficiently explained, nevertheless the malice of men has so grown that, neglecting the licit study of science, rather pursuing curious things with great loss of souls and detriment to civil society itself, they boast that they have obtained a certain principle of soothsaying and divining. Hence by the prestiges of somnambulism and clear intuition, as they call it, those little women, carried away by gesticulations not always modest, prattle that they behold any invisible things whatsoever, and presume rashly to institute discourses concerning Religion itself, to evoke the souls of the dead, to receive responses, to detect unknown and distant things, and to exercise other superstitious things of this kind, certainly about to obtain great gain for themselves and their masters by divining. In all these things, whatever art or illusion at last they use, since physical means are ordered to non-natural effects, there is found deception altogether illicit and heretical, and scandal against honesty of morals.

"Given at Rome, in the Chancery of the Holy Office at the Vatican, August 4, 1856.

"V. Cardinal Macchi."