The Amazing Abbe Faria By Luis S. R. Vas
In 1814 in Paris, an ambitious French army officer François-Joseph Noizet, attended a demonstration of what was then known as somnambulism and is now known as hypnotism. "There, I saw a tall and handsome old man, with half-greying hair, dark complexion, elongated face, hooked nose, large bulging eyes and a sort of beautiful equine head.... I discovered that he was an Indo-Portuguese priest from Goa," wrote Noizet. Noizet then went on to describe the scene where the 'Indo-Portuguese priest' who went by the name of Abbeَ Faria, read laboriously for half an hour from a text and then proceeded to illustrate his theories with a demonstration on a housekeeper and one or two regulars. He asked them to think about sleep, showed them the back of his hand and ordered them firmly: "Sleep!". "At least three out of five times I saw this technique succeed in less than one minute," Noizet comments. Faria, according to Noizet, went on give further demonstration of the dramatic effects of hypnosis. Who was this Abbeَ Faria? He was Jose Custodio de Faria, the son of Caetano Vitorino de Faria of Colvale and Rosa Maria de Souza of Candolim, both native Goans. Born on May 31, 1756, in his mother's house in Candolim he lived there with his parents and his adopted sister, Catarina, an orphan. Perhaps appropriately, the house is now an orphanage. Jose Custodio de Faria's parents soon separated. They obtained the Church's dispensation, the father joined the seminary to complete his studies for priesthood. The mother became a nun, joining the St. Monica Convent in Old Goa where she rose to the position of Prioress. Jose's father had great ambitions for himself and his son. He assembled a vast array of letters of introduction to everybody who was anybody at the Portuguese Court and together they set sail for Lisbon aboard the ship S. Jose when the son was fifteen years old. Nine months later they were in Lisbon, befriending all those who mattered in the Portuguese Court, particularly the Pope's Nuncio or Ambassador to the Court. They managed to convince the Portuguese Sovereign to send them to Rome for Faria Sr. to earn a doctorate in theology and the son to pursue his studies for the priesthood. In 1777, the father returned to Lisbon, now a Doctor of Theology. Eventually, the son too earned his doctorate, dedicating his doctoral thesis on The Existence of God to the Portuguese Queen, D. Maria I. This was followed by another study on the Advent of the Holy Spirit dedicated to the Pope. Apparently His Holiness was sufficiently impressed to invite Jose Custodio de Faria to preach a sermon in the Sistine Chapel, which he himself attended. On his return to Lisbon, the Queen was informed by the Nuncio of the Pope's to honour Faria Jr. She invited the young priest to preach to her in her private chapel. But Faria Jr. climbing the pulpit, and seeing the august assembly was tongue-tied. His father, who sat beneath the pulpit, whispered to him in Konkani: Hi sogli baji; cator re baji. Relieved by the exhortation, the son lost his fear and preached fluently. Faria Jr., from then on, must have often wondered how a mere phrase from his father could alter his state of mind so radically as to banish his stage fright instantly. This incident had far reaching consequences in his life, sowing the seeds of his theory of how the hypnotic phenomenon worked. Convinced that Portugal had no future for him, Faria Jr. departed for France, and just as well, because his father found himself implicated in the Pinto Conspiracy of 1787 hatched in Goa, in which some priests who believed that they were being discriminated against the Portuguese clergy, planned a revolt. The conspiracy was discovered with fatal consequences for the conspirators. However, there was no evidence against Faria Sr. and he was set free. But he lost all his influence in the Portuguese Court. Dr. Mikhail Buyanov, President of the Moscow Psychotherapeutic Academy wrote, "In Paris, they both [father and son] pursued clerical activities but they did not please the authorities and the son was imprisoned in the Bastille. He spent several months there. One of his guards was fond of playing draughts; however, each game only lasted a short time and had to be started again. Jose Custodio de Faria often played with this guard and to prolong the pleasure, he invented hundred-square draughts. This was his first contribution to history." Faria Jr., now known as Abbe Faria, proceeded to develop his own ideas about hypnotism. He asserted that hypnotic trance was caused, not by animal magnetism as maintained by Anton Mesmer, the founder of a school of hypnotism known as mesmerism, but by suggestions from the hypnotist. He recalled how his father's suggestion 'cator re baji' had had a dramatic impact on him when Abbe Faria had been asked to preach at the chapel of the Queen of Portugal. Dr. Buyanov continues, that in 1797 "... he was arrested in Marseilles, taken in a barred police carriage and sent to the Chateau d'If where he suffered solitary confinement. While imprisoned in the Chateau, he steadily trained [himself] using techniques of self-suggestion. It appears that this helped him retain a sound mind and memory." When Abbe Faria was released after many years from Chateau d'If, he returned to Paris. There he probably met Alexander Dumas, the novelist, who was then about fourteen, and seems to have been so impressed with the Abbe that he later used him as a character in his novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. In Paris, Abbe Faria conducted lessons in hypnotism, or somnambulism as he termed it then, for whoever could afford five francs for the course and achieved spectacular results according to General Noizet in his book 'Memoire Sur le Somnubulisme et le Magnetisme Animal'. But he was not without his detractors. Abbe Faria also became the object of envy and the was ridiculed in a vaudeville play which ran to full houses in Paris. Although he had been a teacher of philosophy at Marseilles and Nimes, his reputation did not survive the onslaught on his character and abilities. So he retired as chaplain to an obscure religious establishment and wrote a defence of his theory that hypnosis, or lucid sleep as he now termed it, was caused by the force of suggestion appropriately applied and which he himself had mastered and demonstrated. In 1815, General Noizet returned to Paris and met Abbe Faria. He wrote, "He received me with much enthusiasm and convinced me to review his text with him, to correct some stylistic irregularities that, as a foreigner he could not have helped having introduced. I therefore began this laborious task, without contradicting any of his theoretical ideas and concentrating on the sentence structure only, but I found him so stubborn that I soon regretted my quick agreement to help.... What I can add is that I am absolutely convinced of poor Faria's good faith, of the reality of the effects he obtained and the exactitude of a great part of his doctrine, while believing that his physical appearance, his use of facial expressions and his self-assurance played some part in convincing his subjects." Abbe Faria published the first volume of his book, De la Cause du Sommeil Lucide in 1819, but suddenly died of a stroke. Later, Noizet would write, "Shortly after the publication of my memoirs, Bailliere, a bookseller on the rue d'Ecole de la Medecine, asked me for a copy, saying he had a collection of works on the same topic and, in return, he offered me Abbe Faria's work in three volumes. I had not even finished reviewing even the first volume -- had the author found a proofreader for the other two? I thanked Mr. Bailiere, but had no time for anything else but my work." Unfortunately, these volumes, other than the first, were never found. Just as Alexander Dumas' lost work Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine was recently discovered, one hundred and fifty years after his death, who knows, we may yet find the subsequent volumes of AbbeFaria's sole work! Abbe Faria's valuable contribution to the science of hypnosis has been largely lost in the midst of other hypnotists' claims. Robert H. Wozniak, (author of "Mind and Body: Rene Descartes to William James") wrote, "In Europe, mesmerism continued to develop at the hands of a number of major figures such as the Abbe Jose Custodio de Faria, General Francois Joseph Noizet, Etienne Felix, Baron d'Henin de Cuvillers, and Alexandre Bertrand. Faria, in his De la cause du sommeil lucide (1819), developed the modern trance induction ("fixation") technique, emphasized the importance of the will of the subject rather than that of the magnetizer, recognized the existence of individual differences in susceptibility to somnambulistic sleep, and first articulated the principle of suggestion, which he believed to be effective not only in magnetic sleep but in the waking state as well. "In 1820, Noizet, in a Memoire sur le somnambulisme presented to the Berlin Royal Academy but only published in 1854, and Henin de Cuvillers, in his 'Le magnetisme eclaire', presented more extended accounts of mesmeric effects in terms of suggestion and belief; while Bertrand's 'Traite du somnambulisme' (1823) was the first systematic scientific study of magnetic phenomena." A century ago, Dr. D. G. Dalgado, wrote: "Abbe Faria is known in the medical and scientific world, particularly in France, as having signalled the end of the era of animal magnetism and of magnetized trees and the beginning of the era of the lucid sleep or of hypnotism, which is a very interesting branch of knowledge of physiology and psycho-physiology, with practical applications, specially to therapeutics and pediatrics. His book Of the Cause of Lucid Sleep, published in 1819, and to which he owes his reputation as a scientist, has been out of print for a long time. There are authors -- some of them authorities -- who know about it only through a few quotations cited in other works. I am of the opinion that the reprinting of this book would generate a lot of interest among those who dedicate themselves to the study of hypnotism and whose number is increasing every day." Dr. Dalgado himself reprinted the book in 1906, on Faria's 150th birth anniversary, in the original French and published it along with his own biography and assessment of the man. These, too, again went out of print and have remained so during the next century. And nobody ever bothered to translate them into English neither Faria's nor Dalgado's until today. Fortunately for us, Dr. Laurent Carrer, a French hypno-therapist established in the US, has published an annotated English translation of Abbé Faria's opus, in his 'Jose Custodio de Faria: Hypnotist, Priest and Revolutionary' along with the translation of two studies on the Abbe written in 1906 by Dr. D. G. Dalgado, the Goan biographer and scientist of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Lisbon. Independently, Dr. Manohar Rai Sardessai has also translated Abbe Faria’s ‘De La Cause du Sommeil Lucide’ into English at the request of Dr. Rajendra Hegde, a public spirited psychiatrist from Margao. Here is a final assessment of Faria by the Moscow Psychotherapeutic Academician Dr. Buyanov, "[Faria was] great, because he had no fear and fought for truth rather than for his place at the vanity fair. The Abbot de Faria's mystery does not lie in the circumstances of his life that are unknown to historians and lost forever (a detail more or a detail less, is unimportant); his mystery lies in his talent, courage, and quest for truth. His mystery was the mystery of someone who was ahead of his time and who blazed a trail for his descendants due to his sacrifice." Perhaps the occasion of Abbé Faria’s 250th birth anniversary on May 31, 2006, can be used, at least in Goa, to draw public attention to his life and achievements and build a permanent memorial to him and them. LUIS S R VAS is the author of some 20 books. He is at present writing one on Abbe Faria. The above essay is reproduced, with permission, from Parmal. Parmal is an annual publication of the Goa Heritage Action Group, a not-for-profit based in Goa dedicated to the preservation, protection and conservation of Goa's natural, cultural and man-made heritage. See http://www.goaheritage.org This issue is available from [EMAIL PROTECTED] and is priced at Rs 100 per copy. (courier charges Rs 20 within Goa, additional, Rs 40 within India, Rs 220 by air mail abroad. Make payments favourng Goa Heritage Action Group, Porvorim and contact GHAG, 29/30 Green Valley, Porvorim 403521 Goa India) -------------------------------------------------------------- GOANET-READER WELCOMES contributions from its readers, by way of essays, reviews, features and think-pieces. We share quality Goa-related writing among the 8000+ readership of the Goanet/Goanet-news network of mailing lists. If you appreciated the thoughts expressed above, please send in your feedback to the writer. Our writers write -- or share what they have written -- pro bono, and deserve hearing back from those who appreciate their work. GoanetReader welcomes your feedback at goanet@goanet.org -------------------------------------------------------------- Goanet, 1994-2004. Building community, creating social capital -------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Goa - 2005 Santosh Trophy Champions | | | | Support Soccer Activities at the grassroots in our villages | | Vacationing in Goa this year-end - Carry and distribute Soccer Balls | --------------------------------------------------------------------------