Taboo, repression, and possession: the mesmerising history behind Tom Hardy's sex voodoo

On the face of it, the sequence is pure fantasy, with a few vague lashings of perceived "tribal magic": there was fire, white powder, and a mysterious masked figure, seen as if in a vision. The half Native-American Delaney, the shows suggests, was born with certain supernatural abilities, honed after his time in Africa...and is now letting them loose on pre-Victorian London. 

"You feel me, don't you, when I break in? And I could come more often, but I spare you," he revealed to Zilpha at one point, before adding: "After I left England, I thought I was mad. But they taught me to use it: now it's a gift".

In fact, a few fans have even complained that Taboo's supernatural stuff is getting a little excessive, increasingly at odds with its historical drama.

Show the episode in question to an early 19th-century viewer, however, and (once they'd mentally assimilated the whole box full of moving pictures thing and the whole existence of Tom Hardy thing) they possibly wouldn't find it quite as outré as us.

While the century is often thought of as a golden era for discovery and reason (papers on newly identified dinosaurs Megalosaurus and Iguanadon were published in 1824 and 1825; Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859) it also marked the heyday of practices that we would now dismiss as cultish pseudoscience....some of which can be directly linked to the idea of possessive "sex from a distance".

The art of mesmerism or Animal Magnetism, developed in the late 18th century by a German doctor named Franz Mesmer, was one such technique.

Remote control and possession

At heart, mesmerism, which later gave rise to the more "respectable" hypnotism, was based on the idea that bodies emit mysterious forces, which can be magnetically redirected by a skilled practitioner to allow a patient (more often than not a "hysterical" young woman) to be healed.

While Mesmer himself died in 1815, Mesmerism itself went on to become "all the rage" in the 1840s and 50s, according to History Today writer Roy Porter.

Prior to this, however, the practice was associated with remote possession, and with paranoia about dangerous foreign powers, including revolutionary France. 

In 1796, a man named James Tilly Matthews, an English Mesmerism devotee who had previously been imprisoned by Jacobites in France, claimed that the French were planning to sneak into Britain and use their knowledge of animal magnetism to invade: "Thereby they would Mesmerise members of the administration, rendering them 'possessed', as under a 'spell', and like 'puppets', able to plant thoughts and read minds".

After his fears went unheard, Matthews became convinced that he was the target of a conspiracy, and that a shadowy "gang of seven" was after him, using mesmerism techniques to invade his mind and remotely torture him.

Like Taboo's (fictional) Delaney, these gang members were able to induce distinct physical symptoms from a distance – although the effects they could produce were not of a sexual nature. Instead, according to poor Matthews, their specialties were "vital-tearing", "eye-screwing" and  "fibre-ripping".

While Matthews's paranoia – he later became convinced that high-ranking British officials were involved in the conspiracy against him – would eventually land him in Bedlam, Porter argues that his fears were not atypical for the time: Mesmerism was regarded as dangerous and "foreign", but as a plausible threat.

Where did the sex come in?

Despite its semi-medical origins, Mesmerism was heavily associated with sex, and with fears about "unleashing" female sexuality. Mesmer himself was  a very hands on kind of practitioner, who believed in treating patients through touch – and, as many of his critics at the time pointed out, a suspiciously high proportion of his patients were female.

Rachel P Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm:  "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexuality, has suggested  there was almost certainly a sexual element to Mesmer's techniques. One contemporary account (cited in Maines's book) notes how Mesmer's specially chosen assistants – strong, usually handsome young men – would stroke the stomachs and breasts of female patients until they induced a convulsive "crisis", sometimes accompanied by spasmodic breathing, involuntary laughter and flushing (in other words, all the symptoms of an orgasm).

An investigation in the 1780s, which concluded that Mesmer's invisible fluid and energies did not exist, also raised concerns about the effect that his methods were having on susceptible female patients, suggesting that, while the "science" behind his work was flawed, his chosen methods might nonetheless lead to the unwanted awakening of a patient's sexuality.

And according to Robert Darnton's Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, popular songs from the time were quick to make fun of the "doctor" suggesting that, when it came to his legion of female fans, the healer was "touching them I know not where".