Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Read online

  I begin with such questions not to pretend some knowledge that I do not possess (like the professional debunkers or the true believers), but to provoke and perform our almost total ignorance of such things and, more positively, to call us out of our rationalist denials and naïve assumptions into something more. I am not after easy rational solutions, much less beliefs in this or that cultural mythology. I am after liberating confusions.

  I am after the Impossible.

  Introduction

  OFF THE PAGE

  The literature of fantasy and the fantastic, especially in science fiction, is much in demand, but we still do not know its intimate relationship with the different occult traditions. The underground vogue of Hesse’s Journey to the East (1951) in the fifties anticipated the occult revival of the late sixties. But who will interpret for us the amazing success of . . . 2001[: A Space Odyssey]? I am merely asking the question.

  —MIRCEA ELIADE, “The Occult and the Modern World”

  People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  This book began as another book, Mutants and Mystics. There I explore some of the esoteric currents of American popular culture, particularly as these are narrated and illustrated in the superhero comic book, a pop mythology with some surprisingly intimate ties to the histories of occultism, psychical research, and related paranormal phenomena. In Mutants and Mystics, I am especially interested in the manner in which certain seemingly universal human experiences—out-of-body flight, magical influence, telepathic communication, secret forms of identity, altered states of consciousness and energy—occupy a rather curious place in our present Western culture. Whereas such marvels are vociferously denied (or simply ignored) in the halls of academic respectability, they are enthusiastically embraced in contemporary fiction, film, and fantasy. We are obviously fascinated by such things and will pay billions of dollars for their special display, and yet we will not talk about them, not at least in any serious and sustained professional way. Popular culture is our mysticism. The public realm is our esoteric realm. The paranormal is our secret in plain sight. Weird.

  As I read into the background literature of these modern mythologies, I found myself confronting the histories of Western esotericism, animal magnetism, psychical research, science fiction, and the UFO phenomenon (the latter, it turns out, has been especially influential on the superhero via science fiction). In the process, I began encountering a few select authors whose power of expression, humor, and unfettered freedom of speculative thought simply stunned me. There were many reasons for my sense of surprise. What shocked me the most, however, was the fact that these authors, through decades of extensive data collection, classification, and theorizing (that is, through a kind of natural history of the supernormal), had arrived at some basic metaphysical conclusions that were eerily similar, if not actually identical, to those that grounded the fantasy literature of the superhero comics. So, for example, the American psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud came to the conclusion through his research on the psychokinetic abilities of Ted Serios (who could mentally imprint detailed images on photographic film under carefully controlled conditions) that, “man has in fact within him vast untapped powers that hitherto have been accorded him only in the magic world of the primitive, in the secret fantasies of childhood, and in fairy tales and legend.”1 This struck me as, well, impossible.

  What also surprised me was the fact that I had never heard of these authors, that after over twenty-five years of studying comparative mystical literature professionally, I had never once encountered another scholar mentioning, much less engaging, three of the four writers whom I came to admire so. The British classicist and psychical researcher Frederic Myers was the exception to this rule, but even he was not much of an exception. Everyone in the field reads the American psychologist and philosopher William James. But who reads James’s close friend and intimate collaborator on the other side of the ocean? Who in the study of religion seriously engages Myers’s massive and endlessly fascinating Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death? A few for sure, but only a few.2 The situation is much more dramatic for our second author of the impossible, Charles Fort, whom only a few radical folklorists appear to have read; or our third and fourth, Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust, whom almost no one in the field has heard of, much less read. I hadn’t anyway. My conclusion was a simple one: Myers, Fort, Vallee, and Méheust are not part of the scholarly canon that has come to define what is possible to be reasonably thought and comparatively imagined in the professional study of religion.

  This latter realization both fascinated and upset me. It was as if my profession had somehow intentionally steered me away from such writers and thoughts. I do not, of course, attribute any personal intention here. I am not accusing anyone of anything. Nor do I wish to pretend that the four authors under discussion here somehow solve the problems other scholars have inadequately addressed. The truth is that I have deep reservations about the objectivist epistemologies that control much of psychical research to this day, and I think some of Fort’s ideas are simply nuts (but, to his humorous credit, so did he). I do now suspect, however, that the study of religion as a discipline, as a structure of thought, as afield of possibility, has severely limited itself precisely to the extent that it has followed Western culture on this particular point, that is, to the extent that the discipline constantly encounters robust paranormal phenomena in its data—the stuff is everywhere—and then refuses to talk about such things in any truly serious and sustained way. The paranormal is our secret in plain sight too. Weird.

  Definitions and Broken Lineages

  It does not have to be this way.

  It has not always been this way.

  A few historical observations and opening definitions are in order here. The expression psychic goes back to nineteenth-century uses. It was probably first coined as “Psychic Force” by Serjeant Cox in an 1871 letter to the renowned English chemist William Crookes, who subsequently did more than anyone to bring this Psychic Force into the English language through a series of remarkable experiments and reports in the early 1870s on the observable effects that mediums like Daniel Dunglas Home had on inert objects and human bodies (including Home’s own, which Crookes noted appeared visibly “drained” after employing the Psychic Force). Despite intense professional opposition and censorship, Crookes never retracted either the results of his experiments with Home or his firm conviction that “there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals.”3 In the wake of Crookes’s brave new physics, the London Society for Psychical Research adopted the slightly longer adjective psychical as an unsatisfactory but workable descriptor for its own scientific pursuits. The S.P.R., as it came to be known, was founded in the winter of 1882 by a few close colleagues at Cambridge University. An American branch was founded three years later, in 1885, with William James of Harvard University as one of its key founding figures and certainly the most eloquent and sophisticated proponent of “psychical research” on this side of the Atlantic. In short, the terms psychic and psychical possess elite intellectual roots and were born in the professional academy.

  The language of the paranormal arises a bit later. It originates in the early decades of the twentieth century as a way of referring to physical or quasi-physical events, often of an outrageous or impossible nature (think floating tables, materializing objects or “apports,” and ectoplasm), that were believed to be controlled by as yet unknown physical, that is, natural laws. The term, however, was clearly connected to the earlier American and British Spiritualist movements and so quickly took on more religious connotations as well, often of a highly heterodox nature.

  In order to counter such unwanted connotations (and the fraud that often accompanied their theatrical display), the terminology of psi was introduced by British psychologist Robert Thoul
ess in 1942 as a neutral scientific term designed to replace the more loaded terms of the psychical, the paranormal, and the occult. The same term was meant to code or point to what was thought to be the underlying unitary nature of the disparate telepathic, precognitive, and psychokinetic phenomena. J. B. Rhine took this domesticating and unifying process further and adopted parapsychology as the preferred term for the field. Rhine operationalized psychical research at Duke University in the late 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s through controlled laboratory conditions and careful statistical analyses.

  I have much admiration for the intellectual courage and pioneering spirit of parapsychologists and the numerous thinkers who have critically analyzed this data and drawn out its philosophical implications without regard for the very real professional costs and taboos that still surround the subject. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, however. I am a historian of religions. Consequently, what I am attempting in the pages that follow has little to do with the scientific protocols and statistical methods of the parapsychological lab and everything to do with the textual, narrative, and ethnographic methods of the early British and American psychical researchers. In the process, I hope to resurrect and re-theorize two terms, the psychical and the paranormal.

  For the sake of what follows, I am defining the psychical as the sacred in transit from a traditional religious register into a modern scientific one. This transit is especially easy to see when we set, as we will in chapter 1, the psychical and its related notions (the imaginal, the supernormal, and the telepathic) alongside two other eminently modern terms, both of which took form at roughly the same time but that do not generally carry explicitly scientific connotations: the mystical and the spiritual. Along these same lines, I am defining the paranormal as the sacred in transit from the religious and scientific registers into a parascientific or “science mysticism” register. Basically, in the paranormal, both the faith of religion and the reason of science drop away, and a kind of super-imagination appears on the horizon of thought. As a consequence, the paranormal becomes a living story or, better, a mythology. Things also get wilder. Way wilder.

  Both definitions, obviously, employ a shared third term that needs to be defined immediately as well: the sacred. By the sacred, I mean what the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto meant, that is, a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment. Otto captured this sacred sixth sense, at once subject and object, in a famous Latin sound bite: the sacred is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, the mystical (mysterium) as both fucking scary (tremendum) and utterly fascinating (fascinans). The sacred (minus the fucking part) was a key concept in both the German and French streams of critical theory, particularly in thinkers like Otto, Emile Durkheim, and Joachim Wach, after which the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade made it central to his own work at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. For a variety of reasons, most of them boiling down to some form of implicit materialism, the category has become taboo today. But the subject of the paranormal invokes it again, and in full force. We are back to terror and bedazzlement.

  Unlike the sacred, neither the psychical nor the paranormal has survived in any active form within the professional study of religion. Neither, for example, merits its own entry in Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion, and this despite the fact that “Psychical Research” merited a balanced three-page essay in James Hasting’s classic Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics ninety years ago.4 The author, moreover, was none other than James Leuba, a very prominent psychologist of the time with a penchant for bold reductionistic readings of religious phenomena ranging from conversion to mysticism. Leuba in fact ends his entry with the subject of my first chapter, the London Society for Psychical Research (the S.P.R.), and some comments expressive of that special combination of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic imagination that characterized the period just before his, the period that gave birth to both modern psychology and the study of religion. Here is how Leuba concludes his entry:

  If, after thirty-four years of activity, many of the mysteries which the S.P.R. set out to explore are still unfathomed, much has, nevertheless, been explained. Thus the mischief which mystery works upon credulous humanity has been decreased. . . . But the greatest accomplishment to record is the approximate demonstration that, under circumstances still mostly unknown, men may gain knowledge by other than the usual means, perhaps by direct communication between brains (telepathy) at practically any earthly distance from each other. This dark opening is indeed portentous. It may at any time lead to discoveries which will dwarf into insignificance any of the previous achievements of science.5

  Leuba’s startling words about a “dark opening” still apparently open, still seemingly possible in 1918, is a clear reminder that we have inherited a certain forgetting. It would do us well to try to remember that which we have forgotten in order better to understand that the possible can be construed quite otherwise than it is at the moment, that that which is impossible can become possible. Let us, then, remember for just a moment, and this in just three fields of inquiry: philosophy, anthropology, and psychology.

  Consider first the history of Western philosophy. As the classicist E. R. Dodds (who had read and absorbed his fellow classicist Frederic Myers) points out with respect to “Supernormal Phenomena in Classical Antiquity,” the philosophical and historiographical conundrums of precognition were already fully recognized in the ancient world:

  The paradox of the situation was recognized in antiquity: Aristotle opens his discussion of the subject with the remark that it is difficult either to ignore the evidence or to believe it. Ostensible precognitions formed part of the accepted matter of history: the pages of nearly all ancient historians, from Herodotus to Ammianus Marcellinus, are full of omens, oracles, or precognitive dreams or visions. Yet how can an event in an as yet non-existent future casually determine an event in the present? This was already for Cicero, and even for his credulous brother, Quintus, the magnus quaestio, as it still is today.6

  There is a funny story here that is quite relevant to our discussion of broken lineages. Fritz Graf, a contemporary classics scholar of epigraphy and Greek religion, remembers meeting Dodds in the mid-1970s at his home in Oxford in order to present the esteemed historian with his own newly minted dissertation on Orpheus and Eleusis, both widely considered to be distant historical origin-points of our modern term “mysticism.” Dodds thanked Graf for his book, but then immediately added: “But I have no interest anymore in Greek religion. I am only interested in paranormal phenomena.”7

  If we jump from the classical world into the modern one, Dodd’s magnus quaestio or “great question” with respect to the ancient materials hardly goes away, although it certainly becomes more questionable. In his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Immanuel Kant grappled, sarcastically but deeply, with Emanuel Swedenborg’s seeming noumenal powers, which included one famous scene on June 19, 1759, when the spirit-seer saw a Stockholm fire, the advance of which he accurately described to a garden party in Göteborg, Sweden, as the fire raged three hundred miles away, stopping just three doors down from his own home.8 A bit later, Hegel wrote appreciatively on animal magnetism, extrasensory perception, and a kind of World Soul, all key components of his astonishing vision of a kind of cosmic Mind or absolute Spirit (Geist) coming into fuller and fuller consciousness through history, culture, religion, philosophy, and, now, Hegel and his deep readers.9

  Similarly, Schopenhauer engaged reports of the incredible powers of intention and mind-over-matter to fashion his own philosophy of Will. Throughout The World as Will and Representation (1818), the philosopher invokes Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian mystical sources in order to explain how all things are one in their essence, that is, in the occult force of a cosmic Will out of which all things ineluctably arise and into which they ineluctably disappear. Later, in The Will in Natur
e (1836), he turned to the subjects of animal magnetism and magic to find further support for his metaphysical doctrines. Here he explains, following Kant, that space and time are purely phenomenal. They are constructs or categories of our minds, not features of the world as it is in itself. Space and time are, to borrow Einstein’s language in our opening epigraph, “stubbornly persistent illusions.” Accordingly, the common transcendence of space and time one encounters in clairvoyance and precognition (the latter which Schopenhauer himself experienced) are hardly illusory. Quite the contrary, they witness to the world as it really is. What is in fact illusory are our common everyday perceptions, which can only show us the real as it is mediated to us through our senses and mental categories.10

  Such philosophical streams have recently been revived and renewed by the analytic philosopher Stephen E. Braude, who as a graduate student and self-described arrogant hardnosed materialist witnessed a table lift off the floor and communicate tapping messages to him and two friends during an impromptu séance session. “Now I won’t mince words,” Braude writes. “What happened that afternoon scared the hell out of me. For three hours I observed my own table tilt up and down, without visible assistance.” The scholarly result? Nothing, until he got tenure (“I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid”).11 Since then he has written five especially provocative books, all of which orbit around the questions posed by that floating, tapping table and his intuitive suspicion that it was the three of them who controlled the table with still unknown, unconscious, unacknowledged powers.12 Eisenbud’s “vast untapped powers” come to life in the living room.

  Similar moments could easily be located among the anthropologists. In The Making of Religion (1899), Andrew Lang put early anthropology into dialogue with the then cutting-edge categories of psychical research in order to plumb the speculative origins of various phenomena within the history of religions (magical influence, possession, and divinatory practices, to name just a few) and to ask whether “a transcendental region of human faculty,” a “region X,” might not exist. He also studied scrying (crystal gazing) among Scottish female seers and was especially fond of collecting ghost stories from around the world. It was this kind of field research and comparative collecting that led him finally to conclude that magical beliefs are not groundless superstitious or gross examples of bad thinking left over from a prescientific age, which is exactly what his most prestigious peers thought, but rather, that “[m]an may have faculties which savages recognize, and which physical science does not recognize. Man may be surrounded by agencies which savages exaggerate, and which science disregards altogether, and these faculties and agencies may point to an element of truth which is often cast aside as a survival of superstition.” In Lang’s mind, in other words, “certain obscure facts are, or may be, at the bottom of many folklore beliefs.” Here he gave the fascinating example of a correspondent from India who had witnessed some anomalous lights at dusk in a Darjeeling garden, where the servants shared matter-of-fact descriptions of a race of “little men” (we’ll return to those anomalous lights and humanoids soon enough). In essence, Lang was advancing a theory of the origins of religion in which those origins were grounded in empirical psychical phenomena that were subsequently exaggerated and embellished in folklore and myth. The idea of the soul, for example, he reasoned, did not come about through mistaken interpretations of dreams (which is what his mentor, Edward Tylor, had famously argued), but from real-world veridical experiences akin to those that the S.P.R. had recently labeled instances of “telepathy.” Of the latter phenomenon, he confessed in his 1911 presidential address to the same society, “I am wholly convinced.”13