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

  A half century later, the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino went so far as to claim that the data of ethnography and folklore, and now of psychical research, strongly suggest “the paradox of a culturally-conditioned nature, and all its embarrassing implications.” Reality, De Martino realized, appears to behave differently within different linguistic codes. Magic, the mind’s ability to affect the material world through acts of attention and intention, he went on to suggest, really and truly plays “a role in history.”14 A bit later, Edith Turner wrote of her encounter with spirits and experience of psychical abilities, and Margaret Mead wrote appreciatively on psychical matters, encouraging her intellectual peers to study even the most extraordinary examples of this literature, including the data emerging from the then still secret “remote viewing” or psychical espionage programs of the U.S. military.15 More impressively still, Michael Winkelman demonstrated a striking “correspondence between parapsychological research findings and anthropological reports of magical phenomena” toward the thesis that real-life spontaneous magical experiences have their deepest (that is, ontological) basis not in social processes or logical mistakes (which, again, is what has traditionally been argued), but in extreme emotional states, largely unconscious primary process thinking, and “innate universal human potentials closely associated with psi abilities.” These, he wrote, are “human capacities, still little understood, for affecting the world in a manner which is beyond our current understanding of the laws of nature.”16 In other words, magical powers are real.

  The psychology of religion displays the same submerged patterns again. Pierre Janet, the pioneering French psychologist whose work deeply influenced a young Sigmund Freud, discovered, in the words of historian Alex Owen, “what magicians have traditionally claimed—that it is possible to hypnotize a subject from a distance.” He also realized, correctly, that hypnotism replicated the earlier phenomena of Mesmerism (which in fact were much more robust and impressive), and he wrote his minor thesis on Bacon and the alchemists.17 William James worked for years with a very convincing trance medium named Leonora Piper, puzzled over the possibility of postmortem survival, and wrote extensively on psychical matters.18 C. G. Jung wrote his dissertation on occult phenomena (with his cousin as medium no less), attended séances for another thirty years, experienced paranormal events throughout his life (including in Freud’s presence), and even produced agnostic text out of a kind of “haunting,” his famous Septes Sermones ad Mortuos or Seven Sermons to the Dead.19

  Jung was also famously fascinated by the implications of quantum physics for understanding paranormal phenomena. Indeed, he even forged his category of synchronicity out of his correspondence with one of his patients, the pioneering quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. What is more (way more), Pauli was well known among his physics colleagues for a rather unique mind-to-matter effect. In the words of George Gamow, the “Pauli Effect” boiled down to the strange fact that an “apparatus would fall, break, shatter or burn when he merely walked into a laboratory.”20 This was such a common occurrence that when laboratory equipment failed or broke, the experimenters would ask if Pauli was in town.

  So too with Sigmund Freud. Freud’s close colleague Wilhelm Stekel published an entire book on telepathic dreams in 1921. Although originally dismissive, Freud became convinced that there was a kernel of truth in such occult phenomena. He publicly acknowledged this in a 1925 essay and wrote six essays in all on the subject of telepathy or “thought transference” (Gedankenübertragung), which he considered to be the “rational core” of occultism. And why not? Had not dreams, another classical occult subject, proven to possess meaning in his own system of thought; indeed, had not dreams, themselves closely tied to psychical phenomena, helped found his thought?21 But if telepathy were now admitted and allowed to inform psychoanalytic theory, then what? Where would such a line of thought lead, or more importantly, where would it end? Freud’s colleague and biographer Ernest Jones was concerned that such a development would end in “the essential claim of the occultists,” namely, “that mental processes can be independent of the human body.”22

  For his part, Freud could finally not bring himself to allow such dangerous things into public debate. Hence he counseled Sandor Ferenczi not to relate his telepathic researches to the Hamburg Congress of 1925 with these telling words: “By it you would be throwing a bomb into the psychoanalytical house which would be certain to explode.”23 In other words, such matters are probably true on some level, but they must be denied for the sake of intellectual consensus and the stable future of a young, and still vulnerable, movement. By 1927, however, Freud appears to have moved away from even this hidden recognition. He was growing more skeptical and more ambivalent. Interestingly, he was also growing more ambivalent about a key psychoanalytic capacity, Einfühlung, “empathy” or “feeling into.” In a letter to Ferenczi, Freud described seeing a certain “mystical character” in this well-documented but poorly understood analytic ability to fathom a patient’s unconscious with one’s own unconscious processes, and he could see no easy way to distinguish it from telepathy.24

  This is hardly surprising and essentially correct, since the core themes of “resemblance,” “sympathy,” and especially “rapport” had long been central to magical, mesmeric, and magnetic practice before Freud came on the scene. Little wonder, then, that the lore of psychoanalysis is filled with moments of profound empathy that amount to instances of telepathy. After reading one of my essays on the subject, for example, one contemporary analyst contacted me and told me the story of a female patient of hers. As the patient began to talk, the analyst felt a sharp stabbing pain in her lower left ribcage. The patient then proceeded to tell her about how her father had stabbed her when she was a young girl, in the lower left ribcage.

  And such paranormal moments continue down to the present day. In 2007, the impossible story of a prominent American analyst by the name of Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was published (Mayer had died the year before). After her daughter’s rare harp was stolen in the Bay Area in 1991 and she had exhausted all the normal police channels, Mayer, in desperation, took a friend’s advice and called a dowser or psychic seer in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Using a map of the Bay Area, Harold McCoy told Mayer over the phone the precise location of the house where the stolen harp was located, in Oakland it turned out: “the second house on the right on D____ Street, just off L____ Avenue.” After recovering the harp, Mayer found herself now missing something else, her sense of objective reality: “the harp was in the back of my station-wagon and I drove off. Twenty-five minutes later, as I turned into my driveway, I had the thought, This changes everything.”25

  Indeed, it did. The remotely viewed harp, after all, strongly suggested that consciousness is not bound to the brain or the body, as Mayer had assumed it to be. This, of course, was the same thing that bothered Ernest Jones so about those dreaded “occultists.” It took a long professional quest into the history of psychical research, cold war remote viewing, and quantum physics in order to arrive at a tentative, and now public, thesis about the reality of what Mayer calls, with a phrase that can only be called a gross understatement, “extraordinary knowing.”26 She also organized, with Carol Gilligan, a long-standing series of popular panels on anomalous phenomena in the analytic session for the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association—the return, no doubt, of Freud’s repressed insights into the mystical and telepathic nature of profound analytic empathy. The panels were hugely popular as they became the arena for stories like that of the analyst who was precognitively “stabbed” in the ribcage.

  And the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and psychology are just the beginning. We could easily go on for dozens, for hundreds, of pages demonstrating how these questions lay at the very center of Western intellectual and cultural life. We could trace their pathways through numerous Nobel scientists, with physicists showing a particular fondness for the subject. We could then chart a similar lineage through major mod
ern artists, including painters like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. The latter’s The Spiritual in Art, for example, is clearly indebted to the “Thought Forms” of Theosophy and the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner.

  And this is before we even get to modern literature, with authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, W. B. Yeats, Henry Miller, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen King, and Michael Crichton all writing explicitly about their spiritualist, psychical, paranormal, and occult interests and experiences. Such occult experiences were hardly tangential to such authors. They were integral components of the creative process. Hence Bruce Mills has recently written about the mesmeric and magnetic currents that played such an important role in the creation of a distinctly American literature in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Alex Owen has written about “the symbiotic relationship among vitalism, occultism, and advanced literary ideas” in turn-of-the-century Britain.27 The accomplished occultist W. B. Yeats, whose magical name was Demon Est Deus Inversus or “The Devil is God in Reverse” (they just called him “Demon”), might have been an extreme case, but he was hardly alone when he confessed to John O’Leary in a letter that the “mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”28

  Finally, we could also show—and will show in chapter 4—how the metaphysical shock of the early psychical data was subsequently resisted, tamed, and safely transformed by the buffer or “stop zones” of later intellectual movements from psychoanalysis and psychiatry to surrealism and Derridean deconstructionism, each of which dealt with the paranormal, but only at a distance and in order to keep it at bay. Even Derrida, after all, wrote an essay called “Telepathy” and famously remarked in Specters of Marx that “There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. . . . There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living.”29

  Derrida was wrong about that, as we will soon see. For now, though, it is enough to point out how little this intellectual history appears in contemporary theory. It is enough to pretend with Derrida that “there has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts.”

  Restoring a Lineage

  Perhaps nowhere, however, is this proverbial fear of ghosts more apparent, and more poignant, than in the study of religion, that locus classicus of the paranormal. So whereas, for example, a figure like Rudolf Otto displayed a profound sensibility for the numinous as the eerie, the sacred at once alluring and terrifying, and insisted on the epistemological necessity of such a sensibility to study the sacred in any truly adequate fashion, today those ghostly sensibilities are continuously ridiculed as naive and self-serving, as if real scholarship can only proceed by denying the reality of that which it claims to study. Hence Edith Turner’s reflections on witnessing a spirit emerge from a sick body in Zambia and her subsequent experiences of ESP, all almost completely incomprehensible before what she calls the “religious frigidity” of academics.30

  And so that ancient “taboo against contact with supernatural forces are with us still,” parapsychologist George Hansen observes with respect to the academy, “though in veiled form.” This should not surprise us, Hansen goes on to suggest, for although taboos have always been violated “in order to release magical power,” there is a real cost for such transgressive acts. “Society would be partly deconstructed in the process.”31 Hence the taboo, still very much in place in the academy, against any serious engagement with the paranormal.

  Anthropologically speaking, however, “releasing magical power” is very much akin to “being culturally creative,” so it is perhaps not too surprising to find, once again, some of the strongest occult interests in a founding thinker, which are then later denied, actively demonized, or just politely overlooked. From his youth, the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade was deeply interested in esoteric thinkers and occult matters. This is already patently obvious in his “Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge,” an early essay (1937) in which he argues, more or less exactly like Andrew Lang had done, for the empirical or experiential reality of folkloric beliefs and psychical phenomena.32 Behind at least some of these “miraculous” stories, Eliade argued, lays a series of actual concrete human experiences, which are then exaggerated and mythologized by the religious imagination. Eliade thus explores the critical literature on such things as levitation in Catholic hagiography and Indian yoga and the “fluid” link said to exist between an object and its previous owner assumed in various magical rituals and psychical practices (hence “contagious magic,” the magical use of relics, and “psychometry” or the psychical perception of persons via their possessions). As a way of concluding the essay, Eliade takes the historicists to task for claiming faithfulness to the historical documents, until of course these documents violate their own positivistic and materialistic worldviews. Then they simply ignore them or brush their data aside as “primitive,” “mistaken,” and so on. Now the dismissing word in vogue is “anecdotal.”

  It appears that Eliade’s convictions here flowed out of his own personal experience of such matters and date back to around 1928, when, “as a student, I went to study Yoga and Tantra with S. N. Dasgupta at Calcutta University,” he tells us in an essay on “The Occult and the Modern World.”33 As he once explained in another context, these dissertation researches and early experiments with yoga taught him “the reality of experiences that cause us to ‘step out of time’ and ‘out of space.’”34 Since he doubted that he would be able to describe in “scientific prose”35 the nature of such experiences, he would later “camouflage” them in his literary writings, and particularly in the novella The Secret of Doctor Honigberger, which he explicitly identifies as a species of littérature fantastique. Eliade explains all of this in his interview with Claude-Henri Roquet:

  In describing Zerlendi’s Yoga exercises in The Secret of Doctor Honigberger, I included certain pieces of information, drawn from my own experiences, that I omitted from my books on Yoga. At the same time, however, I added other, inaccurate touches, precisely in order to camouflage the true data. . . . [The reader] would then be led to conclude that all the rest is invented—imaginary—too, which isn’t the case.36

  In other words, exactly as he had argued with respect to the empirical paranormal core of traditional folklore, Eliade was now hiding his own paranormal experiences in his literary creations. This then sets up a certain paradoxical structure for the reader: “some descriptions,” he explained, “correspond to real experiences, but others reflect more directly yogic folklore,” hence “the reader has no means to decide whether the ‘reality’ is hidden in the ‘fiction,’ or the other way around, because both processes are intermingled.” Again, exactly as he had earlier argued with respect to folklore as “an instrument of knowledge,” he seriously suggests that “such types of literary creativity may also constitute authentic instruments of knowledge,” in the sense that the literature of the fantastic may “disclose some dimensions of reality that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches.”37 In other words, literary theory, and in particular the literature of the fantastic, was one of Eliade’s preferred modes of interpreting the “parallel worlds” of the history of religions.

  Eliade was not always so forthcoming about the experiential core of his writing, however. One hundred pages further into the Roquet interview, the subject of De Martino’s magical anthropology—whereby the experience of nature literally changes as a culture evolves—came up. When Roquet asks Eliade, point-blank, whether what Eliade himself had just called “transhuman experiences that we are forced to accept as facts” had happened to him, Eliade gives the following reply: “I hesitate to answer that.”38

  Also relevant here is Eliade’s 1974 Freud Memorial Lecture, in which he turned to the “occult explosion” amo
ng the American youth culture erupting all around him and connected the paranormal to fantastic literature and Freud’s discovery of the Unconscious (which Eliade liked to capitalize). After providing his listeners and readers with succinct modern histories of esotericism and occultism, two comparative categories that work as “umbrella terms” to gather together extremely diverse sets of practices and traditions, Eliade discussed these traditions’ profound influence on early modern European literature and described their scholarly revival in the works of figures like Gershom Scholem on Kabbalah, Henri Corbin on Sufi mysticism, Antoine Faivre on Western esotericism, and his own work on Yoga, Tantra, and shamanism (the latter three subjects were all key to the American youth culture, he rightly notes). In each scholarly case, Eliade pointed out, the contemporary scholarship took up historical phenomena judged to be pure nonsense, if not veritable black magic, and “abundantly proved their theoretical coherence and their great psychological interest.”39 The interpretive power of Freud’s psychoanalysis is one of his primary models here, for “Freud substantiated the gnoseologic values of the products of fantasy, which until then were considered meaningless or opaque.” Once Freud articulated the Unconscious, “the immense number of imaginary universes reflected in literary creations disclosed a deeper, and secret, significance, quite independent of the artistic value of the respective works.”40