Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74.
And how fitting that is. Mystical experiences are almost always in keeping with the tradition of the mystic. Julian of Norwich, a Catholic, perceived “great drops of blood” running down from a crown of thorns. Milarepa, a Tibetan Buddhist, visualized his guru surrounded by multifold Buddhas on lotus seats of wisdom.
Phil adhered to no single faith. The one tradition indubitably his was SF—which exalts “What IF?” above all.
In 2-3-74, all the “What Ifs?” were rolled up into one.
As Valis proved, it was, say whatever else you will, a great idea for a novel.64
Which is all to say that Phil Dick wrote out of that fundamental hesitation, that both-and, that real-unreal place that is the surest mark of the fantastic. Here is how he put it: “My God, my life—which is to say my 2-74/3-74 experience—is exactly like the plot of any one of ten of my novels or stories. Even down to the fake memories & identity. I’m a protagonist from one of PKD’s books . . . ”65
And us?
It would be easy, of course, to assert that a sci-fi author like Dick is not “really” religious, that he is pretending a revelation that he does not in fact possess, that his vast Exegesis was the result of temporal lobe epilepsy and a subsequent paranoia and hypergraphia.66 It would be much more interesting and altogether more historical, though, to admit that what we now call “religion” is closer to what we now call “fiction” than anyone is willing to admit, that living mythology has always followed along the tracks of whatever science was available at the time, and that there are no good intellectual reasons (as opposed to ideological or religious ones) to distinguish whatever was speaking through Dick’s gnostic systems from whatever was speaking through the systems of the early Christian and Jewish gnostic authors.
Hence Nelson’s precise (and, in my mind, correct) invocation of the Platonic realm to describe Dick’s Valis, “a meta-organism identical in all its features to Plotinus’s World Soul.”67 Compared to Nelson’s historically nuanced religious reading, an easy phrase like “temporal lobe epilepsy” offers little, as such neurological events could be the necessary biological condition or neurological opening, as opposed to the materialist cause, for such spiritual inrushes (much more on this in my conclusion). Besides, the early Christian and Jewish authors had temporal lobes too. Why deem one set of firing lobes revelatory and the other solipsistic? What is the difference?
I do not see a difference. And because I myself experienced something similar, if far less dramatic, many years ago, I happen to think that Dick’s gnostic corpus carries its own genuine truths about the human condition and the fantastic nature of consciousness.68 Put a bit differently, for both intellectual and mystical reasons, I am unable to draw any sharp distinctions between the “real,” the “religious,” and the “fictional.” Hence this book on reading the paranormal writing us.
With Tzvetan Todorov, moreover, I want to suggest that it is precisely through this experiential irruption and this subsequent inability to decide what is real and what is fictional within a text (or a life) that the fantastic as the Impossible sparks and inspires. Indeed, Todorov defines the fantastic as “a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality.”69 Todorov, that is, defines fantastic literature in terms of the anomalous. More precisely, he defines it in terms of a certain irreducible indeterminacy:
The person who experiences the [fantastic] event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then his reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. . . . The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous.70
It is the reader’s hesitation, then, between a natural, reductive, or fictive reading and a supernatural, occult, or realist reading that constitutes the first and most important condition of the fantastic. The fantastic thus implies, in Todorov’s words now, “not only the existence of an uncanny event, which provokes a hesitation in the reader and the hero; but also a kind of reading”71—a kind of reading that cannot finally decide on a natural or supernatural conclusion.
This comes very close to Owen’s “crucial alignment of rational consciousness with the apparently irrational world of the myth-creating unconscious” that produces in turn “the powerful experience of the occult ‘real.’” This is also, I would suggest, a surprisingly precise description of the existential situation of the modern study of religion, taken as a whole now rather than as this or that part. Hence the present set of chapters on the fantastic narrative of Western occulture and the authorization of the Impossible within four extraordinary authors.
one
THE BOOK AS SÉANCE
Frederic Myers and the London Society for Psychical Research
Now, my theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant.
—EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON, “The Haunted and the Haunters,” 1859
My history has been that of a soul struggling into the conviction of its own existence.
—FREDERIC MYERS, Fragments of Inner Life
The American horror and science-fiction writer Stephen King has written about his occult understanding of the creative writing process as an archaeological event through which one discovers and digs up a preexisting story, which he compares to a dinosaur skeleton buried in the ground. More extraordinarily still, he considers the craft of writing as a form of effective telepathy whereby one’s mental state comes to transcend not only space but also time through the magical medium of the published text. A published story, for King, is a narrative state of mind “caught” in a text and waiting to be precisely reactivated—word for word—two, ten, even twenty years later down the space-time continuum.1 Writing and reading stories for Stephen King, in other words, mimic or replicate paranormal processes.
King may or may not have been aware that it was the British classicist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901) who first coined and theorized the term telepathy, in 1882, and that Myers opened his autobiographical essay, “Fragments of Inner Life,” with convictions very similar to King’s own. For Myers, however, the book is not so much a telepathically communicated story designed to entertain future generations as a collective séance offered to inspire present readers and guide them toward their individual roles in the evolution of human consciousness. This is how he puts it in his very first sentences, intentionally published only after he died and so quite consciously spoken beyond the grave:
I believe that we live after earthly death; and that some of those who read these posthumous confidences may be among my companions in an unseen world. It is for this reason that I now address them. I wish to attract their attention and sympathy; I wish to lead men and women of like interests but of higher nature than my own to regard me as a friend whose companionship they will seek when they too have made their journey to the unknown home.
Myers also happened to believe, as he immediately explains to his readers in his next lines, that there exists a kind of cosmic record or “photograph” of all that is thought and felt, and that therefore his own whole past “will probably lie open to those with whom I have to do.”2 Here he is drawing on the precognitive and clairvoyant data of early psychical research, which can indeed suggest as much, particularly when it is read through the writings of one of Myers’s most beloved classical authors, Plato.
As explained in texts like the Phaedo—whose study “at sixteen effected upon me a kind of conversion,”3 Myers explains—Plato taught that when the soul learns some profound truth, it is not creating or constructing this truth but in fact remembering some
thing it already knew in a preexistent life. This is what the Greek philosopher called anamnesis, that is, learning-as-remembrance. Similarly, Myers thought that certain forms of knowledge—mathematical, geometric, and poetic knowledge in particular—preexist their human discovery in this other realm, and that such knowledge can be “brought down” into the world through the birth of a particularly gifted soul or genius. We are back to Stephen King’s dinosaur-stories, “buried in the ground” and awaiting a sufficiently sensitive writer to discover and re-express them in a roar.
These are impossible convictions. But precisely as such, they witness admirably to what I have called a hermeneutical model of the paranormal, that is, they witness to the power of words and texts to encode human memories in some stable personalized form and help effect psychical communications of various sorts. It is difficult to overestimate what these convictions in the book-as-séance meant for Frederic Myers, or for anyone who attempts to read him deeply now, since, as we shall soon see, it is these textlike “chains of memory” that constitute one aspect of the personality and provide some of the most suggestive signs of its survival of bodily death. On one level at least, the human personality for Frederic Myers is an evolving story written into and read out of the cosmos over and over again within what he calls a “progressive immortality.” Read and written thus, we are all occult novels composed by forces both entirely beyond us and well within us. As a One that is also Two, we author ourselves, and we are authored. We live in the possible, but we are lived by the Impossible.
As the reference to Plato makes clear, there is something very old about such convictions. There is also something radically new. Committed to the very new perspective of evolution, Myers at least believed that, “[w]e are still in the first moment of man’s awakening intelligence; we are merely opening our eyes upon the universe around us.”4 As for the cultural wars over religion and science of his time, whose long-burning embers Darwin had fanned into a mighty flame, Myers was quick to point out that the argument against the survival of the soul was barely a generation old when he was writing, and that the evidence for survival a mere decade.5 Clearly, it was the newness of it all that impressed Frederic Myers.
When Myers penned “Fragments of Inner Life,” then, he chose to emphasize the same radical break with the past that we have come to see as one of the essential features of modernity. There could be no turning back now. A threshold was crossed. We were living in aNew World. Accordingly, he turned to the discovery of America as an especially apt metaphor for the discovery of new psychical and spiritual truths. And this was no innocent metaphor. It came with an edge. He thus diplomatically confessed his admiration for Christ, but he also noted that Christ’s pioneering work, like the Norsemen’s discovery of America, grows more and more distant with each passing year and is, in the end, simply impossible to trace accurately in the waves of the ever-shifting sea of time. “A new discovery is needed,” he noted, not by any single Columbus this time, but by “the whole set and strain of humanity.” Such a systematic inquiry, Myers insisted, “must be in the first instance a scientific, and only in the second instance a religious one.”6 It is precisely here, in this transit of the sacred out of a traditional religious register and into a new scientific one, in this bold claim of a genuinely new spiritual discovery that can only be had by disciplined research and study, that “the psychical” rises on the horizon of Western thought.
The psychical rose into prominence at a particular moment in Western intellectual history, a moment when Darwinism, materialism, and agnosticism (a word newly coined by “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Huxley, to capture and advance the spirit of the new era) were becoming increasingly dominant, when the universe was looking more and more indifferent to human concerns with each new discovery and every passing year. Science was conquering all, and it did not look good for the believer. Nor had it for quite some time. Ruskin put it well when, already in 1851, he expressed his own waning faith: “If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”7 By 1877, W. H. Mallock was even more sanguine: “It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing,” he wrote. “One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying.”8
There were, of course, different responses to such mournful sounds in the air. Some individuals embraced reason’s science and rejected completely the now defunct and unbelievable claims of faith. Others embraced the claims of faith and chose to reject the science, or at least those parts of it that could not be reconciled with their particular belief system. There was a third option, however, a tertium quid, as its proponents often referred to it in the Latin they all could still read.9 Emily Williams Kelly points out that Myers had been schooled in the mid-nineteenth-century liberalism of John Stuart Mill, who had argued that new knowledge is created by avoiding the extremes and taking truths from both sides of an honest argument. In this liberal spirit, he put the matter this way: “something is gained if, having started with the preconception that ‘all which is not A is B,’ we have come to the conclusion that our own subject-matter is neither A nor B, but X.”10 This was the X-option that, as Myers once put it in less Latin and more humor, has “fallen between two stools.”11
Myers, in other words, belonged to a group of elite intellectuals who refused to be dogmatic about either their religion or their science. Put less metaphorically, they embraced science as a method that could throw new light on old religious questions. They attempted to work through the polarities of reason and faith toward what they thought of as a new and hopeful “science of religion.” By such a shocking combination of words (and it was shocking), these Cambridge friends did not mean what their much more famous contemporary Max Müller meant by the same phrase over at Oxford, that is, they did not understand religious systems as comparable languages whose family organizations, grammatical structures, and devolving histories of literalization could be speculatively traced through time (whereby, for example, the ancient awe before the sun became the worship of a literal, personalized sun-god).
What they meant by a science of religion was a fully rational and fundamentally comparative exercise of collecting, organizing, and analyzing experiential data that could not be fully explained by either the theological categories of the churches or the reductive methods of the sciences. In other words, they did not equate rationalism with materialism. And here the reported experiences were the key: collected and compared in astonishing numbers, these constituted the researchers’ experiments and functioned as the base of their empiricism.
By a science of religion, then, they did not intend a method that would necessarily reduce the religion to the science (although it just might). But neither did they intend away of doing things that would somehow “respect” religion or protect it from the powerful gaze and hard questions of the new scientific method. Rather, what they intended was a still future method that would move beyond both materialistic science and dogmatic religion into real answers to ancient metaphysical questions that had never really been convincingly answered. As Myers put it, “I wish to debate the matter on the ground of experiments and observations such as are appealed to in other inquiries for definite objective proof.”12 In other words, belief was irrelevant. What mattered now was evidence—empirical, experiential evidence.
Both their Enlightenment hostility to traditional religion and their Romantic openness to religious experience are worth emphasizing here. On one page, for example, an author like Myers could write of “how much dogmatic rubbish” even the best minds of earlier centuries were clouded by, and then two pages later approach the pious subject of Prayer (which he capitalized) with “the need of a definition which shall be in some sense spiritual without being definitely theological” (HP 2:307, 309).13 Such passages constitute more strong evidence that the modern popular distinction between the “religious” and the “spiritual” is by no means a recent
invention, but in fact reaches at least as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, to the birth of modern science.14
Such passages also signal that categories like the psychical, the occult, and the paranormal should be studied alongside and contrasted to their cousin-categories of the spiritual and the mystical. All five categories, after all, are eminently modern constructions witnessing to the same broad individuation processes of Western society whereby religion is increasingly “psychologized,” that is, identified as a psychological experience not bound by traditional religious authority. These five terms, however, use different methods, focus on different sorts of reports, and so do different cultural work. Most simply put, whereas the categories of the mystical and the spiritual selectively return to historical religious sources for the creative construction of what amounts to a new religious vision (a perennial philosophy, a comparative theology, and so on), the categories of the psychical, the occult, and the paranormal attempt to move out of the religious register, advancing instead strong scientific or parascientific claims and connotations. This book is concerned with the latter processes, not the former.
Although Myers was certainly deeply influenced by the history of Western mysticism, particularly in its Platonic and Neoplatonic origins, and although he employs the terms “mystical” and “mysticism” in various ways throughout his corpus, his work is also best located in the latter streams of method and thought.15 Hence he can suggest that at least some mystical and occult events are both empirically real and entirely consistent with natural, though as yet unexplained, laws or patterns.
This both-and position is especially clear in a fascinating exchange Myers had with Lord Acton on how to write history after the discoveries of psychical research, especially the history of “miraculous” occurrences common in hagiography, church records, and the general history of religions. Myers counseled Acton to advance a historiography that would take such “impossible” events as real possibilities, all the while being very wary of pious exaggeration, fraud, and institutional religious motives.16 In this, he followed earlier theorists of Mesmerism and animal magnetism, who had similarly turned to scientific language (hence the expression “animal magnetism”) to explain the new forms of healing and psychical energy with which they were experimenting and advanced a historiography called “psychofolklore.” By the latter neologism, they intended a new method of understanding the history of religions whereby the religious past (the folklore part) was read anew in the critical but sympathetic light of psychical research (the psycho part). It was a kind of “believing back,” if you will, a kind of future of the past.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 6