These unnameable things, these damned things, as Fort would say, express themselves in the cultural fantasies of the time and place. They can also be scarily mimetic, as, for example, when they literally hunt hunters or fish for fishermen, as we saw with Vallee’s study of the Latin American cases (SF 201, 203). They are thus hardly objective things “out there.” They are objective things “out there” and subjective things “in here.” They are interactive, participatory realities that cannot be understood outside the forms of consciousness that perceive and experience them, that is, us (SF 75).
Méheust has many ways of expressing this central paradox of his book (which is also the central paradox of this book). It is certainly not an easy idea, one all too easily collapsible into a simple subjectivism, as if UFOs, poltergeists, or telepathic communications were just our cultural or psychological projections; or a naive objectivism, as if UFOs were spaceships piloted by Martians or Venusians and poltergeists were pissed-off dead people named “Joe” and “Kathryn.” Méheust avoids both of these rationalist and religious extremes, consistently arguing instead for a richer and more nuanced position.
That position comes down to this. The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion requiring, say, a physics for their complete explanation. The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment. Whatever they are, UFOs “vibrate in phase” with our forms of consciousness and culture. We thus cannot even conceive of them outside or independent from their observation. This most basic of facts puts into serious doubt the adequacy of any traditional scientific method. Such methods, after all, work from an ideal of complete objectivity, which in turn demands an effort to eliminate all interference with the observer. But what if the observer is the very mode of the apparition? What if the observer is an integral part of the experiment?
For his part, Méheust argues that the naive idea that consciousness is a clean “mirror” separate from the objects that it reflects needs to be abandoned immediately and put into the museum of bad ideas. He cites the physicist Von Neumann here, who wrote that “the conception of an objective reality has thus evaporated” (SF 321). Méheust had arrived at the same conclusion twenty pages up: “We therefore find, but now transposed into the domain of the symbolic representation, the paradoxes of micro-physics: as with the electron, the notion of a UFO independent from its human observer is nonsensical” (SF 302). The implications of all of this for the study of the UFO phenomenon as a “mythical-physical reality” are immense: “one is not able to envisage [the UFO phenomenon] independently from our consciousness; what is more: there can be no question of eliminating that part which the human spirit adds to it; it is, on the contrary, an essential component of the phenomenon” (SF 321).
Such a hermeneutical shocker carries other shockers. There is the notion, for example, that a meaning or a representation can become an efficient cause in the physical world (SF 302), that there is such a thing as “a concrete action of a meaning” (l’action concrete d’un sens) (SF 305). But how? How, Méheust asks, can something entirely without location, mass, or energy, like a meaning or bit of information, interfere with solid objects, with things? After a fascinating footnote on Freud’s letter to Karl Abraham in which Freud suggested that biological evolution may be driven by unconscious mental representations, that is, that consciousness may somehow be able to imprint itself on physical forms (remember Fort’s “wereleaf”?), Méheust finally plays his cards and suggests that reality appears to possess two sides or faces: a public face involving physical matter and causality, and an esoteric face (une face ésotérique) involving the presence of meaning and information (SF 307).18 This is how, for Méheust, a meaning (un sens) can really and truly structure a physical event involving matter, as in an experience of synchronicity (SF 263). Reality really is double-faced. It is matter, and it is meaning. It is “it,” and it is “bit.”19 Not only is the Human Two. So too is the World.
Méheust also employs mythical language to say the same thing. Hence he can describe the entire UFO phenomenon as a “technologized Hermes,” after the Greek trickster god of lucky finds, language and communication, doorways, and dreams (and the etymological base of our own “hermeneutics”).20 Here he points out that in reading the abduction narratives one often has the impression that the victim has “penetrated” into the UFO as if it represented “the other side of the mirror.” Like Alice in Wonderland, the victim has somehow entered another universe, this one of an atemporal and nonspatial order. The UFO has in effect acted like a “windowsill,” even like a “reality changer.” Méheust is particularly struck by all those stories in which a gardener, hunter, fisherman, or driver is engaged in some utterly banal activity when—pop!—another reality opens up in the very midst of the mundane activity. He thus sees these narratives as a return of the repressed Hermes archetype, as a lived embodiment of that most basic of Hermetic principles, “where the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictory” (SF 215–17).
Very much related to these Hermetic notions of the UFO functioning as a windowsill, reality changer, or portal and of paradoxically joining the spiritually profound and the mundane (or the culturally lowbrow) are the key issues of the absurd and the symbolic function. We might recall that Vallee had highlighted the utter absurdity of many of the UFO narratives. He felt that this absurdity was not accidental or meaningless, that it was somehow part of the message. Aimé Michel highlights the same in his preface to Méheust’s book, “Requiem pour des chiméres trés anciennes” (“Requiem for Some Very Old Chimeras”), a potent little gnostic essay in which the author expresses his disgust with “the ideologues and the theologians,” that is, with the representatives of reason and faith, neither of whom, he suggests, have really confronted the facts of the case at hand. Such facts, Michel admits, appear both fantastic and absurd. But does not this nonsense itself make sense? Is not this genre of absurdity entirely appropriate, even expected, before the possible presence of another thought (SF 68)? Hence Michel’s fantastic realist mantra, which is also Méheust’s mantra, “to envisage everything and to believe nothing” (SF 323). Méheust follows the master here, pointing out, for example, that the UFO phenomenon acts like a “super-dream” (sur-reve) that works through a process of radical “absurdization” (SF 289).
Méheust’s most profound treatments on the absurd, however, involve his notion of the symbolic function embedded in the UFO narratives and encounters. For Méheust, the symbolic function is about communication between different orders of reality, orders so different that they cannot communicate to one another in any straightforward or simple way. As an expression of the symbolic function, then, the religious image, the myth, or, in some cases, the dream does not work like a simple word or a precise number. Its meaning is not, and cannot, be a straightforward one. There can be no direct or one-to-one translation, not because the process is being intentionally deceptive or ridiculous, but because a fisherman is trying to talk to a fish. We are back to the Flatland insight.
Méheust thus notes the central role of “bubbles” or crystal-like “encasements” common in both the sci-fi and encounter literatures. Aliens are often imagined or seen floating around in them, revealing themselves through the bubble, and yet also not revealing themselves by staying inside the bubble. Such transparent encasements, such revealings that conceal, symbolize for Méheust the symbolic function itself to the extent that they are all about permitting “the otherwise impossible encounter between two heterogenous realities” (SF 195). Such symbols are relays, as it were, from something invisible and structurally unknowable, something truly alien, to our own local forms of culture and consciousness (SF 310). That is to say, in my own terms now, to the extent that it permits at least some type of communication across radically different metaphysical orders, the symbolic function renders the impossible possible.
It also, alas, renders the possible impossible
to the extent that a culture or a person loses the ability to think symbolically. So deprived, people literalize their cultural myths and symbols and fall into all sorts of genuine absurdities, including the absurdity that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts machines piloted by aliens from outer space. This, Méheust points out, is simply to mistake our own cultural moment—which happens to be imbued by a modern sci-fi register and a cold war space race—as somehow privileged and absolute, that is, as applicable to all place and time in the universe.21 For Méheust at least, this is definitely not what the UFO encounters are about. They are not literal messages. They are not what they seem to be. They symbolize. They translate across metaphysical orders. They reveal the sacred in the mode and code of the day.
And that code is largely pop cultural. Faithful to his Hermetic principle about joining the high and the low, Méheust dedicated this first book to the religious revelations of popular culture, that is, to the high revealing itself in the low. Not surprisingly, other pop cultural allusions appear alongside all those spinning, darting, shining discs.22 Sometimes this is a rather subtle process, as, for example, when Méheust refers to the astonishing displays of the UFOs as their “special effects,” as if what we are witnessing here is a Hollywood movie (SF 16, 132). At other times, the pop cultural allusions are more direct and obvious. The French comic-book character Tin Tin appears to be one of his favorites. The character makes appearances in both Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes (SF 283–84) and, a bit later, in Somnambulisme et médiumnité, to which we will return.
Superman also makes an appearance or two. The first occurs in a discussion of the alien as a modern technoangel, a theme that began to appear in the 1930s (SF 121). “Transcendence is always armed,” Méheust notes, citing one of his favorite authors, Gilbert Durand (SF 121). This is especially obvious in the history of the biblical and Islamic angel, which often looks remarkably like a heavenly military general. So too with the alien and his high-tech weaponry, which Méheust sees as an example of the “technological avatar of the angel.” Such a process culminated in the U.S., Méheust suggests, with the wildly popular appearance of Superman in 1938. The mythical ground had been laid by the earlier science-fiction pulp magazines. And Superman, of course, was essentially a crashed alien. He descends from the sky from another world literally called the Hidden (Krypton) or the Mystical to save us.
Méheust’s fullest treatment of Superman, however, occurs in his discussion of the odd behavior and general comportment of the saucer occupants in the sci-fi narratives and UFO encounters. One never sees saucer occupants performing biological functions, such as eating, drinking, or defecating, he reminds us. Such biological functions have been erased, as if they were not necessary for the message.23 In essence, Méheust suggests, the UFO occupants do not behave like biological creatures. They behave like signs. They are like puppets on a string, or representations in a store window display. Or comic-book characters.
They are also astonishingly, impossibly invulnerable. In one famous American incident, the Hopkinsville case, a farmer and his family shot at the things multiple times. They just bounced back and continued on their terrifying way around the farmyard and farmhouse. It is here that Méheust invokes Superman and the comic books again. “One has the impression,” he writes, “that, if [the superheroes] visually distinguish themselves from the flying saucers, they are nevertheless taken from the same substance, they share all their privileges, that the same force controls all the details of the manifestation” (SF 283–84).
Exactly.
The Challenge of the Magnetic and the Shock of the Psychical
In 1992, Méheust published a second, much less speculative book on flying saucers, this one on the abduction narratives in the comparative light of ethnography and folklore, En soucoupes volantes: Vers une ethnologie des récits d’enlèvements, or On Flying Saucers: Toward an Ethnography of Abduction Narratives.24 If the first book was written by a young and passionate ufologist, this second one was written by a careful and qualifying anthropologist. Méheust frankly worried that the success of his first book—and it was quite successful, both culturally and commercially—was due to its “mistiness.” He also knew that in order to get a university position, which is what he really wanted, he would have to mask his real thoughts. So he put aside all of his bold speculations and true convictions and hid them behind the mask of scholarship and objectivity. The result was disappointing. The people who were interested in the fascinating fusion of science fiction and flying saucers lost all interest in his work. The ufologists saw him as a traitor. And the university scholars, well, they were never interested in UFOs in the first place. The second book landed with a dull thud.
In 2007, now looking back with three decades of such sobering experiences and a certain intellectual maturity, Méheust sat down to write a new preface for the second edition of the first book. Here again, he expressed himself in a careful and cautious vein about the whole matter of UFOs. He remained impressed with the phenomenon as a whole, but he had also become convinced that he had underestimated the epistemological difficulties of the inquiry, and especially “the irrepressible tendency of the human spirit to modify the real in the sense of that which the culture of the moment proscribes.” He had underestimated, that is, “the work of the successive filters through which the real passes before it appears to us” (SF 21).
This is a key distinction, and one central to my own thought as well. Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard captures the same point, beautifully, in the very title of his essay “UFOs: Lost in the Myths.” His point here is the same one that Eliade made in “Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge” with respect to paranormal phenomena and the history of folklore, namely, that there is an experiential core to these myths and legends, and that we ignore this experiential base at considerable cost. Here is how Bullard puts the same idea:
In a sense the myth has fared all too well. It hides the fact that the UFO mystery is not a single question but two, one about the nature of the UFO experience, the other about the human meanings of UFOs. To overlook this distinction leads to dismissal of the whole phenomenon as a cultural reality and nothing more, without any careful reckoning with the experiential core.25
This, of course, is the same idea that authors like Hynek and Vallee had called “the signal in the noise.” I will return to this notion of “the work of the successive filters” and the two hermeneutical levels of the paranormal problem in my conclusion.
Happily, the historical scope and metaphysical depth of this cultural filtering process was precisely the subject of Méheust’s third book, if, that is, one can call a twelve-hundred-page, two-volume tome a “book.” Somnambulisme et médiumnité was the doctoral dissertation he wrote for his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. It is divided into two chronological volumes: volume 1, Le défi du magnetisme, or The Challenge of Magnetism; and volume 2, Le choc des sciences psychiques, or The Shock of the Psychical Sciences.26 The first volume begins on May 4, 1784, the date of the marquis de Puységur’s discovery-production of somnambulism in a twenty-three-year-old peasant by the name of Victor Race, and carries the story forward to the early 1840s, the rough date of the beginning of the magnetic tradition’s cultural decline after a series of official commissions by the French government and medical profession. The second volume returns to the magnetic origin point of 1784, but then carries the story forward further to 1930, the approximate date of this tradition’s absorption and eclipse within Western intellectual culture. Finally, Méheust ends the volumes with some reflections on the state of the French academy with respect to the paranormal at the very end of the twentieth century.
The work is far too large and venturesome to capture even in a second book, much less a brief chapter such as this, so I will restrict myself here to focusing on four major themes that are especially relevant to the themes at hand: (1) Méheust’s notion of l’oubli du magnetisme or “the forgetting of [animal] magnetism” within Western intellectual culture, a two-century process that
coincides with the erasure of the paranormal within intellectual culture and its subsequent migration into “the safety” of popular culture; (2) the related notion of “shock zones” or “stop concepts” through which he explains how later systems of thought—like Freud’s psychoanalysis, Breton’s surrealism, or Bergson’s creative evolution and philosophy of consciousness—both beat back and incorporated the earlier metaphysical defiances and shocks in order to preserve, but also to expand slightly, the epistemological boundaries of Western culture; (3) the central idea of décrire-construire or “description-construction,” which in turns builds on the aforementioned theory of human consciousness as a reservoir of potentialities that can be actualized within different worlds and persons at different places and times through various intellectual practices, psychological techniques, social interactions, and institution building; and (4) the recurrent theme of psychical capacities or extraordinary human powers within this history, basically what Myers called supernormal powers, what Fort called wild talents, and what Vallee referred to as psychical capacities.
1. The Great Forgetting. It is a commonplace in humanistic circles today to hear that such-and-such truth is a “social construction,” or that this or that claim is a product of an “episteme,” that is, a particular order of knowledge that is held together by elaborate networks of power established by earlier cultural battles whose winning arguments have been institutionalized in carefully controlled hierarchical structures and minutely monitored social and intellectual practices. We thus might believe that we are indeed “thinking freely,” but the patterns and tracks, if not troughs, of our “private” thoughts have in fact been laid down before us by quite public practices and battles. We do not think. We are thought. As William Blake might say, we labor with “mind forg’d manacles,” that is, conceptual chains strapped around our flaming brains by the prejudices, bigotries, and idiocies of previous generations. Along similar but more objectively stated deterministic lines, one also often hears that any truth claim is ultimately really only a “discourse,” that is, a language game that makes good sense within its own rules and grammatical structure, but little or no sense outside of them. Such claims, deeply indebted to French figures like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, are general features of what we mean by poststructuralism and postmodernism today.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 30