Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  That which we have learned . . . is, that man can act upon man, at all times and almost at will, by striking the imagination; that signs and gestures the most simple may produce the most powerful effects; that the action of man upon the imagination may be reduced to an art, and conducted after a certain method, when exercised upon patients who have faith in the proceedings.36

  Mills’s own point is simple but profound here, namely, that the psychological insight of the above quote is “as applicable to literary creation as to medical practice or social reform.”37 In other words, what the Mesmerists could do with their patients via magnets, touch, and the passing of hands in a healing practice, the authors could do with their reader via words, plot, and mood in a writing practice. Both, after all, were drawing on the same imagination, the same power of signs and symbols, and the same psychology of belief. This was particularly obvious after Puységur and his colleagues realized that the magnets and related rituals of mesmeric practice were not necessary, that they were artful and useful props, but certainly not literal physical causes.

  This is how, Mills suggests, American writers of the nineteenth century intuited “a link between the mesmeric and literary arts” and came to understand the incredible power of signs.38 This is how the call for a national literature and the subsequent American Renaissance it produced “evolved into attention to the state of one’s own mind, to those manifestations of the highest states of mind, and to the effects of literary choices on readers’ psychological states.”39 Such authors were writing their way to a distinctly American aesthetic that could accommodate and nurture what Mills calls “transition states” in a democratic culture. In my own terms, they were writing their way to a democratic mysticism rooted in literature and individuals as opposed to doctrinal systems and institutions. They were laying the foundation for America’s religion of no religion and its various and diverse “altered states of consciousness.”

  Finally, there is Méheust’s treatment of the common evolutionary reading of the emergent superpowers, evident, as we have already seen, in figures from Alfred Russel Wallace and Fredric Myers to Richard Maurice Bucke and Henri Bergson. These thinkers were hardly alone in their conclusions. In 1902, for example, Jean Jaurés asked whether “the man of extraordinary and unknown powers” may not signal some “new progress of consciousness and life on our planet.” Why, after all, should we consider the present form of man, the “normal” form, the last term or expression of the species? Jaurés then posited a classic homo duplex doctrine by which the human being is seen as possessing two distinct but related forms of consciousness: one familiar and normal, the other manifesting in the altered states of hypnotism and still considered abnormal. Fusing these two forms, Jaurés speculated, might well lead to “the creation of a new humanity.” This, however, would by no means be easy, he thought. It would likely be no easier and no less filled with suffering than that unimaginably long evolution that has already carried life from the amoeba to man (SM 2:157).

  Joseph Maxwell, writing in 1922 on the history of traditional magic in the present light of psychical research, thought more or less the same: “magic,” he wrote, “leads us to consider the human being as an entity whose evolution has not ended, whose powers are not yet fully developed” (SM 2:283). This too was a sensibility very much in line with the intuitions of the magnetic theorists, “for whom,” Méheust writes, “the somnambulist trance permits a return to a very ancient form of experience, but also to a recovery of some latent potentialities in order to re-actualize them and use them to make a contribution to the evolution of humanity” (SM 2:298).

  Hence that whole field of psychofolklore by which earlier forms of magical experience and folklore are revisited and reread through the categories and findings of contemporary psychical research. The past is recovered, but in a new form now. The anthropologist, folkorist, and historian of religions Andrew Lang is usually credited with bringing this method into prominence, but Lang knew well that he did not invent the idea. He knew, that is, that the early magnetic theorists had arrived at the same realization a full century before him (SM 2:273).

  Such evolutionary thinking would find a uniquely gifted voice in the philosopher Henri Bergson and his earlier cited description of the universe as une machine à faire des dieux, that is, “a machine for making gods.” Here also we should place Bergson’s central notion of the élan vital animating the universe. Although Bergson followed Christian mystical theology in his position that mysticism represented a more evolved stage of the spiritual life than psychical abilities, he also thought that it was what Méheust describes as “the potentialities evolving through the psychic phenomena” in which this élan manifests in human nature in a way that can be scientifically, collectively, and cumulatively studied. In this way, Bergson thought, a new vision of human nature and its psychical evolution can eventually be made available to the public, and this in a manner that mystical accomplishments, however profound, could never supply (SM 2:253).

  “If Only One of These Facts . . . ”: The Impossible Case of Alexis Didier

  One of the features of Méheust’s work that makes it so remarkable, and so refreshing, is the fact that he does not avoid the question of whether the magnetic and psychical phenomena are real or not.40 When I spoke to him about his work, he shared with me his observation that this is a question that must not be asked in French intellectual circles. Such phenomena can be discussed as “representations” to be sure, but never empirical facts, never genuinely veridical cognitions of something out there. If Méheust had been a traditional French intellectual (or a traditional American one, for that matter), he would have gone in precisely this direction. He would have “bracketed” the truth claims of the phenomena and treated them as pure forms, as “representations” or “discourses,” to use the safe, postmodern catchphrases in fashion today.

  He does not do this. And this constitutes his most important intellectual intervention. In essence, he forces his readers into a kind of philosophical corner: “If these facts are real,” he asks, “what does this mean?” And more specifically, “If these facts are real, how must we now reread intellectual history and its defensively dismissive treatment of magnetic, psychical, and paranormal phenomena?” These are rhetorical questions. Méheust thinks that the phenomena are very likely genuine. They are not only representations or simply discourses (although they are certainly those things too). But once we postulate such an (im)possibility, the history of animal magnetism and psychical research looks very different indeed, as does the intellectual antireception of these practices and inquiries. It all looks like a vast forgetting, a massive cultural repression, a tragic denial of our own potential nature. All of this is implied but never really stated as such in Somnambulisme et médiumnité. Méheust was still being careful. He still hoped for a university position.

  He didn’t get one.

  And so, after publishing his immense temporal and intellectual map of the Great Forgetting, Méheust decided to make his implicit philosophical challenge more explicit. In order to do this, he zoomed in on a single historical figure and in 2003 published Un voyant prodigieux or A Seer Extraordinaire, an in-depth case study of a mid-nineteenth-century figure whom many consider to be the most gifted magnetic seer of the century, Alexis Didier (1826–86). As with all books, there are many ways to read this one, but it is difficult to miss the ways Méheust employs the biographical details and historical documents (part 1); the elaborate reception of Alexis by journalists, literary figures, intellectuals, and skeptics (part 2); and the various critical approaches to the phenomena that he heralded (part 3) as one long argument about the empirical reality of the magnetic phenomena under study and, most of all, about what these impossible phenomena imply about the still possible nature of human consciousness and culture. As with his first flying-saucer book, he is setting down a metaphysical challenge. As with his two-volume dissertation, he is asking us to remember that which we have forgotten.

  Méheus
t begins the book with a quote from Kant’s response to Emanuel Swedenborg, his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, which includes the following line on the data of clairvoyance: “Such a capital witness, such a perspective of astonishing consequences, if one is able to presuppose that only one of these facts is guaranteed” (VP 7). The line captures well what William James would later make famous as the white crow argument. It only takes one white crow to prove that all crows are not black, James pointed out. So, too, it only takes one proven case of telepathy to establish that the mind is not bound by the brain and the body. The Jamesian white crow became a kind of battle cry or philosophical symbol for early (and later) psychical researchers, but the faultless logic it represents is already present in Kant’s honest philosophical frustrations with the dreams of the Swedish spirit-seer. It only takes one.

  Or a thousand. From about the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-five, when he more or less retired from exhaustion and a variety of health problems (perhaps brought on by his various healings and feats), Alexis Didier demonstrated an entire spectrum of psychical powers that baffle the modern reader even more than they baffled the princes, intellectuals, aristocrats, journalists, and medical professionals who sought him out in the 1840s and ’50s in such great numbers. The latter, at least, lived in a cultural climate that could still remember a time when such powers were widely accepted as real and so were often experienced as such. But even they had to remember. Alexis came on the French scene just after the magnetic movement had been thoroughly defeated in the public arena and had gone underground. The receptive actualizing climate was no more. Because of both this repressive cultural climate and the incredibly short span of the seer’s public career, Méheust sees Alexis as a kind of Icarus figure, a tragic being who attempted to fly too high, who tried to expand the human condition past where his culture, and his own body, was willing to go. His wings melted. His career was cut short. A mere decade or so is all. It was over almost as soon as it began.

  I cannot possibly summarize all the stories Méheust recounts in his exhaustive study. One iconic example will have to do, the one that Méheust himself treats as iconic, that is, the one with which he begins his book. Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend was an Episcopalian priest, an author of an early book on Mesmerism (briefly cited above in our discussion of Mills), an intimate friend of Charles Dickens, and the latter’s literary executor.41 Townshend also wrote poetry, painted, and practiced animal magnetism himself. In October of 1851, he sought out Didier and spent a few hours with him in Paris. He subsequently published an account of his experiences in the form of a letter dated November 25, 1851, in The Zoist.42

  The reported facts are these. Townshend visited the home of a certain Mr. Marcillet, who was the magnetizer of Didier, in order to arrange a meeting with the famous clairvoyant. Marcillet brought Didier to Townshend’s hotel room at 9:00 p.m. that same evening. At Marcillet’s suggestion, Townshend magnetized Didier himself. After a few minutes of magnetic passes and some strange, quite ugly convulsions of his face, Didier passed into a calm state and gave his usual signal that he was there: “Merci!” Once Marcillet saw that Didier was successfully magnetized, he left the two men alone in the hotel room and departed.

  Townshend immediately began to test Alexis “in the matter of seeing distant places,” a particular power the French called clairvoyance à distance but which is very similar to what we have already encountered in its American cold war form as remote viewing. With no Russians to spy on, Townshend asked Alexis if he wished to visit his house in thought. “Which?” Alexis responded. “For you have two! You have a house in London and one in the country. Which shall I go to first?” Townshend asked him to visit the country home. After a pause, Alexis responded, “I am there!” Alexis’s eyes were now wide open but “blank” and staring, like a sleepwalker’s, with his pupils fixed, dull, and dilated. In this odd stare, he described a chateau with a garden around it and a very small house to the left. All exact. He was looking at water now too. Townshend’s windows looked out onto a lake.

  Alexis now entered the salon and commented on the numerous paintings hanging on the wall. He found it curious that they were all modern paintings, except for two, one of the sea and one of a religious subject. Townshend shuddered. Alexis went on. “There are three figures in the picture—an old man, a woman, and a child.” He described the painting in significant, and correct, detail—of Saint Ann in the process of teaching the Virgin Mary to read, it turned out. Townshend asked him what the painting was done on. Alexis described a blackish-gray stone substance that was bumpy. It was, in fact, a black marble base that was rough and bumpy.

  Alexis then proceeded to describe his other home in London, on Norfolk Street. He gave descriptions of the two female servants, especially the young one who struck him as pretty. He described the salon, the library, the elaborate carved frame of a mirror over the chimney, and then, suddenly, a portrait that appeared reflected in the mirror. He described in detail the painting, of the Holy Family this time. Townshend asked him the name of the painter. He replied that he had been dead for some time and, after some effort, he murmured “in a very cavernous voice,” that it was Raphael. “The fact is,” Townshend explains, “the name of Raphael is written dimly in gold letters on the hem of the Virgin’s garment.”

  After a few more uncannily accurate descriptions of paintings, Townshend asked Alexis to read through some kind of opaque obstacle. Alexis successfully read in turn lines or words from Lamartine’s Jocelyn, a popular French magazine, and an English novel, all a number of pages down (determined by Townshend) from where the book or magazine was opened. At Alexis’s request, Townshend now produced a letter in an envelope that he had recently received from a particular lady. Alexis described its contents in impossible detail and then proceeded to describe “the whole history of my fair correspondent—how long I had known her, and many minute circumstances respecting herself and our acquaintance—something too about the character of her sister, and (to crown all) he wrote . . . both the Christian and family name of her father!” One gets the sense that Townshend had some sort of romantic relationship with the woman in question. In any case, he confesses that he cannot make her or her family’s name known in print and that the case would be much stronger if he could indeed be more specific. As with the psychical data emerging from Myers’s relationship to Annie Hill Marshall, the erotic appears to be intimately related to the paranormal, first as a generative force, then as a reason to censor and weaken the report.

  Mr. Marcillet now returned. Townshend continued with his test. He quizzed Alexis about himself and his health. He was astonished by the answers. The conversation finally turned to religious subjects, particularly the question of life after death. “Dieu seul le sait,” Alexis made clear. “Only God knows that.” “It is true,” he went on, “many somnambulists pretend to make revelations about a future state. But the proof they are all wrong is, that no two of them agree: all give different accounts.”

  As the magnetic session ended, Alexis awoke with the same convulsions and grimaces with which he had entered the altered state an hour before. He came back. He was now no longer the gifted seer. He was a young man, timid and respectful to his social senior. It was 10:00 p.m. Marcillet and Didier left. Townshend was left alone with his thoughts.

  Toward the end of the letter, Townshend reflects with his readers about the events he has just recounted. Alexis did make a few mistakes “once or twice,” and he did ask Townshend to concentrate on what he wanted him to see (a significant detail that naturally invokes an alternate but equally paranormal process, that of telepathy). Townshend believed that much of Alexis’s success was a function of his own trust in the seer’s powers. He had no doubt that, had he been impatient or distrustful, “Alexis would have lost his clairvoyance, and perhaps attempted to supply it by guessing. This is the history of most of the mistakes and apparent want of truth of somnambulists. We have no patience with them, and will not observe the conditions requisite for the
development of their clairvoyance.” “But a thousand negations,” he goes on, “are nothing before one affirmative proof.” One white crow is all it takes. And Townshend now had a whole flock of them fluttering about in his brain.

  I have spent so much space on the Townshend-Didier scene for a simple reason. Any attempted summary of the history of psychical research and modern paranormal phenomena—including the halting one I have sketched here and there throughout the present set of chapters—is all too prone to impressions of secondhand rumor and suspicions of sloppy thinking, as if the authors of the last two centuries were somehow not as smart and careful as those of this one. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that Méheust’s study of Alexis Didier reaches to nearly five hundred pages and explores virtually every imaginable criticism and reading, and that in this it resembles and extends the work of such earlier researchers as Frederic Myers, William James, Richard Hodgson, and Hereward Carrington, all of whom we have met above. Such invocations, however brief, are worth making here, since there is much nonsense written about the history of psychical research, with the greatest nonsense of all being the ignorant claim that it was never carefully done.

  This in fact is one of the major points of Méheust’s study of Didier—how elaborate and careful many of the experiments in fact were. The real point of the book, however, is not to defend the nineteenth-century intellect before the dogmatic skepticism of contemporary intellectual culture. It is to establish the genuineness of Didier’s powers, and then to tease out their philosophical and anthropological implications. Basically, it is one immense “If, then . . . ” exercise. And once the “if” is established, the “then” that follows is, as Fort would say, a real whopper. In brief, Méheust shows that Alexis Didier—as a kind of mutant prodigy who magnifies, like a human microscope, powers that lie still tiny and invisible in all of us—presents us with truths that strike at the very heart of our cultural assumptions about humanity and its place in the natural world. These invisible powers now rendered visible through such an excessive being, Méheust argues, possess an “immense polemical and heuristic impact” (VP 18).