Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Méheust reflects here on the dueling perspectives of the sociologist and the parapsychologist: whereas the former brackets the epistemological truth of the visions and reads the visionary through the contexts of his or her social and cultural environment, the latter more or less ignores the cultural context in order to focus exclusively on the objective truth of the visionary cognitions. Such a sectarian division of labor, he points out, essentially paralyzes the inquiry and prevents any real progress toward an adequate resolution of the question at hand. Such different approaches—which align more or less with the methods of the human and natural sciences—need not be seen as opposed, however. They can also be understood as complementary. Consciousness and culture.

  The sociologist’s approach to the seer as a privileged revealer of a social reality ought to be revived, then, but only if we can acknowledge that the argument can be reversed, that is, only if we can acknowledge that the social reality to which the seer gives witness witnesses in turn to the reality of the seer’s experiences. This is a perfect example of the kinds of reflexivity or reversal in modern theory that I have identified as “gnostic”: If all the gods are projections of human nature, as modern projection theory argues so convincingly, then might not human nature itself be considered a veritable supergod?43 Peter Berger put the same “flip” this way in his A Rumor of Angels: “If the religious projections of man correspond to a reality that is superhuman and supernatural, then it seems logical to look for traces of this reality in the projector himself.”44

  In order to demonstrate his own point, Méheust invokes Alison Winter’s historical study of the effective use of magnetic anesthesia during surgical operations in India in the Calcutta practice of the Scottish surgeon James Eisdale.45 The impossible phenomenon, which dated from about 1845 to 1851, is well attested: working for up to two (sometimes even eight) hours a day on each patient, local medical workers under Eisdale’s instruction were able to magnetize whole rows of suffering subjects. Eisdale would then come into the hospital, test the magnetized trance of a particular patient, and then perform the requisite surgical procedure. Some of these operations were especially dramatic (huge scrotum tumors were his specialty, and amputations were not unknown), and, although we have no data from the patients themselves, most of the surgeries were reported as being both successful and as accompanied by little or no apparent pain.

  Winter approaches these historical events through a classic cultural-context argument, that is, by suggesting that the profound social inequalities between the elite Western surgeons and their patients, who were often impoverished charity patients as well as colonial subjects, set up a certain “physiology of colonial power” that made the practice work. She also points out that, unlike in Britain, where the mesmerized often displayed power over the mesmerists, in Eisdale’s Calcutta hospital the whole point was to render the mesmerized subject completely unconscious and entirely passive beneath the surgeon’s knife. These events were sometimes veritable spectacles, moreover, with Eisdale essentially performing minor tortures (burning coals were sometimes used, for example) on the patient to test the depth of a particular trance.

  Yes, of course, Méheust answers, such scenes do in fact reenact the social conditions of Victorian society and British colonial power, and they are inexplicable without such historical contexts. But they also did happen, and this also needs to be explained. Precisely because many of the surgeries were successful, they “constitute at the same time an enigma for the psychologist and the physiologist” (VP 20). The perspectives of the sociologist and the parapsychologist, in other words, can be joined, can be made complementary, but only if we are willing to step out of both our antihistoricism and our resistance to the metaphysical implications of the actual historical data. But how to go about this? Méheust proposes an elegant model of human potentiality and cultural actualization: “If the alleged facts reveal themselves as sufficiently attested, then it is also necessary to consider them as a potentiality of the human spirit, rendered possible by a certain context” (VP 21). Again, this seems exactly right to me.

  Finally, before we leave Alexis, it is worth commenting on a particular section of the book where Méheust manages to synthesize, implicitly anyway, all three of his major works: on flying saucers, on the history of animal magnetism, and on Alexis Didier. The section involves the relationship between the Didier phenomena and major French and English literary figures, particularly Honoré de Balzac, Alexander Dumas, Charles Baudelaire, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Here Méheust points out that the same year that Alexis appeared on the French scene as a young magnetic prodigy, 1842, Balzac published his Ursule Mirouet, a major novel that features scenes in it that eerily replicate the performances of Didier. In fact, Balzac based the novel on his reading of the mesmeric and magnetic literature, so this is not entirely surprising, but the degree of the correspondences is striking. The comparative case is stronger still with a later novel, Louis Lambert, the novel that Balzac considered his major work, where he speaks in the first person, and where he revealed his own metaphysical system. Méheust is blunt: “Alexis, in effect, is Louis Lambert—but a Louis Lambert who has left the universe of the novel in order to develop his presumed gifts in reality” (VP 237).

  The details are certainly analogous enough. Both figures are cast as prototypes of the Romantic hero, that is, as a precocious genius who is prematurely spent by the excessive use of his extraordinary gifts. Both men are described as short, fragile, given to illness, pale, and effeminate. Both men are empowered by a strange, “almost superhuman” force that first appears just short of puberty, that is, at twelve years of age. Both men’s superpowers, moreover, involve the mysteries of textuality and the act of reading. Whereas Lambert possesses a strange ability to enter the labyrinthine world of a text and reconstruct the intentions and intimate meanings of the author, Didier takes this gift even further with his psychometric power by which he takes an object and “reads” the previous owner’s personality and history via its energies and memories. Lambert can gulp down nine to ten lines with a single look. Alexis can read lines ten to twenty pages down from where the book is open. Finally, both men fail in their vocations. Lambert’s secret diaries, which are found by a priest of his boarding school, become the means by which his reputation is ruined. Similarly, when Alexis is attacked by the clergy and accused of being in league with Satan, his niece decides to burn his journal. He also loses his reputation among the academy, which ignores him completely (neglect, as Fort pointed out, being the easiest and most effective form of damning a datum). Both men’s health breaks down as a result of their respective misfortune. Lambert suffers from catalepsy and dies at the age of twenty-eight. Didier suffers from epilepsy and ends his career at roughly the same age.

  How to explain this correspondence between fiction and reality? We have been here before, of course, with the flying saucers and the science fiction. Méheust offers the most obvious and reasonable answer, namely, that Didier had read Balzac. Perhaps, but that hardly explains everything—we are, after all, dealing with technically impossible matters here, not common skills that one can learn from simply reading a novel. True to his earlier writings, Méheust argues that the impact of literature on society is much deeper and much more mysterious than we realize. More specifically, he invokes his Somnambulisme et médiumnité and its central notion of décrire-construire. Something else is going on here, he suggests. A reality is constructed through elaborate social processes, including the processes of literature, and then it is experienced by gifted visionaries as physically real. The impossible is thus rendered possible, here by literary means.

  The case is similar with Alexander Dumas, who assisted in séances with Didier and wrote about magnetic scenes, particularly in his Joseph Balsamo. The scenes look a lot like those involving Alexis.

  The case is somewhat different with Charles Baudelaire, however, as this particular fiction-fact parallel involved Baudelaire’s mystical theory of
poetry, which, or so Méheust suggests, was essentially a reworking of psychometric convictions involving the “auratic perception” of physical objects. Psychometry is the practice of handling an object—a shirt, a lock of hair, a bracelet—that a person owned (or was) and “reading out” the identity or chain of memories allegedly inhering in that object. Didier’s theorization of his own psychometric practices is a perfect example of psychofolklore, that is, the reinterpretation of a traditional religious practice or doctrine in the light of present paranormal experience and psychical research:

  The past, for me, is not dead, but living. There is a pious belief that leads one to preserve religiously, encased in gold or precious stones, the relics of saints, and that encourages one to believe that something of their souls, of their spirits, of their hearts, in a word, of their personalities, remains in these fragments of their dead bodies. For me, I see them re-existing entirely in body, in soul, in spirit, in holiness, within the least particle that they have touched during their lives, and I feel their real presence, as if they were again on this earth.46

  Through a kind of occult historiography involving the act of touch, when Alexis “reads” an object, the past comes alive. He physically “feels” and “remembers” it. So too with an inspired poem for Baudelaire—the correspondences and connotations of the words invoke a certain palpable nimbus of nostalgia and remembrance. They carry, as it were, a certain “physical meaning” that can be reinvoked and re-experienced by the sensitive reader. The state of consciousness of the poet is thus reactivated and reactualized in the act of deep reading. Reading has become a genuine mystical act, and poetry has become a kind of divination, even communion with the soul of the “dead” author. Put more precisely, in Baudelaire the psychometric has become the hermeneutic.

  Finally, there is Didier’s role as a kind of “transcendental detective.” The use of psychics to solve crimes is something one often hears about in the modern world, mostly on The History Channel and in other popular, and sometimes dubious, venues. Regardless, the phenomenon is embarrassingly well attested in the historical literature and appears to be genuine in that most lowly of senses, namely, in the sense that it sometimes works. Skeptics may dismiss such things, but detectives and police departments use what works.47

  The newspapers of the time were certainly convinced. They reported on Didier’s activity here as well, including the time he remotely tracked a man named Dubois who had stolen twenty thousand francs and was visiting gambling houses in Brussels and Spa, where he was finally arrested at Didier’s direction.48 According to Méheust, such scenes appear to have influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. Méheust believes that Doyle read about Didier in English sources that were widely available, took a psychical practice with which he was very familiar, that is, psychometry, and transposed it “into a mythical capacity for hyperdeduction” (VP 248). An ancient practice, that of divination, was thus given a very modern garb, and an entirely secular genre was born as a result—the detective novel (VP 247–48).

  The Collective Mind: Bateson, De Martino, Vallee, and Jung

  One way to get a handle on a thinker’s thoughts is to compare his or her system to those of other thinkers who have addressed similar subjects. Since we are at the end now of our readings of our four authors of the impossible, a brief comparison of these four might also serve us well as the beginning of a conclusion.

  As we have seen, Bertrand Méheust has written at great length about the history of the mesmeric, magnetic, and psychical research traditions in France. But he also knows the British and American psychical research traditions, and he wrote his M.A. thesis on William James. In many ways, then, his concerns are so close to those of Frederic Myers that it seems almost pointless to point this out. My first chapter on Myers and this fourth chapter on Méheust, then, can be thought of as the beginning and the end of a circle, or, more true to my own gnostic imagination, as a written snake biting its own textual tail. In the end, then, it is probably more fruitful to focus on the middle movements of this hissing book and reflect for a moment on Méheust’s thought in relation to that of Charles Fort and Jacques Vallee. I will address the Vallee-Méheust correspondence in this present, penultimate section and the Fort-Méheust correspondence in the last.

  Bertrand Meheust’s relationship to Jacques Vallee is a very obvious one. The two men know each other. They have read each other’s work. They were both partly inspired in their youth by the same older teacher: Aimé Michel. Both, moreover, approach the data looking for “the signal in the noise” (SF 243), and they hear very similar things, particularly concerning the profound connections between folklore and flying saucers. Méheust clearly acknowledges the similarities in approach, as does Vallee.49

  Méheust observes that Vallee’s work, especially in its earlier incarnation, is more interested in the occult dimensions of the phenomenon, and that Vallee moved closer to his own present methodology as his work progressed (it is important to keep in mind here that virtually all of Vallee’s corpus predates Méheust’s, with the important exception of the latter’s science-fiction and flying-saucer book of 1978). This is not an unreasonable reading. In Vallee’s early writings, one can indeed get the sense that the mythological control system that he was writing about was controlled by some kind of alien mind. In his later work, Vallee appears to have come to see this control system more as a kind of spontaneous collective mind. That is to say, he has effectively intuited the ways that the ideas and structures of a society interact and regulate themselves, much as Méheust would intuit later on in his Somnambulisme et médiumnite. It is this approach to a kind of collective mind and its spontaneous self-regulation that really unites our two authors of the impossible and links in turn their books to those of previous authors, especially Gregory Bateson, Ernesto de Martino, and C. G. Jung.

  As for Vallee on Méheust, Vallee embraces the incorporation of science fiction into the discussion (indeed, he has written five science-fiction novels, and he pioneered the folklore approach), but he also points out that unexplained aerial phenomena hardly began in 1947. Indeed, Vallee’s very latest work, with an independent scholar named Chris Aubeck, who co-founded a collaborative network of librarians, students, and researchers on the Internet called the Magonia Project, works very much against this “modernist fallacy” by focusing on five hundred cases of unexplained aerial phenomena before 1875. And it is not just the modernist fallacy Aubeck and Vallee write against. It is also what we might call the “Western fallacy,” for these phenomena are by no means restricted to Europe or North America. Not even close. Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Russian, Egyptian, and Arab accounts, for example, are all listed and discussed in their latest work.50 Vallee, then, reads Western science fiction not as simply productive of a later living folklore involving flying saucers (although it is that too), but also as a kind of literary intuition or imaginal realization of something that has been with us, with all of us, for a very long time. Vallee, in other words, points toward a realist conclusion that is in no way dependent on modern science fiction.

  Where is Méheust with all of this now? “My own concern,” Méheust explained to me, “is the ecology of mind.” He was very enthusiastic about such a notion when he first encountered it in the American anthropologist and cybernetics theorist Gregory Bateson. His thought goes well beyond Bateson’s in terms of its metaphysical reach, but the sensibility is much the same. For Bateson, “mind” is not something restricted to the human skull. Nature has mind. So too do ecological systems. Mind is the intelligence of a collective system or network, of “the patterns that connect,” as Bateson put it so famously in a line that could well function as a motto for the comparativist. This poetic expression captured Bateson’s understanding of mind as any complex system that can process information and self-correct. Cells, societies, and ecosystems are all forms of such mind, which may or may not possess consciousness. All minds, though, rely on multiple material parts. Henc
e there can be no final separation of the mental and the physical. This is why Bateson detested dualism, supernaturalism, or any other theory or theology that separated what he called the “necessary unity” of mind and nature.51

  The implications for the study of the paranormal seem obvious enough. Accordingly, Méheust was especially keen on demonstrating, through a work like Somnambulisme et médiumnité, how the mentality or form of mind of a particular culture shifts, changes, and morphs over time, that is, how it regulates itself. Hence, again, what is possible in one historical period becomes impossible in another, and vice versa. It is on this crucial point—which is also the central point of these four chapters—that Méheust also invokes the work of the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, and especially the latter’s The Magical World.

  As we have already noted in the introduction, De Martino suggested that the data of ethnography, folklore, and psychical research point to “the paradox of a culturally-conditioned nature, and all its embarrassing implications.”52 More specifically, he argued under section titles like “The Problem of Magical Powers” and under rubrics like “paranormal studies” and “paranormal phenomenology” that reality behaves differently within different linguistic codes and historical periods. Magical practices presume a form of human consciousness or collective mind that is much more embedded in the natural world than our own present form of mind in the West. We have moved out of this state of mind in order to gain certain things (foremost of these being the individual), but we have also lost certain things (like our communion with the natural world).