Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
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49. I am adopting this expression from Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). I am using it, however, in a different way. A “meaning event” for Sells is the moment in a piece of mystical literature in which “the meaning has become identical or fused with the act of predication” (9), that is to say, a meaning event is a literary mode that attempts to replicate in human language the structure of the original state of consciousness that inspired it. Sells was writing about Neoplatonic, Christian, and Islamic literature, and his main concern was the nature and structure of something called apophatic theology, that is, ways of “saying away” (apo-phasis) our normal ways of speaking and writing about the divine. This was traditionally accomplished through elaborate poetic and philosophical flourishes of affirmation and negation that express the impossibility of understanding “God” as an experience of something. Here is one, from the fourteenth-century Dominican priest and heretical theologian Meister Eckhart: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Paranormal events, as we shall see, often function in remarkably similar ways. They appear to be designed to confuse. They act like an Eckhartian sermon or a Zen koan. They at once mirror and boggle the human consciousness in which they appear.
50. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 19. This, by the way, is true in a literal scientific sense, as our senses can pick up only a miniscule fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum that buzzes and burns all around us at every moment. Reality really is almost entirely “occult” to our normal sensory capacities.
51. Ibid., 22.
52. Ibid., 6.
53. Ibid., 182.
54. Gauri Viswanathan, “Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 2008), 469.
55. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 237.
56. Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1, Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 68.
57. Ibid., 4.
58. I am influenced in my thinking here by Richard Shweder, Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991). For more on this, see chapter 4.
59. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 288.
60. Ibid., vii.
61. Ibid., 174.
62. Philip K. Dick, “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (1977), in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Harmony 1995), 251.
63. Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978), in ibid.
64. Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York: Citadel, 1991), 208–9, 233.
65. Lawrence Sutin, ed., In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (Underwood Miller, 1991), 175–76.
66. Thomas M. Disch suggests the epilepsy diagnosis in his The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Sutin, however, although he finds such diagnoses possible enough, is not finally impressed with either the adequacy or the wisdom of such easy labels. Both authors are sensitive and fair to Dick. For my part, I am not questioning the diagnosis qua diagnosis. I am simply pointing out how little it explains with respect to Dick’s place in the general history of religions.
67. Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets, 174.
68. This event occurred on November 5, 1989, in Calcutta, my own 11-89, I suppose. I have written extensively about the magnetic-plasmic energies of “that Night” and their reprogramming of my writing practices in Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom and Mutants and Mystics. That Night, in fact, constitutes the impossible, paranormal subtext of all my books, including this one.
69. This is actually Roger Caillois, approvingly cited by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 26. I recognize that Todorov tilts away from the metaphysical, but I am using him for my own purposes here.
70. Ibid., 25.
71. Ibid., 32; italics mine.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000).
2. Frederic W. H. Myers, Fragments of Prose and Poetry, edited by his wife Eveleen Myers (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 1.
3. Ibid., 17.
4. Frederic W. H. Myers, “Science and the Future Life,” in Science and the Future Life with Other Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1901/1893), 16.
5. Ibid., 18.
6. Myers, Fragments, 46.
7. Quoted in Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 45. I have relied heavily on Gauld for my historical understanding of the S.P.R. For my understanding of Myers’s psychology and numerous key quotes from his scattered essays, I am deeply indebted to Emily Williams Kelly’s definitive essay, “F. W. H. Myers and the Empirical Study of the Mind-Body Problem,” in Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
8. Quoted in Gauld, Founders, 64.
9. Hence Edmund Gurney, one of the leading authors of the S.P.R., went so far as to entitle his two-volume study Tertium Quid: Chapters on Various Disputed Questions (London, 1887). The Latin appears to be related in turn to the Pythagorean triton genon or “third race,” which was a term used “to describe the unique position of Pythagoras and other kings and sages as neither gods nor men” (Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 11).
10. F. W. H. Myers, correspondence, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 4 (1890): 248.
11. Myers, Science and a Future Life, 4.
12. Ibid., 7.
13. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904/1903), 2:307 (compare also 309); henceforth HP, followed by volume and page number.
14. As such authors as Leigh Eric Schmidt and Michael Robertson have recently demonstrated, the distinction is probably first found in Emerson’s early essays, after which it blooms in Whitman’s ecstatic poem-prophecy, Leaves of Grass (1855). See Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: Harper Collins, 2005); and Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
15. The category of the spiritual was swamped at this point by the related category of the “spiritualistic,” that is, the phenomena of Spiritualism. The category of the mystical was somewhat more fluid. For negative uses, see Myers’s reference to “any hollow mysticism, any half-conscious deceit” (Gauld, Founders, 143). For neutral uses, consider his rhyming description of the Census of Hallucinations as “not mystical but statistical” (Myers, Science and a Future Life, 29) or his use of the phrase “mystic sentiment” as a gloss for “aesthetic emotion” (ibid., 69).
16. See “Appendix C: Correspondence between Myers and Lord Acton on the Canons of Evidence to be Applied to Reports of ‘Miraculous’ Occurrences,” in Gauld, Founders, 364–67.
17. Thus Myers describes death as the “complete dissociation from the brain itself” (HP 1:xliii).
18. Myers claims his mother’s family was among Wordsworth’s “most appreciative friends” (Myers, Fragments, 4).
19. Ibid., 6–7.
20. Ibid., 45.
21. Ibid., 16.
22. Gauld, Founders, 135.
23. Myers, Fragments, 17–18.
24. Ibid., 22.
25. Gauld, Founders, 95–96.
26. Myers, Fragments, 28.
27. Myers, Science and a Future Life, 51.
28. Ibid., 52.
29. Ibid., 56.
&n
bsp; 30. Ibid., 56–57.
31. Myers, Fragments, 41.
32. Ibid., 45.
33. Humanists are generally very suspicious of evolutionary theologies like Myers’s, mostly because similar philosophies were used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for some truly horrendous political ideologies, including fascist and colonial ones. Much, I suspect, depends upon one’s temporal perspective. It may be dubious indeed to make evolutionary comparisons between contemporary cultures and religions, generations, or even centuries, but it seems difficult to deny that the species and its forms of consciousness have evolved over the last few hundred thousand years, much less the last few million. It also remains true that innumerable expressions of metaphysical religion are simply incomprehensible outside an evolutionary frame. In the end, I would make three simple observations: (1) from a historical perspective, every metaphysical or mystical system employs some version of its era’s understanding of the natural world, hence it would be surprising indeed if this were not also the case for modern movements; (2) a badly used idea is not the same thing as a bad idea; and (3) there are in actual fact hundreds of evolutionary spiritualities in the modern world, including multiple examples from India, each with its own nuances and political histories. Basically, I think we need significantly less moral righteousness here and far more historical consciousness, philosophical nuance, moral balance, and, above all, imagination.
34. Ibid., 40, 46–47.
35. Ibid., 47–48. As we shall see, the Sargasso Sea was central to Charles Fort’s metaphorical armory as well.
36. F. W. H. Myers, Essays: Classical (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883); Essays: Modern (London: Macmillan and Co., 1901/1897); and Science and a Future Life.
37. F. W. H. Myers, Wordsworth (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881).
38. Myers, “Fragments of Inner Life,” 6.
39. Quoted in Gauld, Founders, 333.
40. Quoted in ibid., 54.
41. Ibid., 53.
42. Ibid., 234.
43. Ibid., 239.
44. Ibid., 318
45. For Lincoln, I am relying on Marcia Brennan, “Tragic Dreams and Spectral Doubles: The Metaphysical Lincoln,” in Poetry Nation Review (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2009). For Twain’s remarkable story about an eerily detailed and deadly accurate precognitive dream about his brother’s death in a riverboat accident, see Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (New York: Penguin, 2006), 73–74. In another twist in our developing story, it is worth pointing out that Twain went so far as to suggest in an essay for Harper’s (December 1891) that authors sometimes pick up ideas from one another telepathically. He proposed, Blum explains, “that telepathy could even account for scientists such as Darwin and Wallace developing their insights into evolution during a similar time period” (173).
46. Quoted in Gauld, Founders, 18.
47. Ibid.
48. For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expressions of the mystical as the erotic, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Estoericism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008). For the sexual magic and occult material, see also Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Western Esotericism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), and Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially chapter 3, “Sexual Politics,” and chapter 6, “Aleister Crowley in the Desert.”
49. Blum, Ghost Hunters, 201.
50. Ingo Swann, Psychic Sexuality: The Bio-Psychic “Anatomy” of Sexual Energies (Rapid City, North Dakota: Ingo Swann Books, 1996), 107–8. Swann is a remarkable figure whose books, a few of them, like this one, already collector’s items, deserve a careful study of their own. We will encounter him again below, in chapter 3.
51. Anne Braude’s is the classic study of this side of the Atlantic. See her Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). For the other side (of the pond), see especially Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
52. Targ shared this anecdote with a group of us during the proceedings of a symposium that I codirected with Michael Murphy at the Esalen Institute, “On the Supernormal and the Superpower,” June 1–4, 2008.
53. Gauld dedicates an entire chapter to Palladino. See also Hereward Carrington, Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena (New York: B. W. Dodge, 1909). Carrington, by the way, was an expert on stage magic, so he was hardly one to be easily fooled.
54. Gauld, Founders, 236.
55. Ibid., 241.
56. William James, “Address by the President,” in William James on Psychical Research, ed. Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 61; the original text first appeared in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, pt. 20, vol. 12 (1896).
57. Myers, Fragments, 32–33.
58. Gauld, Founders, 103n3. Sidgwick, by the way, would also confess that “John King is an old friend,” even if “he always came into the dark and talked at random” and “our friendship refrigerated” (ibid., 103–4).
59. Karl von Reichenbach, The Odic Force: Letters on Od and Magnetism, trans. F. D. O’Byrne (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1926). Reichenbach’s work is an unmistakable forerunner of the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his “orgone.” And what would have become of psychoanalysis if it had followed the od instead of the id?
60. Gauld, Founders, 153.
61. Ibid., 234.
62. The exact scenario was never conclusive, since Gurney was known to suffer from headaches and could have easily been administering a painkiller, but even close friends suspected suicide.
63. Blum, Ghost Hunters, 80.
64. Ibid., 91.
65. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 3 (1885): 207–380.
66. They quoted him, of course, in the Proceedings 19 (1907): 365–66; quoted in Gauld, Founders, 336.
67. Gauld, Founders, 251.
68. Ibid., 346.
69. Blum, Ghost Hunters, 186.
70. Ibid., 259.
71. See Murphy and Ballou, William James on Psychical Research, sect. 4.
72. André Breton, The Automatic Message (London: Atlas Press, 1997/1933).
73. William James, “Frederic Myers’s Service to Psychology,” in Murphy and Ballou, William James on Psychical Research, 223.
74. Kelly, “F. W. H. Myers,” 67.
75. F. W. H. Myers, “The Work of Edmund Gurney in Experimental Psychology,” Proceedings 5 (1888): 43.
76. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1962), v–vi. Huxley shared the metaphor of the chemical compound with C. D. Broad, who used it in his own writing on psychical phenomena.
77. F. W. H. Myers, “On Telepathic Hypnotism, and Its Relations to Other Forms of Hypnotic Suggestion,” Proceedings 4 (1886): 178–79.
78. Kelly, “F. W. H. Myers,” 90.
79. F. W. H. Myers, “Automatic Writing, or the Rationale of Planchette,” Contemporary Review 47 (1885): 234.
80. Myers discussed Freud and Breuer’s early studies of hysteria (in chapter 2) and helped introduce Freud’s writings to the English-reading public. Indeed, he was the first to publish Freud in English.
81. William James, “Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher” (originally “Confidences of a Psychical Researcher,” American Magazine, October 1909).
82. The phrase “cosmic consciousness” James almost certainly borrowed from Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Innes & Sons, 1901).
83. Gauld, Founders, 278–79.
84. F. W. H. Myers, “The Subliminal Consciousness. Chapter 1: General Characteristics and Subliminal Messages,” Proceedings 7 (1892): 305.
> 85. Frederic W. H. Myers, “Automatic Writing—II,” Proceedings 3 (1885): 30.
86. Edward F. Kelly, “Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century,” in Irreducible Mind, 585.
87. F. W. H. Myers, “The Drift of Psychical Research,” National Review 24 (1894–95): 197.
88. F. W. H. Myers, “Professor Janet’s ‘Atomatisme Psychologique,’” Proceedings 6 (1889): 195.
89. F. W. H. Myers, “Note on a Suggested Mode of Psychical Interaction,” in Phantasms of the Living, by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore (London: Trübner,1886), 285.
90. Myers, “Professor Janet’s,” 190.
91. F. W. H. Myers, “Obituary: Robert Louis Stevenson,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 7 (1895): 6.
92. Myers, “Subliminal Consciousness,” 318.
93. Gauld, Founders, 83, 137, 214–15
94. Blum, Ghost Hunters, 44, 55.
95. For an analysis of Wallace’s views, see especially Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 296–325.
96. Myers, Science and a Future Life, 55.
97. Ibid., 37.
98. Quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 223, 269.
99. Ibid., 186.
100. Ibid., 231.
101. Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
102. See Dana Sawyer, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 188.
103. Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind, xxx.
104. Myers, Science and a Future Life, 35.
105. Jonathan Z. Smith has famously suggested that the act of making connections between patterns, actions, and ideas that are otherwise not causally connected is a common human activity in both traditional magical practices and contemporary academic method (“In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 19–35). More recently, Christopher I. Lehrich has argued for a similar “magical” structure of critical theory, this time in conversation with modern forms of occultism (The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice [Syracuse: Cornell University Press, 2007]). As a trained scientist who became a historian of religions, Smith wants us to move away from the magical to the scientific. Fair enough. But it seems to me that comparative insights can also sometimes participate in the magical and mystical structures of consciousness, with which we also must deal. In other words, there really is a magic in comparison.