11. Picard, Aimé Michel, ix.
12. Pauwels and Bergier, Morning of the Magicians, 96.
13. Ibid., ix, 96, 95.
14. Ibid., 95.
15. Here cited as SF in its recent second edition, Bertrand Méheust, Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes: Une réalité mythico-physique (Rennes, France: Terre de Brume, 2007).
16. See also Hilary Evans, Intrusions: Society and the Paranormal (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), an excellent meditation on the dysfunctional abyss that separates Western society’s general acceptance of the paranormal and the intellectual establishment’s dismissal of the same.
17. Herbert Thurston, S.J., The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, ed. J. H. Crehan, S.J. (London: Burns Oates, 1952).
18. This esoteric expression involved a literally esoteric author. Méheust derives the expression from an essay in the Revue métaphysique signed by “Xodarap” (SF 307).
19. This idea, sometimes called “neutral monism,” is a fairly common one, even in the natural sciences. The physicist John Wheeler wrote of reality as “it” and “bit,” that is, as composed of both matter and information, and the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley thought that there is “one world stuff” that manifests both material and mental properties depending upon whether it is viewed from the outside (matter) or from the inside (mind). I am not sure, however, what either author would have thought about reality manifesting itself as physical-mythical. An electron as a bit of information is one thing. A myth in the sky chased by F-94s is quite another. My thanks to Dean Radin for the Wheeler reference.
20. Related to Méheust’s technologized Hermeticism is his notion that the origins of American and British science fiction in the earlier French genre of le merveilleux scientifique display the same sacred-to-science patterns. What we have here is the return of the marvelous, but now coded in terms of the scientific discovery. The marvel is no longer the supernatural but the technological. In essence, a new form of the sacred, a “technological sacred,” was born under the mask of science and technology (SF 14, 21).
21. This is also why Méheust rejects the ever-popular ancient astronaut theory, whereby the evolution of human beings and their cultures are seen to have been guided for millennia by space-faring aliens (SF 255–56).
22. It is also worth mentioning here that Méheust’s work on UFOs became the basis of at least two sci-fi novels: former Oxford linguist Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors and Michel Jeury’s Les yeux geants.
23. This is not quite true, as the biological function of sex is present in and indeed often central to the encounter stories, as Méheust himself notes. Still, the general point stands.
24. Bertrand Méheust, En soucoupes volantes: Vers une ethnologie des récits d’enlèvements (Paris: Imago, 1992).
25. Thomas E. Bullard, “UFOs: Lost in the Myths,” in UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge, ed. David M. Jacobs (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 143.
26. Bertrand Méheust, Somnambulisme et médiumnité (1784–1930) (Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo Pour Le Progrés de la Connaissance, 1999); henceforth SM.
27. I am indebted to David Hufford for reminding me here of this particular feature of Berger’s thought (personal communication, April 20, 2008).
28. A. M. J. Chastenet de Puységur, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire et a l’établissement du magnétisme animal (Londres, 1786), 29; italics as underlining in the original; quoted in SM 1:15.
29. Consider the case of CSICOPS, the organization ideologically dedicated to criticizing, humiliating, or otherwise shouting down all paranormal claims, and its dubious handling of the alleged findings of Michel Gauquelin that the position of Mars at an individual’s birth is correlated with athletic ability (George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal [XLibris, 2001], 150).
30. Bertrand Méheust, Un voyant prodigieux: Alexis Didier, 1826–1886 (Paris: Les Empecheurs de Penser en Rond, 2003), 24; henceforth VP.
31. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
32. Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
33. This comes out especially clearly in Méheust’s treatment of Durkheim and the latter’s appreciative reading of William James’s pragmatism (SM 2:271–73).
34. As such, Méheust’s hermeneutic displays strong resemblances to Colin Bennett’s reading of the semireal status and interactional nature of the various “imp-happenings,” “rejected design-solutions,” and “half-realized, undernourished systems-doodles” in the data of Charles Fort’s shoeboxes. See his “Charles Fort’s Degrees of Reality,” in Anomalist 7 (1998): 95–96.
35. This “fear of psi” theme is a very strong one in the literature. One of the most insightful treatments occurs in the historical speculations and psychoanalytic analyses of Jules Eisenbud, The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1967), chapter 14, “The Anatomy of Resistance.”
36. Quoted in Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), xiv. For another treatment of the mystical roots of American literature, see Arthur Versluis, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford, 2001).
37. Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts, xiv.
38. Ibid.,
39. 39. Ibid., back cover.
40. I am fully aware of how loaded, problematic, and undefined a word like “real” is in this context. I will address some of these issues below, but I hope it goes without saying that I have been problematizing this term all along through my criticisms of subjectivist and objectivist epistemologies.
41. Chancey Hare Townshend, Facts in Mesmerism, with Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry into it (London, 1840).
42. Chauncey Hare Townshend, “Recent Clairvoyance of Alexis Didier,” Zoist 9 (1851): 402–14. All citations from this scene are from the original Zoist letter.
43. See Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially chapter 2, “Restoring the Adam of Light.”
44. Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 59. This is a red thread in Berger’s early corpus. He makes a similar case at the end of his classic study, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967); and he makes a related argument again in The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor Books, 1980).
45. Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
46. Henri Delaage, Le Sommeil magnétique expliqué par le somnambule Alexis en état de lucidité (Paris, 1857), 16, quoted in SF 244, my translation. Didier’s articulation here is faithful to the Catholic tradition of relic use, which distinguishes between first-, second-, and third-class relics. First-class relics are body parts. Second-class relics are objects that the saint owned or used in his or her own life. Third-class relics are objects, cloth for example, ritually brought into contact with first-class relics and then distributed among the faithful. Didier is basically addressing second-class relics here.
47. For a balanced and fair summary of this phenomenon, see Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi, The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime (New York: The Mysterious Press, 1991).
48. This story was summarized in a newspaper, Le Pays, and then reprinted in the Zoist essay cited in note 42. Méheust cites another at VP 247.
49. Méheust discusses Vallee, and particularly his Passport to Magonia, at SF 266–70.
50. Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to M
odern Times and Their Impact on Human Culture, History, and Beliefs (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2010).
51. See Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979); and Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
52. Ernesto De Martino, The World of Magic (New York: Pyramid Communications, 1972), 77.
53. These texts are available in the Collected Works (in volumes 10 and 18), but a helpful collection of them with attending material, commentary, and historical contextualization is available in C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: MJF, 1978). The present quote occurs on page 135 of this text.
54. Bullard, “Lost in the Myths,” 165.
55. Ibid., 6.
56. Méheust cites this text at SF 269 in French. The English can be found in C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage, 1989), 323. Other comments on UFOs can be found in C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, ed. William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
57. This again is the same dialectical move that lies at the core of my own “gnostic” methodology, cited above in note 43.
CONCLUSION
1. Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson, Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), xix.
2. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 1:xiii.
3. On one level, my metamethod here with respect to cognitive science is interactionist in the sense that E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. NcCauley define the term, that is, I seek to put explanatory or reductive and interpretive or hermeneutical methods in a dynamic complementary relationship (“Interpretation and Explanation: Problems and Promise in the Study of Religion,” in Religion and Cognition: A Reader, ed. D. Jason Slone [London: Equinox, 2006]). On another level, my approach in this book has been more inclusivistic in the sense that I have privileged the semiotic nature of paranormal events over their presumed causal structure (but primarily to redress a perceived imbalance). On still another level, I am not so sure either term fits, as my interactionist and inclusivistic moves are reflections of a deeper conviction about how neither the humanities nor the sciences can explain this stuff, about how the paranormal event is simultaneously subjective and objective and so falls somewhere between (or, more likely, beyond) both epistemological Dominants. In this two-way skepticism toward religious literalism and scientific materialism, my method is deeply Fortean.
4. For two impressive contemporary statements of the thesis, see: Paul Marshall, Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), especially chapter 8, “Mind Beyond the Brain: Reducing Valves and Metaphysics”; and Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind.
5. A personal note. Looking back, I am struck by how this ontological thread runs throughout all my books, from the first pages of Kali’s Child, where it was expressed mythically through the mystico-erotic union of Kali (as occult energy or maternal matter) on top of Siva (as pure consciousness), through my various comparative studies of sex and spirit (read: matter and mind) in the history of religions in Roads of Excess and The Serpent’s Gift, to the last pages of Esalen, where it was rearticulated as the modal metaphysics (the unity of Consciousness and Energy) realized in the human potential movement and expressed in the American counterculture’s selective turn to Tantric Asia. Apparently, whether I am aware of it or not, this is what I think. In the terms of professional philosophy, I am probably closest to David Ray Griffin’s “nondualist interactionism” (see especially his Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration [Albany: SUNY, 1997], chapter 3), or, better still, the “dual aspect monism” proposed by quantum theorist Harald Atmanspacher out of his extensive work on the Jung-Pauli dialogue that posits an unus mundus or One World of Now beneath the complimentary domains of the mental and material that “split off” this deeper reality or Ground within our own brain-mediated temporal experience (Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, “Pauli’s Idea on Mind and Matter in the Context of Contemporary Science,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13[3], 5–50 [2006]). I certainly do not think that the cognitive, binary, computational structure of the human brain is up to understanding the nondual nature of the One World, although of course human beings experience, intuit, and know such states of being all the time. That is, after all, what they are. For more on these ontological questions, see my “Mind Matters: Esalen’s Sursem Group and the Ethnography of Consciousness,” in What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in a (Not So) Secular Age, eds. Ann Taves and Courtney Bender (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
6. Kelly, “Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century,” 606–7.
7. I am thinking here of works like Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) and Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001). An interesting exception is Sam Harris, whose otherwise famous ideological reductionism generously leaves open the possibility that psychical phenomena may have something to teach contemporary neuroscience. He even writes of “some credible evidence for reincarnation,” citing Ian Stevenson’s work (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason [New York: Norton, 2005], 232n18).
8. D. E. Harding, “On Having No Head,” in The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 23. Or did Hofstadter and Dennet understand Harding’s essay under the “Fantasies” of their subtitle?
9. Ibid., 24, 25.
10. Ibid., 28–29. Hence the symbolic importance of decapitation and severed heads in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu Tantra. Harding, after all, was hiking in the Himalayas.
11. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (New York: Viking, 2008), cover flap.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. Ibid., 66.
14. Ibid., 38.
15. Ibid., 41.
16. Ibid., 45–46.
17. Ibid., 45.
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Ibid., 42.
20. Ibid., 30.
21. Ibid., 31.
22. Ibid., 43.
23. Ibid., 70
24. Taylor even gives us a bit of historical context for one of my central terms. She identifies the first person to suggest that each hemisphere possesses its own form of mind: Meinard Simon Du Pui. “In 1780,” she tells us, “Du Pui claimed that mankind was Homo Duplex—meaning that he had a double brain with a double mind” (ibid., 27).
25. Ibid., 71. I recognize that, as a brain anatomist, Taylor often presents her case as a physicalist or materialist thinker. That makes good sense, at least to the extent that she wishes to stay within the good graces of professional science as it is presently configured. But I can only observe that her constant invocation of mystical language works strongly against this very materialism and physicalism. In the end, in my reading now, her text is a “fantastic” one capable of being read either way.
26. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 150. Although I am in broad and deep agreement with this work, I am troubled that its use of the scholarly literature on mysticism, spirituality, and religious experience is a half century behind the times, that is, the authors rely heavily on authors like William James, Richard Maurice Bucke, Evelyn Underhill, and William Stace (fair enough), but show little or no awareness of the vast literature that historians and philosophers of religion have been working on since the 1960s. I mention this not so much to criticize as to call for some truly reciprocal collaboration between the scien
ces and the humanities, a collaboration that mirrors the very subjective/objective or mind/matter dialectic that authors like Beauregard propose. I would suggest that such a collaboration is possible only if the historical and hermeneutical complexities are engaged at the same depth and at the same level as the neuroscience.
27. Ibid., 152.
28. Ibid., 293. I am supplying the year 1987 after Beauregard’s description of the event as occurring “twenty years ago.”
29. Ibid., 294.
30. Ibid., 295.
31. A case can be made for the confluence of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific models of the unconscious. See especially Frank Tallis, Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious (New York: Arcade, 2002).
32. Beauregard and O’Leary, Spiritual Brain, 132.
33. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 16.
34. Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind.
35. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 25.
36. I am indebted here to Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman, eds., The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (Albany: SUNY, 2008).
IMPOSSIBLE (DIS)CLOSINGS
1. There are numerous sources for what follows, ranging from the orthodox Catholic devotional accounts to the highly heterodox ufological revisionings. I pretend no exhaustive study here, much less a definitive position, but I am relating the story in a way that is reflective of my present subjects, hence my privileging of the Portuguese trilogy discussed below in “Required Reading (That Is Never Read)”: Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D’Armada, Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon; Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D’Armada, Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident; and Fernando Fernandes, Joaquim Fernandes, and Raul Berenguel, Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science (San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2005, 2006, 2008).
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 44