Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (16 page)

Then there are the exceedingly complex cases, which read more like supernatural novellas than simple letters. Myers introduces one such case, which runs to three pages, by describing it as “one of the best-attested, and in itself one of the most remarkable, that we possess.” The account was originally published in the
Proceedings
and was sent to the American branch by a certain Mr. F. G. of Boston. The letter writer opens by stating that this event “made a more powerful impression on my mind than the combined incidents of my whole life.” It is not difficult to see why.

In 1867, the letter writer's only sister died of cholera in St. Louis, Missouri, at a mere eighteen years. This was a severe blow to him, as he was very close to her and loved her deeply. A year or so later, he was traveling on business and happened to be in St. Joseph, Missouri (which, for non-Midwesterners, is on the opposite side of the state from St. Louis). He had sold a number of orders for his business, so he was particularly happy at the moment. It was noon, and he was smoking a cigar and cheerfully writing out his orders when

I suddenly became conscious that some one was sitting on my left, with one arm resting on the table. Quick as a flash I turned and distinctly saw the form of my dead sister, and for a brief second or so looked her squarely in the face; and so sure was I that it was she, that I sprang forward in delight, calling her by name, and, as I did so, the apparition instantly vanished.

The cigar in his mouth, the pen in his hand, and the still moist ink on his letter told him that he was not dreaming. Nor did his sister appear ghostly. On the contrary, her flesh “was so life-like that I could see the glow or moisture on its surface, and, on the whole, there was no change in her appearance, otherwise than when alive.”

He was so impressed that he ended a business trip he had just begun and immediately took the next train home to tell his parents what he had
seen.
In particular, he “told them of a bright red line or
scratch
on the right-hand side of my sister's face.” His mother rose and nearly fainted when she heard this particular detail. With tears in her eyes, she then “exclaimed that I had indeed seen my sister, as no living mortal but herself was aware of that scratch, which she had accidentally made while doing some little act of kindness after my sister's death.” She was embarrassed, and so had covered the little scar with powder and make-up (as she prepared the body for burial, I take it) and never mentioned it to anyone. The writer goes on: “In proof, neither my father nor any of our family had detected it, and positively were unaware of the incident, yet
I saw the scratch as bright as if it [were] just made
.” A few weeks later, his mother died, “happy in her belief she would rejoin her favourite daughter in a better world.”

It is interesting to see how the society debated this particular story. Frank Podmore, for example, wanted to argue that the daughter's apparition was a projection of the mother's mind. Obviously, this leaves a good deal unanswered, like how such a projection could extend from St. Louis to St. Joseph, but this is precisely the sort of thing that they came to call
telepathy
. Myers, on the other hand, sees much more. He sees a pastoral or emotional purpose in the telepathic event. More specifically, he wants to read the coincidence as “too marked to be explained away: the son is brought home in time to see his mother once more by perhaps the only means which would have succeeded; and the mother herself is sustained by the knowledge that her daughter loves and awaits her.” Myers thus ranks this case as an example of “a perception by the spirit of her mother's approaching death” (HP 2:27–30).

Then there is the related subject of dreams as veridical hallucinations. There are hundreds of cases we could treat here. As a rather arbitrary means of focusing, let us consider just nine pages of the second volume of
Human Personality
(HP 2:209–17). The first thing to remind ourselves here is that Myers understood consciousness not as a discrete or stable phenomenon, but as a broad spectrum of potentialities that are actualized at different points in space and time. Dreams or dreamlike phenomena are spread out
along this entire spectrum
. So there is not one kind of dream for Myers. Quite the contrary, there are different types of dreams for differently evolved states of consciousness. There are normal dreams. And there are supernormal dreams. There are dreams. And there are
dreams
.

Consider, for example, the case of the two elite French intellectuals, Professor J. Thoulet and Professor Charles Richet, both well known to historians of psychology. On April 17, 1892, Thoulet wrote Richet with a most remarkable story. During the summer of 1867, Thoulet was traveling with
an
older friend by the name of M. F., a former naval officer turned businessman. They were sleeping in adjoining rooms. One night Thoulet awoke suddenly, walked into his friend's room and said, “You have just got a little girl; the telegram says . . . ” He began to read the telegram—until, that is, he realized that he had received the telegram in a dream. At that moment, the telegram dissolved in his hands, and he could not read any further. The words he had already read remained, however, fully pronounced and clear in his memory; those he had not been able to read, that he had not allowed himself to consider real, remained as only a “form,” as he put it. At M. F.'s insistence, he wrote out what he could, and
drew
the rest as in pictorial form. He had repeated two or three lines of a six-line telegram.

Eight or ten days later, now in Turin on his own, Thoulet received a “real” telegram from M. F.: “Come directly, you were right.” He returned to M. F., who showed him a telegram he had received the night before. “I recognized it as the one I had seen in my dream; the beginning was exactly what I had written, and the end, which was exactly like my drawing.” Thoulet himself underlines the weirdest part, namely, that he had dreamt of a telegram that had not been sent yet: “I had seen it ten days before it existed or could have existed.” Thoulet admits that, were he called into court on this matter, he could not produce a shred of reliable evidence. Nevertheless, “I am obliged to admit that it happened.”

Or consider the case of a certain Mr. Edward A. Goodall, a member of the Royal Society of Painters. In the summer of 1869, he was vacationing in Naples when a pack-donkey he was sitting on suddenly fell to its knees, “as if he had been shot or struck by lightning,” and threw Goodall to the pavement, injuring his arm. Now bedridden, he awoke suddenly on the third or fourth night to the sound of his own voice saying, “I know I have lost my dearest little May.” Another voice, which he did not recognize, answered back immediately and clearly, “
No
, not May, but your
youngest boy
.” The next morning he noticed telegraph wires outside and sent a telegram back home. Later, he received two letters from home. The first informed him that his youngest boy was ill, the second that he was dead. The time of death coincided “as nearly as we could judge with the time of my accident.” Mr. Goodall speculated that the donkey's collapse may have been caused by “terror at some apparition of the dying child.”

It was out of thousands of stories like these that Myers coined the term
telepathy
in 1882, no doubt after the then cutting-edge technology of the telegraph and telegram.
¹⁰⁸
Interestingly, two of the three stories that I have just recounted involve precisely this new communications technology. And why not? Early models of Spiritualism had turned to the same kind
of
language, framing spirit-communications as a kind of “spiritual telegraphy.” Gauld also humorously reminds us that the spirits often claimed famous names, with Benjamin Franklin being one of their favorites, “perhaps because his electrical skills made him seem a likely inventor of the ‘Spiritual Telegraph.'
”
¹⁰⁹
In a similar playful spirit, Bertrand Méheust goes so far as to describe Spiritualism as flowing out of a certain “mythology of telecommunications,” with the early knocks of the Fox sisters as a kind of celestial Morse code.
¹¹⁰
On the other side of the equation, many of the earliest inventors of the new radio technology—Nikola Tesla, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Lord Raleigh—were all intimately involved in psychical research and sometimes imagined their science along similar occult lines.
¹¹¹
And it would not be long before the American writer Upton Sinclair would soon frame his own successful experiments with telepathy as a kind of “mental radio,” with none other than Albert Einstein writing the preface.
¹¹²
The comparisons were simply irresistible.

In the opening definitions of
Human Personality
, Myers defined telepathy as “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense” (HP 1:xxii). Myers points out that the distance through which telepathic communications take place may be measured in miles or in metaphysical states, that is, between physical distances or between the living and the dead. He also suggests that “[t]he operation of telepathy is probably constant and far-reaching, and intermingled with ordinary modes of acquiring knowledge” (HP 1:xlii). As the researches and writing of the S.P.R. developed, its members eventually came to see telepathy as
the
central category through which the stories they were receiving and back-checking made the most sense. The “telepathic law,” as Myers came to call it, thus became the bedrock theoretical construct of
Human Personality
.

The collection of phenomena that this single construct named, however, was by no means singular or simple. To begin with, telepathic events were highly variable, ranging from those focused on some simple projective technology, like the tapping table, crystal ball, or planchette (a kind of automatic writing device invented in 1853 that would later morph into the Ouija Board or “Yes-Yes Board”), to exceedingly complex psychological automatisms, such as automatic writing, trance, and possession states. Words or textual messages were often the literal product, but not always. Myers points out that symbolism, music, and the visual arts are often more natural media for subliminal expressions (HP 1:xxx).

Sometimes, moreover, the message is encoded in an even more basic, and more certain, feeling-tone. Significantly, Myers chose a coinage that
literally
means “
feeling
at distance” (telepathy), and not “voice at a distance” (telephony) or “writing at a distance” (telegraphy). By doing so, he chose to emphasize the emotional, not the intellectual or verbal, components of these remarkable events. There were at least two very good reasons to do this: (1) as phenomena rooted deeply in the wisdom of the body, telepathic communications appear to escape or subvert the rational censor, which would otherwise deem them impossible and so prevent them from happening at all; and (2) telepathic communications often emerge from highly charged events involving people who care about one another deeply, that is, they often involve the two greatest themes in human emotional experience: love and death. Pathos does indeed seem to be a key for Myers, maybe
the
key, as we shall soon see.

It is also important to note that the category of telepathy emerged from the data of dreams and mediums, and that it was originally a category of
suspicion
, that is to say, it was developed in order to refute the older objectivist model of spirits. In essence, it “reduced” the phenomena of spirit-communication to a human psychical potential theoretically present in everyone. It thus practiced a form of reductionism, but finally found the human nature to which the religious phenomena could be reduced to be ironically spiritlike.
¹¹³
Which is not to say that all of the researchers rejected the spirit thesis. They did not. Some of them at least were forced to conclude that telepathic communications could occur either between two living minds, or, more rarely, between a departed spirit and a living one.

It is also important to keep in mind that, in Myers's model, telepathic communications could occur with or without the knowledge of the mind sending them. They could even occur without the knowledge of the mind receiving them, as in Myers's suggestion that sometimes telepathic communications could be received in the day and lay “dormant” until the evening, when the recipient fell asleep and the telepathic communication could surface into dream consciousness. Telepathic communications, moreover, were often couched in symbolic form, as in a dream, and their messages were by no means always clear. In short, as subliminal phenomena, telepathic communications had to cross a psychological threshold in order to appear to the conscious ego at all. Remember the
limen
? We are back to the Human as Two.

And this, of course, is where Frederic Myers becomes a preeminent author of the impossible. He gives us a plausible explanation for why the impossible seems impossible, but is not. He teaches us that the impossible may in fact be a function not of the unreality or fiction of psychical events, but of our own inadequate models of the human personality and our
fundamental
failure to distinguish between the subliminal Self, which appears to be shared between individuals beyond both space and time, and the social ego, which is clearly limited to the individual personality and quite obviously restricted in both space and time. Because we keep assuming that our full human personalities and our social egos are coterminous and identical, we find telepathic events baffling, fraudulent, that is to say, impossible. What we have to do, Myers suggests, is shift our focus from the supraliminal to the subliminal. What we have to do is cross that threshold. Then the impossible not only becomes the possible. It becomes the real.