Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (43 page)

4. Magical Powers as Actualizations of the Self
. All three of these major themes—the cultural forgetting of animal magnetism and psychical research, the concept of intellectual systems as shock zones or “stop concepts,” and the sociology of the impossible embedded in the French sound bite
décrire-construire
—play in turn into Méheust's elaborate discussions and analyses of the various secret powers that manifested themselves, that began to reveal their secret identities, as it were, at the center of this two-century story. Enter our fourth and last theme: the magnetic ability, what will become the supernormal capacity in Myers and company, the wild talent in Fort, and, eventually, the pop-cultural superpower. In historical fact, it was precisely the alleged existence of these magnetic powers—which seemed patently, shockingly obvious to those who witnessed them—that constituted the basic metaphysical challenge of the magnetic and psychical currents. It was the powers and what they implied about human consciousness that so scandalized French intellectual society. It just couldn't be. But it was.

True
to form, Méheust refuses to buffer the shock for us, or just barely does so. He thus writes of “these faculties that seemed to belong to the mythical” (
ces facultés qui paraissaient relever du mythe
) (SM 1:150). These indeed were faculties of mythological proportions. He writes of such capacities at this juncture of European history as if they were quantum events, not yet fully real, but certainly not unreal either. They were “quasi facts” of sorts, possessing a structural instability that is also a rich potentiality, capable of manifesting in any number of directions.
³⁴
Before such states of consciousness, the very foundations of rationality and the real came into question and were negotiated. It was before them that what will become modernity and modern rationalism took shape: “
it is precisely
,” Méheust insists in his own italics, “
on the foundation of the question of [magnetic] lucidity, posed as a sort of horizon, that this world is able to manifest itself
” (SM 1:151).

Put simply, in the fantastic states of magnetic lucidity that were so prominent in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Western intellectual culture was issued a profound metaphysical challenge. It encountered a fork in the road. It chose to take what would become a rationalist and materialist path. But it could have chosen otherwise. Which implies, of course, that it might still. Again, the real is fluid for Méheust. What we know as modernity, and now as postmodernity, is by no means the last word. Both are moments, Fortean fashions to put on and take off, temporary choices in the ongoing dialectic of consciousness and culture.

Various, wildly various, occult powers make their appearances throughout the two volumes. Méheust, for example, discusses how the senses become empowered within a kind of hyperaesthesia (SM 1:156). He also treats the “spiritualized life” (
la vie spiritualiseé
) as a life in which the entire physical organism has become strangely empowered, mystically zapped, spiritually electrified, or, to employ the simpler scientistic language of the day,
magnetized
(SM 1:314–15). Within such a magnetic state, a kind of superhearing might manifest (SM 1:167). Or a supersight, including a kind of X-ray vision that forced the coinage of two new technical terms:
endoscopy
and
exoscopy
. Endoscopy, literally an “inside-sight,” was the alleged ability of the somnambulist to see and diagnose the condition of his or her own internal organs. Exoscopy, literally an “outside-sight,” was the alleged ability of the somnambulist to see into someone else's body and deliver a diagnosis. Such powers, it turns out, went all the way back to 1784 and the original scenes with Victor Race.

Méheust points out that these particular visual abilities, lacking any clear historical precedent with which to make some comparative sense of them, were among the most puzzling and the most capricious of all the
magnetic
phenomena. The learned consensus was that endoscopy was generally more reliable than exoscopy (SM 1:179–80). Later, moreover, endoscopy, now renamed
autoscopy
(in 1904), literally a “self-sight,” would take on yet another form and approach a kind of microscopic vision that could describe internal bodily tissues and structures normally visible only under a microscope (SM 1:184). Things, in other words, hardly cleared up with the coinage of new words. On the contrary, they became more fantastic still.

There were other powers too, many of which Méheust treats in a section entitled “The Magnetic Phenomenology” (SM 1:146–216). These include: spontaneous and provoked sympathetic reactions to another's pain or suffering; the transposition of the senses; seeing through or by means of an opaque body (e.g., reading a book above the head or with the tips of the fingers);
voyage mental et voyance
, what we would today call clairvoyance or remote viewing (SM 2:136); mental suggestion (in the strong sense now, that is, mentally suggested without the use of the voice); and precognition (
faculté de prevision
). And then, of course, there was also “the sixth sense” coined by and subsequently omnipresent in the early magnetic literature itself (SM 1:317).

There were, of course, numerous theorizations of these powers, theorizations grounded in both practice and experience. These theorists were men whom Méheust describes as “theoreticians-practitioners of magnetism, men of the world engaged in the groping quest for a new epistemology” (SM 1: 254). The Comte de Szapary, for example, described the state of magnetic lucidity as a “third state” in which the life of the body and the superior functions of the mind clarify or enlighten one another until they provoke the emergence of new faculties (SM 1:315). J. P. F. Deleuze suggested that such powers are always present but well hidden, effectively and necessarily suppressed by the pressures of daily life and practical action. They thus only manifest in exceptional states of consciousness, like somnambulism, or in sudden interruptions and sufferings, within traumatic and dissociative conditions, as we would say now. Such inner hidden faculties are like the stars in the day sky—they are always there, shining, but they are completely invisible until the sun sets, that is, until the sun of the waking consciousness is temporarily suppressed (SM 1:287–88). Julian Ochorowicz would articulate a similar sensibility, which had been more or less common with the magnetic theorists since Puységur, namely, that the powers of mental suggestion and the forms of magnetic lucidity evident in rare and gifted subjects almost certainly exist “in germ” in every human being (SM 1:582; cf. 1:157). We are all secretly, nocturnally gifted. We just live in the day, oblivious to our own secret stars.

Another
theorist compared the figure of the somnambulist to that of the mythical figure of Proteus, who had similarly received a gift, but a gift that takes a thousand different forms that are virtually impossible to pin down. The sheer diversity of the magnetic phenomena across the human body and senses is indeed overwhelming (hence Fort's adjective of
wild
). It appears that the magnetic state renders the obvious diversity normally seen in human beings much more extreme, and even more individualized (SM 1:255–56). The celebrated somnambulist Alexis Didier, to whom we will soon return, consistently insisted on the same point. For him, the central character of the states of magnetic lucidity is their variability. For others, this “fugitive” or “anarchic” character of the magnetic phenomena, this boundless reservoir of potentialities, should profoundly transform our image of the human being and, consequently, render any final model of human nature, and so any general or universal method of therapy, impossible (SM 1:257).

In the light of such impossible potentialities and possible actualizations, human nature begins to be seen as fundamentally contextual
and
unconditioned, that is, as dialectical. Hence the data of anthropology with respect to shamanism and the realization, already intuited by the magnetic theorists with their studies of mediums and somnambulists, that the ecstatic and his or her environment constitute a single system. So, for example, many shamans have claimed that they cannot access their magical powers without the presence of a group. And similarly, the social group is continually influenced by the presence and dramatic rituals of the shaman (SM 1:274–75). Together, the psyche of the shaman (or medium, or somnambulist) and the cultural group “make each other up.”

Such insights, Méheust reminds us, put into stark contrast the naive objectivism of the scientific method with respect to paranormal phenomena, a method whose philosophical assumptions about determinism, objectivity, nature-as-given, and stable “facts” can only operate by effectively denying, suppressing, or even destroying this psychocultural Gestalt. Méheust articulates the counterproposition as “the idea that the phenomena of somnambulism are not invariable manifestations of the human soul, but that they should be thought of as the actualization of hidden virtualities—an actualization rendered possible only in certain contexts, and therefore variable” (SM 1:275).

There is a moral contribution to make here as well, for there was also a “dark side” to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorizations of the magnetic powers, particularly surrounding the potential for evil that numerous thinkers saw in such occult capacities—essentially, a modern version of the traditional lore around black magic. Or, alternatively, we
might
detect what will later be theorized as a “fear of psi” and watch how the natural paranormal capacities of the human being are almost always demonized, from the early modern Inquisition trials, where such abilities were literally linked to the devil, to the most recent Hollywood movie or television hit, where the gifted one is forever getting hunted down and dying. God forbid such an anomalous person be happy, healthy, and content. Who would want to watch that?
³⁵

Thus Puységur was convinced that something like thought transference was quite real. He had, after all, observed it. But he refused to propagate this discovery too openly for fear that it would be used for nefarious purposes (SM 1:521). Later, there would be quite serious discussions among medical doctors and intellectuals about how psychic criminals might employ mental suggestion in order to manipulate other people, like puppets, for various criminal ends. There was even talk of performing “experimental crimes,” that is, of seeing whether a person could be mentally forced to commit an “experimental suicide” (with a revolver loaded with blanks) or perform “fictitious poisonings.” Philosophically speaking, things were even more serious, as these same theoreticians began to realize what such thought experiments implied, namely, “a funeral hymn for free will” (SM 1:541–45). Was everyone, in the end, a puppet whose strings are being pulled by someone else? By something else? How
do
I know where my thoughts, desires, and motivations come from? How do I know that they are really mine? Shades of Fort's X and Vallee's cosmic Puppeteer. Hence the common link between psychical phenomena and paranoia. It was for both moral and materialist reasons, then, that the medical community waged an effective war against the notion that one human being could have occult influence over another (SM 1:593).

Not that materialism could not sometimes use the same ideas toward immoral ends. Méheust goes to some length to show how different the moral sensibilities of the psychiatrists and the later theorists of hypnotism—all more or less committed to materialism—were to the sensibilities of the early magnetists. Whereas the magnetists considered themselves to be “listening to the voice of Nature” and submitted themselves carefully and humbly to forces they did not claim to control or predict, the psychiatrists and hypnotists considered themselves to be superior to their (mostly female) subjects, whom they often grossly manipulated for scientific ends (SM 1:430–31). Their experiments at Nancy in France and elsewhere were thus often cruel and famously voyeuristic. For Méheust, then, “
the central operation of the science of hypnotism is to eliminate completely the magnetic
hypothesis
of an occult interaction between two human beings
” (SM 1:595). Once the interpersonal spiritual dimensions were removed from the transactional space, a kind of materialistic manipulation could follow, with some quite disturbing medical and symbolic consequences.

Consider the case of Charles Binet-Sanglé, a medical doctor whose authoritarian fantasies regarding occult influence recorded in his
La fin dusecret
or
The End of the Secret
(1922) literally end volume 1 of Méheust's
Somnamublisme et médiumnité
. Binet-Sanglé had adopted one of the theories of telepathy common in his time: the mental-radio thesis (today cognitive processes are all about computers and mental software—we never learn). Telepathic influences were not occult, spiritual, or even necessarily human forces in this model. They were rather completely material processes, mental radio waves, as it were, sent and received over large distances by brains.

In this materialist model of “brain waves,” the doctor recognized the potential benefits for the State's effective control and manipulation of individuals. He dreamed of recruiting telepaths to be put in the service of the State, mostly from the “backwards” races, like the Negroes or the Tibetans, or from those races predisposed to regression, like the Jews (of course). The best candidates, he thought, would be prepubescent Jewish girls. They would receive special training. They would be gathered in
camps
(Méheust italicizes this word). They would be forced to take drugs, like hashish. They would be trained in a strict vegetarian diet. And they would be required to remain virgins, a discipline that would be imposed on them by hypnotic suggestion. Through such an elaborate discipline, they would no doubt develop extraordinary metagnomic powers: “Nothing,” Méheust explains, “would escape their vigilance: the secrets of intimacy, the secrets of correspondence, intentions, past actions, hiding places, [or] diplomatic and military espionage activities” (SM 1:596). There is no need, Méheust points out in the very last line of volume 1, “to underline the posterity of these phantasms” (SM 1:597).