Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (45 page)

I cannot possibly summarize all the stories Méheust recounts in his exhaustive study. One iconic example will have to do, the one that Méheust himself treats as iconic, that is, the one with which he begins his book. Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend was an Episcopalian priest, an author of an early book on Mesmerism (briefly cited above in our discussion of Mills), an intimate friend of Charles Dickens, and the latter's literary executor.
⁴¹
Townshend also wrote poetry, painted, and practiced animal magnetism himself. In October of 1851, he sought out Didier and spent a few hours with him in Paris. He subsequently published an account of his experiences in the form of a letter dated November 25, 1851, in
The Zoist
.
⁴²

The reported facts are these. Townshend visited the home of a certain Mr. Marcillet, who was the magnetizer of Didier, in order to arrange a meeting with the famous clairvoyant. Marcillet brought Didier to Townshend's hotel room at 9:00 p.m. that same evening. At Marcillet's suggestion, Townshend magnetized Didier himself. After a few minutes of magnetic passes and some strange, quite ugly convulsions of his face, Didier passed into a calm state and gave his usual signal that he was there: “
Merci
!” Once Marcillet saw that Didier was successfully magnetized, he left the two men alone in the hotel room and departed.

Townshend immediately began to test Alexis “in the matter of seeing distant places,” a particular power the French called
clairvoyance à distance
but which is very similar to what we have already encountered in its American cold war form as remote viewing. With no Russians to spy on, Townshend asked Alexis if he wished to visit his house in thought. “Which?” Alexis responded. “For you have two! You have a house in London and one in the country. Which shall I go to first?” Townshend asked him to visit the country home. After a pause, Alexis responded, “I am there!” Alexis's eyes were now wide open but “blank” and staring, like a sleepwalker's, with his pupils fixed, dull, and dilated. In this odd stare, he described a chateau with a garden around it and a very small house to the left. All exact. He was looking at water now too. Townshend's windows looked out onto a lake.

Alexis now entered the salon and commented on the numerous paintings hanging on the wall. He found it curious that they were all modern paintings, except for two, one of the sea and one of a religious subject. Townshend shuddered. Alexis went on. “There are three figures in the picture—an old man, a woman, and a child.” He described the painting in
significant,
and correct, detail—of Saint Ann in the process of teaching the Virgin Mary to read, it turned out. Townshend asked him what the painting was done on. Alexis described a blackish-gray stone substance that was bumpy. It was, in fact, a black marble base that was rough and bumpy.

Alexis then proceeded to describe his other home in London, on Norfolk Street. He gave descriptions of the two female servants, especially the young one who struck him as pretty. He described the salon, the library, the elaborate carved frame of a mirror over the chimney, and then, suddenly, a portrait that appeared reflected in the mirror. He described in detail the painting, of the Holy Family this time. Townshend asked him the name of the painter. He replied that he had been dead for some time and, after some effort, he murmured “in a very cavernous voice,” that it was Raphael. “The fact is,” Townshend explains, “the name of Raphael is written dimly in gold letters on the hem of the Virgin's garment.”

After a few more uncannily accurate descriptions of paintings, Townshend asked Alexis to read through some kind of opaque obstacle. Alexis successfully read in turn lines or words from Lamartine's
Jocelyn
, a popular French magazine, and an English novel, all a number of pages down (determined by Townshend) from where the book or magazine was opened. At Alexis's request, Townshend now produced a letter in an envelope that he had recently received from a particular lady. Alexis described its contents in impossible detail and then proceeded to describe “the whole history of my fair correspondent—how long I had known her, and many minute circumstances respecting herself and our acquaintance—something too about the character of her sister, and (to crown all) he wrote . . . both the Christian and family name of her father!” One gets the sense that Townshend had some sort of romantic relationship with the woman in question. In any case, he confesses that he cannot make her or her family's name known in print and that the case would be much stronger if he could indeed be more specific. As with the psychical data emerging from Myers's relationship to Annie Hill Marshall, the erotic appears to be intimately related to the paranormal, first as a generative force, then as a reason to censor and weaken the report.

Mr. Marcillet now returned. Townshend continued with his test. He quizzed Alexis about himself and his health. He was astonished by the answers. The conversation finally turned to religious subjects, particularly the question of life after death. “
Dieu seul le sait
,” Alexis made clear. “Only God knows that.” “It is true,” he went on, “many somnambulists pretend to make revelations about a future state. But the proof they are all wrong is, that no two of them agree: all give different accounts.”

As
the magnetic session ended, Alexis awoke with the same convulsions and grimaces with which he had entered the altered state an hour before. He came back. He was now no longer the gifted seer. He was a young man, timid and respectful to his social senior. It was 10:00 p.m. Marcillet and Didier left. Townshend was left alone with his thoughts.

Toward the end of the letter, Townshend reflects with his readers about the events he has just recounted. Alexis did make a few mistakes “once or twice,” and he did ask Townshend to concentrate on what he wanted him to see (a significant detail that naturally invokes an alternate but equally paranormal process, that of telepathy). Townshend believed that much of Alexis's success was a function of his own trust in the seer's powers. He had no doubt that, had he been impatient or distrustful, “Alexis would have lost his clairvoyance, and perhaps attempted to supply it by guessing. This is the history of most of the mistakes and apparent want of truth of somnambulists. We have no patience with them, and will not
observe the conditions
requisite for the development of their clairvoyance.” “But a thousand negations,” he goes on, “are nothing before
one
affirmative proof.” One white crow is all it takes. And Townshend now had a whole flock of them fluttering about in his brain.

I have spent so much space on the Townshend-Didier scene for a simple reason. Any attempted summary of the history of psychical research and modern paranormal phenomena—including the halting one I have sketched here and there throughout the present set of chapters—is all too prone to impressions of secondhand rumor and suspicions of sloppy thinking, as if the authors of the last two centuries were somehow not as smart and careful as those of this one. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that Méheust's study of Alexis Didier reaches to nearly five hundred pages and explores virtually every imaginable criticism and reading, and that in this it resembles and extends the work of such earlier researchers as Frederic Myers, William James, Richard Hodgson, and Hereward Carrington, all of whom we have met above. Such invocations, however brief, are worth making here, since there is much nonsense written about the history of psychical research, with the greatest nonsense of all being the ignorant claim that it was never carefully done.

This in fact is one of the major points of Méheust's study of Didier—how elaborate and careful many of the experiments in fact were. The real point of the book, however, is not to defend the nineteenth-century intellect before the dogmatic skepticism of contemporary intellectual culture. It is to establish the genuineness of Didier's powers, and then to tease out their philosophical and anthropological implications. Basically, it is
one
immense “If, then . . . ” exercise. And once the “if” is established, the “then” that follows is, as Fort would say, a real whopper. In brief, Méheust shows that Alexis Didier—as a kind of mutant prodigy who magnifies, like a human microscope, powers that lie still tiny and invisible in all of us—presents us with truths that strike at the very heart of our cultural assumptions about humanity and its place in the natural world. These invisible powers now rendered visible through such an excessive being, Méheust argues, possess an “immense polemical and heuristic impact” (VP 18).

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).