Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (56 page)

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.

106
. “Phantasm” was chosen over “phantom,” because the latter term implied a visual component, whereas the cases could involve any of the senses, or even what was called a “diffused sensibility” (HP 1:xix).

107
. Gauld,
Founders
, 290.

108
. For a full, and balanced, early intellectual history of the term, see Roger Luckhurst,
The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

109
. Gauld,
Founders
, 18.

110
. Bertrand Méheust,
Somnambulisme et médiumnité (1784–1930)
(Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo Pour Le Progrés de la Connaissance, 1999), 2:320.

111
. Ibid., 2:426.

112
. Upton Sinclair,
Mental Radio
, preface by Albert Einstein (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2001).

113
. Telepathy as a reduction to the irreducible nature of human consciousness is a lovely example of the kind of mystical humanism or gnostic methodology I proposed in
The Serpent's Gift
.

114
. I cannot help pondering the potential connections between Myers's metaphor of the imaginal as an adult insect and the imaginal realm of later UFO encounters, which often involve psychical, evolutionary, and insectoid themes, from the beelike “buzzing” of the craft, through the evolutionary intentions of the interventions, to the insectlike appearance of the telepathic aliens. I don't know what to make of this, but there it is.

115
. Myers,
Science and a Future Life
, 37–38.

116
. Ibid., 39–40. Myers invokes the same larval/imaginal language at HP 1:97.

117
. For an excellent discussion of the evolutionary mysticisms of both Carpenter and Bucke and their correspondence, see Paul Marshall,
Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

118
. Henri Bergson,
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
(London: Macmillan, 1935), 275.

119
. See, for example, Myers,
Science and a Future Life
, 40.

120
. Myers, however, recognized that telaesthesia merges into telepathy, since it is always possible that a perception at a distance is being picked up from another mind there (HP 1:xv).

121
. HP 1:112. This is another place where Myers and Freud are very close. Freud, after all, turned to the exact same Greek classic in order to gloss his own understanding of sexuality as an omnipresent force capable of genital, cultural, literary, and philosophical expression, that is, Plato's
Symposium
and its fundamentally mystical notion of eros. “In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love,” Freud wrote, “the ‘Eros' of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psycho-analysis” (
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1975], 18:91).

122
. Blum,
Ghost Hunters
, 264.

123
. Myers,
Fragments
, 35.

124
. Blum,
Ghost Hunters
, 258–59.

125
. Eveleen Myers, preface to Myers,
Fragments
, v–vi.

126
. From
Fragments
, quoted in Gauld,
Founders
, 119.

CHAPTER TWO

1
. The standard source for Fort's writings is the Omnibus volume, first published as
The Books of Charles Fort
, with an introduction by Tiffany Thayer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1941), and later reissued as
The Complete Books of Charles Fort
, with a new introduction by Damon Knight (New York: Dover, 1974). Most recently, the Omnibus volume has been reissued again as
The Books of the Damned
, with a new introduction by Jim Steinmeyer (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2008). My page references (which are in fact consistent throughout the three editions) are to the second volume and are preceded in the text by BD (
The Book of the Damned
), NL (
New Lands
), LO (
Lo!
), and WT (
Wild Talents
).

2
. Fort made all of this quite clear in a May 1926 letter to the science-fiction writer
Edmund
Hamilton, as quoted in Damon Knight,
Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained
(New York: Doubleday, 1970), 171–72.

3
. Colin Bennett,
The Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort
(Manchester: Headpress, 2002), 120.

4
. Quoted in Jim Steinmeyer,
Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
(New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), xv.

5
. I am indebted for this quote and line of thought to Steinmeyer, ibid.

6
. Knight,
Charles Fort
, 65.

7
. The phrase “intellectually promiscuous” is mine, but it is entirely faithful to Fort's sexual-intellectual sense of his comparative sins. “I am a pioneer and no purist,” he wrote, “and some of these stud-stunts of introducing vagabond ideas to each other may have about the eugenic value of some of the romances in houses of ill fame. I cannot expect to be both promiscuous and respectable. Later, most likely, some of these unions will be properly licensed” (LO 572).

8
. Tiffany Thayer, quoted in Knight,
Charles Fort
, 180.

9
. Quoted in Steinmeyer,
Charles Fort
, 237.

10
. Quoted in Knight,
Charles Fort
, 70,

11
. Quoted in Louis Kaplan,
The Damned Universe of Charles Fort
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993), 125, without reference.