Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (9 page)

By a science of religion, then, they did not intend a method that would necessarily reduce the religion to the science (although it just might). But neither did they intend away of doing things that would somehow “respect” religion or protect it from the powerful gaze and hard questions of the new scientific method. Rather, what they intended was a still future method that would move beyond both materialistic science and dogmatic religion into real answers to ancient metaphysical questions that had never really been convincingly answered. As Myers put it, “I wish to debate the matter on the ground of experiments and observations such as are appealed to in other inquiries for definite objective proof.”
¹²
In other words, belief was irrelevant. What mattered now was evidence—empirical, experiential evidence.

Both their Enlightenment hostility to traditional religion and their Romantic openness to religious experience are worth emphasizing here. On one page, for example, an author like Myers could write of “how much dogmatic rubbish” even the best minds of earlier centuries were clouded by, and then two pages later approach the pious subject of Prayer (which he capitalized) with “the need of a definition which shall be in some sense spiritual without being definitely theological” (HP 2:307, 309).
¹³
Such passages constitute more strong evidence that the modern popular distinction between the “religious” and the “spiritual” is by no means a recent invention, but in fact reaches at least as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, to the birth of modern science.
¹⁴

Such passages also signal that categories like the psychical, the occult, and the paranormal should be studied alongside and contrasted to their
cousin-categories
of the spiritual and the mystical. All five categories, after all, are eminently modern constructions witnessing to the same broad individuation processes of Western society whereby religion is increasingly “psychologized,” that is, identified as a psychological
experience
not bound by traditional religious authority. These five terms, however, use different methods, focus on different sorts of reports, and so do different cultural work. Most simply put, whereas the categories of the mystical and the spiritual selectively return to historical religious sources for the creative construction of what amounts to a new religious vision (a perennial philosophy, a comparative theology, and so on), the categories of the psychical, the occult, and the paranormal attempt to move out of the religious register, advancing instead strong scientific or parascientific claims and connotations. This book is concerned with the latter processes, not the former.

Although Myers was certainly deeply influenced by the history of Western mysticism, particularly in its Platonic and Neoplatonic origins, and although he employs the terms “mystical” and “mysticism” in various ways throughout his corpus, his work is also best located in the latter streams of method and thought.
¹⁵
Hence he can suggest that at least some mystical and occult events are both empirically real
and
entirely consistent with natural, though as yet unexplained, laws or patterns.

This both-and position is especially clear in a fascinating exchange Myers had with Lord Acton on how to write history after the discoveries of psychical research, especially the history of “miraculous” occurrences common in hagiography, church records, and the general history of religions. Myers counseled Acton to advance a historiography that would take such “impossible” events as real possibilities, all the while being very wary of pious exaggeration, fraud, and institutional religious motives.
¹⁶
In this, he followed earlier theorists of Mesmerism and animal magnetism, who had similarly turned to scientific language (hence the expression “animal
magnetism
”) to explain the new forms of healing and psychical energy with which they were experimenting and advanced a historiography called “psychofolklore.” By the latter neologism, they intended a new method of understanding the history of religions whereby the religious past (the
folklore
part) was read anew in the critical but sympathetic light of psychical research (the
psycho
part). It was a kind of “believing back,” if you will, a kind of future of the past.

A good example of this new super naturalism or psychofolklore is Myers's treatment of the famous miracles of Lourdes. Listen:

It is
not
true, a thousand times it is
not
true, that a bottle of water from a spring near which a girl saw a hallucinatory figure will by miraculous virtue heal a Turk
in
Constantinople; but it
is
true that on some influx from the unseen world,—an influence dimly adumbrated in that Virgin figure and that sanctified spring,—depends the life and energy of this world every day. (HP 1:215)

Obviously, Myers and his colleagues were not out to celebrate the Virgin's virtues, nor were they interested in privileging any other specific mythological expression of the cosmic influx, be it the Catholic's or the Muslim's. They were after a comparative model of the human psyche that could make some sense of these events' specific occurrences and dynamics under whatever cultural and historical guise they were expressed. Beyond A and B, there is an X.

Precisely because they recognized the gap that existed—that
always
exists—between the myth or symbol and that which is symbolized (the Virgin vs. the cosmic influx), they recognized that this new knowledge could never settle with mere descriptive accuracy of this or that religious experience, much less with speculative accounts of a particular religion's historical or social development. The Virgin and the spring were never enough. An adequately robust theory of religion would have to go much deeper than mere description or ordinary history, and it could
never
be bound by the believer's perspective. Nor, however, could it be bound by a scientistic perspective that conflated rationalism and materialism. It would have to be about the real questions, the metaphysical questions. The double nature of the human being, or what they preferred to call “the human personality,” as it split in two in the process of dying would come to play the central role in this quest. In our own contemporary terms, we might say that they were after a comparative model of extreme religious experiences, the latter catalyzed mostly by traumatic dissociative events, with death being privileged as the ultimate, most complete, and truly universal dissociative event.
¹⁷

Obviously, these were not minor questions. They were quite literally life-and-death issues. Accordingly, as these authors approached what they thought might be the first glimmers of a real answer, as the impossible began to look possible, a real excitement began to shimmer between their lines. And why not? A new metaphysical America was appearing on the horizon of their impossible thought. They were about to discover a New World.

After
Life

Frederic W. H. Myers was the son of Frederic Myers, who was a pastor, and Susan Myers (born Susan Harriet), who loved poetry and nature.
¹⁸
He was
born
on February 6, 1843, in Keswick, Cumberland. He spent his childhood in a parsonage, which he remembers as a veritable paradise.

The boy's first existential crisis revolved around finding a mole crushed by a carriage wheel when he was five or six. It wasn't quite the little creature's death, however, that shocked the boy so. It was his mother's calm assurance that the thing had no soul. His second shock came again from his mother's words, this time around seven or eight. “My mother, who shrank from dwelling on the hideous doctrine of hell,” Myers recalled, “suggested to me that perhaps men who led bad lives on earth were annihilated at death.”
¹⁹
This was simply more than the boy could take. His father's death about this same time, in 1851, gave little Fred no anguish compared to the idea of such an unthinkable existential horror.

These are significant, even iconic memories, of course. As we shall soon see, Myers would spend much of his adult life essentially rewriting the afterlife as he received it from his father's faith and his mother's shocking thoughts. He would write for decades against all of this, “from the vague emptiness of the conventional heaven to the endless tortures which make the Cosmos the fabrication of a fiend.”
²⁰
Hideous indeed.

His father had been teaching Myers Latin since his sixth birthday. At sixteen, he was sent to a classical tutor, then to a mathematical tutor, and then, at seventeen now, on to Trinity College at Cambridge University. At the age of twenty-two, in 1865, Myers was elected fellow and classical lecturer at Trinity. He resigned four years later, to start, as he put it, “the new movement for the Higher Education of Women.”
²¹
In 1871, he accepted a temporary post as an inspector of schools and, in 1872, took a similar but now permanent position. He was appointed to the Cambridge district in 1875, a job that he held until his health collapsed shortly before his death in 1901.

Then there was the family life. In 1880, at thirty-seven, Myers stepped into Westminster Abbey in order to marry a twenty-two-year-old woman named Eveleen Tennant. Evie, as she was called, came from a wealthy family. Alan Gauld cites another woman describing her, not too nicely (but perhaps not inaccurately), as a “barmaid beauty.” For his part, Gauld describes her as “without doubt one of the most beautiful girls of her time.”
²²
Appearances aside, Evie had her own social circles and intellectual interests, which never quite melded with those of her husband. The new couple took up residence in 1881 in Leckhampton House, on the western edge of Cambridge. There they had three children over the next few years. Most of the historians agree that theirs was a stable marriage, but not an entirely happy one. We shall see why later: basically, Evie had married a man married to a ghost.

Myers
insists that these events (except for the ghost part) were only the external events of his story. The real events were the inner ones. These, it turns out, involved the loss of not one, not two, but
three
consecutive worldviews. Frederic Myers knew how to let go. Looking back on his life, he traced four major periods of conviction: Hellenism, Christianity, Agnosticism, and what he calls “the Final Faith.”

His early life was dominated by the Greek and Latin classics, particularly Virgil and Plato. From sixteen to twenty-three, the classics “were but intensifications of my own being.”
²³
He
was
the texts he read. This period ended, however, in 1864 when Myers visited Greece and realized that this was a vanished world. He now felt “cold and lonely.” He traveled to America in 1865, where on the night of August 28 he swam the dangerous currents of the Niagara River from the Canadian shore to the American one. This death-defying feat felt like a metaphor to him: “I emerged on the American side, and looked back on the tossing gulf. May death, I dimly thought, be such a transit, terrifying but easy, and leading to nothing new?”
²⁴

After his return to England, he converted to a particularly emotional form of Christianity through the ministrations of a young and beautiful woman named Josephine Butler, in whose particular form of sanctity (and Myers's excessive response to it) many of Myers's friends suspected more than piety. Gauld, for example, describes Butler's erotically charged methods in some delicious detail, summarizing her ministry as “the spiritual seduction of promising young men.” “Myers' worship of Christ,” he concludes, “was not perhaps quite distinct in his own heart from a worship of Mrs. Butler; and his enthusiasm for her brought some sharp comments from his friends.”
²⁵
But such a faith, which did contain doctrinal elements as well, eventually faded too, like his earlier Hellenic ideals. Much later, he would look back: “That faith looks to me now like a mistaken shortcut in the course of a toilsome way.”
²⁶

It was a simple lack of evidence and the rigorous methods of science that did in his worldview this time. Agnosticism and materialism set in, and with them a dull pain and a certain horror before a completely indifferent universe. Not that he did not appreciate the birth of modern science, or even the demanding virtues of an intellectual agnosticism. He most certainly did, as is apparent in his essay “Charles Darwin and Agnosticism.” Here he writes warmly of Thomas Huxley and his famous new word. As for Darwin himself, no other man in history, Myers believed, had so completely altered the common worldview by thought alone.
²⁷
He took obvious delight in the fact that the great man was buried in Westminster Abbey, that “Darwin should be laid in the shrine of Peter,” as he put it.
²⁸
Indeed,
Myers went so far as to call Darwin “a
liberator
of mankind.”
²⁹
Those were his italics too. He meant it.

As an example of what Darwin liberated humanity from, Myers cites the contentious issue of sin. After Darwin, Myers points out, we can no longer see sin as a defect in our relationship to some higher power. We must understand it now in the context of earlier evolutionary development. It deserves no punishment. It is simply an example of our ancient instincts reasserting themselves. Sin is a moment of “arrested development” and nothing more.
³⁰
It was in this way that Myers finally took his revenge on his boyhood's hated hell—by making it look silly and unnecessary in Darwin's bright light. The same move, of course, more or less vaporized traditional Christianity, for without sin, there is no Fall, and without the Fall, there is no need for Redemption, and . . . The house of cards was wobbling, and Myers knew exactly which card to pull out.