Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (44 page)

It would be a serious mistake, though, to claim—as many ideologically driven skeptics have claimed—that the paranormal somehow automatically leads to fascism or right-wing politics. Méheust is very clear on this point: the full history presents us with no necessary relationship or link between the psychical data and any particular political system. Moreover, there is a fairly strong, if by no means definitive, trajectory through the history that links the magnetic and the psychical with degrees of autonomy, liberty, and freedom still unknown to any political system. This was already apparent in the ways that the Being whom Puységur could not name
related
to the marquis in ways that would have been entirely inappropriate for a young peasant like Victor Race. The Being manifesting in Victor's magnetic states, in other words, possessed its own autonomy and liberty and would have nothing of the usual deference and submission required before someone of Puységur's social rank.

Similar levels of autonomy and freedom were intuited in the magnetic discourses on belief and the whole phenomenon of “suggestion.” The theorists realized that the content of the belief or the suggestion (much less the literal magnets themselves that were sometimes used) mattered little, if at all. What was important was the power or conviction in the belief (recall that Fort would later express the exact same insight into the irrelevance of belief and the centrality of mental focus). For these authors, in other words, “the fundamental suggestion is the belief in the power of suggestion.”
Ideas are forces
, they realized, and the most powerful idea of all is the idea of the force of ideas. In this way, the theorists encountered the dominant psychic determinism of their era, refracted it through their own practices with mental suggestion and magnetic healing, and inverted it into a kind of radical freedom for which we still have no real models, much less a stable practical institution (SM 1:574).

Méheust, it should be noted, is hardly alone in linking nineteenth-century psychical phenomena to liberal political practices and democratic values. We have already noted the remarkable case of Spiritualism and social reform around gender issues. To take another particularly striking case that bears directly on my repeated insistence that there is a profound link between psychical phenomena and literary phenomena (that is, that the paranormal is a hermeneutical reality), consider the recent work of Bruce Mills, whom I briefly alluded to in my introduction. Mills has persuasively argued that Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, and Walt Whitman all turned to the critical literature on Mesmerism, where they learned that the true power of mesmeric practices lay not in any literal “fluid,” but in the power of the imagination and the nature of signs, gestures, and beliefs that such practices artfully employed. Puységur, we might recall, was the first to realize this. He quickly concluded that the materialism of Mesmerism was mistaken and that what was in fact at work in these extraordinary states was not “fluids,” tiny “atoms,” or the “workings of the spheres,” but the nearly omniscient and seemingly omnipotent power of a vast magnetic Mind. Although they differed, of course, on the nature of this mind, even the most official critics recognized the truth of this basic psychological insight.

Hence
Mills quotes from Chauncy Hare Townshend's
Facts in Mesmerism
, in which he approvingly cites the following lines from the Commission of the French Academy of Science and its report on animal magnetism:

That which we have learned . . . is, that
man can act upon man
, at all times and almost at will, by striking the imagination; that signs and gestures the most simple may produce the most powerful effects; that the action of man upon the imagination may be reduced to an art, and conducted after a certain method, when exercised upon patients who have faith in the proceedings.
³⁶

Mills's own point is simple but profound here, namely, that the psychological insight of the above quote is “as applicable to literary creation as to medical practice or social reform.”
³⁷
In other words, what the Mesmerists could do with their patients via magnets, touch, and the passing of hands in a healing practice, the authors could do with their reader via words, plot, and mood in a writing practice. Both, after all, were drawing on the same imagination, the same power of signs and symbols, and the same psychology of belief. This was particularly obvious after Puységur and his colleagues realized that the magnets and related rituals of mesmeric practice were not necessary, that they were artful and useful props, but certainly not literal physical causes.

This is how, Mills suggests, American writers of the nineteenth century intuited “a link between the mesmeric and literary arts” and came to understand the incredible power of signs.
³⁸
This is how the call for a national literature and the subsequent American Renaissance it produced “evolved into attention to the state of one's own mind, to those manifestations of the highest states of mind, and to the effects of literary choices on readers' psychological states.”
³⁹
Such authors were writing their way to a distinctly American aesthetic that could accommodate and nurture what Mills calls “transition states” in a democratic culture. In my own terms, they were writing their way to a democratic mysticism rooted in literature and individuals as opposed to doctrinal systems and institutions. They were laying the foundation for America's religion of no religion and its various and diverse “altered states of consciousness.”

Finally, there is Méheust's treatment of the common evolutionary reading of the emergent superpowers, evident, as we have already seen, in figures from Alfred Russel Wallace and Fredric Myers to Richard Maurice Bucke and Henri Bergson. These thinkers were hardly alone in their conclusions. In 1902, for example, Jean Jaurés asked whether “the man of
extraordinary
and unknown powers” may not signal some “new progress of consciousness and life on our planet.” Why, after all, should we consider the present form of man, the “normal” form, the last term or expression of the species? Jaurés then posited a classic
homo duplex
doctrine by which the human being is seen as possessing two distinct but related forms of consciousness: one familiar and normal, the other manifesting in the altered states of hypnotism and still considered abnormal. Fusing these two forms, Jaurés speculated, might well lead to “the creation of a new humanity.” This, however, would by no means be easy, he thought. It would likely be no easier and no less filled with suffering than that unimaginably long evolution that has already carried life from the amoeba to man (SM 2:157).

Joseph Maxwell, writing in 1922 on the history of traditional magic in the present light of psychical research, thought more or less the same: “magic,” he wrote, “leads us to consider the human being as an entity whose evolution has not ended, whose powers are not yet fully developed” (SM 2:283). This too was a sensibility very much in line with the intuitions of the magnetic theorists, “for whom,” Méheust writes, “the somnambulist trance permits a return to a very ancient form of experience, but also to a recovery of some latent potentialities in order to re-actualize them and use them to make a contribution to the evolution of humanity” (SM 2:298).

Hence that whole field of psychofolklore by which earlier forms of magical experience and folklore are revisited and reread through the categories and findings of contemporary psychical research. The past is recovered, but in a new form now. The anthropologist, folkorist, and historian of religions Andrew Lang is usually credited with bringing this method into prominence, but Lang knew well that he did not invent the idea. He knew, that is, that the early magnetic theorists had arrived at the same realization a full century before him (SM 2:273).

Such evolutionary thinking would find a uniquely gifted voice in the philosopher Henri Bergson and his earlier cited description of the universe as
une machine à faire des dieux
, that is, “a machine for making gods.” Here also we should place Bergson's central notion of the
élan vital
animating the universe. Although Bergson followed Christian mystical theology in his position that mysticism represented a more evolved stage of the spiritual life than psychical abilities, he also thought that it was what Méheust describes as “the potentialities evolving through the psychic phenomena” in which this
élan
manifests in human nature in a way that can be scientifically, collectively, and cumulatively studied. In this way, Bergson thought, a new vision of human nature and its psychical evolution can eventually
be
made available to the public, and this in a manner that mystical accomplishments, however profound, could never supply (SM 2:253).

“If
Only One of These Facts . . . ”: The Impossible Case of Alexis Didier

One of the features of Méheust's work that makes it so remarkable, and so refreshing, is the fact that he does not avoid the question of whether the magnetic and psychical phenomena are real or not.
⁴⁰
When I spoke to him about his work, he shared with me his observation that this is a question that must not be asked in French intellectual circles. Such phenomena can be discussed as “representations” to be sure, but never empirical facts, never genuinely veridical cognitions of something out there. If Méheust had been a traditional French intellectual (or a traditional American one, for that matter), he would have gone in precisely this direction. He would have “bracketed” the truth claims of the phenomena and treated them as pure forms, as “representations” or “discourses,” to use the safe, postmodern catchphrases in fashion today.

He does not do this. And this constitutes his most important intellectual intervention. In essence, he forces his readers into a kind of philosophical corner: “If these facts are real,” he asks, “what does this mean?” And more specifically, “If these facts are real, how must we now reread intellectual history and its defensively dismissive treatment of magnetic, psychical, and paranormal phenomena?” These are rhetorical questions. Méheust thinks that the phenomena are very likely genuine. They are not only representations or simply discourses (although they are certainly those things too). But once we postulate such an (im)possibility, the history of animal magnetism and psychical research looks
very
different indeed, as does the intellectual antireception of these practices and inquiries. It all looks like a vast forgetting, a massive cultural repression, a tragic denial of our own potential nature. All of this is implied but never really stated as such in
Somnambulisme et médiumnité
. Méheust was still being careful. He still hoped for a university position.

He didn't get one.

And so, after publishing his immense temporal and intellectual map of the Great Forgetting, Méheust decided to make his implicit philosophical challenge more explicit. In order to do this, he zoomed in on a single historical figure and in 2003 published
Un voyant prodigieux
or
A Seer Extraordinaire
, an in-depth case study of a mid-nineteenth-century figure whom
many
consider to be the most gifted magnetic seer of the century, Alexis Didier (1826–86). As with all books, there are many ways to read this one, but it is difficult to miss the ways Méheust employs the biographical details and historical documents (part 1); the elaborate reception of Alexis by journalists, literary figures, intellectuals, and skeptics (part 2); and the various critical approaches to the phenomena that he heralded (part 3) as one long argument about the empirical reality of the magnetic phenomena under study and, most of all, about what these impossible phenomena imply about the still possible nature of human consciousness and culture. As with his first flying-saucer book, he is setting down a metaphysical challenge. As with his two-volume dissertation, he is asking us to remember that which we have forgotten.

Méheust begins the book with a quote from Kant's response to Emanuel Swedenborg, his
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
, which includes the following line on the data of clairvoyance: “Such a capital witness, such a perspective of astonishing consequences, if one is able to presuppose that
only one
of these facts is guaranteed” (VP 7). The line captures well what William James would later make famous as the white crow argument. It only takes one white crow to prove that all crows are not black, James pointed out. So, too, it only takes one proven case of telepathy to establish that the mind is not bound by the brain and the body. The Jamesian white crow became a kind of battle cry or philosophical symbol for early (and later) psychical researchers, but the faultless logic it represents is already present in Kant's honest philosophical frustrations with the dreams of the Swedish spirit-seer. It only takes one.

Or a thousand. From about the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-five, when he more or less retired from exhaustion and a variety of health problems (perhaps brought on by his various healings and feats), Alexis Didier demonstrated an entire spectrum of psychical powers that baffle the modern reader even more than they baffled the princes, intellectuals, aristocrats, journalists, and medical professionals who sought him out in the 1840s and '50s in such great numbers. The latter, at least, lived in a cultural climate that could still remember a time when such powers were widely accepted as real and so were often experienced as such. But even they had to remember. Alexis came on the French scene just after the magnetic movement had been thoroughly defeated in the public arena and had gone underground. The receptive actualizing climate was no more. Because of both this repressive cultural climate and the incredibly short span of the seer's public career, Méheust sees Alexis as a kind of Icarus figure, a tragic being who attempted to fly too high, who tried to expand the
human
condition past where his culture, and his own body, was willing to go. His wings melted. His career was cut short. A mere decade or so is all. It was over almost as soon as it began.