Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (5 page)

In other words, exactly as he had argued with respect to the empirical paranormal core of traditional folklore, Eliade was now hiding his own paranormal experiences in his literary creations. This then sets up a certain paradoxical structure for the reader: “some descriptions,” he explained, “correspond to real experiences, but others reflect more directly yogic folklore,” hence “the reader has no means to decide whether the ‘reality' is hidden in the ‘fiction,' or the other way around, because both processes
are
intermingled.” Again, exactly as he had earlier argued with respect to folklore as “an instrument of knowledge,” he seriously suggests that “such types of literary creativity may also constitute authentic instruments of knowledge,” in the sense that the literature of the fantastic may “disclose some dimensions of reality that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches.”
³⁷
In other words, literary theory, and in particular the literature of the fantastic, was one of Eliade's preferred modes of interpreting the “parallel worlds” of the history of religions.

Eliade was not always so forthcoming about the experiential core of his writing, however. One hundred pages further into the Roquet interview, the subject of De Martino's magical anthropology—whereby the experience of nature literally changes as a culture evolves—came up. When Roquet asks Eliade, point-blank, whether what Eliade himself had just called “transhuman experiences that we are forced to accept as facts” had happened to him, Eliade gives the following reply: “I hesitate to answer that.”
³⁸

Also relevant here is Eliade's 1974 Freud Memorial Lecture, in which he turned to the “occult explosion” among the American youth culture erupting all around him and connected the paranormal to fantastic literature and Freud's discovery of the Unconscious (which Eliade liked to capitalize). After providing his listeners and readers with succinct modern histories of
esotericism
and
occultism
, two comparative categories that work as “umbrella terms” to gather together extremely diverse sets of practices and traditions, Eliade discussed these traditions' profound influence on early modern European literature and described their scholarly revival in the works of figures like Gershom Scholem on Kabbalah, Henri Corbin on Sufi mysticism, Antoine Faivre on Western esotericism, and his own work on Yoga, Tantra, and shamanism (the latter three subjects were all key to the American youth culture, he rightly notes). In each scholarly case, Eliade pointed out, the contemporary scholarship took up historical phenomena judged to be pure nonsense, if not veritable black magic, and “abundantly proved their theoretical coherence and their great psychological interest.”
³⁹
The interpretive power of Freud's psychoanalysis is one of his primary models here, for “Freud substantiated the gnoseologic values of the products of fantasy, which until then were considered meaningless or opaque.” Once Freud articulated the Unconscious, “the immense number of imaginary universes reflected in literary creations disclosed a deeper, and secret, significance, quite independent of the artistic value of the respective works.”
⁴⁰

One can hardly ask for a better introduction to the present project on the psychical and the paranormal. Hence my opening Eliade epigraph
from
the very last lines of the same Freudian lecture. Whether or not Eliade was “merely asking the question” about the religious meaning of science fiction and the occult dimensions of popular culture (I doubt this very much), I am certainly trying to offer his question a series of possible answers in the pages that follow. And it is certainly my intention—or at least my impossible wish—to take up phenomena judged by many of my peers to be pure nonsense and establish both their theoretical coherence and their psychological interest.

Eliade founded a certain intellectual lineage at the University of Chicago, a lineage in which I was trained in the 1980s and early '90s under his successor, Wendy Doniger, herself more than adept at negotiating mind-boggling metaphysical terrain.
⁴¹
This same lineage, as diverse and as contentious as any healthy intellectual community, has occasionally displayed a quite serious engagement with the paranormal. Nowhere is this more apparent and obvious than in Eliade's fellow Romanian and Chicago colleague Ioan Couliano. Couliano's lifelong interest in magical and gnostic matters was reflected in a rich personal occult life.
⁴²
Together at Chicago in the early '80s, the two men studied what they were calling “cultural fashions” (their code for what I am calling the paranormal in popular culture), and particularly the mysticism of science literature that turned to quantum physics for a theoretical base for a new modern mysticism. Couliano was inspired by this bold comparative literature and by like-minded elite intellectuals, like the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, who was a fan of Couliano's and who has written openly about his own gnostic experiences of a transcendent Self separate from the ego and beyond the reach of the orthodox religions. Couliano was clearly moving toward a fusion of quantum physics and the history of religions before he was murdered in a toilet stall one sad spring day in 1991.
⁴³

Such an attempted fusion of the sciences and the humanities is particularly apparent in Couliano's study of gnosticism, that strange and largely ignored book,
The Tree of Gnosis
. In the introduction to this text, Couliano asks the following crucial question: If we are now living in an Einsteinian space-time continuum determined by three extended dimensions and a fourth of time, the intimate participation of consciousness in the material world, and the metaphysical identity of energy and matter, themselves likely continuously created by utterly bizarre quantum processes that more or less destroy any stable notions of linear causality, time, locality, and independent existence, why are we still writing history as if we only inhabited a simple three-dimensional cosmos, lived in a neat linear time,
and
existed as so many disconnected billiard balls in a world of Newtonian causality, collisions, and reactions? If the world is so utterly bizarre, why do we pretend it is so simple? And if we now know that the universe is most certainly
not
a three-dimensional box or two-dimensional pool table, why do we keep writing history as if it were? Why, in other words, cannot we reimagine history (and hence ourselves) “outside the box” and “off the page” of what Max Weber so powerfully called the iron cage of modern rationalism, order, and routinization?

Good questions. Couliano tried to bring us up to speed through his historical method of morphodynamics. I will not go into the details here, mostly because I don't understand them (apparently I'm still in the box), but it is worth noting that Couliano's morphodynamic history writing is essentially about taking seriously the possibilities that religious systems function as archetypal forms (
morpho-
) that exist in a dimension outside the four of space-time, and that these can and do interact (
dynamic
) historically within the four dimensions of our perceived world in ways that appear strange and random but in fact are structurally organized and essentially meaningful.
⁴⁴

To explain such altered states of history, Couliano turned to Edwin Abbot (1838–1926), that imaginative British theologian whom Albert Einstein had previously invoked in order to explain his own theory of general relativity and its mind-blowing image of the universe as the hypersurface of a hypersphere (don't ask; I don't get it either). In his
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
(1883), written and illustrated under the humorous penname of “A Square,” Abbot introduced the idea of the Flatlanders, two-dimensional beings who can only experience the intervention of a third dimension as hopelessly confusing or inexplicable, that is, as “miraculous.” Couliano invokes the same Flatland to describe how the history of religions can be imagined as “a sequential interaction of multiple systems of thought.” He explains:

Let us suppose a two-dimensional world, like an infinitely thin sheet of paper, in which completely flat beings live. Imagine further that this film would let a solid object pass through it without the film breaking. Now let us indeed move a solid object through it, for instance a fork. What would a two dimensional inhabitant of Flatland
see
? S/he would see a disparate set of phenomena: first four rounding lines, recognized as being circles, without connection between them, corresponding to the four prongs of the fork; then a line whose size varies incessantly, corresponding to the base and handle of the fork; eventually the line
will
disappear from sight. Obviously, the fork would appear to the Flatlander as a sequence of disparate phenomena in time. One more dimension is needed in order to perceive it as a single solid.
⁴⁵

So too with systems of thought, which exist in their own logical dimension: “They interact with history at every moment, and the chronological sequence they form is a sort of sequential puzzle, like the four prongs of the fork viewed from the perspective of the Flatlander.” What Couliano proposes, then, is that we begin to study history as a similar interaction, that we “study systems of thought in their own dimension” and “recognize the fork for what it is: an object coming
from outside
and crossing our space in an apparently disconnected way, in which there is a hidden logic which we can only reveal
if we are able to move out of our space
.”
⁴⁶
In other words, we cannot properly interpret religious systems and their appearance in time because we assume that the three (or four) dimensions we routinely experience exhaust the possible, when in fact we live in a universe of multiple dimensions to whose astonishing complexity and “strangeness” the history of religions, and particularly the history of gnosticism and mysticism, gives abundant witness.

Not surprisingly, Ioan Couliano was ignored. The implications of what he was trying to say are simply too deep and disturbing to the neat rational lines of modernity and the normally linear modes of writing history. He shattered our little box. He wrote “off the page,” outside our Flatland.

I do not claim to know whether Ioan's particular model of a gnostic history of religions is an accurate or even a plausible one. That is not my point here. What I do know—and this
is
my point—is that any ordinary history of religions that relies exclusively on textual-critical, social-scientific, or political analyses (from Foucauldian constructionism and postcolonial theory to philology and materialist cognitive science) is woefully inadequate to the task of understanding and interpreting the paranormal, particularly when we get to ideas and experiences, as we will soon enough, surrounding the hyperdimensionality of UFOs and the possibility that these are fundamentally religious phenomena, “fishermen,” if you will, from another dimension baiting and occasionally hooking us from above the four-dimensional waters of space-time.

An author like Ioan Couliano may be correct about the general solution to the metaphysical conundrums that this history of religions presents us. He might also be wrong. But at least he recognized the problem of the paranormal as something that will have to be central to any future and truly adequate history of religions. At least he was willing to think outside
the
iron cage and off the two-dimensional page of our present Flatland rationalisms.
⁴⁷

Authors
of the Impossible: The Paranormal as Meaning

Authors of the Impossible
is an attempted recovery of precisely this kind of thinking “off the page.” Such a project is based on the wager that new theory lies hidden in the anomalous, that the paranormal appears in order to mock and shock us out of our present normal thinking. Seen in this way, psychical and paranormal phenomena become the still unacknowledged, unassimilated Other of modern thought, the still unrealized future of theory, the fleeting signs of a consciousness not yet become a culture.

This is hardly an easy claim to advance within our present order of knowledge and the possibilities it dictates for us. Paranormal phenomena, after all, dramatically violate those firm epistemological boundaries that, since Descartes, have increasingly divided up our university departments (and our social reality) into things pertaining to matter and objective reality (the sciences) and things pertaining to human experience and subjective reality (the humanities). Our scientific worldview has progressed, moreover, with the assumption more or less intact that it is the former objective reality that is really real, not the latter subjective . . . well, whatever
that
is.

Paranormal phenomena, however, bring the subjective component back in, and with a vengeance—the return of the repressed in all its fury. Whatever they are, it is clear that such events cannot be understood without reference to consciousness
and
the material world: Wolfgang is in town and the laboratory instruments fizzle and fry; the physical location of Elizabeth's harp is pegged by a mind over a thousand miles away; my analyst colleague feels a sharp stabbing physical pain in relationship to an emotional story she has not yet heard; and so on. Such events are thus not just casually, occasionally, or anecdotally anomalous. They are structurally and cognitively anomalous.

The Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack put the matter as eloquently as anyone in an interview with
Nova
when he commented on how the physical phenomena of abduction reports violate our present epistemology and worldview: “we have a kind of either/or mentality. It's either literally physical, or it's in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for—or we have lost the place for—are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world.” Mack concluded what many thoughtful observers
of
such ufological matters have concluded, namely, that, taken alone, the framework of modern science is simply insufficient here. Rather, “multidisciplinary studies combing physics with comparative religion and spirituality are needed to further consider how the interdimensional bridging properties of the abduction phenomenon might work.”
⁴⁸