Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2 page)

I couldn't figure out what was happening. As far as I knew there had been no noise, I felt no pain or discomfort. I turned on the light and, not knowing what else to do, reached for the transistor radio beside my bed. I flicked the “on” switch. I did not know what local station I had tuned to during the day, but, being the middle of the night and the AM band subject to those strange late-night bounces, now a distant station had supplanted the local one. It was a California station. The radio voice, a newsman of some sort, was asking Robert Kennedy a question [he was fresh off a victory in the California presidential primary election and was passing through a hotel kitchen on his way to a press conference]. The newscaster was walking with Kennedy and his entourage. As I listened, I heard sounds of mayhem. When the newsman was able to get his wits together, he said, with uncontrollable emotion, that Kennedy had just been shot. I was stunned. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. For the next hour or so I remained glued to this distant station, listening as the bits and pieces of news were put together to construct a picture of what had happened, and finally hearing the sad word of Kennedy's death, some time later.
¹

The emotional effect of all of this on Adam was as immediate and as dramatic as his sudden awakening in the middle of the night: “I was devastated. I was an admirer of Kennedy and impressed by his campaign. I had seen him the previous fall at the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto where he had attended a football game and had even shaken his hand as he left the area.” The experience would not leave him, would not let him go:

Later, when I reflected on what happened to me in those few minutes that night, I began to realize that something truly extraordinary had occurred—for several
reasons:
(1) I had never before (and have never since) gone instantaneously from a sound sleep to total wakefulness; (2) the fact that when I reached for the radio it was tuned to a position on the dial that would give me that particular California station; and (3) the fact that the events of the assassination occurred within five minutes of my sudden awakening. Was this coincidence? I simply could not bring myself to accept that explanation. Could it have been some kind of ESP, some kind of telepathic communication from Kennedy picked up perhaps at random? At first sight that may seem possible. But a little thought showed me that this explanation was not adequate. Events had to happen in my room in precisely the right way for this to occur, and there is no way that telepathy could have arranged them. Even if, as some might believe, a telepathic communication could have awakened me in that strange way, the telepathic explanation could not account for the physical state of things that was needed for the event to occur as it did, nor could it account for the crucial timing of my movements over those first few minutes after awakening. By that, I mean that it could not account for my radio being set at the very frequency at which the broadcast would occur, and it could not account for the fact that I turned on the radio at precisely the moment when the event was being broadcast. Besides, there are many other things I could have done instead when suddenly awakened, such as getting up to see that everything was all right in the house or getting a drink, but in fact I immediately reached over and turned on that fatefully tuned radio.

And there was more:

For years I could not understand why, even given the paranormal dimensions of this experience, it was me to whom it happened. Then in the early 1980s I had occasion to study the traditional magico-spiritual system of the Hawaiian Islands, called “Huna.” In his exposition of this fascinating doctrine, Max Freedom Long described the Huna belief that when people have some kind of meaningful contact with each other, a “sticky thread” comes into existence that connects the two and continues to connect them wherever they go for the whole of their lives. Without going into the implications of this belief, I would just like to say that when I read this I suddenly remembered that night in 1968, but also, and especially, my handshake with Robert Kennedy. I recalled that handshake very vividly. That day I was, of course, very moved to be shaking the hand of a man who so greatly impressed me. But something else, something very odd also affected me. It was how his hand felt. It was a strange impression that I could not get out of my mind at the time. Without realizing it, when I reached out toward Kennedy, I had expected to feel a warm moist hand, and what I felt instead really puzzled me. He hand was very dry, almost like leather.
I
was taken aback by the feeling, because it was so different from what I was expecting. Now, as I read Long's words about those “sticky threads,” that contact with Kennedy's hand came back vividly to me. Viewing the experience in terms of the Huna view of the world, for the first time some bit of light seemed to be cast on the “Why me?” question. A vibrant thread of connection was there, and it was along that thread that the events of June 5, 1968, were strung. Even though questions remained, and even though this new insight did not remove the mystery of the event, I seemed to feel a little more understanding of one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

For what it is worth, Adam was not alone in his nightly vision. Alan Vaughan, the writer who would coauthor
Dream Telepathy
(1973) with Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner, identified sixty-one precognitive dreams in his own journals (the researcher as researched), including two he wrote down on May 25, 1968, that he felt indicated Robert Kennedy's life was at risk. Vaughan wrote Krippner a detailed letter about them.
²
Kennedy was shot a week later.

Still, it is also true that Adam's story remains a tricky one. It can, after all, be read in two very different ways. Inside the box, that is, from within Adam's own experience, there was something clearly and unmistakably uncanny about it. Outside the box of those personal experiences, however, an observer could just as easily read the story as a series of striking coincidences, and nothing more. One is left, then, with a profound hesitation—a fundamental uncertainty or question mark.

But what if this sense of coincidence is precisely what is inside the box, and it is Adam's uncanny sense of things that is operating “outside the box,” as we say? What if there are patterns and plots in our lives that simply cannot be read and understood from a normal sense-based perspective? And what if paranormal experiences like Adam's are a kind of signal from or refraction of this other dimension of time and space into the brain and its box?

I begin with such questions not to pretend some knowledge that I do not possess (like the professional debunkers or the true believers), but to provoke and perform our almost total ignorance of such things and, more positively, to call us out of our rationalist denials and naïve assumptions into something more. I am not after easy rational solutions, much less beliefs in this or that cultural mythology. I am after liberating confusions.

I am after the Impossible.

Introduction

OFF THE PAGE

The literature of
fantasy
and the fantastic, especially in science fiction, is much in demand, but we still do not know its intimate relationship with the different occult traditions. The underground vogue of Hesse's
Journey to the East
(1951) in the fifties anticipated the occult revival of the late sixties. But who will interpret for us the amazing success of . . .
2001[: A Space Odyssey]
? I am merely asking the question.

—MIRCEA ELIADE
, “The Occult and the Modern World”

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

This book began as another book,
Mutants and Mystics
. There I explore some of the esoteric currents of American popular culture, particularly as these are narrated and illustrated in the superhero comic book, a pop
mythology
with some surprisingly intimate ties to the histories of occultism, psychical research, and related paranormal phenomena. In
Mutants and Mystics
, I am especially interested in the manner in which certain seemingly universal human experiences—out-of-body flight, magical influence, telepathic communication, secret forms of identity, altered states of consciousness and energy—occupy a rather curious place in our present Western culture. Whereas such marvels are vociferously denied (or simply ignored) in the halls of academic respectability, they are enthusiastically embraced in contemporary fiction, film, and fantasy. We are obviously fascinated by such things and will pay billions of dollars for their special display, and yet we will not talk about them, not at least in any serious and sustained professional way. Popular culture is our mysticism. The public realm is our esoteric realm. The paranormal is our secret in plain sight. Weird.

As I read into the background literature of these modern mythologies, I found myself confronting the histories of Western esotericism, animal magnetism, psychical research, science fiction, and the UFO phenomenon (the latter, it turns out, has been especially influential on the superhero via science fiction). In the process, I began encountering a few select authors whose power of expression, humor, and unfettered freedom of speculative thought simply stunned me. There were many reasons for my sense of surprise. What shocked me the most, however, was the fact that these authors, through decades of extensive data collection, classification, and theorizing (that is, through a kind of natural history of the supernormal), had arrived at some basic metaphysical conclusions that were eerily similar, if not actually identical, to those that grounded the fantasy literature of the superhero comics. So, for example, the American psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud came to the conclusion through his research on the psychokinetic abilities of Ted Serios (who could mentally imprint detailed images on photographic film under carefully controlled conditions) that, “man has in fact within him vast untapped powers that hitherto have been accorded him only in the magic world of the primitive, in the secret fantasies of childhood, and in fairy tales and legend.”
¹
This struck me as, well,
impossible
.

What also surprised me was the fact that I had never heard of these authors, that after over twenty-five years of studying comparative mystical literature professionally, I had never
once
encountered another scholar mentioning, much less engaging, three of the four writers whom I came to admire so. The British classicist and psychical researcher Frederic Myers was the exception to this rule, but even he was not much of an exception. Everyone in the field reads the American psychologist and philosopher
William
James. But who reads James's close friend and intimate collaborator on the other side of the ocean? Who in the study of religion seriously engages Myers's massive and endlessly fascinating
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
? A few for sure, but only a few.
²
The situation is much more dramatic for our second author of the impossible, Charles Fort, whom only a few radical folklorists appear to have read; or our third and fourth, Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust, whom almost no one in the field has heard of, much less read. I hadn't anyway. My conclusion was a simple one: Myers, Fort, Vallee, and Méheust are not part of the scholarly canon that has come to define what is possible to be reasonably thought and comparatively imagined in the professional study of religion.

This latter realization both fascinated and upset me. It was as if my profession had somehow intentionally steered me away from such writers and thoughts. I do not, of course, attribute any personal intention here. I am not accusing anyone of anything. Nor do I wish to pretend that the four authors under discussion here somehow solve the problems other scholars have inadequately addressed. The truth is that I have deep reservations about the objectivist epistemologies that control much of psychical research to this day, and I think some of Fort's ideas are simply nuts (but, to his humorous credit, so did he). I do now suspect, however, that the study of religion as a discipline, as a structure of thought,
as afield of possibility
, has severely limited itself precisely to the extent that it has followed Western culture on this particular point, that is, to the extent that the discipline constantly encounters robust paranormal phenomena in its data—the stuff is
everywhere
—and then refuses to talk about such things in any truly serious and sustained way. The paranormal is our secret in plain sight too. Weird.

Definitions
and Broken Lineages

It does not have to be this way.

It has not always been this way.

A few historical observations and opening definitions are in order here. The expression
psychic
goes back to nineteenth-century uses. It was probably first coined as “Psychic Force” by Serjeant Cox in an 1871 letter to the renowned English chemist William Crookes, who subsequently did more than anyone to bring this Psychic Force into the English language through a series of remarkable experiments and reports in the early 1870s on the observable effects that mediums like Daniel Dunglas Home had on inert
objects
and human bodies (including Home's own, which Crookes noted appeared visibly “drained” after employing the Psychic Force). Despite intense professional opposition and censorship, Crookes never retracted either the results of his experiments with Home or his firm conviction that “there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals.”
³
In the wake of Crookes's brave new physics, the London Society for Psychical Research adopted the slightly longer adjective
psychical
as an unsatisfactory but workable descriptor for its own scientific pursuits. The S.P.R., as it came to be known, was founded in the winter of 1882 by a few close colleagues at Cambridge University. An American branch was founded three years later, in 1885, with William James of Harvard University as one of its key founding figures and certainly the most eloquent and sophisticated proponent of “psychical research” on this side of the Atlantic. In short, the terms
psychic
and
psychical
possess elite intellectual roots and were born in the professional academy.