Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (41 page)

Superman also makes an appearance or two. The first occurs in a discussion of the alien as a modern technoangel, a theme that began to appear in the 1930s (SF 121). “Transcendence is always armed,” Méheust notes, citing one of his favorite authors, Gilbert Durand (SF 121). This is especially obvious in the history of the biblical and Islamic angel, which often looks remarkably like a heavenly military general. So too with the alien and his high-tech weaponry, which Méheust sees as an example of the “technological avatar of the angel.” Such a process culminated in the U.S., Méheust suggests, with the wildly popular appearance of Superman in 1938. The mythical ground had been laid by the earlier science-fiction pulp magazines. And Superman, of course, was essentially a crashed alien. He descends from the sky from another world literally called the Hidden (Krypton) or the Mystical to save us.

Méheust's fullest treatment of Superman, however, occurs in his discussion of the odd behavior and general comportment of the saucer occupants in the sci-fi narratives and UFO encounters. One never sees saucer occupants performing biological functions, such as eating, drinking, or defecating, he reminds us. Such biological functions have been erased, as if they were not necessary for the message.
²³
In essence, Méheust suggests, the UFO occupants do not behave like biological creatures. They behave like
signs
. They are like puppets on a string, or representations in a store window display. Or comic-book characters.

They are also astonishingly, impossibly invulnerable. In one famous American incident, the Hopkinsville case, a farmer and his family shot at
the
things multiple times. They just bounced back and continued on their terrifying way around the farmyard and farmhouse. It is here that Méheust invokes Superman and the comic books again. “One has the impression,” he writes, “that, if [the superheroes] visually distinguish themselves from the flying saucers, they are nevertheless taken from the same substance, they share all their privileges, that the same force controls all the details of the manifestation” (SF 283–84).

Exactly.

The
Challenge of the Magnetic and the Shock of the Psychical

In 1992, Méheust published a second, much less speculative book on flying saucers, this one on the abduction narratives in the comparative light of ethnography and folklore,
En soucoupes volantes: Vers une ethnologie des récits d'enlèvements
, or
On Flying Saucers: Toward an Ethnography of Abduction Narratives
.
²⁴
If the first book was written by a young and passionate ufologist, this second one was written by a careful and qualifying anthropologist. Méheust frankly worried that the success of his first book—and it was quite successful, both culturally and commercially—was due to its “mistiness.” He also knew that in order to get a university position, which is what he really wanted, he would have to mask his real thoughts. So he put aside all of his bold speculations and true convictions and hid them behind the mask of scholarship and objectivity. The result was disappointing. The people who were interested in the fascinating fusion of science fiction and flying saucers lost all interest in his work. The ufologists saw him as a traitor. And the university scholars, well, they were never interested in UFOs in the first place. The second book landed with a dull thud.

In 2007, now looking back with three decades of such sobering experiences and a certain intellectual maturity, Méheust sat down to write a new preface for the second edition of the first book. Here again, he expressed himself in a careful and cautious vein about the whole matter of UFOs. He remained impressed with the phenomenon as a whole, but he had also become convinced that he had underestimated the epistemological difficulties of the inquiry, and especially “the irrepressible tendency of the human spirit to modify the real in the sense of that which the culture of the moment proscribes.” He had underestimated, that is, “the work of the successive filters through which the real passes before it appears to us” (SF 21).

This is a
key
distinction, and one central to my own thought as well. Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard captures the same point, beautifully, in the
very
title of his essay “UFOs: Lost in the Myths.” His point here is the same one that Eliade made in “Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge” with respect to paranormal phenomena and the history of folklore, namely, that there is an experiential core to these myths and legends, and that we ignore this experiential base at considerable cost. Here is how Bullard puts the same idea:

In a sense the myth has fared all too well. It hides the fact that the UFO mystery is not a single question but two, one about the nature of the UFO experience, the other about the human meanings of UFOs. To overlook this distinction leads to dismissal of the whole phenomenon as a cultural reality and nothing more, without any careful reckoning with the experiential core.
²⁵

This, of course, is the same idea that authors like Hynek and Vallee had called “the signal in the noise.” I will return to this notion of “the work of the successive filters” and the two hermeneutical levels of the paranormal problem in my conclusion.

Happily, the historical scope and metaphysical depth of this cultural filtering process was precisely the subject of Méheust's third book, if, that is, one can call a twelve-hundred-page, two-volume tome a “book.”
Somnambulisme et médiumnité
was the doctoral dissertation he wrote for his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. It is divided into two chronological volumes: volume 1,
Le défi du magnetisme
, or
The Challenge of Magnetism
; and volume 2,
Le choc des sciences psychiques
, or
The Shock of the Psychical Sciences
.
²⁶
The first volume begins on May 4, 1784, the date of the marquis de Puységur's discovery-production of somnambulism in a twenty-three-year-old peasant by the name of Victor Race, and carries the story forward to the early 1840s, the rough date of the beginning of the magnetic tradition's cultural decline after a series of official commissions by the French government and medical profession. The second volume returns to the magnetic origin point of 1784, but then carries the story forward further to 1930, the approximate date of this tradition's absorption and eclipse within Western intellectual culture. Finally, Méheust ends the volumes with some reflections on the state of the French academy with respect to the paranormal at the very end of the twentieth century.

The work is far too large and venturesome to capture even in a second book, much less a brief chapter such as this, so I will restrict myself here to focusing on four major themes that are especially relevant to the themes at hand: (1) Méheust's notion of
l'oubli du magnetisme
or “the forgetting of [animal] magnetism” within Western intellectual culture, a two-century
process
that coincides with the erasure of the paranormal within intellectual culture and its subsequent migration into “the safety” of popular culture; (2) the related notion of “shock zones” or “stop concepts” through which he explains how later systems of thought—like Freud's psychoanalysis, Breton's surrealism, or Bergson's creative evolution and philosophy of consciousness—both beat back and incorporated the earlier metaphysical defiances and shocks in order to preserve, but also to expand slightly, the epistemological boundaries of Western culture; (3) the central idea of
décrire-construire
or “description-construction,” which in turns builds on the aforementioned theory of human consciousness as a reservoir of potentialities that can be actualized within different worlds and persons at different places and times through various intellectual practices, psychological techniques, social interactions, and institution building; and (4) the recurrent theme of psychical capacities or extraordinary human powers within this history, basically what Myers called supernormal powers, what Fort called wild talents, and what Vallee referred to as psychical capacities.

1. The Great Forgetting
. It is a commonplace in humanistic circles today to hear that such-and-such truth is a “social construction,” or that this or that claim is a product of an “episteme,” that is, a particular order of knowledge that is held together by elaborate networks of power established by earlier cultural battles whose winning arguments have been institutionalized in carefully controlled hierarchical structures and minutely monitored social and intellectual practices. We thus might believe that we are indeed “thinking freely,” but the patterns and tracks, if not troughs, of our “private” thoughts have in fact been laid down before us by quite public practices and battles. We do not think. We are thought. As William Blake might say, we labor with “mind forg'd manacles,” that is, conceptual chains strapped around our flaming brains by the prejudices, bigotries, and idiocies of previous generations. Along similar but more objectively stated deterministic lines, one also often hears that any truth claim is ultimately really only a “discourse,” that is, a language game that makes good sense within its own rules and grammatical structure, but little or no sense outside of them. Such claims, deeply indebted to French figures like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, are general features of what we mean by poststructuralism and postmodernism today.

One way of thinking about Méheust's project is to read it as an elaborate delineation of these fundamental postmodern insights with respect to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural wars surrounding animal magnetism and psychical research, but toward a very specific, and deeply subversive, end. Basically, what Méheust demonstrates is how the present
regime
of power and knowledge—a regime defined by materialism, determinism, objectivism, and scientism—came about through the disciplining, suppression, and finally forgetting of the metaphysical shock of the psychical, which can indeed be read with the tools of postmodernism
but finally overflows and overwhelms these
. Méheust, in other words, employs the tools of poststructuralist thought in order to think beyond poststructuralism. He relativizes the relativizers, as the sociologist of religion Peter Berger might say.
²⁷

Thus, for example, when he discusses Pierre Bourdieu and the notions that all of our linguistic and geographic borders are the result of conflicts, compromises, and transactions, that the real is not given but constructed, that “society is the seat of a permanent battle around its definition,” he is careful to remind his readers of that which is common in all of this, which is precisely that which is often forgotten, namely, humanity itself (SM 2:121). Not that this human base is entirely stable. The limits of our human faculties, he suggests, were not in 1900 what they were in 1800. The very structure and capacities of our sensorium change with our social practices and intellectual categories, over which we ceaselessly fight. And not for nothing, it turns out: worlds of experience and possibility are indeed at stake.

Vigorous psychical phenomena are less common, or at least less reported, today than they were in the first half of the nineteenth century. Is this because we are not as credulous today, because our predecessors were being duped and we no longer can be? Or is it because the older epistemological limits were less stable, more fluid, and had not yet fully enforced the specificities of our present mental universe? It is not so absurd to ask, then, “if the culture in which we live has not finished completing the occultation of a psychism
sui generis
” (SM 2:122–23). It is not so absurd to ask, that is, if we have forgotten our own innate nature, whether we have, as it were, fallen into a certain cultural unconsciousness.

For the story Méheust tells, the nineteenth century was the turning point, the space and time in Western culture where and when consciousness defiantly suggested that it might be fantastically free of the spatial and temporal strictures that were then beginning to be seen as absolute. It all began on May 4, 1784, when a career military man and artillery colonel, an aristocrat by the name of Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), attempted to put a young peasant by the name of Victor Race into a Mesmeric “healing crisis.” That didn't happen. Instead, Race
woke up asleep
. More specifically, he began to manifest a calm, lucid state of consciousness in which he ceased to speak in his village accent, took on a learned tone, and began to respond not to Puységur's vocal
commands,
but to his unspoken thoughts. It was as if Race had some immediate access to his magnetizer's innermost processes and desires.

Puységur was understandably stunned. He would write two years later of encountering in Victor “a being I do not know how to name” (
un etre que je ne sais pas nommer
).
²⁸
The two men (or the two men and the Being), ten years apart and from vastly different social backgrounds, became close collaborators in a shared exploration of this extraordinary state of mind. Victor, it turned out, could predict in these states the future course of his own treatment and healing with calenderical precision. More astonishingly still, he could also diagnose the conditions of other patients and prescribe effective treatments for their ills.

Puységur quickly discovered other somnambulistic subjects with similar abilities in the same district of France. The area was now a kind of psychic contagion zone. Puységur named this new technique
somnamublisme provoqué
or
sommeil magnétique
. It was the last expression that would finally stick and enter the English language as “magnetic sleep.” By “magnetic,” he referred to the strange metaphysical energies, at once physically palpable and mentally directed, that commonly manifested themselves in these altered states of consciousness. The eventual result of such seemingly humble beginnings was an extremely broad and diverse intellectual, therapeutic, and medical movement that spanned much of the Western world, but especially France, Germany, England, and the U.S. The efflorescence in France was the earliest, although it waned under the Napoleonic wars and, when it revived under the Restoration, so too did the rationalist forces poised against it, mostly from the academy (SM 1:384–93). An official commission was organized under a certain Doctor Husson, the chief medical officer at the Hotel-Dieu. It studied the matter for five years only to issue a report in 1831 that concluded that most of the magnetic phenomena were in fact quite real and effective.