Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (46 page)

The details are certainly analogous enough. Both figures are cast as prototypes of the Romantic hero, that is, as a precocious genius who is prematurely spent by the excessive use of his extraordinary gifts. Both men are described as short, fragile, given to illness, pale, and effeminate. Both men are empowered by a strange, “almost superhuman” force that first appears just short of puberty, that is, at twelve years of age. Both men's superpowers, moreover, involve the mysteries of textuality and the act of reading. Whereas Lambert possesses a strange ability to enter the labyrinthine world of a text and reconstruct the intentions and intimate meanings of the author, Didier takes this gift even further with his psychometric power by which he takes an object and “reads” the previous owner's personality and history via its energies and memories. Lambert can gulp down nine to ten lines with a single look. Alexis can read lines ten to twenty pages down from where the book is open. Finally, both men fail in their vocations. Lambert's secret diaries, which are found by a priest of his boarding school, become the means by which his reputation is ruined. Similarly, when Alexis is attacked by the clergy and accused of being in league with Satan, his niece decides to burn his journal. He also loses his reputation among the academy, which ignores him completely (neglect, as Fort pointed out, being the easiest and most effective form of damning a datum). Both men's health breaks down as a result of their respective misfortune. Lambert suffers from catalepsy and dies at the age of twenty-eight. Didier suffers from epilepsy and ends his career at roughly the same age.

How to explain this correspondence between fiction and reality? We have been here before, of course, with the flying saucers and the science fiction. Méheust offers the most obvious and reasonable answer, namely, that Didier had read Balzac. Perhaps, but that hardly explains everything—we are, after all, dealing with technically impossible matters here, not common skills that one can learn from simply reading a novel. True to his earlier writings, Méheust argues that the impact of literature on society is much deeper and much more mysterious than we realize. More specifically, he
invokes
his
Somnambulisme et médiumnité
and its central notion of
décrire-construire
. Something else is going on here, he suggests. A reality is constructed through elaborate social processes, including the processes of literature, and then it is experienced by gifted visionaries as physically real. The impossible is thus rendered possible, here by literary means.

The case is similar with Alexander Dumas, who assisted in séances with Didier and wrote about magnetic scenes, particularly in his
Joseph Balsamo
. The scenes look a lot like those involving Alexis.

The case is somewhat different with Charles Baudelaire, however, as this particular fiction-fact parallel involved Baudelaire's mystical theory of poetry, which, or so Méheust suggests, was essentially a reworking of psychometric convictions involving the “auratic perception” of physical objects. Psychometry is the practice of handling an object—a shirt, a lock of hair, a bracelet—that a person owned (or was) and “reading out” the identity or chain of memories allegedly inhering in that object. Didier's theorization of his own psychometric practices is a perfect example of psychofolklore, that is, the reinterpretation of a traditional religious practice or doctrine in the light of present paranormal experience and psychical research:

The past, for me, is not dead, but living. There is a pious belief that leads one to preserve religiously, encased in gold or precious stones, the relics of saints, and that encourages one to believe that something of their souls, of their spirits, of their hearts, in a word, of their personalities, remains in these fragments of their dead bodies. For me, I see them re-existing entirely in body, in soul, in spirit, in holiness, within the least particle that they have touched during their lives, and I feel their real presence, as if they were again on this earth.
⁴⁶

Through a kind of occult historiography involving the act of touch, when Alexis “reads” an object, the past comes alive. He physically “feels” and “remembers” it. So too with an inspired poem for Baudelaire—the correspondences and connotations of the words invoke a certain palpable nimbus of nostalgia and remembrance. They carry, as it were, a certain “physical meaning” that can be reinvoked and re-experienced by the sensitive reader. The state of consciousness of the poet is thus reactivated and reactualized in the act of deep reading. Reading has become a genuine mystical act, and poetry has become a kind of divination, even communion with the soul of the “dead” author. Put more precisely,
in Baudelaire the psychometric has become the hermeneutic
.

Finally, there is Didier's role as a kind of “transcendental detective.” The use of psychics to solve crimes is something one often hears about in the
modern
world, mostly on The History Channel and in other popular, and sometimes dubious, venues. Regardless, the phenomenon is embarrassingly well attested in the historical literature and appears to be genuine in that most lowly of senses, namely, in the sense that it sometimes works. Skeptics may dismiss such things, but detectives and police departments use what works.
⁴⁷

The newspapers of the time were certainly convinced. They reported on Didier's activity here as well, including the time he remotely tracked a man named Dubois who had stolen twenty thousand francs and was visiting gambling houses in Brussels and Spa, where he was finally arrested at Didier's direction.
⁴⁸
According to Méheust, such scenes appear to have influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. Méheust believes that Doyle read about Didier in English sources that were widely available, took a psychical practice with which he was very familiar, that is, psychometry, and transposed it “into a mythical capacity for hyperdeduction” (VP 248). An ancient practice, that of divination, was thus given a very modern garb, and an entirely secular genre was born as a result—the detective novel (VP 247–48).

The
Collective Mind: Bateson, De Martino, Vallee, and Jung

One way to get a handle on a thinker's thoughts is to compare his or her system to those of other thinkers who have addressed similar subjects. Since we are at the end now of our readings of our four authors of the impossible, a brief comparison of these four might also serve us well as the beginning of a conclusion.

As we have seen, Bertrand Méheust has written at great length about the history of the mesmeric, magnetic, and psychical research traditions in France. But he also knows the British and American psychical research traditions, and he wrote his M.A. thesis on William James. In many ways, then, his concerns are so close to those of Frederic Myers that it seems almost pointless to point this out. My first chapter on Myers and this fourth chapter on Méheust, then, can be thought of as the beginning and the end of a circle, or, more true to my own gnostic imagination, as a written snake biting its own textual tail. In the end, then, it is probably more fruitful to focus on the middle movements of this hissing book and reflect for a moment on Méheust's thought in relation to that of Charles Fort and Jacques Vallee. I will address the Vallee-Méheust correspondence in this present, penultimate section and the Fort-Méheust correspondence in the last.

Bertrand
Meheust's relationship to Jacques Vallee is a very obvious one. The two men know each other. They have read each other's work. They were both partly inspired in their youth by the same older teacher: Aimé Michel. Both, moreover, approach the data looking for “the signal in the noise” (SF 243), and they hear very similar things, particularly concerning the profound connections between folklore and flying saucers. Méheust clearly acknowledges the similarities in approach, as does Vallee.
⁴⁹

Méheust observes that Vallee's work, especially in its earlier incarnation, is more interested in the occult dimensions of the phenomenon, and that Vallee moved closer to his own present methodology as his work progressed (it is important to keep in mind here that virtually all of Vallee's corpus predates Méheust's, with the important exception of the latter's science-fiction and flying-saucer book of 1978). This is not an unreasonable reading. In Vallee's early writings, one can indeed get the sense that the mythological control system that he was writing about was controlled by some kind of alien mind. In his later work, Vallee appears to have come to see this control system more as a kind of spontaneous collective mind. That is to say, he has effectively intuited the ways that the ideas and structures of a society interact and regulate themselves, much as Méheust would intuit later on in his
Somnambulisme et médiumnite
. It is this approach to a kind of collective mind and its spontaneous self-regulation that really unites our two authors of the impossible and links in turn their books to those of previous authors, especially Gregory Bateson, Ernesto de Martino, and C. G. Jung.

As for Vallee on Méheust, Vallee embraces the incorporation of science fiction into the discussion (indeed, he has written five science-fiction novels, and he pioneered the folklore approach), but he also points out that unexplained aerial phenomena hardly began in 1947. Indeed, Vallee's very latest work, with an independent scholar named Chris Aubeck, who co-founded a collaborative network of librarians, students, and researchers on the Internet called the Magonia Project, works very much against this “modernist fallacy” by focusing on five hundred cases of unexplained aerial phenomena
before 1875
. And it is not just the modernist fallacy Aubeck and Vallee write against. It is also what we might call the “Western fallacy,” for these phenomena are by no means restricted to Europe or North America. Not even close. Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Russian, Egyptian, and Arab accounts, for example, are all listed and discussed in their latest work.
⁵⁰
Vallee, then, reads Western science fiction not as simply productive of a later living folklore involving flying saucers (although it is that too), but also as a kind of literary intuition or imaginal realization of something
that
has been with us, with all of us, for a very long time. Vallee, in other words, points toward a realist conclusion that is in no way dependent on modern science fiction.

Where is Méheust with all of this now? “My own concern,” Méheust explained to me, “is the ecology of mind.” He was very enthusiastic about such a notion when he first encountered it in the American anthropologist and cybernetics theorist Gregory Bateson. His thought goes well beyond Bateson's in terms of its metaphysical reach, but the sensibility is much the same. For Bateson, “mind” is not something restricted to the human skull. Nature has mind. So too do ecological systems. Mind is the intelligence of a collective system or network, of “the patterns that connect,” as Bateson put it so famously in a line that could well function as a motto for the comparativist. This poetic expression captured Bateson's understanding of mind as any complex system that can process information and self-correct. Cells, societies, and ecosystems are all forms of such mind, which may or may not possess consciousness. All minds, though, rely on multiple material parts. Hence there can be no final separation of the mental and the physical. This is why Bateson detested dualism, supernaturalism, or any other theory or theology that separated what he called the “necessary unity” of mind and nature.
⁵¹

The implications for the study of the paranormal seem obvious enough. Accordingly, Méheust was especially keen on demonstrating, through a work like
Somnambulisme et médiumnité
, how the mentality or form of mind of a particular culture shifts, changes, and morphs over time, that is, how it regulates itself. Hence, again, what is possible in one historical period becomes impossible in another, and vice versa. It is on this crucial point—which is also the central point of these four chapters—that Méheust also invokes the work of the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, and especially the latter's
The Magical World
.

As we have already noted in the introduction, De Martino suggested that the data of ethnography, folklore, and psychical research point to “the paradox of a
culturally-conditioned
nature, and all its embarrassing implications.”
⁵²
More specifically, he argued under section titles like “The Problem of Magical Powers” and under rubrics like “paranormal studies” and “paranormal phenomenology” that reality behaves differently within different linguistic codes and historical periods. Magical practices presume a form of human consciousness or collective mind that is much more embedded in the natural world than our own present form of mind in the West. We have moved out of this state of mind in order to gain certain things (foremost of these being the individual), but
we
have also lost certain things (like our communion with the natural world).

This is an especially powerful idea with strong parallels and resonances in thinkers ranging from Henri Bergson's notion of an
élan vital
guiding the evolution of human consciousness, through John Gebser's notion of an evolving human sensorium that cognitively and sensually constructs reality in different ways in different historical periods, to Charles Taylor's
Sources of the Self
and his notion that the boundaries around the experience of the Western self are more stable now. In De Martino, the thesis is expressed in an especially strong way, and he does not hesitate to draw on parapsychological material to make his point. Accordingly, assessments of De Martino's
The Magical World
range from readings of it as a youthful mistake out of which the anthropologist, thankfully, matured, to celebrations of the little anomalous book as the key to his entire lifework. Clearly, however we read De Martino's corpus, the base notion that reality appears to human consciousness differently in different cultural frames, that the real is malleable, that the impossible becomes possible and the possible impossible, is fundamental to Méheust's corpus.