Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

Home > Other > Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred > Page 7
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 7

by Jeffrey J. Kripal


  A good example of this new super naturalism or psychofolklore is Myers’s treatment of the famous miracles of Lourdes. Listen:

  It is not true, a thousand times it is not true, that a bottle of water from a spring near which a girl saw a hallucinatory figure will by miraculous virtue heal a Turk in Constantinople; but it is true that on some influx from the unseen world,—an influence dimly adumbrated in that Virgin figure and that sanctified spring,—depends the life and energy of this world every day. (HP 1:215)

  Obviously, Myers and his colleagues were not out to celebrate the Virgin’s virtues, nor were they interested in privileging any other specific mythological expression of the cosmic influx, be it the Catholic’s or the Muslim’s. They were after a comparative model of the human psyche that could make some sense of these events’ specific occurrences and dynamics under whatever cultural and historical guise they were expressed. Beyond A and B, there is an X.

  Precisely because they recognized the gap that existed—that always exists—between the myth or symbol and that which is symbolized (the Virgin vs. the cosmic influx), they recognized that this new knowledge could never settle with mere descriptive accuracy of this or that religious experience, much less with speculative accounts of a particular religion’s historical or social development. The Virgin and the spring were never enough. An adequately robust theory of religion would have to go much deeper than mere description or ordinary history, and it could never be bound by the believer’s perspective. Nor, however, could it be bound by a scientistic perspective that conflated rationalism and materialism. It would have to be about the real questions, the metaphysical questions. The double nature of the human being, or what they preferred to call “the human personality,” as it split in two in the process of dying would come to play the central role in this quest. In our own contemporary terms, we might say that they were after a comparative model of extreme religious experiences, the latter catalyzed mostly by traumatic dissociative events, with death being privileged as the ultimate, most complete, and truly universal dissociative event.17

  Obviously, these were not minor questions. They were quite literally life-and-death issues. Accordingly, as these authors approached what they thought might be the first glimmers of a real answer, as the impossible began to look possible, a real excitement began to shimmer between their lines. And why not? A new metaphysical America was appearing on the horizon of their impossible thought. They were about to discover a New World.

  After Life

  Frederic W. H. Myers was the son of Frederic Myers, who was a pastor, and Susan Myers (born Susan Harriet), who loved poetry and nature.18 He was born on February 6, 1843, in Keswick, Cumberland. He spent his childhood in a parsonage, which he remembers as a veritable paradise.

  The boy’s first existential crisis revolved around finding a mole crushed by a carriage wheel when he was five or six. It wasn’t quite the little creature’s death, however, that shocked the boy so. It was his mother’s calm assurance that the thing had no soul. His second shock came again from his mother’s words, this time around seven or eight. “My mother, who shrank from dwelling on the hideous doctrine of hell,” Myers recalled, “suggested to me that perhaps men who led bad lives on earth were annihilated at death.”19 This was simply more than the boy could take. His father’s death about this same time, in 1851, gave little Fred no anguish compared to the idea of such an unthinkable existential horror.

  These are significant, even iconic memories, of course. As we shall soon see, Myers would spend much of his adult life essentially rewriting the afterlife as he received it from his father’s faith and his mother’s shocking thoughts. He would write for decades against all of this, “from the vague emptiness of the conventional heaven to the endless tortures which make the Cosmos the fabrication of a fiend.”20 Hideous indeed.

  His father had been teaching Myers Latin since his sixth birthday. At sixteen, he was sent to a classical tutor, then to a mathematical tutor, and then, at seventeen now, on to Trinity College at Cambridge University. At the age of twenty-two, in 1865, Myers was elected fellow and classical lecturer at Trinity. He resigned four years later, to start, as he put it, “the new movement for the Higher Education of Women.”21 In 1871, he accepted a temporary post as an inspector of schools and, in 1872, took a similar but now permanent position. He was appointed to the Cambridge district in 1875, a job that he held until his health collapsed shortly before his death in 1901.

  Then there was the family life. In 1880, at thirty-seven, Myers stepped into Westminster Abbey in order to marry a twenty-two-year-old woman named Eveleen Tennant. Evie, as she was called, came from a wealthy family. Alan Gauld cites another woman describing her, not too nicely (but perhaps not inaccurately), as a “barmaid beauty.” For his part, Gauld describes her as “without doubt one of the most beautiful girls of her time.”22 Appearances aside, Evie had her own social circles and intellectual interests, which never quite melded with those of her husband. The new couple took up residence in 1881 in Leckhampton House, on the western edge of Cambridge. There they had three children over the next few years. Most of the historians agree that theirs was a stable marriage, but not an entirely happy one. We shall see why later: basically, Evie had married a man married to a ghost.

  Myers insists that these events (except for the ghost part) were only the external events of his story. The real events were the inner ones. These, it turns out, involved the loss of not one, not two, but three consecutive worldviews. Frederic Myers knew how to let go. Looking back on his life, he traced four major periods of conviction: Hellenism, Christianity, Agnosticism, and what he calls “the Final Faith.”

  His early life was dominated by the Greek and Latin classics, particularly Virgil and Plato. From sixteen to twenty-three, the classics “were but intensifications of my own being.”23 He was the texts he read. This period ended, however, in 1864 when Myers visited Greece and realized that this was a vanished world. He now felt “cold and lonely.” He traveled to America in 1865, where on the night of August 28 he swam the dangerous currents of the Niagara River from the Canadian shore to the American one. This death-defying feat felt like a metaphor to him: “I emerged on the American side, and looked back on the tossing gulf. May death, I dimly thought, be such a transit, terrifying but easy, and leading to nothing new?”24

  After his return to England, he converted to a particularly emotional form of Christianity through the ministrations of a young and beautiful woman named Josephine Butler, in whose particular form of sanctity (and Myers’s excessive response to it) many of Myers’s friends suspected more than piety. Gauld, for example, describes Butler’s erotically charged methods in some delicious detail, summarizing her ministry as “the spiritual seduction of promising young men.” “Myers’ worship of Christ,” he concludes, “was not perhaps quite distinct in his own heart from a worship of Mrs. Butler; and his enthusiasm for her brought some sharp comments from his friends.”25 But such a faith, which did contain doctrinal elements as well, eventually faded too, like his earlier Hellenic ideals. Much later, he would look back: “That faith looks to me now like a mistaken shortcut in the course of a toilsome way.”26

  It was a simple lack of evidence and the rigorous methods of science that did in his worldview this time. Agnosticism and materialism set in, and with them a dull pain and a certain horror before a completely indifferent universe. Not that he did not appreciate the birth of modern science, or even the demanding virtues of an intellectual agnosticism. He most certainly did, as is apparent in his essay “Charles Darwin and Agnosticism.” Here he writes warmly of Thomas Huxley and his famous new word. As for Darwin himself, no other man in history, Myers believed, had so completely altered the common worldview by thought alone.27 He took obvious delight in the fact that the great man was buried in Westminster Abbey, that “Darwin should be laid in the shrine of Peter,” as he put it.28 Indeed, Myers went so far as to call Darwin “a liberator of mankind.”29 Those were his ital
ics too. He meant it.

  As an example of what Darwin liberated humanity from, Myers cites the contentious issue of sin. After Darwin, Myers points out, we can no longer see sin as a defect in our relationship to some higher power. We must understand it now in the context of earlier evolutionary development. It deserves no punishment. It is simply an example of our ancient instincts reasserting themselves. Sin is a moment of “arrested development” and nothing more.30 It was in this way that Myers finally took his revenge on his boyhood’s hated hell—by making it look silly and unnecessary in Darwin’s bright light. The same move, of course, more or less vaporized traditional Christianity, for without sin, there is no Fall, and without the Fall, there is no need for Redemption, and . . . The house of cards was wobbling, and Myers knew exactly which card to pull out.

  What he calls the Final Faith developed slowly and gradually. It took decades, really, and it will take us the rest of this chapter to explain its most basic outlines. Myers tried his hand at the same and managed to summarize his worldview in just eight pages in “Fragments of Inner Life.” This was not an easy process for him, since, as he explains, “although my character is ill fitted to illustrate the merits of any form of religion, it is well fitted to bring out that religion’s defects.”31 It was not all criticism and deconstruction, though. There was both a positive foundation and a constructive purpose to his final worldview, namely, the “principles of continuity and evolution.”32

  It was finally evolutionary theory, put into deep dialogue with mystical theorists like Plato and Plotinus, that gave him the grid on which he could then locate and make sense of the psychical data.33 As Myers himself explained it, there were three creedal points: (1) “the fact of man’s survival of death”; (2) “the registration in the Universe of every past scene and thought”; and (3) a “progressive immortality” or “progressive moral evolution” moving always “towards an infinitely distant goal.”34 We will treat each of these in turn. For now it is enough to note what it cost Myers to arrive at such a final faith. “I have been mocked with many a mirage, caught in many a Sargasso Sea,” he admits in a reference to the large expanse of water in the middle of the Atlantic and its multiple currents that contemporary folklore had held responsible for lost ships, a kind of early Bermuda Triangle.35

  Myers is best known for the massive, two-volume tome that focuses the present chapter, his posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), which is in turn based on a series of papers on the subliminal Self that he published between 1880 and his death in 1901. (In his literary defense, the title was bestowed posthumously by his editors.) Myers himself describes the work in a letter from 1900 as “a big book of some 1200 octavo pages, which I don’t expect anybody to read.” It is clear that he was already putting the text together in 1896, when he arranged for Richard Hodgson and Alice Johnson to complete it upon his death (HP 1:ix). They would have to do just that. In truth, Myers was hardly writing from scratch in these final years, since much of the text was culled from the first sixteen volumes of the Proceedings, the first nine volumes of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, as well as from the society’s other “big book,” Edmund Gurney, Myers, and Frank Podmore’s Phantasms of the Living (1886). These are the real source-texts of Human Personality, which is not so much a book as an entire corpus and archive crystallized into a book.

  The damned thing is haunted.

  It is important to point out that Human Personality was not the only book Myers wrote. Far from it. Significantly, most of his other published writings had little to do with psychical research and everything to do with what we would today call literary criticism. For example, he published two separate collections of literary pieces: Essays: Classical and Essays: Modern.36 The former included three long studies of “Greek Oracles,” “Virgil,” and “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.” The latter included readings of figures like George Sand, Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, and George Elliot. Myers also published a separate monograph on Wordsworth, which included both a biographical study and a theological analysis of the poet’s “natural religion,” and a collection of metaphysical essays entitled Science and a Future Life, which included treatments of “Tennyson as Prophet” and “Modern Poets and Cosmic Law.”37

  He was especially fond of the Romantic poets, like Wordsworth, since he considered their poetic access to the deeper realms of the human personality to be superior to that of “the saints and illuminés of various creeds.” Why? Because there is nothing in a poet like Wordsworth that “any other revelation can invalidate or contradict.” In other words, the Romantic poets declared no exact creeds or specific doctrines. Precisely because their subliminal uprushes of genius were simple and evocative, Myers thought that they carried “more conviction” (HP 1:111).

  The truth is, as William James pointed out in a eulogy for his friend, Frederic Myers was, in the end, a Romantic thinker. This seems exactly right to me. Frederic Myers was first and foremost a man of letters, a published award-winning poet, an interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, a classicist, a scholar of deep humanist learning and leanings. He may have been writing of scientific themes as an adult, but he often associated mathematical knowledge with Plato’s doctrine of reminiscences, and he was studying Latin and reading Virgil at six.38

  I cannot stress this point enough, as it underlines and emboldens my own hermeneutical and literary approach to psychical phenomena. Nowhere is the textual nature of Myers’s soul more obvious than in the famous “cross-correspondences” affair that broke out a few years after his death. This involved different women on different continents (including Alice Fleming, the sister of Rudyard Kipling, who was living in India) receiving bits and pieces of classical poetry and personal allusions, allegedly from Myers, that his colleagues then had to piece together and interpret in order to establish their possible postmortem source. Nowhere do we find a more mischievous suggestion that, yes indeed, for Frederic Myers and his colleagues the soul is a hermeneutical reality, that is, a multilayered text that must be interpreted to be seen at all.

  In November of 1899, Myers was diagnosed with Bright’s disease. His heart would now enlarge and his arteries deteriorate. On the first day of 1901, he arrived in Rome, where a certain Dr. Baldwin injected him with an experimental serum developed from the glands and testicles of goats. Myers the hybrid wrote to Oliver Lodge of his upcoming visit to Lodge and his daughters: “possibly I shall meet my dear young female friends on my return as a cross between an old goat and a guardian angel.”39 Alas, he would soon be more guardian angel than goat. A few weeks later, on January 17, 1901, Frederic Myers died, at 9:30 p.m.

  Myers and the Founding of the S.P.R.

  Looking back on his life before he fell ill, Myers found the first clear hint of his Final Faith etched in his diaries on November 13, 1871, in a single brief line: “H. S. on ghosts.” H. S. did not stand for the Holy Spirit. It stood for Henry Sidgwick, a lecturer of moral philosophy at Cambridge and a close and important mentor of the young and idealistic Frederic Myers.

  Sidgwick was a rigorously honest man with an exceptionally fine mind and a big white beard. By the time of Myers’s diary entry, Professor Sidgwick had been losing his Christian faith for years. It wasn’t exactly Ruskin’s geology and those annoying hammers this time, though. It was the historical-critical study of religion. In 1862, Sidgwick read Renan’s Etudes d’Histoire Religieuse, which convinced him that there was no real way of understanding early Christianity without contextualizing its beliefs in the earlier Hebrew and Semitic frameworks. Put simply, he realized that Christianity was a historical phenomenon. He could certainly not now pretend, as he described the attitude of another contemporary, that “the Bible had dropped from the skies ready translated into English.”40 Instead, he chose to study Arabic and Hebrew, and he worried about the impossible miracles that seemed to be at the base of his religion.

  Such pursuits finally taught him that there was no way to rescue his
faith through historical studies. Quite the contrary, he learned that history was a very good way to lose one’s faith. So he returned to his original training in moral philosophy and theology.41 That didn’t help either. Realizing that he could no longer in good conscience fulfill the terms of his appointment—which required him to affirm the doctrines of the Church of England—he resigned his fellowship and assistant tutorship at Trinity. But his standing in the university was very solid, so he was simply reappointed college lecturer in moral science in 1867. He had lost a great deal of income, as this was clearly a demotion of sorts, but he still had a Cambridge career.

  It is important to capture something of Sidgwick’s humanity. There are four lovely scenes in Gauld’s wonderful history of “the Sidgwick group” that merit recalling here. There was the time, for example, when the famous Neopolitan medium Eusapia Palladino was invited to the Myers’s home for a series of experiments. Everyone was preparing for her arrival and practicing for the events that would ensue. “A practice sitting was held,” Gauld explains, “at which, to Myers’ amusement, Sidgwick threw himself under the table, his long white beard trailing on the floor, to practice holding Eusapia’s legs.”42 Palladino was famous for her crude ways and “naughty Neopolitan stories,” and she often came on to her experimenters sexually, and not at all subtly. Sidgwick once responded to such a scene by reciprocating. Essentially, he flirted with her (“a fact,” Gauld explains, “not made available to the impious”). Eusapia, we are told, was even photographed wearing Sidgwick’s academic robes.43 The gown appears again in the third story. As he aged, Sidgwick’s health declined and his doctor told him that he needed more exercise, that he should be riding horses. Sidgwick asked if he could just run himself instead. Yes, the doctor replied. So there was Professor Sidgwick, running through the streets of Cambridge, sometimes even in his academic cap and gown. Finally, there was the time when a German intellectual was trying to convince Sidgwick that the English language is impoverished. After all, it has no word for Gelehrte or “learned men.” “Oh, yes, we have,” replied the good professor, “we call them p-p-prigs.”44

 

‹ Prev