Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  “This,” Myers explains, “is exactly what I hold to have happened in the history of human evolution.” And it was Plato who “was the first larva to insist upon the imaginal characters.”115

  Here he is thinking again of Plato’s doctrine of reminiscences whereby “sudden increments of faculty” of a mathematical or musical type (as with a genius) are explained by positing a preexisting state in which these forms of knowledge came naturally to the soul. “Somewhat similarly,” Myers writes, “I would suggest that telepathy and cognate faculties . . . may be the results of an evolution other than that terrene or physical evolution.” Basically, in a telepathic event, we are (re)discovering an innate human potential that evolution is now actualizing in a fuller and fuller fashion. We are realizing that we may not be slugs after all. Still on that cabbage-leaf band of the spectrum, but seeing past it now, Myers concludes that “here is a similarity of structure between our own intelligence and some unseen intelligence, and that what that unseen intelligence is we too may once have been, and may be destined again to be.”116

  Such a line of thinking, of course, did not begin or end with Frederic Myers. We have encountered it already in Alfred Russel Wallace. The truth is that literally hundreds of philosophers, poets, psychical researchers, psychologists, physicists, and philosophers were exploring the idea in the second half of the nineteenth century. Different forms of it, for example, were expressed by the British writer Edward Carpenter and, in a much less disciplined way, by the Canadian physician and Whitmanian mystic, Richard Maurice Bucke, who gave the twentieth century the phrase “cosmic consciousness.”117 It was this same line of thought again that led eventually to a world-class intellectual like Henri Bergson, who philosophically refigured the nature of consciousness in the light of psychical research and what he called the “evolutionary impulse” (élan vital), kept a portrait of William James in his office, became president of the London Society for Psychical Research in 1913, and ended his very last book with this very last line:

  Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. . . . Theirs [is] the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.118

  Who today writes like that?

  The Telepathic and the Erotic: Myers’s Platonic Speech

  The subliminal, the supernormal, and the imaginal, then—all on their way to “the making of gods.” For Myers, all of this was subsumed within the centerpiece of his system—the telepathic. The “telepathic law,” as he called it, is what held everything else together. It was the “gravity” of the psychical world, the binding idea that explained almost everything for Frederic Myers, from spirit communication and poetic or philosophical genius, to crisis apparitions and possession, to the efficacy of prayer, the communion of saints, and the ancient doctrine of the World-Soul, even the actions of a possible Divine Spirit.119 This is all well known and often discussed in the literature on Myers and the S.P.R.

  What is not so well known and, as far as I can tell, seldom discussed is Myers’s own clearly stated conviction that the telepathic is related to the erotic, that telepathy is, if you will, ultimately an expression of love or, conversely, that “Love is a kind of exalted, but unspecialized telepathy” (HP 2:282). Some of this may have already been intuited in the curious linguistic fact that the British psychical research tradition emerged out of an earlier discourse on Mesmerism and animal magnetism located largely in France and the delightful coincidence that the French word for “magnet” is also the adjective for “loving” (aimant). To my knowledge, however, Myers never engages in such playful speculations.

  We need no such speculations, however, in order to establish that the telepathic and the erotic are intimately linked phenomena for Frederic Myers, that, somehow, these two dimensions of the human condition are expressing the same deep metaphysical unity of things. Myers, after all, explicitly tells us exactly this in one of the most dramatic sections of Human Personality. In the third chapter on “Genius,” we come across an extensive discussion of “the primary passion” (HP 1:111–16). Myers has just completed a long discussion of genius as subliminal uprush in philosophers, mathematical prodigies, poets (Wordsworth, Browning, and Shelley), and contemporary novelists (George Sand, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson), all of whom, he argues, were uniquely skilled at remaining open to subliminal suggestions of great scientific, literary, and philosophical worth. Stevenson, for example, dreamed of possessing a double personality (the Human as Two again). He wrote entire stories after what he called “the Little People” or “Brownies.” These were his dream sprites who, with an eye to the bankbook, happily and dutifully appeared in his dreams in order to act out precise plots that he could later write down and sell (HP 1:91). Exactly like Freud, moreover, Myers saw a poet of Wordsworth’s status as an “introspective psychologist,” that is, as a genius who was accessing on an experiential level what the psychologists were mapping on an abstract theoretical level (HP 1:109). In our own contemporary terms, we might say that, for Myers, great writers are practical mystics.

  After such literary studies, Myers suggests that, as far as such subliminal uprushes or impossible authorizations are intellectual, they also tend to be telaesthetic, that is, they bring “direct knowledge of facts of the universe outside the range of any specialized organ or of any planetary view” (HP 1:111). Telaesthesia was yet another Greek coinage of Myers. The term referred to the mind’s ability to access information at a distance without any receiving or sending mind on the other end. He preferred it to the more common French term, clairvoyance, because the latter implies the organ of sight, and perceptions at a distance are by no means always visual. It is also important to note that, although telaesthesia is clearly related to telepathy, they are not the same thing. Telepathy requires another human being, whereas telaesthesia does not.120 Unlike telaesthesia, moreover, telepathy implies, as its Greek root suggests, a powerful emotional connection. Telepathy implies love, passion, pathos. For Myers, telepathy, precisely because of this strong emotional component, is higher than telaesthesia. In my own terms now, Myers’s central category of telepathy is not simply about Consciousness. It is also about Energy.

  The reader can almost feel this energy in the text. When Myers gets to the subject of eros, the voice and tone shift dramatically. We are no longer reading a scientific treatise or a piece of literary criticism. Myers becomes a poet again, and he is giving a speech now. But not just any speech. It is as if, with just a few months left to live, he decided to set aside all reservations and say what he really thought.

  And so he imaginatively enters, he becomes one of his most beloved Greek classics, that most famous of all collections of speeches on eros and its sublimation into philosophical ideation, Plato’s Symposium or “Drinking Party.” Fred Myers enters the text, stands up in his turn, and begins:

  Telaesthesia is not the only spiritual law, nor are subliminal uprushes affairs of the intellect alone. Beyond and above man’s innate power of world-wide perception, there exists also that universal link of spirit with spirit which in its minor earthly manifestations we call telepathy. Our submerged faculty—the subliminal uprushes of genius—can expand in that direction as well as in the direction of telaesthesia. The emotional content, indeed, of those uprushes is even profounder and more important than the intellectual;—in proportion as Love and Religion are profounder and more important than Science or Art. (HP 1:111)

  And he goes on:

  That primary passion, I repeat, which binds life to life, which links us both to life near and visible and to life imagined but unseen;—that is no mere organic, no mere planetary impulse, but the inward aspect of the telepathic law. Love and religion are thus continuous;—they represent different phases of one all-pervading mutual gravitation of souls. The flesh does not conjoin, but dissever; a
lthough through its very severance it suggests a shadow of the union which it cannot bestow. We have to do here neither with a corporeal nor with a purely human emotion. Love is the energy of integration which makes a Cosmos of the Sum of Things. (HP 1:112)

  Myers immediately explains that there is no “emotion subliminal” that ranges so widely and shows itself in so many guises as love.121 Employing his spectrum method again, he explains that at one end of the scale, love is “as primitive as the need of nutrition,” that is, it manifests as sex. At the other end, eros morphs into hermeneutics. Literally. Here is Myers: “at the other end it becomes, as Plato has it, the hermeneueon kai diaporthmeuon, ‘the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man’” (HP 1:112). We are back to the threshold and the art of interpretation across the gap of two states of consciousness or being.

  Myers immediately glosses this rather mysterious line with another: “The controversy as to the planetary or cosmical scope of the passion of Love is in fact central to our whole subject” (HP 1:112). In other words, it all comes down to whether we understand the erotic as something simply sexual and biological, or as something also potentially mystical and hermeneutical, that is, as the “the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man.” It is worth repeating, in my own terms now: by his own stark confession late in life and in his own final statement, a metaphysical understanding of the erotic lay at the very heart and center of Myers’s lifework. And by the erotic, I do mean the erotic. I mean eros.

  So did Myers. The classicist invokes two iconic figures to represent the two poles of this perennial debate about the metaphysical status of “that primary passion”: the famous French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, who is made to represent “the physiological or materialistic conception of the passion of love,” and Plato himself, whose record of the prophetess Diotima’s speech on eros in the Symposium Myers unequivocally describes as “unsurpassed among the utterances of antiquity” (HP 1:112, 113). Thus, whereas Janet’s “planetary view” sees “sexual instinct as the nucleus of reality around which baseless fancies gather,” the “Platonic view” regards such “earthly passion as the initiation and introduction into cosmic sanctity and joy” (HP 1:xxxi). Basically, what we have here is a very clear polarization of the erotic as the sexual and/or the mystical.

  Although he plays at a certain balance between Janet and Plato, it is very clear where Myers himself stands on the debate. He stands with Plato and his conviction that it is eros that generates genital desire and the creative energies of philosophy, law, poetry, art, culture, and society itself. As if to drive this point home, Myers quotes directly from the Symposium for almost two full pages.

  There is something about this section on Plato’s Symposium in Human Personality that sets it apart, that marks it for me. It is my own intuitive sense, which I cannot prove or establish beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is here that Myers gives himself away; that it is here that we learn about what drove him to research, classify, and write for those two remarkable decades. It is not simply Myers’s stated conviction that the primary passion of Love is central to his entire subject. It is not simply the textual fact that his quotes from the Symposium in this section are among the longest of the entire two volumes. It is the biographical facts that in the summer of 1873 Myers fell madly in love with his cousin’s wife, Annie Hill Marshall, and—more importantly still—that it was her tragic death, on September 1, 1876, that helped catalyze and drive his own anxious questions about the postmortem survival of the human personality. Annie committed suicide, probably in despair over her mentally ill husband, by ineffectively cutting her throat with a pair of scissors and then walking into a cold lake. Myers was devastated.

  But he never really let Annie go. As historians Alan Gauld and Deborah Blum have explained in some detail, Myers would love this ghost for the rest of his life. There were early alleged signals from Annie in Myers’s extensive sittings with mediums, but it was not until 1899 that Myers received his first clear communication from his beloved, this time through a medium named Rosina Thompson. Myers was convinced now. As a sign of just how convinced, it is worth pointing out that he sat with Mrs. Thompson 150 times between September of 1898 and December of 1900. And this, of course, was at the very same time he was completing Human Personality and, presumably, polishing those passages on Plato’s Symposium. In any case, it was these late sittings with Rosina Thompson that Myers considered his very best evidence for the soul’s survival of bodily death. Annie’s continued existence was the final proof that he would soon publish for the world.

  Until, of course, his wife found out. The best evidence and final proof was systematically suppressed by Myers’s widow, Eveleen Myers, who actively censored her late husband’s Human Personality by excising all the key passages about Annie Hill Marshall. Blum explains:

  What he could not have foreseen when he composed Human Personality was that the evidence that Myers considered strongest—the séances in which Annie Marshall appeared, his many sittings with Rosina Thompson—would not give support to his published argument. His wife had many pertinent records destroyed; more than that, she had refused to allow [Richard] Hodgson to mention them in his edited version of the book.122

  And that was not all. “Evie Myers wanted every trace destroyed, every scrap of evidence, that her husband had been infatuated with a spirit,” Blum explains. She particularly hated her husband’s autobiography, “Fragments of Inner Life,” in which he “had actually counted the days with and without his beloved Annie.”

  “I find,” Myers writes in these same pages, “that love in its highest—in its most spiritual—form is a passion so grossly out of proportion to the dimensions of life that it can only be defined, as Plato says, as ‘a desire for the eternal possession’ of the beloved object.”123 He was almost certainly writing about Annie. He had hinted at the same in what I have called the “Platonic speech” of Human Personality: “And through the mouth of Diotima,” he wrote there, “Plato insists that it is an unfailing sign of true love that its desires are for ever; nay, that love may be even defined as the desire of the everlasting possession of the good” (HP 1:113). Evie was not the everlasting possession whom Myers desired. And this, quite understandably, infuriated her.

  Blum goes on to explain how Myers had given privately printed copies of “Fragments” to his closest colleagues in 1893. Evie demanded that they all turn their copies over to her. She even asked William James to oversee the censorship campaign. Sir Oliver Lodge, head of the physics department at the University of Birmingham, flatly refused, although he agreed not to publish the whole thing.124 Evie would end up editing the final published version of “Fragments of Inner Life” in 1904. They were indeed now “Fragments” in more ways than one. In her preface, she makes no mention of Annie, only that she has collected other letters of her husband, and that “some day they may be possibly printed, but they are of too personal a nature for present publication.”125 That is all.

  As both Blum and Gauld have stressed, then, on some deep level it was Myers’s “primary passion” for Annie that provided the spiritual fuel for those two decades of incredible focus, dedication, travel, and writing. Recall that before the S.P.R. was even founded in 1882, Myers had participated in 367 séances. He would sit at many hundreds more, including those 150 times with Rosina Thompson as he approached and entered the writing of Human Personality. There are more than a few reasons to approach Human Personality as a kind of textualized séance, then. There are all those séances.

  On a deeper level, however, we might also speculate that the ritual of the séance structured the text itself, that, through these pages at the end of his life, Frederic Myers was striving to establish contact with his departed beloved, Annie Hill Marshall, as he himself moved toward the threshold to meet her again. We might speculate, that is, that his philosophical quest was driven, exactly as in Diotima’s speech, by the altered states of eros, by the love of a deceased Beloved and the forces unknown to science that he appears
to have known in her presence, both while she was still living and after she had died. The “passion of love” was indeed “central to our whole subject,” as he put it so well, so clearly, so honestly. It was in this way that the erotic subsumed the traumatic in Myers’s Human Personality. This was how Love finally conquered Death.

  Given all of this—some of it easily established, some of it admittedly speculative—I cannot help asking a final question. Was Frederic Myers’s conversion to psychical research in the fall of 1873 really connected to shaking John King’s hairy hand from the ceiling? Could it have rather been connected to Annie, with whom he had just fallen deeply in love that previous summer? I find it significant that Myers is forever relating his central concept of telepathy to eros, not to hairy hands. It must be admitted that this connection between the telepathic and the erotic is not immediately obvious, unless of course one has experienced exactly such a connection in one’s own life. Then it is not only patently obvious; it is crucially important. This, I suspect, is what happened to Frederic Myers.

  Recall here that our only source for what Myers describes as his “personal experience of forces unknown to science,” which he tells us he will not tell us about, is the very text that his widow later censored and controlled, that is, his “Fragments of Inner Life.” Obviously, when Frederic Myers refuses to tell us a secret in a text that was not made public until after his death and that we know his widow subsequently censored, we must be more than a little wary.

  Alan Gauld makes a similar point, although he does not ask quite the same question about Myers’s initial conversion experience to psychical research. He points out that Myers fell madly in love with Annie Marshall at the exact time he began investigating Spiritualism. He is also very clear that Annie became a veritable mystical presence for him. She was Beatrice to Myers’s Dante. “She became at once a symbol and a manifestation of a hidden world of timeless realities, a world once apprehended by Plato, and now obscurely revealed by the strange phenomena of Spiritualism.” This, Gauld speculates, is partly explained by the fact that Annie herself showed mediumistic talents and attended séances with Myers.