Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (10 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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
.
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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.”
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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.
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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

Sidgwick and Myers, like most of their academic contemporaries, were initially repulsed by the phenomenon of Spiritualism, which had spread
in
the 1850s and '60s to England from the crude hinterlands of America, where it had first erupted in the spring of 1848 in Hydesville, New York. There the two Fox sisters, aged 12 and 14, began hearing raps in their little house, allegedly from a dead peddler buried in the basement. As with the poor peddler (his initials were C. B., and he claimed to have been slain by a butcher's knife by the previous homeowner, a blacksmith named John C. Bell), these Spiritualist movements would operate with a more or less literal reading of the spirits as objectively real entities that interact with living human beings via mediums, knockings, table tippings, dreams, and the cultus of the home séance.

And then things got wilder. It was one thing when men like Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln engaged Spiritualist beliefs and confessed to precognitive intuitions of their own or their loved one's deaths.
⁴⁵
It was quite another when spirits began showing up for “spirit photographs” (which usually amounted to little more than primitive double exposures) or when floating trumpets and accordions played on a literal stage in poor light, for paying patrons no less. Such scenes did not exactly instill confidence in Cambridge intellectuals.

Nor did many of the spirit messages. There were real beauties here, like the one Gauld quotes from the spirit sermon of Reverend H. Snow: “We cannot dwell minutely upon the particulars which go to make up the sum total of the vastness of immensity.”
⁴⁶
What made the situation even more appalling to professional writers was the fact that similar lines were being composed from the spirits of the likes of Emanuel Swedenborg, Saint Paul, and John the Baptist. Gauld dryly concludes: “Of their efforts one can only say that if the great minds of this world degenerate so much in the next the prospect for lesser fry is bleak indeed.”
⁴⁷

Things were not entirely bleak, however. For one thing, as numerous historians, including Gauld himself, have pointed out, these outlandish belief systems often encoded the most progressive and socially liberal visions of the time, visions that would only find realization decades later when the broader culture in effect “caught up” with what the spirits had been saying for quite some time. On some issues, moreover, the culture has
yet
to catch up with the nineteenth-century séances.

The Spiritualist movement, for example, was often especially liberal and ahead of its time when it came to gender and sexual issues. Discussions around both the mysteries of postmortem sexuality and the practice of an earthly ethic of free love were not uncommon in Spiritualist literature, and both the Spiritualist and especially the later occult communities were
filled
with heterodox sexual ideas, mystico-erotic practices, and alternative
genders
and sexualities. These included, among other things, the abandonment of dysfunctional marriages for “spiritual affinities” or soul-mates, sexual intercourse with Elementals or subtle beings, ectoplasm emerging from between the legs (read: from the vaginas) of female mediums, the theological identification of the Fall with sex (a quite common equation in the history of Western esotericism), ritual intercourse without orgasm or movement (a practice taught by Thomas Lake Harris and latter dubbed “Carezza”), a famous female religious leader known to her intimates as “Jack” (Madame Blavatsky), and an equally famous male leader who received his most potent magical revelation in a traumatic homosexual ritual encounter that he himself designed (Aleister Crowley).
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