Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Read Free

professional way. Popular culture is our mysticism. The public realm is our esoteric realm. The paranormal is our secret in plain sight. Weird.
    As I read into the background literature of these modern mythologies, I found myself confronting the histories of Western esotericism, animal magnetism, psychical research, science fiction, and the UFO phenomenon (the latter, it turns out, has been especially influential on the superhero via science fiction). In the process, I began encountering a few select authors whose power of expression, humor, and unfettered freedom of speculative thought simply stunned me. There were many reasons for my sense of surprise. What shocked me the most, however, was the fact that these authors, through decades of extensive data collection, classification, and theorizing (that is, through a kind of natural history of the supernormal), had arrived at some basic metaphysical conclusions that were eerily similar, if not actually identical, to those that grounded the fantasy literature of the superhero comics. So, for example, the American psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud came to the conclusion through his research on the psychokinetic abilities of Ted Serios (who could mentally imprint detailed images on photographic film under carefully controlled conditions) that, “man has in fact within him vast untapped powers that hitherto have been accorded him only in the magic world of the primitive, in the secret fantasies of childhood, and in fairy tales and legend.” 1 This struck me as, well,
impossible
.
    What also surprised me was the fact that I had never heard of these authors, that after over twenty-five years of studying comparative mystical literature professionally, I had never
once
encountered another scholar mentioning, much less engaging, three of the four writers whom I came to admire so. The British classicist and psychical researcher Frederic Myers was the exception to this rule, but even he was not much of an exception. Everyone in the field reads the American psychologist and philosopher William James. But who reads James’s close friend and intimate collaborator on the other side of the ocean? Who in the study of religion seriously engages Myers’s massive and endlessly fascinating
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
? A few for sure, but only a few. 2 The situation is much more dramatic for our second author of the impossible, Charles Fort, whom only a few radical folklorists appear to have read; or our third and fourth, Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust, whom almost no one in the field has heard of, much less read. I hadn’t anyway. My conclusion was a simple one: Myers, Fort, Vallee, and Méheust are not part of the scholarly canon that has come to define what is possible to be reasonably thought and comparatively imagined in the professional study of religion.
    This latter realization both fascinated and upset me. It was as if my profession had somehow intentionally steered me away from such writers and thoughts. I do not, of course, attribute any personal intention here. I am not accusing anyone of anything. Nor do I wish to pretend that the four authors under discussion here somehow solve the problems other scholars have inadequately addressed. The truth is that I have deep reservations about the objectivist epistemologies that control much of psychical research to this day, and I think some of Fort’s ideas are simply nuts (but, to his humorous credit, so did he). I do now suspect, however, that the study of religion as a discipline, as a structure of thought,
as afield of possibility
, has severely limited itself precisely to the extent that it has followed Western culture on this particular point, that is, to the extent that the discipline constantly encounters robust paranormal phenomena in its data—the stuff is
everywhere
—and then refuses to talk about such things in any truly serious and sustained way. The paranormal is our