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

secret in plain sight too. Weird.
    Definitions and Broken Lineages
    It does not have to be this way.
    It has not always been this way.
    A few historical observations and opening definitions are in order here. The expression
psychic
goes back to nineteenth-century uses. It was probably first coined as “Psychic Force” by Serjeant Cox in an 1871 letter to the renowned English chemist William Crookes, who subsequently did more than anyone to bring this Psychic Force into the English language through a series of remarkable experiments and reports in the early 1870s on the observable effects that mediums like Daniel Dunglas Home had on inert objects and human bodies (including Home’s own, which Crookes noted appeared visibly “drained” after employing the Psychic Force). Despite intense professional opposition and censorship, Crookes never retracted either the results of his experiments with Home or his firm conviction that “there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals.” 3 In the wake of Crookes’s brave new physics, the London Society for Psychical Research adopted the slightly longer adjective
psychical
as an unsatisfactory but workable descriptor for its own scientific pursuits. The S.P.R., as it came to be known, was founded in the winter of 1882 by a few close colleagues at Cambridge University. An American branch was founded three years later, in 1885, with William James of Harvard University as one of its key founding figures and certainly the most eloquent and sophisticated proponent of “psychical research” on this side of the Atlantic. In short, the terms
psychic
and
psychical
possess elite intellectual roots and were born in the professional academy.
    The language of the
paranormal
arises a bit later. It originates in the early decades of the twentieth century as a way of referring to physical or quasi-physical events, often of an outrageous or impossible nature (think floating tables, materializing objects or “apports,” and ectoplasm), that were believed to be controlled by as yet unknown physical, that is, natural laws. The term, however, was clearly connected to the earlier American and British Spiritualist movements and so quickly took on more religious connotations as well, often of a highly heterodox nature.
    In order to counter such unwanted connotations (and the fraud that often accompanied their theatrical display), the terminology of
psi
was introduced by British psychologist Robert Thouless in 1942 as a neutral scientific term designed to replace the more loaded terms of the psychical, the paranormal, and the occult. The same term was meant to code or point to what was thought to be the underlying unitary nature of the disparate telepathic, precognitive, and psychokinetic phenomena. J. B. Rhine took this domesticating and unifying process further and adopted
parapsychology
as the preferred term for the field. Rhine operationalized psychical research at Duke University in the late 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s through controlled laboratory conditions and careful statistical analyses.
    I have much admiration for the intellectual courage and pioneering spirit of parapsychologists and the numerous thinkers who have critically analyzed this data and drawn out its philosophical implications without regard for the very real professional costs and taboos that still surround the subject. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, however. I am a historian of religions. Consequently, what I am attempting in the pages that follow has little to do with the scientific protocols and statistical methods of the parapsychological lab and everything to do with the textual, narrative, and ethnographic methods of the early British and American psychical researchers. In the process, I hope to resurrect and re-theorize two terms, the psychical and the paranormal.
    For the sake of what follows, I am