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

defining the psychical as
the sacred in transit from a traditional religious register into a modern scientific one
. This transit is especially easy to see when we set, as we will in chapter 1 , the psychical and its related notions (the imaginal, the supernormal, and the telepathic) alongside two other eminently modern terms, both of which took form at roughly the same time but that do not generally carry explicitly scientific connotations: the mystical and the spiritual. Along these same lines, I am defining the paranormal as
the sacred in transit from the religious and scientific registers into a parascientific or “science mysticism” register
. Basically, in the paranormal,
both
the faith of religion
and
the reason of science drop away, and a kind of super-imagination appears on the horizon of thought. As a consequence, the paranormal becomes a living story or, better, a mythology. Things also get wilder. Way wilder.
    Both definitions, obviously, employ a shared third term that needs to be defined immediately as well: the
sacred
. By the sacred, I mean what the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto meant, that is, a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment. Otto captured this sacred sixth sense, at once subject and object, in a famous Latin sound bite: the sacred is the
mysterium tremendum et fascinans
, that is, the mystical (
mysterium
) as both fucking scary (
tremendum
) and utterly fascinating (
fascinans
). The sacred (minus the fucking part) was a key concept in both the German and French streams of critical theory, particularly in thinkers like Otto, Emile Durkheim, and Joachim Wach, after which the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade made it central to his own work at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s. For a variety of reasons, most of them boiling down to some form of implicit materialism, the category has become taboo today. But the subject of the paranormal invokes it again, and in full force. We are back to terror and bedazzlement.
    Unlike the sacred, neither the psychical nor the paranormal has survived in any active form within the professional study of religion. Neither, for example, merits its own entry in Mircea Eliade’s
Encyclopedia of Religion
, and this despite the fact that “Psychical Research” merited a balanced three-page essay in James Hasting’s classic
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics
ninety years ago. 4 The author, moreover, was none other than James Leuba, a very prominent psychologist of the time with a penchant for bold reductionistic readings of religious phenomena ranging from conversion to mysticism. Leuba in fact ends his entry with the subject of my first chapter, the London Society for Psychical Research (the S.P.R.), and some comments expressive of that special combination of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic imagination that characterized the period just before his, the period that gave birth to both modern psychology and the study of religion. Here is how Leuba concludes his entry:
    If, after thirty-four years of activity, many of the mysteries which the S.P.R. set out to explore are still unfathomed, much has, nevertheless, been explained. Thus the mischief which mystery works upon credulous humanity has been decreased. . . . But the greatest accomplishment to record is the approximate demonstration that, under circumstances still mostly unknown, men may gain knowledge by other than the usual means, perhaps by direct communication between brains (telepathy) at practically any earthly distance from each other. This dark opening is indeed portentous. It may at any time lead to discoveries which will dwarf into insignificance any of the previous achievements of science. 5
    Leuba’s startling words about a “dark opening” still apparently open, still seemingly possible in