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

1918, is a clear reminder that we have inherited a certain forgetting. It would do us well to try to remember that which we have forgotten in order better to understand that the possible can be construed quite otherwise than it is at the moment, that that which is impossible can become possible. Let us, then, remember for just a moment, and this in just three fields of inquiry: philosophy, anthropology, and psychology.
    Consider first the history of Western philosophy. As the classicist E. R. Dodds (who had read and absorbed his fellow classicist Frederic Myers) points out with respect to “Supernormal Phenomena in Classical Antiquity,” the philosophical and historiographical conundrums of precognition were already fully recognized in the ancient world:
    The paradox of the situation was recognized in antiquity: Aristotle opens his discussion of the subject with the remark that it is difficult either to ignore the evidence or to believe it. Ostensible precognitions formed part of the accepted matter of history: the pages of nearly all ancient historians, from Herodotus to Ammianus Marcellinus, are full of omens, oracles, or precognitive dreams or visions. Yet how can an event in an as yet non-existent future casually determine an event in the present? This was already for Cicero, and even for his credulous brother, Quintus, the
magnus quaestio
, as it still is today. 6
    There is a funny story here that is quite relevant to our discussion of broken lineages. Fritz Graf, a contemporary classics scholar of epigraphy and Greek religion, remembers meeting Dodds in the mid-1970s at his home in Oxford in order to present the esteemed historian with his own newly minted dissertation on Orpheus and Eleusis, both widely considered to be distant historical origin-points of our modern term “mysticism.” Dodds thanked Graf for his book, but then immediately added: “But I have no interest anymore in Greek religion. I am only interested in paranormal phenomena.” 7
    If we jump from the classical world into the modern one, Dodd’s
magnus quaestio
or “great question” with respect to the ancient materials hardly goes away, although it certainly becomes more questionable. In his
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
, Immanuel Kant grappled, sarcastically but deeply, with Emanuel Swedenborg’s seeming noumenal powers, which included one famous scene on June 19, 1759, when the spirit-seer saw a Stockholm fire, the advance of which he accurately described to a garden party in Göteborg, Sweden, as the fire raged three hundred miles away, stopping just three doors down from his own home. 8 A bit later, Hegel wrote appreciatively on animal magnetism, extrasensory perception, and a kind of World Soul, all key components of his astonishing vision of a kind of cosmic Mind or absolute Spirit (
Geist
) coming into fuller and fuller consciousness through history, culture, religion, philosophy, and, now, Hegel and his deep readers. 9
    Similarly, Schopenhauer engaged reports of the incredible powers of intention and mind-over-matter to fashion his own philosophy of Will. Throughout
The World as Will and Representation
(1818), the philosopher invokes Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian mystical sources in order to explain how all things are one in their essence, that is, in the occult force of a cosmic Will out of which all things ineluctably arise and into which they ineluctably disappear. Later, in
The Will in Nature
(1836), he turned to the subjects of animal magnetism and magic to find further support for his metaphysical doctrines. Here he explains, following Kant, that space and time are purely phenomenal. They are constructs or categories of our minds, not features of the world as it is in itself. Space and time are, to borrow Einstein’s language in our opening epigraph, “stubbornly persistent illusions.” Accordingly, the common transcendence of space and time one encounters in clairvoyance and precognition