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

(the latter which Schopenhauer himself experienced) are hardly illusory. Quite the contrary, they witness to the world as it really is. What is in fact illusory are our common everyday perceptions, which can only show us the real as it is mediated to us through our senses and mental categories. 10
    Such philosophical streams have recently been revived and renewed by the analytic philosopher Stephen E. Braude, who as a graduate student and self-described arrogant hardnosed materialist witnessed a table lift off the floor and communicate tapping messages to him and two friends during an impromptu séance session. “Now I won’t mince words,” Braude writes. “What happened that afternoon scared the hell out of me. For three hours I observed my own table tilt up and down, without visible assistance.” The scholarly result? Nothing, until he got tenure (“I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid”). 11 Since then he has written five especially provocative books, all of which orbit around the questions posed by that floating, tapping table and his intuitive suspicion that it was the three of them who controlled the table with still unknown, unconscious, unacknowledged powers. 12 Eisenbud’s “vast untapped powers” come to life in the living room.
    Similar moments could easily be located among the anthropologists. In
The Making of Religion
(1899), Andrew Lang put early anthropology into dialogue with the then cutting-edge categories of psychical research in order to plumb the speculative origins of various phenomena within the history of religions (magical influence, possession, and divinatory practices, to name just a few) and to ask whether “a transcendental region of human faculty,” a “region X,” might not exist. He also studied scrying (crystal gazing) among Scottish female seers and was especially fond of collecting ghost stories from around the world. It was this kind of field research and comparative collecting that led him finally to conclude that magical beliefs are not groundless superstitious or gross examples of bad thinking left over from a prescientific age, which is exactly what his most prestigious peers thought, but rather, that “[m]an may have faculties which savages recognize, and which physical science does not recognize. Man may be surrounded by agencies which savages exaggerate, and which science disregards altogether, and these faculties and agencies may point to an element of truth which is often cast aside as a survival of superstition.” In Lang’s mind, in other words, “certain obscure facts are, or may be, at the bottom of many folklore beliefs.” Here he gave the fascinating example of a correspondent from India who had witnessed some anomalous lights at dusk in a Darjeeling garden, where the servants shared matter-of-fact descriptions of a race of “little men” (we’ll return to those anomalous lights and humanoids soon enough). In essence, Lang was advancing a theory of the origins of religion in which those origins were grounded in empirical psychical phenomena that were subsequently exaggerated and embellished in folklore and myth. The idea of the soul, for example, he reasoned, did not come about through mistaken interpretations of dreams (which is what his mentor, Edward Tylor, had famously argued), but from real-world veridical experiences akin to those that the S.P.R. had recently labeled instances of “telepathy.” Of the latter phenomenon, he confessed in his 1911 presidential address to the same society, “I am wholly convinced.” 13
    A half century later, the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino went so far as to claim that the data of ethnography and folklore, and now of psychical research, strongly suggest “the paradox of a
culturally-conditioned
nature, and all its embarrassing implications.” Reality, De Martino realized, appears to behave differently within