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

different linguistic codes. Magic, the mind’s ability to affect the material world through acts of attention and intention, he went on to suggest, really and truly plays “a role in history.” 14 A bit later, Edith Turner wrote of her encounter with spirits and experience of psychical abilities, and Margaret Mead wrote appreciatively on psychical matters, encouraging her intellectual peers to study even the most extraordinary examples of this literature, including the data emerging from the then still secret “remote viewing” or psychical espionage programs of the U.S. military. 15 More impressively still, Michael Winkelman demonstrated a striking “correspondence between parapsychological research findings and anthropological reports of magical phenomena” toward the thesis that real-life spontaneous magical experiences have their deepest (that is, ontological) basis not in social processes or logical mistakes (which, again, is what has traditionally been argued), but in extreme emotional states, largely unconscious primary process thinking, and “innate universal human potentials closely associated with psi abilities.” These, he wrote, are “human capacities, still little understood, for affecting the world in a manner which is beyond our current understanding of the laws of nature.” 16 In other words, magical powers are real.
    The psychology of religion displays the same submerged patterns again. Pierre Janet, the pioneering French psychologist whose work deeply influenced a young Sigmund Freud, discovered, in the words of historian Alex Owen, “what magicians have traditionally claimed—that it is possible to hypnotize a subject from a distance.” He also realized, correctly, that hypnotism replicated the earlier phenomena of Mesmerism (which in fact were much more robust and impressive), and he wrote his minor thesis on Bacon and the alchemists. 17 William James worked for years with a very convincing trance medium named Leonora Piper, puzzled over the possibility of postmortem survival, and wrote extensively on psychical matters. 18 C. G. Jung wrote his dissertation on occult phenomena (with his cousin as medium no less), attended séances for another thirty years, experienced paranormal events throughout his life (including in Freud’s presence), and even produced agnostic text out of a kind of “haunting,” his famous
Septes Sermones ad Mortuos
or
Seven Sermons to the Dead
. 19
    Jung was also famously fascinated by the implications of quantum physics for understanding paranormal phenomena. Indeed, he even forged his category of synchronicity out of his correspondence with one of his patients, the pioneering quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. What is more (way more), Pauli was well known among his physics colleagues for a rather unique mind-to-matter effect. In the words of George Gamow, the “Pauli Effect” boiled down to the strange fact that an “apparatus would fall, break, shatter or burn when he merely walked into a laboratory.” 20 This was such a common occurrence that when laboratory equipment failed or broke, the experimenters would ask if Pauli was in town.
    So too with Sigmund Freud. Freud’s close colleague Wilhelm Stekel published an entire book on telepathic dreams in 1921. Although originally dismissive, Freud became convinced that there was a kernel of truth in such occult phenomena. He publicly acknowledged this in a 1925 essay and wrote six essays in all on the subject of telepathy or “thought transference” (
Gedankenübertragung
), which he considered to be the “rational core” of occultism. And why not? Had not dreams, another classical occult subject, proven to possess meaning in his own system of thought; indeed, had not dreams, themselves closely tied to psychical phenomena, helped
found
his thought? 21 But if telepathy were now admitted and allowed to inform psychoanalytic theory,