Magic as Natural Science, Part Two: Magical Psychology

Janet made interesting experiments proving the individuality of the unconscious. In hypnosis he laid before his somnambulist five white cards, two of which were marked with small crosses, and gave her the suggestion not to see the latter, marked cards after waking. He then woke her and asked her to hand him one by one the cards lying in her lap. She gave him the three unmarked ones, and when he asked for more, declared there were none left. Thereupon he turned all the cards over, so that the crosses could no longer be seen, and when he now asked for them she gave him all. The crosses, then, had in fact been seen, but the impression remained unconscious; the eye had functioned, the brain had not. He then put her to sleep again, laid 20 numbered papers in her lap, and ordered her not to see after waking those divisible by 3. When he asked for the papers she gave him only 14; those divisible by 3 stayed behind. When she then once more kept back the cards marked with crosses and the papers divisible by 3, he used a moment when her attention was diverted for the suggestion that she should take the pencil and write what lay in her lap. Her right hand wrote automatically: “There are 2 cards there marked with a cross”. To the question: “Why has Lucie not given them to me?” came the answer: “She cannot, she does not see them.” Concerning the papers the hand wrote: “There are still 6 papers on the clothes”, and to the question what was written on them came the answer: “The numbers 6 .. 15 .. 12 .. 3 .. 9 .. 18; I see them very well.” In the same way the numbers divisible by 2 and by 5 were made invisible. From a piece of writing laid before her Janet made now the vowels, now the consonants disappear. When the somnambulist was made blind by posthypnotic suggestion she believed the lamp had gone out; but by automatic writing she named all the objects held before her. Such suggestions, then, cause no real anaesthesia of the sense of sight, but only prevent the consciousness of seeing. When Janet asked for the cards mentioned not from Lucie but from the unconscious, he received those marked with crosses, and the hand wrote: “there are no more there”; but the waking Lucie gave him the three still remaining. All the papers, then, had been seen, those marked with crosses by the unconscious personality, the others by the waking one. In hypnotic blindness, then, sensation is not suppressed but transferred into the transcendental consciousness.

Mr. Wilmot embarked in 1863 at Liverpool on the steamer “City of Limerik” for New York, where his wife and children were expecting him. On the second day a storm arose that lasted over a week and slackened only in the night of the eighth day. For the first time since his embarking Wilmot now had a good night again. Meanwhile his wife had received news of the storms on the Atlantic Ocean, and her anxiety rose to the highest pitch at the news that the “Africa”, sailing for Boston, which had left England on the same day as the “City of Limerik”, had been wrecked. The wife was in the greatest fear for her husband and stayed up very long with her thoughts on him, until she lay down with this anxiety in her heart; it worked on in sleep as a monoideism and was bound to release magical functions, because only through such could release from the anxiety come. Toward morning, that is, Mrs. Wilmot dreamed that she was led over the storm-tossed sea, where she met a black, low ship. She went on board and searched the cabins as far as those of the after deck. There she found her husband, and wondered that the berth above him was set further back than his own. In the upper berth lay a man who stared at her, so that for a moment she hesitated whether she should go in. But then she went forward, bent over her husband, embraced him and went away again.

As it turned out later, the appearance of the ship and of the cabin seen in the dream corresponded completely with reality. The question is, then, whether there was only seeing at a distance here, or whether the real double was sent out. To decide this alternative we must examine the corresponding events on the ship and the perceptions of the two occupants of the cabin at the same hour. Mr. Wilmot lay in his berth, sleeping well again, as was said, for the first time. Toward morning he dreamed that his wife came in, hesitated a moment at the sight of his cabin-mate, but then came up to him, embraced him and went away again. When he woke (and with this we come to the decisive point) he saw his cabin-mate William D., who was looking down at him propped on his elbows. “You are a lucky fellow,” said William, “to have a lady who comes to you in this way.” Asked to explain himself further, William told what he had seen awake, and it agreed exactly with Wilmot’s dream.¹⁾

Meanwhile, however, I must try to develop the theory of this problem further. In what has gone before I have set up the joining of monoideism with the state of sleep as the prescription for experimental magic, and I am convinced that in this way all the wonderful faculties that are ascribed to somnambulists, but are withdrawn in waking from our will, indeed from our consciousness, could be raised from latency. There are faculties in us, however, whose natural patterns show that, although they belong to the transcendental kernel of our being, they reach with a part of their effect into waking. Thus, for example, a vision at a distance can come in a dream that sinks down into the unconscious on waking, but with its accompanying excitement of feeling, mostly fear, remains above the threshold of sensation and leaves behind that residue which we call presentiment.²⁾ In the same way, within the sphere of the will, there can remain either the impulse to an act, unmotivated for consciousness (as with the posthypnotic command), or conversely a holding back from an act that we mean to commit. For the latter the classic example is the daemon of Socrates, so often misunderstood, because understandable only to the occultist. When, especially in critical situations, he was about to do something harmful to himself, he was warned by an inner voice, and as a result of his experiences he had such trust in this “daemon” that he obeyed it unconditionally. If friends were involved who thought nothing of his daemon and acted on their own judgement, they always had cause to regret it. These experiences seemed so wonderful to Socrates that he was inclined to believe in the influence of a divine being; but this individual providence was after all only his own soul, as indeed his predecessor Xenocrates had already said, that the soul of each man is his daemon.¹⁾

2) du Prel: Entdeckung der Seele. I, c. 6.

There are historical examples where mass phenomena of this kind occurred, and the success, because a living agent was lacking, was determined wholly by the psychic factor on the side of the patient. To these belong the phenomena at the grave of the Abbé Paris some 160 years ago, lasting many years, which occurred in favour of the Jansenist sect. These phenomena, mostly miraculous cures, are of an extraordinary nature, but attested by officers of the courts, physicians, numerous witnesses, and even by the opponents, the Jesuits, who knew how to help themselves only by ascribing them to the devil. It sometimes happened then that when the faith of the patient began to waver the success failed to come. One sick woman had for a long time received very beneficial secours there from those present (these were in part measures that recall Dr. Eisenbart); but through her dealings with enlightened women friends she began to doubt, and now the healing effect lessened and at last stopped. Another, whose eyes were well on the way to healing, made no more progress when she married an unbeliever. These secours were often of a frightful and repulsive kind; but the sick had the unshakeable faith that they would help them. They called to the onlookers, who were often frightened by the mere sight, not to stop in the help demanded, and reproached them with their lack of faith. But when the patient himself, frightened for the moment, lost his trust, it happened that he was seriously harmed by the secours. A sick woman who was dealt sword thrusts that could not penetrate her flesh lost her courage for a moment and cried: You will kill me! She had hardly said it when a sword went two thumbs deep into her flesh.¹⁾

1) Carré de Montgeron: La vérité des miracles etc. III, 769. 774. 800. 722.

David Hume, the sceptical philosopher, who however had no notion that psychic forces are set over the organic ones and rule them, sees himself compelled nevertheless to say concerning these events in Paris: “Never has a greater number of miracles been ascribed to anyone than those said to have happened in France on the grave of the Abbé Paris, the notorious Jansenist, with whose holiness the people were so long deceived. The healing of the sick, the restoring of hearing to the deaf and of sight to the blind, were told everywhere as effects of the holy grave. But what is much more wonderful still is that many of these miracles were established on the spot, and that by judges of unquestionable integrity, on the testimony of credible and respected persons, in an enlightened age and on the most eminent stage of the present world. But that is not all. An account of them was printed” (the book of the parliamentary councillor Carré de Montgeron is meant) “and the Jesuits were not able to refute it definitely or to uncover the fraud, although this learned body was supported by the authorities and was a declared enemy of the views (of Jansenism) in whose favour the miracles were said to have happened”.¹⁾