BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY
NO 54. TO BE A PRINCESS, A QUEEN... THEN A MARTIAN?
From India to Planet Mars
The curious case of Hélène Smith (1861-1929) used to be notorious in fortean circles, if only for her remarkable claim to have communicated with Martians by way of automatic writing (see FT76:22-28). She even went so far as to reproduce the writing of the Martians and spoke the language. (For another medium who made similar claims of Martian contact, see FT314:28-29.) Her distinction deserves to be revived and preserved, for rather less often celebrated are her remarkable additional claims to have had former lives as a 15th-century Indian princess as well as no less a personage than Marie Antoinette, the doomed wife of Louis XVI of France. Her case – or cases – were followed for five years by Théodore Flournoy, professor of psychology at the University of Geneva, a man of wide accomplishments, and by no means a fool. After initially studying medicine, he gained bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, natural sciences, literature, and engineering, and had an abiding interest in philosophy, especially the work of Immanuel Kant. His dad, a wealthy stockbroker, was able to withstand this tendency to become the eternal student; finally back at home in Geneva, Flournoy settled on psychology as a career, and so became acquainted with Mlle Smith – real name Catherine-Elise Müller – wellknown in the city as a medium; she had a high-powered job in commerce, and never charged for her psychic sittings.
The first chapter of Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars (1901) is devoted to a description of the nature of Mlle Smith’s mediumship, which was complex and manifold, in that she had visual and auditory hallucinations, wrote automatically, took on the personality of her communicators and spoke in their voices, and induced table rappings. Also seemingly present for much of the time was her ‘spirit guide’, who called himself Leopold. But he “is only a pseudonym under which is concealed the illustrious Cagliostro, who, it appears, was madly infatuated with Queen Marie Antoinette, and who now, discarnate and floating in space, has constituted himself the guardian angel in some respects of Mlle Smith, in whom after a long search he has again found the august object of his unhappy passion of a century ago.” Count Cagliostro (1743–95), it may be recalled, was born Joseph Balsamo (his title seems to have been self-awarded) and in various tours of Europe gained a reputation (and a fortune) as a successful alchemist (for a fake Cagliostro wunderkammer ,see FT354:6-7). Not everyone was impressed, however, and finally in Rome in 1789 he was scooped up by the Inquisition. Found guilty of promoting Freemasonry, he died in prison. Flournoy makes no mention of Cagliostro’s colourful career and attendant scandals, perhaps feeling his contemporary audience already knew the lurid background.
Next, Flournoy turns to Mlle Smith’s childhood and family background. Flournoy describes Hélène Smith when they met as “a beautiful woman about 30 years of age, tall, vigorous, of a fresh, healthy complexion, with hair and eyes almost black, of an open and intelligent countenance, which at once invoked sympathy. She evinced nothing of the emaciated or tragic aspect which one habitually ascribes to the sibyls of tradition, but wore an air of health, of physical and mental vigour, very pleasant to behold...” Her merchant father, by birth Hungarian, “possessed a remarkable facility for languages”, which Hélène appears not to have inherited except “in a latent and subliminal manner”. Her mother indulged in some table-tipping in the mid1800s, and later had “sporadic visions”. One involved an angel appearing above her ill infant daughter (Hélène’s sister) in the night; the child died the next day. Hélène’s grandmother and brother also had minor paranormal experiences. As a child and adolescent, she had occasional waking hallucinations, and some hypnogogic and hypnopompic visions. She was also an inveterate daydreamer. Flournoy tells us: “All that we know of Hélène’s character, both as a child and as a young girl, shows us that her dominant emotional note was a sort of instinctive inward revolt against the modest environment in which it was her lot to be born, a profound feeling of dread and opposition, of inexplicable malaise, of bitter antagonism against the whole of her material and intellectual environment. While showing herself always very devoted to her parents and brothers, she had only feeble natural affinities for them. She felt like a stranger in her family and as one away from home. She had a feeling of isolation, of abandonment, of exile, which created a sort of gulf between her and her family. So strong were these feelings that she actually one day seriously asked her parents if it was absolutely certain that she was their daughter, or whether it was not possible that the nurse might someday by mistake have brought home another child from the daily walk.”
Hélène herself said: “Even while very young I do not remember to have shared any of the tastes or any of the ideas of the members of my family. Thus during the whole of my childhood I was left in what I call a profound isolation of heart. And in spite of all, in spite of this complete want of sympathy, I could not make up my mind to marry, although I had several opportunities. ...since I have engaged in spiritism I have found myself so surrounded with sympathy and friendships that I have somewhat forgotten my sad lot.” Which, as Flournoy says, speaks volumes. Her sitters provide her with warm sympathetic companionship; the shadowy and capricious Leopold, who would on occasion irrupt into her waking life, is like an adult version of a child’s ‘invizikid’
(see last column, FT393:52-53); contact with the spirits gives her meaning and purpose. And taken together, these things justified her lifelong sense of distinction, and gave her a place in the world at large.
After a digression on Mlle Smith’s character, which he finds exemplary in all respects, and a long disquisition on the Leopold entity, Flournoy turns to the matter of Mars. Among her three great ‘cycles’ of stories, this actually emerged last, after Marie Antoinette and then the Indian princess. Flournoy seems to have departed from the chronology in order to place the accounts in ascending order of complexity; although fragments from any one cycle would intrude into accounts of the others: “It is possible... to behold, in the same séance... in complete somnambulism, a Hindoo vision… followed by a Martian dream, with an incarnation of Leopold in the middle, and a scene of Marie Antoinette to wind up with.” Flournoy is not impressed with Leopold. We are, he says, “forced to ask whether this soidisant authentic revenant is simply a very well-gotten-up simulacrum, an admirable reconstruction, a marvellous imitation, such as the subliminal faculties are only too glad to produce for the diversion of psychologists and the mystification of the simple,” and notes that “there are the answers of Leopold to the questions put to him concerning his terrestrial life. These answers are remarkably evasive or vague. Not a name, not a date, not a precise fact does he furnish.” Flournoy illustrates a distinct difference between Leopold’s handwriting and that of Cagliostro. However, as ‘protector’ – Freudians might call it a projected superego – “Leopold certainly expresses in his central nucleus a very honourable and attractive side of the character of Mlle Smith, and in taking him as her ‘guide’ she only follows inspirations which are probably among the best of her nature.” Which is a nice way of saying that Leopold/Cagliostro/Balsamo is her own invention, although Mlle Smith would never accept this.
Flournoy seems to have regarded the ‘Martian problem’ as the easiest to solve because Mlle Smith made the mistake (our word) of being so specific about the Martian tongue. He says: “I must acknowledge that as a linguist and philologist I am very much like an ass playing the flute,” but he makes a pretty good hoof of analysing the strange tongue and alphabet that Mlle Smith produced and that Leopold so often obliged in translating. He concludes that Mlle Smith’s ‘Martian’ is actually a version of French; the only letters in the Martian alphabet that we recognise as bearing any resemblance to an Earthly one is terrestial ‘b’, which looks like a distorted version of Hebrew lamed (‘l’), and the sign for the plural, which could be an inverted version of the (handwritten) Greek ‘x’. You may be able to find others (see picture above).
There are subtler objections, which Flournoy pursues with admirable diligence and clarity, but which would take too long to explicate here. Suffice to say his flautistry isn’t bad for a donkey, and he proves his point. From the position of finde-siècle astronomy, Mlle Smith might have been better off sticking to the Martian canals and her rather charming paintings of Martian houses and landscapes and some rather curious animals. What’s also noteworthy is that the actual messages from the Martians, as reported by Flournoy at least, are utterly uninformative as to daily life, economics, flora and fauna, politics and social organisation, and so on. This is a somewhat egregious omission. The eccentrics of the 1950s contact movement were cannier than she.
There is a related linguistic problem with Mlle Smith’s persona as Marie
Antoinette: she seems to have forgotten every word of her native German language, which is quite a surprise, although her French spelling is appropriately antique. One of the heftier problems is the stark contrast between the mostly frivolous and extravagant character of the French queen and the demure, even inhibited, nature of Mlle Smith; perhaps this persona was a necessary relief; against that at least one informant, the Queen’s brother, said she was rather prudish. And the supposed handwriting of Marie Antoinette as received by Mlle Smith bears little resemblance to the historic character’s, as Flournoy amply illustrates. The French plot is slightly thickened by Leopold’s claiming that as Cagliostro he was infatuated with Marie Antoinette, and is suitably delighted to see her reincarnated in Mlle Smith. In real life the historical pair seem to have had not much contact; in any case Cagliostro’s passion went unrequited, for Marie Antoinette’s own one true love was the Swedish diplomat Count Axel Fersen.
The Indian cycle brings up a far thicker plot. According to Mlle Smith’s séanceroom testimony, she had been born an Arab sheikh’s daughter, named Simandini, in the early 15th century, and was taken to Tchandraguiri to be a wife (ultimately his favourite) of the rajah Sivrouka Nayaka. In 1401 he had built a massive fortress there. There were several major problems with the tale. That an Arabian lady, presumably Muslim, should end up the wife (or concubine) of a Hindu seems unlikely. Flournoy could find but one solitary, second-hand source for Sivrouka’s earthly existence, which at least had the saving grace of describing him as a Jain, although the experts Flournoy consulted denounced the source as seriously unreliable. Flournoy’s best explanation for all this was that Mlle Smith was reviving some cryptomnesic experience. But there was another kind of catch. In her character as Simandini, Mlle Smith revealed that none other than Flournoy was a reincarnation of the rajah Sivrouka. Flournoy, with delicacy and subtle periphrasis, naturally considers whether this indicated that Mlle Smith had developed what we would call a crush on him, but absolves her of the embarrassment.
So Flournoy – a trifle regretfully, one senses – concludes that Mlle Smith’s previous incarnations and Martian adventures are products of her own subliminal imagination. Yet he cannot be dismissed as an intransigent ‘debunker’, for he asserts his faith in both telepathy and psychokinesis. And his dissection of Mlle Smith’s claims are nothing if not exhaustive. A book to remember.
Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: a study in a case of somnambulism with glossolalia, Harper & Brothers, 1901. Republished at great expense by the Princeton University Press, but also available free online.
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