Hélène Smith
Hélène Smith(real name Catherine-Elise Müller, December 9, 1861,Martigny– June 10, 1929,Geneva) was a famous late-19th centuryFrenchmedium.She was known as "theMuseofAutomatic Writing"by theSurrealists,who viewed Smith as evidence of the power of the surreal, and a symbol of surrealist knowledge.[1]Late in life, Smith claimed to communicate with Martians, and to be a reincarnation of a Hindu princess andMarie Antoinette.
Early life
[edit]Daughter of aHungarianmerchant, Smith worked as an employee in a commercial house. She discoveredspiritualismin 1891 and joined a spiritualist "development" circle. According to her fellow believers, she began to show evidence ofmediumisticabilities in 1892, and claimed to communicate withVictor HugoandCagliostro.
Career as medium
[edit]She became well known in Geneva, and it was there that Flournoy made her acquaintance. Her channeling evolved from the usual raps and table-tipping tosomnambulatorytrances,of which she remembered nothing. While in this state she experienced clear images of faraway places such as a civilization on Mars, and of her own former lives. She would write out the Martian communications on paper and translate them intoFrench,popularizingautomatic writing.
In 1900, Élise Müller became famous with the publication ofDes Indes à la Planete Mars( "FromIndiato the PlanetMars") byThéodore Flournoy,Professor ofPsychologyat theUniversity of Geneva.The medium and the psychologist remained very close until 1899, when "Des Indes à la planète Mars" was first published. The book documented her various series of experiences in terms of romantic cycles: the "Martian" cycle, "Ultramartian" cycle, "Hindu","Oriental",and" royal "cycles.
In 1900, a certain Mrs. Jackson, a rich American spiritualist who was impressed by Müller, offered her a salary which would permit her to quit her job and dedicate herself to pursuing and documenting her experiences. Müller accepted and was able to continue with further cycles. She also began to paint her visions and particular religious images ofChrist.
Smith is mentioned byAndré Bretonin his bookNadjawhere he compares her to the eponymous character.
"A brief scene in dialogue at the end of my" Poisson Soluble, "and which seems to be all she has yet read of theManifest,a scene whose precise meaning moreover...gives her the impression of having actually participated in it and even of having played the-if anything obscure- part of Hélène. "[2]
Evaluation
[edit]Théodore Flournoyconsidered her "cycles" as the products of what he judged to be infantile imaginings and her Martian language as a mereconstructed language.[3]Flournoy concluded that her "Martian" language had a strong resemblance to Ms. Smith's native language of French and that her automatic writing was "romances of the subliminal imagination, derived largely from forgotten sources (for example, books read as a child)." He invented the termcryptomnesiato describe this phenomenon.[4][5][6]
PsychologistsLeonard Zusne,Warren H. Jones have written:
Flournoy was able to show her Martian language was an artful fabrication. Although it sounded decidedly foreign, frequency analysis of words and letters and an examination of the syntax convinced Flournoy that the language had all the basic structural characteristics of French, Hélène Smith's native tongue. In a subsequent investigation, Flournoy reported that the source of a short phrase that she had written in Arabic during her Indian cycle probably came from having seen an identical phrase inscribed in a book owned by a Genevan physician. She had retained a visual image of the script and, in due time, copied it from memory in an uncertain hand.[7]
The case was examined in depth by psychologistDonovan Rawcliffein 1952 who noted that Smith had suffered from afantasy prone personalityand hystericalhallucinations.[8]
References
[edit]- ^Rosemont, Penelope.(1998).Surrealist Women.University of Texas Press. p. xlii.ISBN0-292-77087-1
- ^Breton, Andre (1999).Nadja.Great Britain: Penguin Books. pp. 79–80.
- ^Flournoy, Théodore.(1901).From India to the Planet Mars, a Study of Somnambulism with Glossolalia.English edition translated by Daniel Vermilye. Harper. p. 193, pp. 245-260
- ^Randi, James.(1995).An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural.St. Martin's Press. p. 22.ISBN0-312-15119-5
- ^Baker, Robert A.(1996).Cryptomnesia.InGordon Stein.The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal.Prometheus Books. p. 188.ISBN1-57392-021-5"The term Cryptomnesia itself we owe to the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy and his investigations of the psychic-medium Hélène Smith (1861-1929), fully recounted in his bookFrom India to the Planet Mars(1963). Flournoy not only analyzed, but also convincingly disproved Hélène Smith's supernormal claims. "
- ^Tallis, Frank. (2002).Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious.Profile Books. p. 29.ISBN1-55970-643-0
- ^Zusne, Leonard;Jones, Warren H. (1989).Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking.Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. p. 224.ISBN978-0-805-80507-9
- ^Rawcliffe, Donovan.(1988, originally published 1952).Occult and Supernatural Phenomena.Dover Publications. pp. 178-186.ISBN0-486-25551-4
External links
[edit]- Flournoy,From India to the Planet Mars,English translation of the 1901 edition. Entire text on line at Google Books; PDF available for download.
- full text of From India to the Planet Mars at sacred-texts(different scan than Google).
- Théodore Flournoy,Des Indes à la planète MarsArchived2009-12-01 at theWayback Machine,Étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, Éditions Alcan et Eggimann, Paris et Genève, 1900
- Daniel Rosenberg,articlein Cabinet magazine on Helene Smith
- Huub Engels,Understanding the Glossolalia of Hélène Smith, the Famous Spiritist Medium
- Huub Engels,PhD thesis(in Dutch) paying attention to the Martian language of Hélène Smith in chapter 7. Summary in English on pages 207-214
