Heaven and Hell
Warning: Suicide Themes
In a time when Darwinism was taking hold, and Christian beliefs were beginning to weaken against scientific debate, many were worried that despondency would dominate the world and turn people desperate and destructive in their actions, to extend the one mortal life they had against the void. In response to this ruthless scientific method, a Victorian iconoclast attempted to preserve the old religion while at the same time adopt new beliefs about the paranormal. Frederic W. H. Myers embarked on adventures in his travels, but none of those were as exotic as his internal explorations. What started off as a romantic attempt to preserve nostalgic beliefs, turned into a scientific quest to prove the existence of another dimension: the afterlife.
To explain these existential yearnings, one must look to Myers’ upbringing to describe the disposition he had for such subjects. Trevor Hamilton in Immortal Longings, helped to keep the record straight and weave between all the gossip from that time to provide a more balanced portrait of the man. His father Reverend Frederic Myers Sr., was a Christian scholar, and after his illness and death “his widow doggedly put together materials for his life, which was never published, but she successfully supported efforts to get his ecumenically focused work Catholic Thoughts through the press. The book had two central themes: the rejection of the dominance of a small, select priesthood, and the need to interpret the Bible in a non-literal fashion. The text of the Bible was flawed, argued Frederic Myers, and did not accurately reflect God’s intentions. The book was made widely available through general publication in 1873 and was re-issued in 1883 with a filial introduction by his son. Frederic Myers Sr. also had a strong interest in education and instigated a monthly series of lectures at the parochial meetings in the school room at St. John’s Church. He was not, however, strongly didactic and forceful. He was a tolerant and sensitive man and in private conversation could reject the concept of eternal punishment and the reality of the devil (doctrines which were already beginning to be challenged by the educated classes). In fact, one of his friends commented rather tartly on this. Mrs Myers had asked him if he had any letters she might use in a projected life of her husband. He replied, ‘His comprehensiveness of feeling enabled him to hold simultaneously views which perhaps a severer intellect would have discovered to be incompatible with one another.'”
Frederic Jr.’s mother Susan was also a Christian influence. “…She ‘made our welfare the absorbing interest of her life. Her character was such as in each age in turn is attributed to ‘the old school’;—a character of strong but controlled affections, of clear intelligence, unflinching uprightness, profound religious conviction. Our debt to her is as great as that of sons to a mother can be.’ Susan Myers kept a journal from February 1844 to September 1851, with the young Myers and his mother’s concern that he develop in the right way figuring strongly. She seems to have been aware of the natural bounce and optimism of his personality (she said that there was too much ‘prosperity’ in his character) and she was concerned to develop in him a reflective approach to matters of this world and the next. She was accused by one friend of the family of being rather too chilly and forbidding in her upbringing of the children: ‘Mrs. Myers she told me was a cold, hard, woman, and she believed she was a Unitarian. She has not seen her for years and so she may be by this time softened. She said the children, that is Frederick Myers and his brothers, were brought up very carefully if anything too carefully. They were almost prigishly brought up.’ The same friend contrasted her unfavourably with Frederic Myers’ first wife. Susan Myers, it was true, had a certain initial severity of manner, but she was obviously a shrewd and competent woman, with a good intellect and helpful and supportive to family and friends. Henry Stanley, the explorer, who later became Myers’ brother-in-law, commented how alike she and Myers were, in both appearance and in character. He noted that, ‘Fred has her eyes—her face—her intellect and deliberation.'”
Frederic’s Christian training started as soon as it was deemed to be possible. “In [Susan’s] journal she noted that she was considering religious instruction for the young Myers. He was then two years and nine months. As part of that process he was introduced to the primal concepts of death, extinction and punishment. The idea of extinction particularly terrified him. He described in his autobiography the impact that the sight of a dead mole, squashed by a cart, made on him as ‘the first horror of a death without resurrection rose in my bursting heart.’ He was also devastated by his mother’s suggestion that totally evil people could be annihilated by God, rather than spend eternity in hell: ‘The idea that such a fate should be possible for any man seemed to me appalling. I remember where I stood at the moment, and how my brain reeled under the shock.’ He was obviously a highly imaginative child: ‘I can remember my own feelings at four years old, when a respected elderly friend, ‘stated that he was a bear, and simulated to some slight extent the movements of that quadruped. I knew all the time that it was Mr. S; but the idea of bears, pre-existing in my mind, was so strongly stimulated that I was paralyzed with terror.'”
Frederic was able at a young age to see the wonder and the fantastic in nature itself despite the horror of death. “He was an inquisitive child, eager to learn and in love with natural beauty. In fact, Myers demonstrated elements of both a Wordsworthian and a Keatsian feel for nature as a child; a sense of both mysticism and of sensuality. Writing of his family garden he stated, ‘The thought of Paradise is interwoven for me with that garden’s glory;—with the fresh brightness of a great clump and tangle of blush roses, which hung above my head like a fairy forest, and made magical with their fragrance the sunny inlets of the lawn.'”
In contradiction to the fears of an overbearing mother, other authors worried about him instead being too sheltered and too spoiled. “In his account of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Fraser Nicol speculated, with reference to Myers, that, ‘one cannot avoid the suspicion that the seeds of his future troubles at Cambridge were unwittingly planted by the love of a too-doting mother for her brilliant child.’ In the light of other comments on the character of Mrs. Myers, this is probably a superficial Freudian speculation. Myers grew up in a very supportive environment, had considerable natural gifts, a strong physique, an optimistic temperament, and huge energy. These gifts, in his cradle, were more than enough to encourage arrogance, without postulating a soft and ‘too doting’ mother. She, in fact, spotted the bumptious side to his character and tried to tone it down. Because of this, she tended, if anything, to underestimate his intellectual precocity. As she wrote in her journal, ‘I do not see anything remarkable in his intellect so far—good sense and a very good memory seem to be his gifts.’ Certainly, his early letters to his mother, written on ruled paper, show little evidence of outstanding ability. Yet, his questions to her (which she recorded) about the nature of Heaven and Hell were, for a child of five, really quite perceptive:
“‘But can you tell Mamma, why God made only 2 places—one so very good as heaven, & the other so very bad as hell—& why not another, not quite so bad, for those who are a little good?’ I said ‘God gives us all our choice here on earth whether we will choose good or evil & tells us this is one only time.’ ‘Then Mamma where do you think that little baby of Aunt C.’s who died before it had any name will go?—won’t it go to heaven, for you know it had no time to choose?'”
This preoccupation with sin and hell was inculcated to the point that it would be difficult to identify with for modern readers, and how it’s lessons and warnings seeped into the culture back then. “Myers, as a child, believed in Christianity with great literal intensity, as many children brought up in such an environment did. It is difficult for most of us to recapture the direct relationship which, in the 1840s and 1850s, even educated people had to the Bible.” This built a capacity for the young Myers to be empathetic towards his mother like that of an authority, and also to be helpful to others throughout his life.
Frederic’s life was also supported by financial backing that allowed him to access a high education like his father. “Myers’ early life was secure financially as well as religiously. John Marshall, Susan’s father, had built his fortune on the application of machinery to the spinning of flax…Myers had first begun to display real intellectual precocity when he went to preparatory school at Blackheath. Then Myers went to Cheltenham where he sparkled…Myers was quite clear-eyed about himself. He knew his strengths and weaknesses and this is what gave him his confidence. He knew what he could pull off. He had a very vigorous and powerful intelligence, and was extremely good at absorbing and classifying material, and expressing it forcefully under pressure.”
Myers in particular excelled in poetry, but the kind of circles he was keeping created distractions in the form of class warfare. “‘He was our poet; & while still a boy was a Tennysonian enthusiast who could show reason for his faith at the time when quite intelligent men and women scoffed at Maud & found In Memoriam obscure.’ In addition, his poetry was beginning to attract attention from informed adults. The poet, Aubrey Thomas de Vere, told Susan Myers that he was very much struck with the poems of Myers that Lady Monteagle (Mary Marshall) had shown him. He thought them superior to any poetry he had seen written at that age with regard to imagination, vigour of diction and artistic instinct. True, they had echoes of Tennyson. But that was quite natural, given Myers’ age. Myers went up to Cambridge on a minor scholarship in October 1860 with a reputation which had already travelled beyond his school. He had obviously imbibed the developing tradition at Cheltenham that it was a school that was not for the idle rich but for the middle ranking members of the community who by hard work and effort would gain successful careers in the services, in academic life, in business and in the Empire beyond. However, success appeared to come so easily to him, that the effect on his character was likely to be detrimental. For example, while still at school, he was [runner up] for a national competition, the Burns poetry prize. This led to a heady letter from the Court Circular Office, asking him (at the age of 16) to become an occasional contributor of poems to it. Myers, for much of his life, needed no encouragement to focus ‘on the upper classes of society.’ Myers was not long in establishing an early reputation at Cambridge. He won the Chancellor’s English Medal for poetry with his The Prince of Wales at the Tomb of Washington.”
Stumbling through popularity contests, it was easy to target Myers for ridicule and accuse him of arrogance. “It appears that the early verses, which Myers recited ‘in the uncompromising sing-song which poets use,’ were greeted with ‘laughs, groans, cat-calls, and hisses.’ Yet by the end the audience had appreciated the poem and he received applause and an ovation. He was popularly regarded in the University, ‘as a [rare bird], certainly eccentric, probably negligible.’ There was a developing side to his character that was too theatrical, intense, and self-absorbed for many people, and he may have recognised this in himself. There is some evidence that after this Myers, at least in public, played down his intellectual interests, and tended to associate with the heartier, more aristocratic crowd, though the arrogant exhibitionist in him re-emerged late in his undergraduate career, with almost disastrous results. Gauld has suggested that associating with the rowing set meant that he did not get the intellectual cut and thrust from his peers that might have given him greater balance.”
With success comes envy, rumors and prejudice, especially aimed at the sexual orientation of the higher educated who were acquainted with Greek philosophy. “There were, rumours that he was homosexual and gossip about this swirled around in society for a number of years. There are two letters which suggest, from very different perspectives, that Myers had, at the least, a temporary homosexual phase. Firstly, there is the letter from Symonds to Dakyns in which he describes himself, Myers and Arthur Sidgwick as, ‘three of not the least intellectually constituted members of our Universities assailed by the same disease,’ and in the same letter he mentions the dangers of ‘idealising the passions of the Phaedrus.’ He particularly emphasized the insidious dangers that this posed to highly educated and well-read young men like Sidgwick and Myers. The second letter is a more melodramatic one from Josephine Butler to her son at the time of the Oscar Wilde affair (Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour in 1895 for homosexual practices):
Yes, I have heard also as you have, that the Oscar Wilde madness is spread like a plague thro’ London fashionable & artistic society. Stuart told me Wilde is likely to be let off easily on that account. I long ago heard a dreadful account of Lord Battersea [formerly Cyril Flower]. It was Frederic Myers who first led him astray & many others. I hope Myers has got a fright. He quite deserves Oscar Wilde’s fate. I am sorry for sensitive youths with some principle like Edmund Gurney, who died by his own hand, in despair because of having been so corrupted. His mother, my cousin, was such a good Christian woman. A friend of Lady H. Somerset came to see me (Lady HS’s husband went that road). She told me that London upper society is simply rotten with this vice. What fools people are who worship art & beauty & perfumes & poetry & nonsense in place of God.
What’s usually left out in rumors about homosexuality is that a full blown homosexual is exclusively homosexual and this prevents any signs of a real passion towards the opposite sex, since it would appear fake, or would not appear at all. “A certain balance and caution is needed here. Myers, as is not unusual in all-male communities, had, as a young man, a strong emotional and aesthetic attraction to some of his own sex. But that did not necessarily mean that it was expressed physically. For example, both he and Conington had been reading Johnson’s homoerotic poems, but they obviously found the tone of some of them distasteful. The melodramatic, almost blood-curdling narrative of a latter-day sodomite, vividly sketched by Josephine Butler, should not be taken too literally. There seems little doubt that if there was a physical aspect to his male relationships at university (and there is no direct evidence that there was), it was a temporary phase. Myers’ later life was characterised by strong and intense friendships with a small number of very gifted men but these were not homosexual. They were built on the basis of intellectual interests and comradeship in the pursuit of common challenging goals. What was true, however, and a point that Myers acknowledged in his draft autobiography, was that Hellenism ‘encouraged that indifference to ordinary persons, & excessive interest in physical beauty, which have greatly injured my efficiency in life.’ He also showed considerable enthusiasm for the company of attractive young women, and in his autobiography lamented that the Greeks had not spent enough time studying and writing about them. It is highly implausible, in fact almost unbelievable, that Myers could have retained the affection and loyalty of men of the calibre and moral integrity of Oliver Lodge, Henry Sidgwick, William James and others, if a temporary phase of same-sex attraction at university, had metamorphosed into permanent membership of the illegal late-Victorian homosexual community.”
Like for most adults who have graduated from school, one feels unmoored and indecisive about a career path. This leads to having desires for dating, travel, exploration, and especially self-exploration. “…He lacked direction and ballast. He had no clear idea of a future career, and no settled view of the nature and purpose of life. Most educated people then, probably, took a modest position with regard to the ultimate verities, ranging from low-key conviction to mild atheism. But Myers’ temperament was such that he needed certainty, an emotional imperative that drew him into belief, but a belief that ultimately had to be strong enough to stand up to the facts of the situation. He was without intellectual and emotional security at this stage in his life; for the vivid Hellenism of his university years had not survived his tour of the sites of the ancient world, and he had lost the literal Christian faith of his childhood. He sought diversion in travel,” but “…Myers’ nature abhorred a spiritual vacuum and he found, within a year, flooding through his mind and heart, an intense and vibrant Christian belief whose wellspring was the beautiful Mrs. Josephine Butler. She sent him a set of extraordinarily passionate and frank letters which give us some insight into the nature of her appeal for sensitive, educated young men. Their strange mixture of the quasi erotic and the yearning for religious rapture and certainty would have stirred and befuddled the young Myers’ senses…She wrote, ‘You have been so wonderfully gentle and kind & dear to me for some months past…Try always to pray, please…You will fling your whole being into it, & then you will be safe. It will use up the fire in you…’ She explained why she felt relaxed about taking such an intimate tone with him: ‘My dear, my beloved Frederic, I love you very much. You know how I have given my human to God, & so you must understand how I can in his very presence call you by kind and pitying and tender names.'”
In the midst of his travels, the pressure of the popular atheism and non-belief in the culture pushed Myers back to his old worries about annihilation and the futility of a finite life.
“Visiting Niagara alone, I resolved to swim across the river immediately below the falls; in the track where boats cross with ease, before the turmoil of the river collects itself for the rapids below. This was before any of the professional exploits in swimming Niagara, and my proposed swim, which would of course be thought nothing of now, had seldom been attempted, so far as I could learn, except by deserters from the Canadian shore, some of whom were said to have been swept down and drowned in the whirlpool. There was thus some imaginative sense of danger; though it was plain that where a rowing-boat with one oarsman could ply, an ordinary swimmer ought to be able to make his way also. I started from the Canadian side late at night, to avoid spectators, and alone, except for a man following with my clothes in a boat. As I stood on a rock, choosing my place to plunge into the boiling whiteness, I asked myself with urgency, ‘What if I die?’ For once the answer was blank of emotion…I plunged in; the cliffs, the cataract, the moon herself, were hidden in a tower of whirling spray; in the foamy rush I struck at air; waves from all sides beat me to and fro; I seemed immersed in thundering chaos, alone amid the roar of doom.”
The Seventh Seal – Witch Burning: https://youtu.be/HK-u-ClOTU0?si=2aqWn5hSlrKVBHS9
Naturally in an exploration for one’s true vocation, either extremes have to be broached before finding a middle ground. In Myers’ case, he was gradually coming to the conclusion that one must use the scientific method to prove the afterlife in order to make any impact against the sweeping atheism that was dominating the world of the demonstrable and necessary. “Myers commented that the indifference with which he regarded his possible demise, gave him insight into the intellectual inertness, the apathy that most of humanity seemed to display with regard to their ultimate destiny…Myers rejected, in arguing the case for Christianity, the historical and scientific methodology that he would later embrace so wholeheartedly when investigating the apparently supernatural. And there was, as well, his yearning for and appeal to the comradeship of elite spirits—another characteristic which remained with him and can clearly be seen in the later friendships he made in his work with the Society for Psychical Research…At this stage in his life, he seems to have been very unstable and to have suffered great swings of emotion and intellectual position. Even though he described himself as in a state of nihilistic despair when he swam beneath Niagara, he had already written a letter to Arthur Sidgwick expressing a very positive attitude towards Christianity.”
While dealing with heath problems that further eroded his beliefs in the institutionalized form of Christianity, he dabbled in contemporary mesmerism and began in earnest to get on with life and find a wife. “He concluded that the last Sunday in October 1871 was the final time he attended church with any hope of learning aught of ‘the chief concerns of man.’ The severance from Mrs. Butler’s Christianity was permanent. Yet he did not break with her social reform aspirations. He actively supported higher education for women, and resigned his lectureship in 1869 to work for it, and he retained an interest in broader social and political reforms for them…He obviously longed for both a physical and spiritual relationship, yet too fastidiously high standards may have prevented him from settling on anyone. A number of shadowy female figures flit in and out of his diaries but few attain any individuality or wider record. He made a proposal of marriage to a Miss E. in 1871 which was rejected and he had a dalliance with a Miss Drew in 1872 which came to nothing. ‘Enough of Miss Drew’ was the diary entry.”
Through Myers’ mother’s connections with the wealthy Marshall family, he was able to come between a marriage falling apart between Annie and her husband Walter Marshall. He was a manic depressive who “would veer from extreme depression to over-extravagant and excitable behaviour.” Like with Josephine Butler, Frederic would have to thread the needle carefully and keep his relationship with Annie platonic, also like with the literary Dante and Beatrice. “As a member of the Marshall family, Myers met many of the extended Marshall clan at one or other of their great houses in the Lake District, particularly Patterdale or Hallsteads. The first recorded meeting in his diary, with Annie Marshall, his great love in the 1870s, is for June 1867—a lunch at Patterdale—with a later annotation from Petrarch, ‘Blessed be the day, the month and the year.’ Annie had, by this time, been married for a year. She was the daughter of a clergyman, the Reverend J.R. Hill, and if the comments of Myers’ mother to him are to be believed, she seems to have been a beautiful and gifted swan in a family of commonplace geese. Her marriage to Walter Marshall gave her considerable social and financial status. Yet it came at a price. For Walter Marshall was a manic depressive.”
Internal conflict built up in Annie and it was sending her towards tragedy. “…Love really began to grow between Annie and Myers when he met her at Vevey in 1871, during a long European holiday he was having. A note has survived, describing the impact she made on him there as she tried to cope with her husband’s increasingly erratic behaviour. Myers was with them at Chillon and Montreux and he walked with her by the lake on the 21st February. On the 22nd she fainted when out with Myers and Walter. No doubt this was under the strain of coping with his increasingly erratic and exuberant behaviour. And she had, at the same time, the pressure of Myers falling in love with her. Entered in his diary on the next page, broken up into several pieces as was sometimes his way with material that required discretion, was, ‘I recognise traces of the former passion.’ Is there, perhaps, a hint here that the initial stirrings of love went back even farther than 1871? Matters came to a climax in 1876 when Walter went through a particularly hyper-manic phase and started to spend even more wildly. He became involved in a property investment in London (lending money without adequate security) and grew abusive when questioned by his wife. Annie asked Myers, her husband’s brother George, and her father to help, and on the following day arrangements were made to have him certified—if only temporarily—as insane. When Walter left his house with the family doctor he was immediately seized by two men, bundled into a horse-drawn cab, and taken to a nearby asylum. Shortly afterwards he was moved to Ticehurst in Sussex, where his wealth enabled him to live in comfort although with restricted freedom. Walter protested strongly at his confinement, agreeing that he was an excitable and demonstrative personality but not that he was insane. However, when he stated on the 24th May that he had contracted syphilis at 21, the doctors began to treat his symptoms as indicative of a move towards [late stage syphilis dementia]. Walter’s early release was therefore highly unlikely.”
Annie’s feelings of guilt and remorse eventually built up as options for a clear conscience were vanishing, and she became more distant from Frederic’s mother Susan. “Annie’s mood grew increasingly dark and guilt-ridden. She went first to stay with her clergyman father and then later asked for a family meeting to discuss the situation. Racked with shame and remorse, a common reaction amongst relatives of the confined in the nineteenth century, she offered to look after Walter herself. However, it was decided that all communications with regard to Walter should go through Annie’s father and that a small committee handle the practical affairs…Annie became increasingly withdrawn and appeared to lose her confidence in Susan Myers, who previously had been one of her greatest supports. She said, ‘she saw she had been quite wrong in everything.’ Certainly that statement referred to Walter’s certification but whether it also expressed guilt at the relationship with Myers we cannot know. The sheer tiredness and strain consequent on looking after Walter and five children, plus the pressure of the events of the summer of 1876, must have completely worn her out, and in her exhausted and remorseful state she could have seen no way out except suicide. Susan Myers, who had been keeping her company, had left on the evening of the 28th August to travel to Edinburgh. Annie had crept out sometime that night and her body was found in deep water on the following morning, the 29th. A shawl had been left on the edge of the lake. The newspaper reports of the inquest revealed that she had first tried to stab herself with scissors and when that failed she had drowned herself.”
This spurred Myers to seek solace for Annie’s death by seeking proof of an afterlife. “After her death he hoped for messages from her and occasionally he thought he caught glimpses of her presence in séances, glimpses that became more sustained and visible when he encountered the high quality mediumship of Mrs. Piper and then Mrs. Thompson. The first hints at some communication beyond the grave occurred on a visit to Paris in 1877 when in a session with Madame Rohart, Annie Marshall apparently communicated, giving her name, her father’s name, her relationship to Myers, and a long message in French. Characteristically, Myers with his linguistic skills commented: ‘Notice the French, which is anglicised & much resembles the fluent but non-idiomatic way in which she talked.’ Myers described the medium as a repulsive old crone. He had a number of sessions with mediums in Paris at that time, but despite his growing experience of the field he still, like many other investigators, found it difficult to accept that evidence of the most profound spiritual importance should come through unattractive messengers.”
Myers began to age prematurely as his attempts at finding a wife were failing, and his friend Edmund Gurney was also struggling. “Myers described the appalling event in a letter to George Eliot, ‘You will have heard what has happened to the Gurneys. Three sisters who had taken an invalid brother to Egypt have been drowned in the Nile…Edmund Gurney loses in the youngest the very darling of his heart…& in both of the younger ones the only unfailing and instinctive sympathy in music which he knew…’ Photographs of Myers in the late seventies sometimes show him as rather ragged, and as having lost his youthful good looks. This was hardly surprising given what had happened to him and to Gurney. He received, however, no sympathy from that sharp Cambridge observer, Caroline Jebb, who commented on what appeared to be his increasingly anxious search for love and marriage after the death of Annie Marshall. She described his desperate quest for a wife, when on holiday in America, and his failure to realise that the kind of young women he was attracted to would not be interested in a man who was showing signs (in Victorian terms) of middle-age. She criticised his habit of talking too much and expecting the woman to provide an adoring, but attentive, audience…There was, indeed, a sense of emotional desperation about these bachelor years. Myers had moved to London in the early 1870s, eventually ending up at 3, Bolton Row, Mayfair. Sidgwick had married in 1876 and Gurney in 1877, so Myers alone amongst his most intimate male friends was single. Furthermore, it was as if the death of Annie released him to focus on more immediate physical and emotional needs and he probably had the feeling that time was running out for him.”
Myers eventually met Eveleen Tennant briefly in 1876, but there’s no documentation of a love building up when they met again in 1879, when “the mutual attraction was strong…[Frederic] said that Eveleen cared for the serious, the intellectual side of him, and that, ‘she has said absolutely nothing that either bored me or jarred in me in anyway.’ The family was much wealthier than the Myers, with a large townhouse in London and a country house in Wales with, in addition, extensive rented-out properties and farms. There is no doubt that Myers was marrying into a family whose social position, connections and sheer wealth was far greater than his own…Eveleen was obviously deeply in love with him and the household rated intellectual and creative qualities highly.” After marriage, the passion continued to grow. “The relationship had a strong physical and emotional basis and they were both volatile personalities in private. She wrote on one occasion, ‘I have taken All your night shirts away so that you Must come to my Room.’ As Peter Gay has vividly demonstrated, one should not be dismissive and superior concerning any supposed Victorian diffidence about private sexuality. Her letters frequently express a physical yearning for his presence and a gushing acknowledgement of his almost quasi-divinity!”
In Victorian times, couples who had extended periods apart took advantage of letters to write as many of them as possible and to fill them with emotional inflections that made the biggest impact on the reader. When Myers’ children were born and began to grow up, these long separations led to the children becoming bonded more with the mother than Frederic. Eveleen was even comfortable with her husband enjoying mild flirtation on his extended trips. “They spent a fair amount of time apart because of his HMI inspections and psychical research activities. She gradually came to accept these absences and to believe that his eye for a pretty face was harmless; for Myers was quite open with her about his appreciation of female charm and beauty. She wrote to him while he was on a demanding research tour in France towards the end of 1886, that he’d been working so hard that she hoped he could find some time to enjoy himself and ‘I wish some lovely being be there to make it delightful for you.’ In addition to research, Myers was adamant that he would spend an adequate amount of time with his widowed mother and that he would holiday with his brother Arthur. Arthur, who suffered from [seizures], needed support, particularly if they were going swimming or doing some hard, remote walking. A small number of letters survive from Arthur Myers to his eldest brother. They are friendly and affectionate and reveal his determination to try to keep his affliction under control.”
At other times Eveleen was more competitive and wanted private time with Frederic away from his visiting friends. Her jealousy also extended to his intellect and she felt she had to compete. “She also felt a distinct sense of intellectual inferiority to her husband and was concerned that she had not enough knowledge to keep pace with him or adequately to educate their three young children. She assured him that, ‘I am going to work so hard when I am up again, to get such a store of knowledge for our own little Rabbit & heather-bird.’ The Myers eventually had three children—Leopold Hamilton 1881 (named after Prince Leopold his first godfather), Silvia 1883 and Harold 1886…Myers was more than thirteen years older than his wife and the more intensely Victorian of the two of them. He agreed with her that they were both totally united in their love for their children, but argued that she thought more of their happiness and he more about their immortal souls…He pointed out that she should not put him on a pedestal and that his ideal of life was not one of quiet domesticity with no challenge, but one which contained ‘seasons of struggle and contest.’ Yet, he continually re-iterated that she was what he wanted and that, ‘you are all that my heart had conceived in your exquisite and satisfying companionship.'”
The Renewal Of Youth
The struggle that Myers sought was a particular challenge like that of contending with the weakening Christian faith in the wake of Charles Darwin. In Science and a future life, he worried about determinism through genetics and a lack of spiritual transcendence that would certainly limit moral advancement. “For on the theory of descent, our sense of sin is a sense of relation, not to a higher Power, but to our own remote and savage progenitors. If I commit a selfish or violent act, this is because the impulse to immediate enjoyment, or to self-defence, which I inherit from half-human ancestors, is temporarily stronger than the impulse to self-control or to forgiveness, which my more recent ancestors have slowly acquired and imperfectly transmitted. The remorse which follows on my action is due to the fact that the impulse which I have outraged is permanent in my breast, whilst the impulse which I have gratified was a fleeting one, and has expired with its gratification. My sin, then, so far as it went, was a case of reversion, of arrested development; it does not justify ‘desperation,’ or suggest the infinite anger of offended Deity. Yet, on the other hand, in losing the sense of divine offence we lose the sense of divine aid, of divine forgiveness. If we feel that there is no access by which spiritual strength may be borne upon the soul, and if we are at the same time conscious of helpless weakness, our new state is surely a bondage rather than a liberation—a bondage to the inexorable laws of heredity, which have determined at our birth that we shall be able to struggle thus far, and no farther, along the upward way.”
In The renewal of youth, Myers felt that the last vestige of faith could be found in our dreams, but with much confusion. “The presence of a God has gone from men. Live in your dreams, if ye must live, but I Will find the light, and in the light will die.” Christianity emphasizes a kind of self-discipline, but so did the scientific method with Darwin. With mounting evidence and new inventions, progress that had been denied by superstition gave way to an industrial revolution as the ultimate demonstration. “[Darwin’s] reception therein was deeply and honourably significant—significant of a resolute national candour which, when the case is proved and the first shock over, will set no dogma higher than truth. And it was significant also of the continuity between the two ideals, of the fact that virtue and duty are in essentials the same to the man who treats this life as all as to the man ‘begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’ For the personal character of the great innovator largely influenced the reception of his teaching by the mass of mankind.”
The difficulty was in ethics. Science is a discipline that only bumps into ethics when there are victims of its inventions and schemes for power and control over the earth. A life without ethics is truly a loss. “Since whatever science does not tend to prove, she in some sort tends to disprove; beliefs die out, without formal refutation, if they find no place among the copious store of verified and systematised facts and inferences which are supplanting the traditions and speculations of pre-scientific days as the main mental pabulum of mankind.” Myers poetized the Christian life that would die out where the possibility of living a life of a clear conscience would disappear unnoticed, even when mired in the consequences, since if science could not prove an afterlife, why posit its existence? When one dies, there’s no consciousness, let alone punishment. “Ah, sweet that still upon this earth should be / So many simple souls in holy glee, / Such maids and men, unknowing shame or guile, / Whose whole bright nature beams into a smile!…And gradually the educated world—which science leads—is waking up to find that no mere trifles or traditions only, but the great hope which inspired their fathers aforetime, is insensibly vanishing away.”
A sense of wonder, purpose and meaning for mankind, with a reward in the afterlife, could turn into a meaninglessness at the level of gambling, with a shift toward Darwin’s perspective. “I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind…I cannot, anyhow, be contented, to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.” Myers instead pursued the spiritual reward and poetized it’s repose where the old body is relinquished for a youthful undamaged soul. “What yearning falls from twilight’s shadowy dome / For the unchanged city and the abiding home!…Save the child’s heart and trust as of the child.”
Phantasms of the Living
After letting go of a belief in the church system, Frederic started working in the mode of evidence where belief can only come from observations that can be shared. “In the 1870s, as we have partially seen, a series of three interconnected events unfolded which shaped Myers for the rest of his life. He lost his Christian faith, though he continued to use the vocabulary and moral lessons of Christianity, as his letters to his wife demonstrated. Consequent on this, and with the encouragement of Henry Sidgwick, he began to make a systematic investigation of paranormal phenomena. Secondly, after a certain amount of havering and advice from friends, he embarked on a career as one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. This gave him a certain professional status and income, but was not so demanding that it impeded his other interests and activities.”
In Victorian times there was an obvious class system and how often people went to church was decided by the amount of free time they could enjoy. Those who had the time and just simply drifted from that strong faith must have gone through a grieving process. That vacuum was eventually filled by scientific inquiry. “It is too simple to represent Victorian England as a pious, fundamentalist land shaken by the advances of a materialistic and iconoclastic science. The census of 1851 revealed that well over five million people did not attend church on Sunday 30th March 1851. Many of them, as first or second generation migrants from the countryside to the industrial cities, found the Established Church of little relevance to their immediate social and economic problems, though it may still have influenced them through less formal methods than Sunday attendance. It was amongst the educated middle classes and upper-middle classes, who were emancipating themselves from their evangelical roots, that scientific and scholarly advances had most impact. On this group, from which Myers, Sidgwick, Gurney (all of whom had clergymen fathers) and some others of the SPR sprang, the loss of simple faith was particularly devastating.”
Myers asked of his colleague Henry Sidgwick, “‘almost with trembling, whether he thought that when Tradition, Intuition, Metaphysic, had failed to solve the riddle of the Universe, there was still a chance that from any actual observable phenomena,—ghosts, spirits, whatsoever there might be,—some valid knowledge might be drawn as to a World Unseen. Already, it seemed, he had thought that this was possible; steadily, though in no sanguine fashion, he indicated some last grounds of hope; and from that night onwards I resolved to pursue this quest, if it might be, at his side…’ They had both already made some initial forays in this field. Myers had shown an interest in mesmerism and abnormal behaviour in the 1860s. Indeed, as early as 26th June 1863 he had visited a lunatic asylum, but does not appear to have been deeply disturbed, for afterwards he played croquet and went for a walk. In February 1867 he visited the London Mesmeric Hospital, and in his diary for the same month there is a reference to Henry Sidgwick’s being involved in mesmeric experiments. There were also a number of diary references to his mesmerising or being mesmerised, particularly in May, October and November 1867.”
What was discounted by scientists as magic tricks and fraud, was still accepted by those who had experiences they could not shake off. “What were these strange phenomena, shunned by the rational and sensible, that Myers, Sidgwick, and later a wider group, began to investigate? There were two main sorts. The first was mesmerism, which took its name from Franz Mesmer, a Viennese who made his international reputation in Paris in the 1780s. In a less ostentatious form, this was adapted to an English environment by John Elliotson at University College London and, in its hypnotic form, by James Braid in Manchester. Naturally, showmen and charlatans took these medical phenomena into a show business context, and (mostly using their own stooges but occasionally genuine members of the audience) performed in halls and theatres around the country. Those affected would go into a trance, lose the capacity to feel pain, sometimes develop clairvoyant powers, sometimes share the same sensations that their mesmerisers were experiencing, and often give exhibitionist performances of great dramatic and physical skill. These would be well outside their normal physical competence or their normal behaviour patterns. And, most disturbingly, sometimes, they would appear to be affected at a distance by the will of the mesmeriser. The mechanism behind all this, it was argued, was a powerful fluid, flowing through the natural world, which could develop and increase in potency through the mesmeric passes of the agent…The second set of phenomena (often linked to mesmeric activity) related to spiritualism. This developed rapidly as a religion from the first odd powers demonstrated by the children of the Fox family of Hydesville, New York, and it eventually arrived in England through the American medium, Mrs. Hayden, in 1852. Interest became more widespread with the arrival of another transatlantic visitor, the charismatic and handsome Daniel Dunglas Home, in 1859. A bewildering variety of phenomena were associated with these professional mediums and a number of them were replicated in private sittings or home circles. They included automatic writing and drawing by the medium, or writing and drawing by the spirits themselves, music, scents, the materialisation of objects and sometimes the full forms of spirits, and vague uplifting addresses or, less frequently, clairvoyance and evidences of spirit identity. It was to these happenings, many of them nauseatingly fraudulent and viciously exploitative of human grief, that Myers was referring when he, in fear and trembling, asked Sidgwick, his famous question.”
The Discovery of the Unconscious – Henri Ellenberger: https://rumble.com/v1gtd1r-the-discovery-of-the-unconscious-henri-ellenberger.html
In these dangerous areas of fringe science, there’s a temptation to become an influencer to gain a credulous audience, and of course money. “Yet, equally characteristically, Sidgwick was careful in his relations with Myers, as with others, not to appear the guru…He also recognised, as had Myers’ mother long before, the way that Myers’ emotions sometimes ran ahead of his intellect in his impatient search for answers:
And I feel that your peculiar phase of the ‘Maladie’ is due to the fact that you demand certainty with special peremptoriness—certainty established either emotionally or intellectually—I sometimes feel with somewhat of a profound hope and enthusiasm that the function of the English mind with its uncompromising matter-of-factness will be to put the final question to the Universe with a solid passionate determination to be answered which must come to something. However, in the mean-time we have to live on less than certainty, which for you is peculiarly difficult.
“Encouraged by the deepening friendship and support of Sidgwick, Myers began to make his own personal psychical investigations in 1872 and suggested to Sidgwick that they might research together.”
In Phantasms of the Living, Gurney, Myers, and Frank Podmore, began focusing on telepathy to find evidence for the unseen world. With telepathy, the researchers had to find evidence where there hadn’t been collusion between two or more people as well as subjects being kept distant enough so as body language could be ruled out as well as all other forms of contact. This also included people who did not know they were involved in these experiments. Registered evidence came in the form of visual or auditory impressions. Results could also be muscular with guided movements, speaking in tongues, and automatic writing. The writing specimens that were more salient involved an unconscious intelligence that appeared very different from the conscious personality. Myers “…thought that the apparition might be caused by telepathic stimulation of the cortex which then sent messages to the optic nerve and the visualising centre and that the percipient in some way often modified the primary telepathic impulse.”
Veridical, or truthful impressions, were what distinguished lesser content from knowledge that the percipient, or receiver, could not have known. These impressions could be posited as a thought-transference. Many of these were connected to deathbed visions and crisis situations. “Cyrus Read Edmonds, the headmaster of the Leicestershire Proprietary Grammar School, told his wife that, in a dream, ‘he had seen the Thames Tunnel breakthrough. That the workmen rushed to the staircases or ladders, the means of exit, but one poor fellow…was overtaken by the rush of water and perished.’ He had the accuracy of his dream confirmed at a dinner party the following evening. Myers argued, ‘The kind of communication which we are now picturing to ourselves no longer resembles a whisper along a tube, but a shout diffused in space and caught by a casual listener.’ Picking up information about a major event like this would seem to be a radically different process and perhaps implied a cosmic ether, in which all events were retained and registered and were only accessible to the random few individuals with the appropriate sensitivity….The nature of the phantasm was very varied and complex. It was very rarely a full physical materialisation occupying space, reflecting light, and seen by different percipients from the appropriate perspective. It could range from a vague physical approximation to full visual hallucination. It could be symbolic or almost completely representational.”
The SPR approach, and especially that of Myers, was to focus on intelligence and truth as being the guideposts. “Ghosts and apparitions were seen by the mentally ill and those who had been temporarily destabilised by illness and injury. To admit the literal reality of the ghost was to move back to the dark ages. In this sense, by using telepathy as the explanation, the SPR were trying to avoid that accusation and give their apparitions a different status and origin from morbid ones. As the first report of the committee on mesmerism stated, ‘In virtue of having their real cause outside the percipient, and so in a way conveying true information, we may describe death-wraiths and the like as veridical hallucinations.’ The central thesis emerging through the book was that crisis apparitions were produced telepathically by dying persons. This was based on well attested and examined evidence from sane and healthy individuals. These individuals had experienced an hallucination associated with the death or trauma of a distant person; and this had happened more frequently than one would expect from chance…On the basis of a census [Gurney] made of people ‘in good health, free from anxiety, and completely awake’ who had experienced visual hallucinations, he calculated that 1 in every 248 of them had found their hallucination coincided with the death of the person identified in the hallucination. By comparing this to the daily death rate of the country’s population he worked out that the odds against the link between the deaths and the crisis visions being purely chance, were in the trillions to one. It was therefore vital, Gurney stressed—in the light of such remarkable figures—to make absolutely sure that the original accounts were accurate and valid. The investigators had to check that there was no way the percipient could have had prior knowledge of the impending death/trauma of the apparitional figure, that there had been no deliberate fraud or playful hoaxing, and that there was other oral and written evidence to corroborate the original testimony…[Hornell Hart] examined the six leading theories as to the nature and status of apparitions and argued that, on balance, the evidence suggested that there was an ‘objective’ element involved supporting Myers’ view that in some unknown and complicated way, ordinary space was actually modified or impacted on by the phantasm.”
The French School
In the end, Myers was to be the one to synthesize the SPR’s research that was to influence psychology into the 20th century, and even in the 21st with Transpersonal Psychology. He had to take what he learned from Phantasms of the Living, and compare that from the exciting developments in French psychology at the time. “Myers’ contribution to Phantasms of the Living was limited. He only did a relatively small amount of interviewing. He contributed two comparatively short chapters. He had no expertise to bring to the statistical section or to those aspects of post-publication controversy. What he could give to Gurney, in the long hours of isolation from other people and the possible distancing from his wife, was companionship. They still frequently met each other and they collaborated, to some extent, on mesmeric/hypnotic experiments and on visits to France to meet the French savants. Myers, as the more consistently buoyant character, must have helped his intimate friend through the difficulties he faced…Parallel with the collection and examination of phantasms, went the collection and examination of other unusual and abnormal phenomena, both naturally occurring and experimentally induced. Myers and Gurney, particularly, saw automatic writing and hypnosis (and later various forms of crystal gazing) as new experimental methods peculiarly appropriate for examining the hidden depths of human personality…[Myers] selected automatic writing for study in this connection since he believed that the partial dissociation caused by automatic writing (in a milder way parallel to thought-transference in the hypnotic trance or somnambulistic state) was a useful tool for studying telepathy and the creative workings of the unconscious mind.”
Analytical Psychology: The French School: https://rumble.com/v4pemmz-analytical-psychology-the-french-school.html
By theoretically creating a gradation between personal psychology to cosmic intelligence, he could organize the different content. “Myers already suspected, by 1885, that the vast majority of material that spiritualists claimed originated from discarnate beings through automatic writing really came from a hidden intelligence within the conscious personality. In his conclusion, however, he stated quite moderately that, ‘some of the effects which Spiritualists ascribe to spirits are referable to the unconscious action of the writer’s own mind.’ This hidden intelligence could produce, without the conscious knowledge of the rational mind, both sense and nonsense, but even when there was evidence of insightful and creative activity, no external source need be posited in the vast majority of cases. It was not really until the arrival on the scene of Mrs. Piper, the Boston medium, that he thought there was any substantial evidence for an external source of information. But even in this case, telepathy between sitter and medium needed to be rigorously ruled out first.”
Independently of mediums, methods of automatic writing and purposeful thought transmission showed more promise. “[Myers] tested in greater detail the claims that some automatic writing contained information that the writer did not know…[Myers] argued that the mind had often retained impressions and details that it was not consciously aware that it had and which, in certain circumstances, might be wrongly ascribed to an external source. But in a small number of cases he believed that he had—from automatic writing, as well as from earlier SPR thought-transference experiments—evidence of mind-to-mind contact. He based a substantial part of this argument, in his second paper, on his examination of the private diary of the Reverend P.H. Newnham. This diary recorded the experiments for eight months in 1871 when Newnham attempted to ‘transmit thought voluntarily to his wife.’ They established a set of ground rules. They sat about eight feet apart. The husband wrote questions in his notebook, with his back to his wife, and she, not knowing the questions, used the planchette to reply. Newnham received over three hundred responses from his wife via automatic writing, often with considerable relevance to the original unseen question, and frequently displaying a mixture of humour, cunning and prevarication when searching or persistent questions were asked.”
Even when there was criticism from other researchers and authors, Myers stuck with the belief that there are at least two minds, much like the two brain hemispheres. “Myers had his own reflections to make, but he also recorded Newnham’s suggestion that there might be a dual state in every brain and that the second state might emerge from the right hemisphere, the untrained side, the side that behaved like a mendacious and cheating child. Myers himself raised the question of terminology, what was this unconscious mind? He distinguished it from the ‘complex unconscious cerebration’ of his first paper. Unlike unconscious cerebration, which occurred when conscious attention was elsewhere, it presented itself ‘as co-ordinate with the conscious action, and as able to force itself upon the attention of the waking mind.’ In addition hestated that: ‘A secondary self—if I may coin the phrase—is thus gradually postulated,—a latent capacity, at any rate, in an appreciable fraction of mankind, of developing or manifesting a second focus of cerebral energy which is apparently neither fugitive nor incidental merely—a delirium or a dream—but may possess for a time at least, a kind of continuous individuality, a purposive activity of its own.’ Myers linked the telepathic phenomena of the Newnhams with the SPR’s growing collection of Phantasms of the Living and proposed three hypotheses which he never withdrew for the rest of his life: the existence of a secondary self; telepathy as one of its supernormal activities; and the manifestation of such phenomena through channels usually associated with ‘abnormal or morbid vital phenomena’ like automatic writing or somnambulism. As a rider to this last hypothesis, he stated that these phenomena could be evolutive or dissolutive. For him telepathy was part of the evolutionary process. He was prepared with Newnham to assume that the secondary self, with its apparently telepathic powers, manifested through the right hemisphere. But he was not prepared to accept that this was the home of the ‘untrained moral sense.’ He knew of no ‘well-recognised doctrine of cerebral localisation’ that would authorise that conclusion. Finally, he laid down a challenge to the spiritualists. His argument was that these phenomena showed no ‘spiritual influence other than that of the spirits of living and breathing men.’ He needed evidence—’cases which they can give on first-hand testimony, and with full details’—that an intelligence other than that of some living man was at work. But in spite of an appeal ‘in the leading Spiritualistic newspaper’ he had received very little, nor was he to.”
The British contingent were then surprised at the knowing reception when they visited France, and it was an environment where they felt they could speak about these topics with less fear of moral panic and judgment. “Myers’ growing belief in a secondary self was enriched and consolidated by his visits to France in the mid and later 1880s. He made four significant and substantial visits to France…In Human Personality in the Light of Hypnotic Suggestion he fed back—to an England largely ignorant and complacent about European developments in this field—what he, Gurney and Arthur Myers had discovered. As he stated: ‘I have, through the kindness of Drs Charcot, Féré, Bernheim, and Liébeault, myself witnessed typical experiments at the Salpêtrière in Paris, in the Hôpital Civil at Nancy, and in Dr. Liébeault’s private practice; have been allowed myself to perform experiments on the principal subjects whose cases are recorded.’ In a letter back to his wife he expressed his delight at the reception they received from the French savants: ‘The way in which we were received by savants in Paris was most gratifying. We are far better known than we expected.’ In the article he tried to strike an appropriate balance between doing justice to the material and its implications and not alarming his readers. Stage hypnotism, as in the performances of Donato across Europe since 1875, threatened to discredit the scientific and medical uses of hypnosis.”
By not eliminating the rational mind, Myers could investigate these altered states to gather information and integrate with the waking personality. One didn’t have to subsume the other. “‘Hypnotism is in its infancy; but any psychology which neglects it is [obsolete] already.’ The examination of the extraordinary states made possible by hypnotism provided new insight into the mind and, ‘we may return to those normal states which lie open to our habitual introspection, having gained a new power of disentangling each particular thread in the complex of mentation, as when the microscopist stains his object with a dye that affects one tissue only among several which are indiscernibly mixed.’ Myers’ views were not only based on direct observation. He read very widely and was particularly impressed by Pierre Janet’s account of further work with Léonie, published in the Revue Philosophique for March 1888. It was Léonie’s later development, when, under Janet’s control she exhibited three distinct personalities—Léonie, Léontine, and Léonore—which gave him much additional support for his ideas. He was, therefore, able to challenge the existing intellectual grain in psychology with greater confidence. As we have seen, the general belief—though this was gradually being modified—was that reflex actions applied from the lowest to the highest activity. And, as Carpenter argued, the automatic action of the cerebrum could account for all abnormal as well as all normal and creative activities. Huxley, while remaining agnostic about ultimate, metaphysical questions, supported this position. He argued that there was no evidence that the mind produced ‘molecular’ changes, rather the reverse. So, on these two key counts one can see Myers challenging the existing orthodoxy, even before he had fully formulated his concept of the subliminal self. He could not accept the conventional view that unconscious actions that appeared conscious were really just physical reflexes. They certainly were involuntary in the sense that the individual did not consciously will them, but they were not automatic and reflex in the traditional sense. Myers, in fact, believed that there were other centres of conscious activity and purpose in human beings which, at their own level, consciously initiated the so-called reflex behaviour, and that terms like secondary intelligence, or multiplex personality, better explained the phenomena…The visits to France had encouraged and strengthened his belief in the mutability of human personality and the range of personalities that could exist in one body. He argued strongly that this mutability, this capacity for modification, had hardly been recognised by the scientific establishment, and that what they might call ‘morbid disintegration’ in abnormal personalities gave us clues as to the nature of the working of the ‘normal’ personality and that the behaviour changes were ‘not all of them pathological or retrogressive.'”
In contradistinction to the medical model, Frederic Myers was like an early positive psychologist in that he didn’t want to obsess over pathology, but to use signs of pathology to infer what good mental health would look like. “This explained why cunning, clumsy, sometimes silly and obscene material was often part of the phenomena observed. The messages, psychological or spiritual, could not get through the logical, academic left brain into full consciousness. Myers further argued, in support of this, that automatic writing was often full of mistakes, reminiscent of those of aphasic patients, who had damage to the right cerebral hemisphere. Janet, however, was not convinced that the immorality and oaths and awkwardness associated with some automatic writing was necessarily linked to the right hemisphere…Myers’ second conclusion was that these psychological automatisms, which Janet and others believed were pathological—signs of disease, of insanity, hysteria, epilepsy—were a clue to humanity’s health and growth, as well as an indication of disease and dissolution. Rightly understood, they could point the way to the releasing of considerable human potential. However, he took a more pessimistic view than Janet with regard to the timescale necessary to effect a cure. Janet believed it was possible to create an integrated personality in one earthly lifetime. Myers—probably because his concept of the subliminal self, as he later came to call his interpretation of the unconscious mind, was larger, more complex and grandiose than Janet’s—believed that such unification was unlikely if not impossible in this world.”
These advancements, as seen with other psychoanalysts, led to utopian thinking and encountered the endlessly challenging determination of what is authentic vs. people pleasing to get rewards and doing things as a means-to-an-end. “Myers, in the last part of that paper, sketched out an apparently utopian scenario where hypnotism could be widely used to get more ‘work’ out of us, improve our creativity, get rid of pain, and reform our characters. Who can deny that a range of new age therapies and strategies, largely based on hypnotic suggestion, has in some ways moved us in the direction anticipated by Myers, over one hundred years ago? Myers believed in man’s capacity to renew and remake himself, in his fundamental creative plasticity, which promised a glorious destiny and was in stark contrast to those degenerative views of human kind that others were putting forward. There is of course a danger here. This plasticity that we recognise in ourselves may suggest an element of role playing, a desire to please, in those being treated by hypnosis. Hacking, for example, has pointed out how [a patient] may well have fabricated his states in order to get the rewards he was not able to obtain in any other way. Myers himself was not unaware of this possibility, pointing out how the hysterics in Charcot’s Salpêtrière, were all able when hypnotised, to exhibit with uncanny accuracy, as we have seen, the three stages of what Charcot called the grand hysteria.”
By taking on a developmental model, Myers could replace demonic presences found in spiritualism, with an understanding of arrested development and infantilisms. “By the mid-1880s Myers appeared to be attacking the spiritualists on all fronts. Gurney’s work on hypnotism and mesmerism and the visits to France clearly demonstrated the suggestibility of many people and the ease with which distraction and suggestion could create the illusion of the paranormal. Research into automatic writing indicated that the messages, no matter how lofty or sonorous, could often be traced to latent faculties in the writer’s mind, or incarnate mind-to-mind interaction. Voices were not spirit voices but messages from the hidden, secondary self. Silly and obscene automatic writing was not the product of evil spirits but of the untrained child lurking in the right hemisphere. Dreams, too, were the dramatic inventions of the internal actor in us all and not an arena in which the spirit world interacted with us.” A proto-psychology was taking shape.
At the time of these successes, Edmund Gurney faced tragedy and gossip. His later death was considered by some to be a suicide and based on rumor, but it may have turned out to be an accident. “It is difficult to believe that such a man, at the ‘top of his game,’ should have committed suicide. However, the events of the night of 22nd June were open to a number of different interpretations, one of which might support that hypothesis. Gurney had dined at the hotel and gone to bed around 10.00pm. At 2.00pm the following day, since there had been no response to earlier knocking, the door was broken down. Gurney was found dead in his bed with a sponge-bag pressed over his nose and mouth. A small bottle, with a little chloroform in it, was by the bed. Gurney had either been using it to commit suicide, or by inhalation or direct application, as a palliative for [nerve pain]. This was quite a common practice but it had its attendant dangers as Cromwell Varley’s description of his near-fatal inhalation in 1871 demonstrates. Varley described how, possibly in very similar circumstances to Gurney, he had applied a chloroformed soaked sponge to his face, ‘After a little time I became conscious…and I saw myself on my back with the sponge to my mouth, but was utterly powerless to cause my body to move.’ His wife, sensing something wrong, came in and saved him. This is what could well have happened to Gurney, and as there was no evidence to suggest that he intended to commit suicide, the coroner’s jury delivered a verdict of accidental death…Myers rose to the challenge of Gurney’s death and the removal of the Society’s most gifted full-time worker. He began to discuss, in the pages of the Proceedings, in a more considered and systematic way, the nature of ghosts/apparitions and the type of evidence required to support belief in life after death. He did this in three papers which completed material Gurney was working on at the time of his death and which responded to the sceptical arguments of his fellow SPR honorary secretary, Frank Podmore; for after Gurney’s death, Myers and Podmore split Gurney’s role as honorary secretary of the SPR between them.”
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
As Myers continued to collect evidence and to produce what was his last book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, his health turned for the worse. “He had always been susceptible to flu and colds. He had bad attacks in March 1898 and February 1899. This brought on Bright’s disease which eventually damaged his heart and his arteries.” He would often go to the South of France to improve his health, “but Bright’s disease was beginning to affect his heart and arteries and his gasping for breath was only relieved by copious draughts of nitro-glycerine (a not uncommon medical practice of the time).” He eventually died in Rome on 17th January 1901, “where he and his family had gone in order to take the same treatment that William James was having. James had been receiving a fashionable remedy consisting of injections of ‘goats’ lymph from the thoracic duct, and extracts from the lymphatic glands, brains, and testicles.’ Although Myers also underwent this, he continued to decline, but retained his curiosity and intellectual energy to the last. James wrote to Mrs. Sidgwick:
Poor FWHM, as you will ere this have learned, died here on the 17th of pneumonia supervening upon all his other troubles. His serenity, in fact his eagerness to go, and his extraordinary intellectual vitality up to the very time that the death agony began, and even in the midst of it, were a superb spectacle and deeply impressed the doctors, as well as ourselves. It was a demonstration of the practical influence of a living belief in future existence.
Despite his death, Myers’ influence continued with his posthumously published book and there were claims made by mediums that messages received individually, supposedly without collaboration, that when put together provided evidence that Myers was communicating from the afterlife. Jeffrey Mishlove recounts that “Myers half-jokingly promised his fellow-workers that when he died he would devise an experiment that would leave people in no doubt as to his identity and survival. Beginning shortly after his death, and continuing for three decades, there were a remarkable series of communications purporting to come from him (with a few from his colleagues Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgwick, who had also died by this time) that became known as the ‘cross correspondences.’ These transcripts came to a dozen mediums in England, the United States, and India. They comprised fragments of messages, including fragments of classical quotations, that were clearly incomplete in themselves but when assembled at the Society for Psychical Research office in London fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle…Most of these scripts consisted of references to and quotations from classical and modern literature. Some were so obscure that only a scholar would recognize them. The seeming intention was to make these scripts seem pointless to the individual mediums, in order to avoid giving clues to the train of thought behind them. They only became meaningful and showed evidence of design when pieced together by independent investigators.”
Regardless of whether these events could ever be believed, Myers left behind in his actual book a prescription for readers to develop a habit of some form of automatic writing, or crystal-visioning, so that each person could benefit from self-development. “Myers begins his analysis by looking at the ways the personality is known to disintegrate. Insistent ideas, obsessing thoughts and forgotten traumas lead up to hysterical neuroses where the subliminal mind takes over certain body functions from consciousness. Gradually these maladies merge with cases of multiple personalities. He notes the subliminal personalities often represented an improvement over the normal conscious self, and suggested that ‘as the hysteric stands in relation to ordinary men, so do we ordinary men stand in relation to a not impossible ideal of sanity and integration.'”
Aldous Huxley wrote the forward and appeared to have been a fan. “Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow with a cellar? Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath? Freud, the most popular and influential of modern psychologists, inclined to the bungalow-with-basement view of human nature. It was only to be expected; for Freud was a doctor and, like most doctors, paid more attention to sickness than to health. His primary concern was with the subterranean rats and black beetles, and with all the ways in which a conscious ego may be disturbed by the bad smells and the vermin below stairs…F.W.H. Myers, who was born fifteen years before Freud and predeceased him by forty, was not a doctor and so had no vested interest in sickness. As a classical scholar, a minor poet, a conscientious observer and a platonic philosopher, he was free to pay more attention to the positive aspects of the subliminal self than to its negative and destructive aspects. He knew, of course, that the cellar stinks and is alive with vermin; but he was more interested in what goes on in the rooms (ordinarily locked) above street level—in the treasures of the piano nobile, in the far-ranging birds (and perhaps even angels) that come and go between the rafters of a roofless attic that is open to the sky…In this great book Myers brought together an immense store of information about the always strange and often wonderful goings-on in the upper stories of a man’s soul-house. And this information he presents within a theoretical frame of reference that takes account not only of the rats and beetles in the cellarage, but also of those treasures, birds and angels so largely ignored by Freud and his followers…His account of the unconscious is superior to Freud’s in at least one respect; it is more comprehensive and truer to the data of experience. It is also, it seems to me, superior to Jung’s account in being more richly documented with concrete facts and less encumbered with those psycho-anthropologico-pseudo-genetic speculations which becloud the writings of the sage of Zurich. Jung is like those classical German scholars of whom Porson once said that ‘they dive deeper and come up muddier than any others.'”
Whether it’s automatic writing, or automatic utterance, Myers wanted readers to loosen up their idée fixe and let in stream of consciousness material to assess the level of mental health based on the positive qualities of what arose. “We find that a tendency to automatic writing is by no means uncommon among sane and healthy persons. But we also find that the messages thus given do not generally rise above the level of an incoherent dream. They seem to emerge from a region where scraps of thought and feeling exist confusedly, with no adequate central control. Yet sometimes the vague scrawling changes its character. It becomes veridical; it begins to convey a knowledge of actual facts of which the automatist has no previous information; it indicates some subliminal activity of his own, or some telepathic access to an external mind. There will often be great difficulty of interpretation; great perplexity as to the true relation between a message and its alleged source. But every year of late has added both to the mass of matter and to the feasibility of interpretation. These are not the hieroglyphs of the dead but the hieroglyphs of the living.”
Cultural Psychoanalysis: Karen Horney Pt. 10: https://rumble.com/v727dyo-cultural-psychoanalysis-karen-horney-pt.-10.html
Anticipating Freud, and inspired by Pierre Janet, Myers described a possible form of talking therapy. “The first symptom of disaggregation is thus the idée fixe, the persistence of an uncontrolled and unmodifiable group of thoughts or emotions, which from their brooding isolation, from the very fact of deficient interchange with the general current of thought, become alien and intrusive, so that some special idea or image presses into consciousness with undue and painful frequency. We may perhaps suppose that the fixed idea here represents the psychological aspect of some definite, although ultra-microscopic, cerebral lesion. One may look for analogy to a corn, to a boil, to an encysted tumor, to a cancer. The idée fixe may be little more than an indurated prejudice which hurts when pressed upon. Or it may be like a hypertrophied center of inflammation, which sends its smart and ache abroad through the organism. Or for certain hysterical fixed ideas we shall find our best parallel if, accepting a well-known hypothesis, we suppose that a tumor may originate in the isolated and extravagant growth of some fragment of embryonic matter, accidentally nipped off or extruded from the embryo’s concordant development. Such tumors may be encysted or encapsuled, so that they injure surrounding tissues by pressure, while yet their own contents can only be discovered by incision. Just such, one may say, are the forgotten and irrecoverable terrors which give rise to hysterical attacks. Such tumors of the mind may sometimes be psychologically cut down upon and removed by free discussion; ‘talked out,’ as it were. Worst of all, of course, are the cancer-like cases, where the degeneration, beginning it hardly matters where, invades with rapid incoherence the whole compass of the mind…It may well be that we must look even further back than our own childhood for the origin of many haunting troubles. Inherited tendencies to terror seem to reach back far into a prehistoric past…Now we shall find, I think, that all the phenomena of hysteria are reducible to the same general conception. Or in some cases we may go a step further, and say that these fixed ideas show us, not merely an ordinary supraliminal instinct functioning without due check, but rather a submerged and primitive instinct rising with a subliminal uprush into undesired prominence, and functioning wildly instead of remaining hidden and quiescent.”
For Myers, genius was the mark of healthy impulses, or healthy subliminal uprushes. His alternative definition of genius “should be regarded as a power of utilizing a wider range than other men can utilize of faculties in some degree innate in all. It is a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought. An ‘inspiration of Genius’ will be in truth a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but rather a fulfillment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may be, of something supernormal—of something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage.”
Hinting at other forms of therapy, like using the Socratic dialectical method, or art therapy, Myers used a musical example. “Saint-Saëns had only to listen, as Socrates to his Daemon; and M. Ribot, summing up a number of similar cases, says: ‘It is the unconscious which produces what is vulgarly called inspiration. This condition is a positive fact, accompanied with physical and psychical characteristics peculiar to itself. Above all, it is impersonal and involuntary, it acts like an instinct, when and how it chooses; it may be wooed, but cannot be compelled. Neither reflection nor will can supply its place in original creation…The bizarre habits of artists when composing tend to create a special physiological condition, to augment the cerebral circulation in order to provoke or to maintain the unconscious activity.’ We note that a very brief and shallow submergence beneath the conscious level is enough to infuse fresh vigor into supraliminal trains of thought. Ideas left to mature unnoticed for a few days, or for a single night, seem to pass but a very little way beneath the threshold. They represent, one may say, the sustenance of the supraliminal life by impulse or guidance from below.”
Plato: Phaedo: https://rumble.com/v6uhnsv-plato-phaedo.html
As in 20th century psychology, sleep and dreaming was important to Frederic and those who maintained good sleep and tried to learn from their dreams could incorporate their wisdom into their waking life. “He is in fact coordinating the waking and the sleeping phases of his existence. He is carrying into sleep the knowledge and the purpose of waking hours; and he is carrying back into waking hours again the benefit of those profound assimilations which are the privilege of sleep. Hypnotic suggestion aims at co-operations of just this kind between the waking state in which the suggestion, say, of some functional change, is planned and the sleeping state in which that change is carried out—with benefit persisting anew into waking life. The hypnotic trance, which is a developed sleep, thus accomplishes for the ordinary man what ordinary sleep accomplishes for the man of genius.”
Genius also has a mark of wanting to protect a clear conscience. Morality is intertwined with these uprushes, with what Myers and called “sensitives,” or those who have a strong faculty for intuition. “Some remarkable instances of this kind undoubtedly do exist. The most conspicuous and most important of all cannot, from motives of reverence, be here discussed. Nor will I dwell upon other founders of religions, or on certain traditional saints or sages. But among historical characters of the first mark the names of Socrates and of Joan of Arc are enough to cite. The monitions of the Daemon of Socrates—the subliminal self of a man of transcendent genius—have in all probability been described to us with literal truth; and did in fact convey to that great philosopher precisely the kind of clairvoyant or precognitive information which forms the sensitive’s privilege today. We have thus in Socrates the ideal unification of human powers.”
The Passion of Joan of Arc – Has God Made You Promises?: https://youtu.be/C4_KDf4xhU8?si=SQDdX32TBC1fVeSb
In the Platonic sense, Myers agreed that there was a soul and that it inhabited the body to use it for a period of time, but discard it when the necessary time came to die. “I would say in crude terms that the soul keeps the body alive by attending to it, and can attend to central operations more directly than to superficial ones—to the activities of sleep more directly than to those of waking. Hence in deep states it can partially withdraw attention from the organism and bestow it elsewhere, while remaining capable of at once resuming its ordinary attitude towards that organism. Bodily death ensues when the soul’s attention is wholly and irrevocably withdrawn from the organism, which has become from physical causes unfit to act as the exponent of an informing spirit. Life means the maintenance of this attention; achieved by the soul’s absorption of energy from the spiritual environment. For if our individual spirits and organisms live by dint of this spiritual energy, underlying the chemical energy by which organic change is carried on, then we must presumably renew and replenish the spiritual energy as continuously as the chemical. To keep our chemical energy at work, we live in a warm environment, and from time to time take food. By analog, in order to keep the spiritual energy at work, we should live in a spiritual environment, and possibly from time to time absorb some special influx of spiritual life.”
Integration for Myers was to not allow complete possession, but to inform the conscious personality of unconscious materials that may be of use to balance out the personality. The contents that are heeded upon are only to be the ones that are beneficial to the conscious personality, not destructive. Integration would also reduce internal conflict that allows for Flow states to arise, which is why concentration is hinted at as being an important skill that supports all this self-exploration. “Passing on to genius it is noticeable that there also is a certain degree of temporary substitution of one control for another over important brain-centers. We must here regard the subliminal self as an entity partially distinct from the supraliminal, and its occupation of these brain-centers habitually devoted to supraliminal work is a kind of possession. The highest genius would thus be the completest self-possession—the occupation and dominance of the whole organism by those profoundest elements of the self which act from the fullest knowledge, and in the wisest way…If a spirit from outside can enter the organism, the spirit from inside can go out, can change its center of perception and action, in a way less complete and irrevocable than the change of death. Ecstasy would thus be simply the complementary or correlative aspect of spirit-control.”
Ultimately, Myers aimed at a non-duality in that it included our earthly wisdom, because we are made by the universe, and this knowledge which could be saved by the cosmos by a transference dimension permeating collective and individual consciousnesses. “That which lies at the root of each of us lies at the root of the Cosmos too. Our struggle is the struggle of the Universe itself; and the very Godhead finds fulfillment through our upward-striving souls.”
Somebody Up There Likes You – Simple Minds: https://youtu.be/dCRH06Ck2Z0?si=p8k0HDckZiMazYzV
But the difficulty of validation still remains today. One has to test to the point where foreknowledge is impossible and collect enormous amounts of that data until distinct patterns emerge, which no one has successfully accomplished without serious scientific misgivings. The irony is that without complete certainty, one is still faced with the fact that a therapeutic attitude requires a strong enough faith to displace the fear of death, and this is by allowing the mind the belief that there’s something better on the other side.
Immortal Longings: F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death – Trevor Hamilton: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781845402488/
Science and a Future Life – Frederic William Henry Myers: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781108027380/
Phantasms of the Living – Edmund Gurney, Frederic William Henry Myers, Frank Podmore: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781108027335/
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death – Frederic William Henry Myers: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781571742384/
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393310696/
Ryan, M.B. (2010). The resurrection of Frederic Myers. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 42, 149-70.
The Road To Immortality: A Description Of The After-Life By F.W.H. Myers – Geraldine Cummins: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781908733467/
Ryan, M.B. (2010). The resurrection of Frederic Myers. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 42, 149-70.
Genuine Reality: A Life of William James – Linda Simon: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226758596/
Berkencotter, Carol. (2011). A Patient’s Tale of Incarceration in a Victorian Lunatic Asylum. International Journal of English Studies (IJES).
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/