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Reviewed by:
  • Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
  • Bill Ellis
Jeffrey J. Kripal. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. 320. ISBN: 978-0226453866.

This passionately written book argues for the central place of previously marginalized authors who have made serious attempts to theorize paranormal phenomena outside conventional scientific and religious frameworks. Kripal, currently the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University and an active participant in the countercultural Esalen Center for Theory and Research, contends that claims of the supernatural should be the subject of “open-minded collection, classification, and theory building” (253). Participation in the “sacred” is one of the central elements that supports religious activity and in any case is a fundamental element in the structure of human consciousness, and so, Kripal concludes, confronting such experiences should be at the center of religious studies, both privately and in research universities. The tendency of academia, instead, to marginalize and even consciously exclude such “damned” topics from serious discussion forms a disturbing thread through the book, as indeed it should.

Kripal explains that the book’s origins lay in his proposal to discuss the popular culture devoted to fictional characters with hidden superpowers. Such culture excites an enormous following, he notes, indicating that the theme of undisclosed capabilities within the human mind strikes a deep chord within modern audiences. His Esalen colleagues, indeed, suggested to him that such “superpowers” express a widespread belief among audiences that the human psyche does in fact contain many hidden potentialities, which have been repressed by culture.1 These can be cultivated by some highly talented individuals, but in [End Page 355] fact they become available to most people at times of stress. However, he notes, such speculations, along with the fictional narratives they embody, “fly beneath the radar” of most research, and so the larger implications of superhero pop culture for religious studies has gone virtually unnoticed.

He found the same paradox in the way most researchers routinely refuse to entertain discussion of phenomena suggesting that certain psychic potentialities did in fact exist, even when it was impressively attested. The bulk of the book is a close reading of the writing of four “outsider” authors who countered this trend to develop complex theories of the paranormal. From the early twentieth century, the book singles out the British psychic researcher Fredrick Myers and the American eccentric Charles Fort. From more recent times, Kripal handles two French-born contemporaries, Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust, supplementing his reading of their works with interviews and personal correspondence.

Kripal affirms that he takes seriously his professional duty not to believe all the “impossible” events he finds in the works of these four authors. Nevertheless, he does insist that all were careful researchers, and that they based their theorizing on occurrences that were both compelling in themselves for those who witnessed them and also frequently attested in various cultures and time periods. The authors’ conclusions directly challenge precepts of consensus reality, making them “authors of the impossible,” but Kripal patiently shows that they were not self-deluded or mad. Rather, he demonstrates that the material they confront stubbornly resists simple explanation and thus compels them to seek new explanations outside both science and religion. While each author focuses on different types of paranormal phenomena—contact with the dead, poltergeists, UFOs and contact with aliens, and the quasi-medical practice of “magnetism”—each is not a discrete mystery but in fact part of a larger realm that comprises religion, myth, folklore, and contemporary experience. Kripal concludes that one cannot properly study such data by assuming that it can be reduced to existing concepts of physics or psychology: the paranormal, he insists, must be understood on its own terms (158).

The body of the book is valuable for bringing into precise focus the intellectual challenge such materials present to the rational discourse of the West. His use of Tzvetan Todorov’s work on literature of the “fantastic” in literature is especially insightful, for the structuralist recognized that the peculiar pleasure of such stories is not their use of paranormal motifs, nor the triumph of reason...

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