Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, and: Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal by Jeffrey J. Kripal (review)

Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, is dedicated to the comparative study of religions. He specializes in literature that expresses the connections between divinity and humanity, a category that he was pleased to discover embraces writing about the paranormal, science fiction, and graphic novels. Such works, he finds, are produced by “authors of the impossible,” authors who use both sides of their brains, often by expressing their ideas in both words (left brain) and images (right brain). More specifically, in Authors of the Impossible and Mutants & Mystics, Kripal presents his theory that science fiction and some related categories of writing are an expression of paranormal experiences—and that these paranormal experiences are understood in relation to what is called divine. As he says in the later volume, “I … want to [show] how these modern mythologies can be fruitfully read as cultural transformations of real-life paranormal experiences, and how there is no way to disentangle the very public pop-cultural products from the very private paranormal experiences. And that, I want to suggest, is precisely what makes them fantastic” (2).

Authors of the Impossible is about writers focused on the paranormal, and includes chapters dedicated to Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901), who was deeply involved with the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, and author of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903); Charles Fort (1874–1932), who wrote The Outcast Manufacturers (1909) and what Kripal correctly describes in several places as “four really weird books”: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932); Jacques Vallée, ufologist and author of Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space; A Scientific Appraisal (1965), Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma (1966), and Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969), and others; and parapsychologist Bertrand Méheust. Kripal finds that “certain seemingly universal human experiences—out-of-body flight, magical influence, telepathic communication, secret forms of identity, altered states of consciousness and energy,” and so forth, described by these authors are not only “enthusiastically embraced in contemporary fiction, film, and fantasy,” they are also part of the history of Western esotericism. “Popular culture,” he writes, “is our mysticism. The public realm is our esoteric realm. The paranormal is our secret in plain sight” (6). Also important to the argument is the idea of “the human as two,” which is based on the differences in right and left brain functioning. It is through awareness of the right brain, Kripal believes, that “a writer becomes an ‘author of the impossible’” (39).

Mutants & Mystics (2011) is divided into chapters dedicated to Kripal’s seven mythemes: divinization/demonization, which is about the supernaturals who have interacted with humans in the guise of mythological and religious figures; orientation, which identifies the source or location of sacred wisdom in some other place or time; alienation, which is about the transfer of “the gods and their wisdom” (27) to outer space; radiation, or the discovery that matter is energy; mutation, or the discovery that sentient life is the product of evolution and that “humanity is a transitional or temporary form” (28); realization, specifically the realization that the paranormal is a real “dimension of the world that works remarkably like a text or a story … that we are all figments of our own imagination” (28); and authorization, the stage at which we...