From India to the Planet Mars (Forgotten Books) - Softcover

Pownall, Thomas Walker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606802445 ISBN 13: 9781606802441

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

Synopsis

This is a skeptical inquiry into a remarkable 19th century French medium, here called Helene Smith. Her actual name was Catherine-Elise Muller (b. 1861 d. 1929). She popularized the concept of automatic writing, which earned her admiration from the latter-day Surrealists. And her interplanetary psychic visions are extremely similar to contactee accounts from the 1950s and 1960s.

Helene, at the hands of her bossy and controlling sprit guide 'Leopold,' visited remote times and places, particularly 15th century India (where she was a doomed princess), and 18th century France (where she was Marie Antoinette), and of greatest interest, Mars. This book documents the Martian language and writing, includes hand-drawn illustrations of scenes, and mysterious vignettes of life on another planet. Included are over forty short texts in 'Martian,' with translations in French (interlinear) and English.

Flournoy's book brought Helene fame, and the book is still in print over a hundred years later. However, she was not appreciative of his critical approach, and refused to work with him any further after the book was published. (Quote from sacred-texts.com)

About the Author

Theodore Flournoy (1854-1920) was a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva and author of books on spiritism and psychic phenomena. He is most known for his study of the medium Helen Smith (or Helene Smith - a pseudonym for Catherine Muller) who relayed information about past lives through a trance state, entitled From India To The Planet Mars (1899). He proposed this information as 'romances of the subliminal imagination', and a product of the unconscious mind (Stevens 1994). Flournoy was a contemporary of Freud, and his work influenced C. G. Jung's study of another medium - his cousin Helen

About this title

Review

"Readers ... will be very interested in the recently published version of Théodore Flournoy's wonderfully written examination of a young medium whom he has diagnosed as having [multiple personality disorder]. This volume is a double treat because in addition to the main body ... it has a fascinating and in-depth scholarly introduction ... that places the book in its historical context and sheds light on its importance then and now."--Contemporary Psychology

From the Back Cover

"Two books that became classics in dynamic psychiatry appeared in 1900: Flournoy's From India to the Planet Mars and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

.... [The former] told the story of Théodore Flournoy's five-year investigation in Geneva of Catherine Muller [whom he called "Hélène Smith"], who claimed to have the gift of clairvoyance and the ability to reincarnate, in her mediumistic trances, phases of her previous lives.... This book, as entertaining as a novel by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, is a deep-reaching analysis of some of the subtle processes of the subconscious mind. It brings evidence of subliminal imaging as a creative and continuous activity."--Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious

"[Flournoy's study] of a single, complex, extraordinary case remains one of the most detailed case histories of multiple personality theory.... Simply put, [it] is to current-day multiple personality theory what Anna O. was to psychoanalysis--one of the founding cases."--Mark S. Micale

Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606802445
• ISBN 13: 9781606802441
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 318