THE MARTIAN CODE: Kate Cherrell deciphers the enigma behind an Alien puzzle

From the dawn of Modern Spiritualism, individuals have claimed to have succeeded in separating their consciousness from their corporeal form and heading skywards. Whether this contact was made at séance tables in Victorian dining rooms, wartime spiritualist circles or during the age of LSD and remote viewing experiments, Martians in particular seemed very keen to talk.

THE MEDIUM AND THE MARTIANS

By Kate Cherrell

During the spiritualism boom of the 19th Century, mediums and mystics claimed to have conversed with the spirits of loved ones, of historical figures and even religious figures and prophets. However, it should be said that the profundity of such biblically fed messages suggests that mediums were catching Jesus and his brethren on a decidedly ‘off day’. Yet for every experience with human spirits, there were many other mediums who set their sights a little higher than heaven.

Looking back to the 19th Century when Spiritualism as a movement and modern religion was in its infancy, it was no great stretch of the imagination that contact with life beyond our planet should be possible. Following decades of scientific discoveries, industrial developments and schools of new religious thought, the conflation of science fiction, astrological observation and changing spiritual beliefs became a curious subsection in the world of mediumship.

In David P. Abbott’s 1907 work ‘Behind the Scenes with the Mediums’, the magician-turned-debunker collated stories of fraudulent and ‘questionable’ mediumship from across America. He shared the methods and wider impact of these acts, but also committed to print some of the stranger claims made by travelling mediums and conjurers across the States. Indeed, a number of mediums appeared to be matchmaking their clients with aliens for some time, as he commented ‘doubtless some of my readers have heard of some such persons…whose “soul-mates” reside on Mars, Jupiter, or some other planet. Sometimes these persons have considerable means and pay the medium a godly sum to materialize a particular “soul-mate” for them.’ (Behind the Scenes with the Mediums - David P Abbot 1907) Martians were not only exciting and futuristic, but lucrative.

Before Victorian and 20th Century mediums ventured into inter-planetary realms, Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic and scientist, reported an out of body experience where his soul journeyed to Mars, finding a peaceful, ungoverned civilisation on its surface. Similarly, in the late 19th Century, medium Lizzie S. Green claimed to channel news of Mars via the convoluted means of channelling fellow medium Madam Fredrika Ehrenborg who had predeceased her by several years. Ehrenburg’s spirit was said to have drifted to Mars following the medium’s earthly death in 1873 and transferred messages of the red planet via psychic sate writing several years later. These messages, although predominantly inane in content, were collated by Mrs Green and published to great success. Once more, the spirit-focused public were keen to explore other alien worlds, as much as the human spirit realm that surrounded them.

Yet for all of these space-bound mediums, one in particular blazed a light across the Martian sky in the 19th Century, leaving a legacy of alien observations, landscapes and languages in her wake; the Swiss medium, Hélène Smith.

‘Hélène Smith’ was born Catherine-Elise Müller in Martigny, Switzerland in 1861 into a Protestant family. However, she was subsequently baptised into the Catholic Church and her family, her mother in particular, remained devout practising Christians. Curiously, her mother claimed to have experienced religious visions for many years, which undoubtedly introduced the idea of spirit contact and mediumship to the young Hélène. She was a solitary, introverted child, prone to daydreams, where she also reported visions, mainly consisting of colourful, hypnotic landscapes that she later attributed to Martian visitation.

From the age of 13, Hélène worked in a silk shop until she discovered spiritualism in 1892 (an American admirer would later pay her a salary to work as a full time medium). She quickly joined a “development” circle, whereby attendees attempt to develop their psychic and spiritual powers through group tutoring and activities. According to others in her circle, she quickly began to show mediumistic talents, predominantly ‘moral admonitions, treatment prescriptions for the consultants, messages from deceased relatives and friends, and revelations of past lives of the participants of the séance.’[1]

As her development as a medium progressed, she supposedly began communication with Italian adventurer and magician Alessandro Cagliostro and French novelist Victor Hugo. When you begin your career with the great and good, it’s understandable that the only way to go is up. Literally.

As Hélène’s séances began to bring her fame, she was soon introduced to Théodore Flournoy, a professor of psychology and author on Spiritism and parapsychology. It was Flournoy who proposed that she use the pseudonym ‘Hélène Smith’ after his young daughter. After meeting the child, the 30-year-old medium was satisfied with her new name and took it forwards into her career, and her studies with Flournoy.

Flournoy, a contemporary of Freud, conducted long-term investigations into Hélène’s abilities which he published under the title ‘From India To The Planet Mars’ (1899). He entered the study with a wealth of compliments for the medium, emphasising her physical appeal and mental stability as a means to credit the legitimacy of his academic interest in her claims. Had Ms Smith been rather more eccentric, the justification of his multi-year study may have been rather more difficult. Of the medium, Flournoy said ‘I found the medium…to be a beautiful woman about thirty years of age, tall, vigorous, of a fresh, healthy complexion…of an open and intelligent countenance, which at once invoked sympathy. [She] wore an air of health, of physical and mental vigour, very, very pleasant to behold, and which., by-theway, is not often encountered in those who are good mediums.’ (Flournoy, Theodore. From India to the Planet Mars)

Throughout this study, Smith entered a trance state and channelled a number of past lives. Flournoy would later attribute these experiences to ‘cryptamnesia’, a type of subconscious plagiarism and memory bias. Flournoy later suggested that Smith should be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and that such mediumistic trances and false memories were the result of the subconscious mind. Not spirits.

Upon entering a trance, her ‘guide’ of sorts (Leopold, a reincarnation of Cagliostro), would explain Helen’s acts to Flournoy and talk to the investigator, seemingly independent of Hélène. She would often claim to awake from these deep trances with no recollection of the events.

Hélène’s vast array of narratives was termed by Flournoy as ‘Subliminal Romances’, which he used to denote everything from trances involving past lives, through to spirit painting and glossolalia. Cryptamnesia aside, Hélène’s past lives are staggeringly wild. Flournoy classed these lives into three cycles: the Hindu cycle, the Royal cycle and the Martian cycle. These past lives, conducted through trance and séance, began with such historical icons as Marie Antoinette. Hélène’s depictions of life at court were detailed, elaborate and mimicked Marie Antoinette’s refined behaviours with a high degree of accuracy.

Another regular in the Hindu cycle was Princess Simandini, a fifteenth-century Arab princess, married to Sivrouka, a Hindu potentate. In many of her trance sessions, she channelled the Princess’ memories, including her horrific death at her husband’s funeral pyre (committing ‘sati/suttee’). She recounted landscapes, architecture and historical customs of the time. She would also sing ‘exotic melodies, played with an imaginary monkey.’

As her trances progressed, she named Flournoy as the reincarnation of her husband and together, they strangely recreated scenes from their life together. In these scenes, Smith supposedly spoke Sanskrit and wrote in rudimentary Arabic script. While these narratives were often described as ‘fragmented’ compared to her Martian efforts, her ability to describe romantic scenes and landscapes was astounding.

But most impressively, Hélène claimed to make regular journeys to Mars. She painted elaborate Martian landscapes and claimed to speak and write the language perfectly. Hélène’s Martian cycle included verbal descriptions, writing and paintings, describing landscapes, inhabitants and experiences. She would describe her ‘flight into space’, arriving at a landscape of disembodied, long-dead inhabitants, ‘carriages gliding by, with no horses or wheels but emitting sparks’; ‘of houses with fountains on the roof’; and men and women dressed almost similarly.’[2]To accompany one Martian inhabitant was a dog-like creature with the ‘head of a cabbage’ that combined the ‘intelligence of the dog with the stupidity of the parrot’ which retrieved objects, but was also able to write, ’[3] albeit in a mechanical manner. Sadly, no handwriting example of this leafy pooch was taken. This Martian hound was described as having ‘a big green eye in the middle (like the eye of a peacock feather), and five or six pairs of paws, or ears all about’ which rather complicates the detailed requirements of Hélène’s Martian paintings. The landscapes described and painted by the medium varied enormously, but were bright and colourful places, with a ‘sky of yellow, green lake and grey shores’, but with much vegetation similar to Earth’s own.

However, Hélène’s Martian writing is some of the most interesting evidence provided in the entire Flournoy study. This strange language would come to Hélène in a variety of hallucinations, both auditory and visual, and through these visions, she would be shown how to write the alien symbols.

Her Martian language has long been studied in the field of linguistics as a form of a ‘hereditary tendency to glossolalia.’ While Helen’s native language was French, she was well versed in Hungarian, Spanish, Italian and German, with a rudimentary knowledge of Latin, English and Greek. Her Martian language, while looking truly extra-terrestrial, was dissected by Flournoy and Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and was described as being a language derived from French idiom. In short, Hélène’s Martian was like a French code, with each symbol relating to a French letter, with similar French grammatical rules.

After these French roots were discovered, Hélène then created a second, more complex Martian language, which Flournoy called part of the ‘UltraMartian Cycle’, relating to a language from a planet further away than mars. The Society for Psychical Research explains ‘The Ultra-Martian language was more complex; ultra-Martian inhabitants were more grotesque than those of Mars, which Flournoy interpreted as an unconscious response on the part of Hélène to his scepticism towards her naïve descriptions of the beauty of life on Mars.’

In Flournoy’s final work, he attributes Smith’s past lives and supernatural narratives to being ‘products of a subliminal imagination, their content based on her previous memories and experiences, incubated and creatively combined in the subliminal regions of her mind.’ Smith’s lives were very real and legitimate to her, but little more than her mind’s own creation. Nonetheless, her Martian narratives play a fascinating and important role in the wild history of 19th century mediumship and spirit contact.

But Hélène and Flournoy’s relationship did not end with the publication of his study. Rather, it negatively escalated. Upon publication, Hélène was incensed by the depictions of her mediumship and the suggestion of their illegitimacy. This led to a strained battle over royalties, which resulted in Flournoy conceding 50% to Hélène. While she stated that the study caused her great embarrassment and had lasting negative effects, she continued her mediumship and alien tales long afterwards, expanding her extra-terrestrial ‘romances’ to Uranus and the Moon.

As Hélène’s career progressed, she left her alien narratives behind, seeking refuge in her paintings and Christian visions. While she renounced her beliefs in her Martian and Hindu cycles, Marie Antoinette remained. Following the death of her mother, her devotion increased tenfold, and she spent much of her time painting Christ and the Virgin Mary. While these were never cited to be past lives, they appeared to provide some therapeutic effort in processing her loss.

Over time, Hélène gave fewer séances and continued her religious devotion. Through the financial support of her American financial sponsor, she could pursue her spiritual, religious painting and garner a reputation for her skills, particularly within the surrealist movement. Shortly after her death in 1929, a large retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Geneva Art museum, where her strange art was celebrated by art lovers and spiritualists alike. And, despite estrangement from Flournoy, she continued to use the pseudonym he gave her until she died.

REFERENCES:

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[1]https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/Hélènesmith#Psi_Phenomena [2]https://scroll.in/magazine/873582/remembering-theswiss-woman-who-went-from-india-to-the-planet-mars-inthe-19th-century [3]http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/1/i_martian.php Flournoy, Théodore. From India to the Planet Mars. 1899.

BIOGRAPHY:

Kate Cherrell is a writer, public speaker and creator of BurialsAndBeyond.com, a website exploring the stranger side of life and death. She is a specialist in 19th century Spiritualism and has recently completed a PhD in female mediumship and the gothic. Her Patreon features new light-hearted videos, podcasts and articles every week, all relating to the paranormal, dodgy mediums, death and the occasional spectral mongoose.

www.burialsandbeyond.com Patreon.com/burialsandbeyond