One lesson we can learn from a fresh look at our historical sources is that leaders of modern sciences have been hopelessly polarized in their views on the empirical evidence for ‘occult’ phenomena. In my last post, I addressed this by noting deep disagreements among founding figures of modern psychology and psychiatry regarding the marvels … Read more
Does it matter that some eminent scientists and intellectuals have firmly believed in ‘psychic’ phenomena? Or should we just accept vocally dismissive statements on these matters by scientifically distinguished disbelievers? This is one of several questions I touched upon in my latest article, which I was invited to contribute to a thematic issue of the … Read more
Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979). Image credit: Hugh Lloyd-Jones/Verlag C.H. Beck. If you enjoyed my video plug for the reading group and are keen on additional background readings about Oxford classicist Eric R. Dodds, I got you sorted: you can now download a free PDF of Dodds’s article “Why I do not believe in survival” (1934) … Read more
The philosopher and occult writer Carl du Prel was the most prominent German-language theorist of the unconscious self immediately before Sigmund Freud, who once called du Prel “that brilliant mystic.” Revered by artists like R. M. Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, du Prel’s writings informed the work of renowned psychologists other than Freud, … Read more
I’m glad to share the news that my contribution to the Oxford Handbook of William James has just appeared in an electronic version ahead of print. William James at a slate-writing seance with the medium Mrs. Walden (probably late 1890s. Image Credit: James papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS.Am.1092.[1]). Chapter summary: James’s open advocacy, practice, … Read more
When the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London was still in existence, it was widely regarded the international flagship of medical history and attracted some of the brightest scholars and students from all around the world. One of the people I met there around a decade ago was Yu-chuan Wu from … Read more
“You don’t want to mess with Mrs. Sidgwick!”. No Victorian has ever written a statement like this, though it is certainly along the lines of what many contemporaries of Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick were thinking. Born on 11 March 1845 into one of the most politically and intellectually influential families in Britain, Nora (as she was … Read more
Christian Jarrett, an editor at Aeon magazine, approached me after reading my response to a Japanese newspaper query on ghost beliefs in the West last year to commission a short article on a similar topic. I was happy to comply, and my Aeon piece on the hidden history of hallucinations and visions went online in … Read more
The latest issue of Aries, the prime academic journal for the study of Western esotericism, includes a comprehensive assessment of Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters by Eva Kingsepp at Karlstad University, Sweden. Whereas the first part of my own review here on Forbidden Histories was concerned with Kurlander’s evidence-free depiction of ‘mainstream’ science’s relationship with parapsychology … Read more
Earlier this month I was contacted by a reporter from the Tokyo newspaper Chunichi Shimbun with questions on ghost beliefs in the UK. The occasion for the query was the Obon Festival – the time of the year when spirits of the dead are believed to reunite with their families –, which is currently celebrated … Read more