Difference between revisions of "Hélène Smith"

The daughter of a Hungarian merchant, Smith worked as an employee in a commercial house. She discovered [[spiritualism]] in 1891 and joined a spiritualist "development" circle. According to her fellow believers, she began to show evidence of mediumistic abilities in 1892, and claimed to communicate with Victor Hugo and Cagliostro.

She became well known in Geneva, and it was there that Flournoy made her acquaintance. Her [[channeling]] evolved from the usual raps and table-tipping to somnambulatory trances, of which she remembered nothing. While in this state she experienced clear images of faraway places such as a civilization on [[Mars]], and of her own former lives. She would write out the Martian communications on paper and translate them into French, popularizing [[automatic writing]].

In 1900, Élise Müller became famous with the publication of Des Indes à la Planete Mars ("From India to the Planet Mars") by Théodore Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva. The medium and the psychologist remained very close until 1899, when "Des Indes à la planète Mars" was first published. The book documented her various series of experiences in terms of romantic cycles: the "Martian" cycle, "Ultramartian" cycle, "Hindu", "Oriental", and "royal" cycles.

In 1900, a certain Mrs. Jackson, a rich American spiritualist who was impressed by Müller, offered her a salary which would permit her to quit her job and dedicate herself to pursuing and documenting her experiences. Müller accepted and was able to continue with further cycles. She also began to paint her visions and particular religious images of [[Jesus Christ|Christ]]. Smith is mentioned by André Breton in his book Nadja where he compares her to the eponymous character.

Théodore Flournoy considered her "cycles" as the products of what he judged to be infantile imaginings and her Martian language as a mere constructed language. Flournoy concluded that her "Martian" language had a strong resemblance to Ms. Smith's native language of French and that her automatic writing was "romances of the subliminal imagination, derived largely from forgotten sources (for example, books read as a child)." He invented the term cryptomnesia to describe this phenomenon.