Intriguing Claims of Alexis Didier, Master Clairvoyant

Some of the most astonishing nineteenth century evidence for ESP comes in accounts involving Alexis Didier.  The original accounts can be read in the pages of the nineteenth century journal The Zoist, which can be read here.  At the link here you can read an account of many pages describing very compelling evidence for the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier. My post "Still More Nineteenth Century Evidence for ESP" has many quotes from this account, one entitled "Reports of Various Trials of the Clairvoyance of Alexis Didier, Last Summer, in London." 

Alexis Didier was by trade an engraver and artist, but also a skillful writer who produced a work in French describing his experiences with clairvoyance. The book has some very striking and beautifully written passages that I will quote in English. I used the Google Translate utility to produce the translations. 

Alexis Didier

Didier's displays of clairvoyance would often occur after he was hypnotized into a trance-like state. On page 15 Didier discusses being hypnotized. Hypnotism originally went under names such as animal magnetism and artificial somnambulism.  The "magnetic fluid" Didier refers to below is a speculative idea about some invisible fluid that can be manipulated by a hypnotist. We read this complex assertion, which must be one of the most remarkable claims I have ever read:

"When I feel invaded by the magnetic fluid, something indefinable happens within me that delights me, transports me, tenses and convulses my nerves, twists my limbs, upsets my entire inner being, seizes me, possesses me and painfully tears me away from the realities of earthly life that surround me, to open before the inner eye of my mind, endless horizons; this first sensation, always painful, is succeeded by a feeling of well-being; material obstacles becoming more transparent than crystal, no longer block my vision. The entire Universe is before me, and I can transport myself from one pole to the other with the speed of lightning; I can converse with the Kaffirs, walk in China, descend into the mines of Australia, enter the harem of the Sultan in less than an hour, without fatigue; for the soul, daughter of God, has only to will in order to be, like her father, everywhere; this power which triumphs over space and allows the soul to transport itself from one place to another, is nothing in comparison with that which makes it victorious over time and which makes all the centuries present to my sight. The vanished generations, which, more numerous than the grains of sand of the sea, have lived on earth, appear at my will or at the evocation of the consultant, in their perfect individuality, having the costumes, the features, the morals, the habits, the character which distinguished them during their stay here below. The past for me is not dead, it is living. There is a pious belief that makes one religiously preserve, enshrined in gold and precious stones, the relics of the saints, and that makes one believe that there remains something of their soul, their spirit; of their heart, in a word, of their personality, in these fragments of their dead body. For me, I see them, re-existing entirely in body, in soul, in spirit, in holiness, under the smallest particle of an object that they touched during their life, and I enjoy their real presence, as if they were still on this earth."

On page 20 Alexis tells us this:

"When I touch, I feel, I breathe, I see this vital essence, it is the man or woman from whom it emanates and that it contains only by an electrical contact that incorporates me so to speak to them, that I touch, that I feel, that I breathe, that I see; it is this that makes me enter into direct communion of thought, of feeling, of sensation with those who are in relation with me; with the help of a simple lock of hair or a letter, I touch them, I feel them, I see them, I hear them, they live in me their life, I feel myself suffering from their pain, enjoying their enjoyment, loving their love; my soul, freed from the bonds of the flesh, touches them unites in spirit with them."

One of the strangest phenomena reported under hypnotism is a phenomenon called the transposition of the senses. When the phenomenon occurs, a hypnotized person may report receiving sensations from parts of the body other than the eye. He may report seeing through the epigastrium (the upper central part of the abdomen), or seeing through his fingertips. You can read accounts of this strange "transposition of the senses" phenomenon in my seven posts here.  Using the term "lucidity" to mean clairvoyance, and the term "sleepwalker" to mean a hypnotized person, Didier reports the following on page 22:

"In the state of upheaval in which lucidity occurs, the sleepwalker no longer has recourse to the ordinary organs of sight. Thus, I sometimes read with the epigastrium, when I feel that my soul, removed from the empire of the flesh, radiates spiritually through this organ. This sight is painful, it only operates with jolts and electric tremors. It is called second sight, because it appears second place and that it is only the privilege of a few beings on earth, who owe it to a certain unhealthy disposition."

On page 38 Didier tells us this, using the term "sleepwalkers" for hypnotized subjects obtaining clairvoyance, which he calls "lucidity":

"The soul is an immaterial though substantial being, created by God in each man at the moment of his birth, of the nature of the angels and immortal like them; it is invisible to the senses and can only be seen by sleepwalkers gifted with a very high lucidity; it is enclosed in the body as in a prison...The soul is therefore a simple being emanating from God, without participating in its nature and without proceeding from it. It is sovereignly, actively and essentially intelligent, from the moment when, returned so to speak to itself, it is separated from the body; because then it knows everything, sees everything, flies from one end of the universe to the other, walks in time as in its domain, and reanimates at will the vanished generations; nothing is hidden from him any more, because what limits the faculties of man is the imperfection of the material organs, limited, finite and often altered, which serve him in the usual operations of life."

On page 54 Didier speculates about a kind of spiritual fluid or energy that permeates nature, rather sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi talking about the Force: 

"There exists spread throughout the world a subtle, luminous, imponderable fluid, which mysteriously animates all the parts of creation where it maintains movement and to which it gives invisible life to the eye of the senses; we feel its presence, but we see it only in the state of lucidity where it appears a breath of light taking in turn all the colors of the rainbow; it is it which makes plants vegetate, it is it which makes animals and men live. This spiritual fluid is one, but it modifies its nature differently according to the body which it animates; its absence produces death in the parts where its presence maintained life."

On page 68 Didier talks about what it is like to be clairvoyant when hypnotized: 

"For me, under the convulsive action of the magnetic fluid, I feel, so to speak, completely transformed: it seems to me that life has withdrawn within me and has awakened an inner being who enjoys infinitely more extensive faculties; I feel myself endowed with organs infinitely more exquisite and more perfected than in the waking state, and the most audacious enterprises seem to me child's play, for I feel a force, a light which act powerfully in me and allow me to accomplish, without hesitation, the most extreme desires of my consultants.

As soon as I have in my hands a lock of hair impregnated with the vital fluid of an individual living here below, with the electric rapidity with which the sensation operates, my spirit finds itself carried away in space and reunited with that of this individual; I have sought a name to describe this astonishing marvel which instantly unites me in spirit with the persons whose clothing is given to me or a lock of hair, and I have not found one more expressive than that of communion. Indeed, my spirit, triumphing over space with incalculable rapidity, will unite with the one whose fluid I feel in the part of the world where he is at the moment when I am put in contact with him, and I am so well present in spirit in the same place as him, that I hear the language of the people who surround him without understanding it, if the language is unknown to me, and that I am able to describe, in their most minute details, the beauties or the particularities of the sites or monuments which surround him.

If I like, to paint this miraculous union of spirits across space with an electric instantaneity, to use the word communion, it is because I feel completely identified with the individual with whom I am in contact; my presence, although invisible, is so real, that not only can I look through the windows of the apartment he lives in, hear what is said to him and what he answers, see what he does, read what he writes, but also because I suffer from the illness from which he suffers, I am worried by his worries, happy with his joys; my face sometimes takes on the air of his face, and my writing becomes his writing. I know perfectly well that everything I write here is so magical in appearance, although true in reality, that if I had not witnessed these phenomena and convinced the most intelligent men of this century of their reality, I would not dare to have it printed."

Later a medical doctor named Joseph Bodes Buchanan would publish  a long book called Manual of Psychometry: Dawn of a New Civilization, a book which claimed to document many examples of what is described by Didier above: an ability of someone to obtain information about someone in an anomalous way merely by touching something the person had once owned or worn, or perhaps touching a lock of the person's hair. For example, he claims on this page: "Thus, a lock of hair, or an article of clothing, may be made the means of forming a correct diagnosis." 

On page 84 Didier tells about clairvoyance (which he calls "lucidity") obtained by hypnotized subjects, which he refers to as magnetized subjects ("animal magnetism" being the word used for hypnotism before the word hypnotism came into common use):

"The first characteristic of lucidity is to allow magnetized subjects to see distinctly, with closed eyes and even blindfolded, the objects which are presented to them, with the epigastrium or the tips of the fingers. The second consists in penetrating the most opaque bodies, in seeing what a closed box contains, in reading in an uncut book which is totally unknown to them, the page which is indicated to them, in perceiving objects through a piece of furniture or a wall, as if the walls of the wall and the piece of furniture had become transparent to them like a sheet of glass; in going in spirit to all the countries of the world, to enter into communion with the individuals with whom they have been put in contact, so that they can give news of them. Lucidity has as its characteristic the faculty that we have just enumerated. It is certain that with such powerful means of informing oneself, the somnambulist must enjoy an intelligence and a science as profound as superior. "

On page 158 Didier discusses some of the philosophical relevance of the displays of clairvoyance he so successfully produced on so many occasions. Again, the term "lucidity" is used for clairvoyance:

"These facts, some of which I have cited, have been repeated often enough for my name to enjoy, in public opinion, a great reputation for lucidity. I take advantage of this celebrity to make known to man, not the dogmas of a new philosophy, but to explain to him one of the most elementary truths of all religions, the existence and immortality of the soul. There is no doubt that, if I did not possess within me an immaterial principle, I could not launch myself into space, to an immense distance, and contemplate what takes place in the most distant countries. There is, moreover, no doubt that this principle, being immaterial, is indecomposable, and must resist and survive this crisis of decomposition that we call death."

Below is a 19th-century newspaper article about Alexis Didier:

An 1875 newspaper account complains about the failure of spiritualists to find a missing person named Charley Ross. We read this reference to a feat of clairvoyance by Alexis Didier:

"If the spiritualists wish to secure believers they should find Charley Ross. That is a magnificent opening for clairvoyance, or mediumship, or whatever it may happen to be. We are the more surprised at their utter failure in that case for the reason that  professional clairvoyants, such as Alexis Didier, have actually solved much more difficult problems than that. He once really discovered a child who had been abducted, murdered, and the body conveyed to a distant province (it was in France) and concealed at the bottom of a disused dry well."

At the link here you can read an account of many pages describing very compelling evidence for the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier. On pages 158 to 162 of Edwin Lee's 1866 book Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism, you can read five pages of description of the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier.  We are told that Alexis could play cards "while his eyes were padded over and bandaged." We read Lee state this:

"Alexis also described my room in the hotel, and stated that there was something white on the night table close to the bed, which I denied, believing there was nothing of the kind ; but on my return I found a large piece of the white bed-curtain covering  the top of the night-table. On another occasion he described minutely the  particulars of my apartment in London, even to two engravings (representing the story of Mazeppa)."

On another page of Lee's book we read this:

"During his sojourn at Brighton, Alexis gave numerous proofs of his extraordinary clairvoyant and perspective power as regarded his being able to designate cards while with their faces to the table, to read lines from any book opened at random, the opened page being placed on his forehead, on the top or back of his head. He was frequently requested by one or other of the company assembled at the seances to read some words or lines at ten, fifteen, or any stated number of pages further on than where the book was opened. He then took a pen or pencil, drew a line at some part of the page, saying that the words which he wrote down would be found at the corresponding level of the page indicated, and he was seldom wrong as to the words, though he was not unfrequently as to the precise number of pages ; the words, though on the same level, being sometimes found a page or two nearer or further on than that specified. On one occasion the trial was made with a book, the leaves of which were uncut, and which had to be cut open to ascertain the accordance of the printed words with those which the clairvoyant had written."

I have never heard anyone mention the relevance of HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) to the topic of clairvoyance. The first topic is quite relevant to the second. Cases of  HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) are cases of rare humans with the most astonishing ability to recall details of almost every day of their adult life. Evidence for such cases is documented in my posts here. From HSAM subjects such as Jill Price, we know that small numbers of humans have memory powers very dramatically beyond those possessed by the average human. Given such a HSAM reality (not disputed by scientists), it seems all the more reasonable to believe that some humans have powers of clairvoyance beyond anything experienced by the great majority of humans -- particularly given that the evidence for clairvoyance is vastly deeper than the evidence for  HSAM (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory). I can recall only one HSAM case from the nineteenth century (the very well-documented case of Daniel McCartney described here). But well-documented cases of clairvoyance from the 19th century are very many (and you can read about some of them in my series of posts here). 

Powers such as HSAM and clairvoyance are unthinkable if you are a brain, but powers we can believe in, because you are a soul, not a brain. We know various physical limits and physical shortfalls of all brains (limits which should actually prevent anyone from ever being able to instantly recall using a brain or instantly learn by means of a brain). We understand no physical limits of souls.