Hélène Smith

Hélène Smith (real name Catherine-Elise Müller, December 9, 1861,

Early life

Daughter of a

Career as medium

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

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

Smith is mentioned by André Breton in his book Nadja where he compares her to the eponymous character.

"A brief scene in dialogue at the end of my "Poisson Soluble," and which seems to be all she has yet read of the Manifest, a scene whose precise meaning moreover...gives her the impression of having actually participated in it and even of having played the-if anything obscure- part of Hélène."^[2]

Evaluation

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.^[3] 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.^[4][5][6]

Psychologists Leonard Zusne, Warren H. Jones have written:

Flournoy was able to show her Martian language was an artful fabrication. Although it sounded decidedly foreign, frequency analysis of words and letters and an examination of the syntax convinced Flournoy that the language had all the basic structural characteristics of French, Hélène Smith's native tongue. In a subsequent investigation, Flournoy reported that the source of a short phrase that she had written in Arabic during her Indian cycle probably came from having seen an identical phrase inscribed in a book owned by a Genevan physician. She had retained a visual image of the script and, in due time, copied it from memory in an uncertain hand.^[7]

The case was examined in depth by psychologist