June 10

The Martian Chronicles: The Life & Death of Hélène Smith

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She claimed to be the reincarnation of Marie Antionette—but that wasn’t the strangest of her claims. According to renowned psychic medium and contemporary innovator of “automatic writing,” Hélène Smith, who passed away in Geneva on this date in 1929, she was also fluent in speaking “Martian”—as she had been a regular visitor to the fourth planet from the sun for many years.

Born Catherine-Élise Müller on December 9, 1861, in Martigny, Switzerland, Smith spent four decades as the most celebrated medium in the French-speaking world, becoming the subject of a landmark study that shaped both modern psychology and the Surrealist movement. Based upon that study, Ferdinand de Saussure—the father of modern linguistics—personally analyzed and named Smith’s “Martian” language, “Sanskritoid,” while painters of the era were inspired by her paintings of the planet’s apparent red landscape. Smith also had a spirit guide she called “Leopold” who, presumedly, was the reincarnation of Cagliostro and, together, they communicated with the ghost of Victor Hugo.

But to the Hungarian merchant’s daughter who spent her days as a bookkeeper, nothing could compare with the beauty of Mars.

So why have so few people heard of the fascinating Hélène Smith?

The Geneva Séances

As Catherine Müller, Smith first discovered Spiritualism in 1891 and quickly joined a local group to learn more and take part in their séances. Within only a year, she was recognized as an amazing medium, displaying psychic abilities that both impressed and terrified her fellow practitioners. Having developed a strong following, she changed her name to “Hélène Smith” and was soon the preeminent psychic medium throughout Geneva’s large Spiritualist community.

Her early mystic career were rather simple, by esoteric standards, producing table-rappings and messages from the dead. But, as she claimed, with practice, her skills developed; soon, she was among the most elaborate among her peers, introducing them to her spirit guide, Leopold, and working alongside him for extraordinary psychic communications. According to Smith—or, rather, Leonard, himself—he was the spirit of Count Alessandro Cagliostro, the legendary eighteenth-century occultist and adventurer who had been the toast of European high society before his 1795 death in a papal prison. “Leopold” spoke through Smith in a voice drastically different from her own, and protected her during her more advanced-level and dangerous séances and, ultimately, guided her through what would amount to four distinct eras within her career: her “Royal Cycle” introduced her as the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette (completed with memories of the Court of Versailles); her “Hindu Cycle” led to her speak as “Simandini,” a fifteenth-century Indian princes and wife of an Arab sheik (which, to the chagrin of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, was near-perfect Sanskrit); her legendary “Martian Cycle,” during which Smith introduced extended trances into her séances, describing the lavish landscapes of Mars; and, finally, her “Ultra-Martian Cycle,” which pushed the boundaries further than Mars and into the outmost reaches of the cosmos.

The Subliminal Romances

In 1894, a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva, Théodore Flournoy, attended one of Smith’s now-incredibly popular séances. By nature, Flournoy was skeptical and scientifically rigorous. Yet, his curiosity got the better of him, and he went on to attend five years’ worth of Smith’s public work, taking copious notes and documenting everything he witnessed. Rather than trying to prove or disprove Smith’s mediumship, Flournoy was intrigued by the connection between Smith’s obvious creativity and the growing study of psychoanalysis—particularly the link between psychic abilities and the unconscious mind.

Flournoy’s eventual published conclusion was decidedly generous in his approach to Smith’s apparent mediumship. She was not, he argued, consciously fabricating anything; rather, Smith was genuinely experiencing everything she described—which only intrigued him further. But, he was careful to conclude, the source of her experiences was not extraterrestrial or supernatural; it was subliminal. Her Martian narratives, her Hindu princess memories, her “Royal Cycle”—could all be chalked up to what he labelled “subliminal romances”: a creative biproduct of unconscious mental processes that assembled forgotten fragments of memory, personal readings, and a lifetime of experiences that had “created” alternate worlds and dimensions within her psyche. In turn, those “romances” were, to Smith, as real as the material world the rest of us inhabited. Yet, her creative and artistic genius presented them into her consciousness with all the vividness and lush detail of genuine sense memories. For this, Flournoy coined a term: “cryptomnesia”—the “hidden memory.”

If any of this sounds even remotely familiar, you’re not alone in seeing Flournoy’s obvious debt to his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Building off of Freud and Jung’s respective deep dives into the human condition, Flournoy became convinced that Smith’s experiences felt like clairvoyance or past-life recall, but here actually surface manifestations of things from her own past, absorbed and forgotten. (For his part, Jung himself studied Flournoy’s work closely, and even wrote about cryptomnesia in his 1902 doctoral thesis, identifying it as a key mechanism in anomalous experiences.) The resulting 1900 book, Des Indes à la Planète Mars, became one of the foundational texts of “depth psychology.”

But it was the interest of another great scientific mind that elevated the story of Hélène Smith from fascinating to truly extraordinary—and rightfully places her among the canon of great modern occultists:

Ferdinand de Saussure —the Swiss linguist whose posthumously published Course in General Linguistics (1916) is arguably the founding document of modern linguistics (the very work that established semiotics, structural linguistics, and the concept of the linguistic sign)—was a colleague of Flournoy’s at Geneva. When Flournoy first encountered the apparent Sanskrit in Smith’s “Hindu Cycle” and the Martian language of the “Martian Cycle,” he brought in the best available language expert her could find—De Saussure.

De Saussure’s verdict on the “Hindu Cycle” language was what he named “Sanskritoid”: an original form of verbal communication that had all the structural characteristics of Sanskrit without being authentic Sanskrit. He concluded that Smith had somehow absorbed visual impressions of Sanskrit script from a book she had seen in the home of a Geneva physician and unconsciously reconstructed a matching grammar and vocabulary from those fragments. Almost as incredible as her apparent mediumship, Smith had, in De Saussure’s opinion, been speaking a whole language that she’d never learned—a language that her unconscious had created from only small scraps and fleeting glimpses. Like Flournoy, rather than publicly shame Smith as a fraud, De Saussure championed her for the complex accomplishment—even if he remained convinced that her unconscious had done all the heavy lifting.

The Martian language, however, was a little more complex. Frequency analysis of its phonemes and an in-depth examination of its syntax convinced both de Saussure and Flournoy that the language was structurally isomorphic with French: it contained all the basic grammatical and phonological properties of Smith’s native tongue, disguised beneath an invented vocabulary and an alien script. Again, neither clinician considered it fraud; rather, they were astounded that her unconscious could construct a brand-new language and dress it in an extraterrestrial tongue.

De Saussure declared Smith “a precious subject to study how languages are born and structured.”

A Muse of the Surrealists

Perhaps it is quite apropos that Hélène Smith’s contributions carried over into the afterlife:

Author and poet André Breton, who had trained as a psychiatrist and who understood the Surrealist project as an exploration of the unconscious’s creative capacity, encountered Smith’s case through Flournoy’s book and was instantly obsessed. He mentioned her in his 1928 autobiographical novel, Nadja, his 1928, comparing the book’s title character to her. Later, the Surrealist technique of automatisme—"automatic writing,” was exactly what Smith had been doing in trance for decades, only without benefit of Surrealist theory.

She was, as the movement recognized, its unwitting pioneer: a medium before the Surrealists had a name for what she was doing. Her paintings of Marian landscapes attracted particular Surrealist attention; the strange, red landscapes populated by vaguely humanoid forms, extraterrestrial vegetation and architectural structures—executed with a vividness and consistency that made them seem less like fabrications than like genuine records.

Hélène Smith spent her final years painting religious images of Christ, supported by an American patron who had been so impressed by her gifts that she provided a stipend. “Leopold,” by most accounts, had grown quieter in her final years and, by then, the “Martian cycles” had ended.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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