11 - Inner vision and occult detection: Le Fanu's Martin Hesselius

Summary

Enthusiasm about awakening hidden or missing senses was tempered by suspicion about what else might be awakened in the process. For an early literary example of this anxiety in the nineteenth century I wish to turn to Le Fanu's 1872 short story collection In a Glass Darkly, which also features the first overtly occult detective in literature, the German Martin Hesselius. While I shall say more about occult detectives later, the merger of the ether, wave theory, and extra-sensory perception discussed in the previous chapter is integral to understanding Hesselius's ideas about a mode of perception which he “term[s] indifferently ‘sublimated,’ ‘precocious,’ and ‘interior’” (“GT,” p. 38). However we choose to describe it, the condition is very serious and, as Hesselius's research and experiences demonstrate, often fatal to the seer.

Calling himself a “medical philosopher” and “philosophic physician” (“GT,” pp. 8, 28), Hesselius blends physiology, psychiatry, and Swedenborgian mysticism; his medicine is a science of body and soul alike. As he explains:

[T]he entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organized substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man's existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body – a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.” (“GT,” p. 8)