Quick Answer
Kripal's move is to stop asking whether the paranormal is real and start asking what it says. He builds the case through four figures who took anomalous experience seriously, argues that such events behave like texts rather than like natural phenomena, and proposes that interpretation is the right tool. It is genuinely interesting intellectual history, the prose is a pleasure, and the refusal to answer the reality question is either the book's insight or its evasion depending on what you wanted from it.
Key Takeaways
- Four thinkers, each a chapter, each a different way of taking the impossible seriously.
- Read it, do not test it is the central and contested proposal.
- Myers is the recovery that most justifies the book.
- The reality question is declined, deliberately, and that will frustrate some readers.
- Very well written for an academic book on this subject.
🕑 16 min read
What This Book Is
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred was published in 2010 by the University of Chicago Press. It runs around three hundred pages.
Its structure is four biographical and intellectual portraits, framed by an introduction and a conclusion that state the argument.
The four are Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallée and Bertrand Méheust. Each took paranormal phenomena seriously in a different way, and each developed a method for doing so that departed from both belief and debunking.
The argument the four are marshalled to support is that anomalous experience has been excluded from serious study by a disciplinary decision rather than an evidential one, and that the right approach to it is interpretive rather than experimental.
Where it sits in his work. This is one of several books Kripal has written on the same territory, and it is the most self-contained. Later work develops the argument further and sometimes further out; this one states the position clearly and stays with the history.
Who Jeffrey Kripal Is
Kripal is a professor of religion at Rice University, where he has held a chair for many years, and his early work was on Hindu mysticism.
His first book, on the Bengali saint Ramakrishna, argued for a sexual dimension in the mystic's experience and caused a substantial controversy in India, with calls for it to be banned. The episode marked him and appears indirectly in later work.
From there he moved toward the paranormal, publishing a history of the Esalen Institute, a study of the relation between comic books and mystical experience, and a series of books arguing that religious studies has excluded the phenomena most central to religion.
He is not a fringe figure. He publishes with university presses, has directed a major department, and holds appointments that are not given to eccentrics.
He is also unusual in writing openly about his own anomalous experience, which he treats as data rather than as credential.
The Problem He Starts From
A diagnosis of his own field, and the book only makes sense as a response to it.
Religious traditions are full of accounts of impossible events. Visions, voices, healings, apparitions, precognitions, bodies that do what bodies do not do. These reports are not marginal; they are frequently the foundation on which the tradition rests.
Modern religious studies handles them in one of two ways. It brackets the question of what happened and studies the social function of the belief, or it explains the report psychologically and moves on.
Kripal's charge is that both moves quietly assume the answer. Bracketing sounds neutral and functions as a decision that nothing happened, since a real event would not be bracketable.
His alternative is to take the reports as reports of something, without deciding in advance what, and to develop a method adequate to that.
Frederic Myers
The first portrait and the most valuable recovery in the book.
Myers was a Cambridge classicist who, in 1882, co-founded the Society for Psychical Research with a group that included serious scientists and philosophers. The project was to investigate reports of telepathy, apparitions and survival with the methods of empirical inquiry.
He coined the word telepathy, along with several other terms still in use, and produced an enormous posthumous work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published in 1903.
The context matters. In the 1880s the boundary between psychology and psychical research had not yet been drawn, and figures including William James took the work seriously and participated in it.
Kripal's point is that the exclusion of this material from psychology was a boundary-drawing exercise carried out by a discipline seeking scientific respectability, and that the intellectual content was not refuted so much as abandoned.
The Subliminal Self
Myers's theoretical contribution, and the reason he is more than a historical curiosity.
He proposed that the ordinary waking personality is a fragment of a larger self, most of which operates below the threshold of awareness. The supraliminal, above the threshold, is what we call ourselves; the subliminal is the rest.
The proposal predates Freud's unconscious and differs from it in a crucial respect. Freud's unconscious is largely a repository of what has been repressed, and its contents are primitive. Myers's subliminal contains capacities superior to those of the waking self as well as inferior ones.
Genius, creativity, and the phenomena the Society was investigating are all, on this account, subliminal capacities breaking through.
Kripal argues that the version of the unconscious that psychology adopted was the impoverished one, and that a great deal was lost in the choice. This is his strongest historical claim and it holds up well: Myers was read, was influential, and then stopped being cited, and the discontinuity is not explained by any refutation.
Charles Fort
The second portrait, and the strangest.
Fort spent decades in libraries reading newspapers and scientific journals, extracting reports of events that should not have happened: rains of frogs and fish, lights in the sky, objects appearing where nothing could have put them, disappearances.
He accumulated these in notebooks and published four books consisting largely of the reports, interspersed with commentary that is sardonic, digressive and deliberately resistant to summary.
Fort was not arguing for any explanation. His method was accumulation, and the effect he was after was the destabilising of confidence: here are a thousand things the accepted account has no room for, and the accepted account did not so much explain them as decline to look.
Kripal reads him as a satirist of the excluded middle, whose contribution was showing that the boundary of the acceptable is maintained by not counting.
The chapter is enjoyable and it is the weakest of the four as argument, because Fort's method does not survive scrutiny: newspaper reports are not evidence, and accumulating unreliable reports produces a larger pile of unreliable reports.
Jacques Vallée
The third portrait, and the one that shifts the book's terms.
Vallée is a computer scientist, trained in astronomy, who worked on early network systems and who has spent his life studying reports of unidentified aerial phenomena.
His distinctive position, developed from the 1960s, is that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is inadequate to the data. The reports have features that do not fit a physical craft with a physical crew: absurd details, apparent responsiveness to the observer, patterns that recur across centuries under different names.
What he noticed is that the modern reports resemble older folklore. The encounters with fairies, the abductions to somewhere else, the missing time, the altered accounts of what was seen: the structure repeats and only the costume changes.
His conclusion is that whatever is producing these events is doing something other than visiting, and that it appears to interact with the belief system of the observer rather than existing independently of it.
This is where Kripal's argument gets its sharpest support, because Vallée arrived at an interpretive position from empirical frustration rather than from theory.
Bertrand Méheust
The fourth and least known to English readers.
Méheust is a French sociologist who has written extensively on animal magnetism, on the history of psychical research in France, and on the sociology of what a culture agrees to find impossible.
His contribution, as Kripal presents it, is the analysis of how a phenomenon becomes unavailable. Not refuted, but placed outside the boundary of what a serious person discusses, after which the evidence stops being collected and the absence of evidence confirms the exclusion.
He worked in detail on the nineteenth-century magnetic somnambulism literature, which was extensive, was taken seriously by physicians at the time, and vanished from the record.
The chapter is the most sociological in the book and the most useful for readers interested in how disciplines police themselves.
The four portraits are doing something cumulative that is easy to miss. Myers shows the material was once inside serious inquiry. Fort shows how much of it there is. Vallée shows that a careful investigator working from the data is driven away from the obvious explanations. Méheust shows the mechanism by which a subject stops being studiable. Together they make a historical case that the current situation is a result rather than a finding, which is Kripal's real argument.
The Reading Proposal
The theoretical core, stated in Kripal's own terms.
His proposal is that a paranormal event resembles a text more than it resembles a natural phenomenon, and should be approached accordingly.
A natural phenomenon is repeatable, indifferent to observers, and describable in terms of regularities. It can be tested.
A text is meaningful, addressed, and structured symbolically. It cannot be tested; it has to be interpreted, and interpretation admits of better and worse without admitting of proof.
His claim is that anomalous events have the second set of properties. They occur once, they resist replication, they are laden with symbolic content specific to the person they occur to, and they frequently arrive at moments of personal significance.
Given that profile, insisting on laboratory replication is a category error, and the century of parapsychological experiment that produced ambiguous statistical results may have been asking the wrong kind of question.
Why Events Look Authored
The second half of the title, and the more radical suggestion.
Kripal notices that these events do not merely resemble texts in structure. They resemble authored texts: they seem composed, aimed, sometimes witty, and frequently they involve improbable coincidences of timing and detail that read as intentional.
What he does not do is name the author. He leaves the question open, gestures at the possibility that the experiencer is in some sense co-authoring, and moves on.
This connects to Jung's synchronicity, which describes the same profile of meaningful coincidence resistant to causal explanation, and Kripal is explicit about the debt.
The suggestion has considerable descriptive force and no explanatory content, which is either an honest acknowledgement of the limits or a way of sounding profound about not knowing.
The Trickster Pattern
An observation that recurs and deserves separating out.
Across the material, the phenomena display a consistent character: they appear, produce strong conviction in the witness, and then decline to appear under conditions where they could be documented.
They are frequently absurd. The details that accompany otherwise impressive reports are often silly in a way that seems designed to make the report unusable.
They mock the investigator. Cases that look strong dissolve on examination, and cases dismissed as trivial turn out to have features nobody looked at.
The trickster figure in mythology has exactly this profile, and Kripal is not the first to notice that the phenomenology of the paranormal resembles the behaviour of a specific mythological character.
What to do with the observation is unclear. It is either a deep clue about the nature of the phenomena or a description of what unreliable reports look like from the inside, and no evidence discriminates between those readings.
The Impossible Body
A theme running under all four portraits that Kripal draws out and that gives the book more substance than a survey would have.
The reports he is dealing with are overwhelmingly bodily. Something is seen, felt, heard; the body reacts before the mind has a description; people report physical after-effects lasting days. These are not experiences of having an idea.
This matters for his argument in two directions. It tells against the purely psychological explanation, which has to account for why a mental event produces a physical response indistinguishable from the response to a real one. And it tells against the purely physical account, since the events are not available to any instrument that was pointed at them.
Kripal's suggestion is that the body is the site where the categories break, and that a phenomenon which is neither a thought nor an object is exactly what a system with only two boxes will be unable to file.
He connects this to the older literature on the mystical body, where contemplative traditions report physical phenomena that their own theologies struggle with, and the parallel is well drawn.
The weakness is that a strong bodily response is exactly what an intense conviction produces, and the neurology of that is well documented. Kripal notes the objection and does not answer it, which is the pattern of the whole book: he is very good at identifying where the standard accounts strain and consistently unwilling to say what should replace them.
The Objections
Three, and the first is the one that matters.
The reality question is prior. If these events do not occur, then interpreting them is interpreting a psychological or social phenomenon, which is a legitimate but different project. Kripal's method works identically whether or not anything happened, which is a problem rather than a feature.
Unfalsifiability by construction. A framework in which the phenomena are expected to evade testing cannot be tested, and the trickster observation converts every failure to replicate into confirmation.
Selection of exemplars. The four are chosen because they support the argument. A book on the same subject centred on the investigators who found fraud and error would produce a different picture from the same century.
Is It an Evasion
The question deserves a straight answer rather than a balanced one.
Partly, yes. Kripal repeatedly declines the reality question in a way that lets him have the interest of the material without the burden of defending any claim about it, and readers who want to know what he actually thinks happened will not find out.
And partly, no. His observation that the phenomena have the profile of meaning rather than of regularity is a real observation, and if it is correct then the demand for laboratory proof genuinely is misplaced.
The strongest version of his position is narrow: that the century of experimental parapsychology has produced small ambiguous effects while the anecdotal record contains events of overwhelming personal force, and that this mismatch is itself the datum.
That is worth taking seriously. It does not license everything Kripal builds on it.
What It Says About Scholarship
The part of the book most likely to be valuable to readers who care nothing about the paranormal.
Kripal's account of how a subject becomes unstudiable is careful and it generalises. A topic acquires low status. Working on it becomes career-limiting. Serious people stop. The remaining work is done by enthusiasts and is of poor quality. The poor quality confirms the low status.
The loop is self-sealing and it does not require anyone to have decided anything. It requires only that individual scholars make rational choices about their own careers.
Whether the loop is operating in this case is exactly what is in dispute, and the mechanism he describes is real and observable in other fields, which is why the argument has force.
What the Book Is Worth
Three things it delivers regardless of what you conclude.
Myers restored. The subliminal self is a serious idea that was dropped rather than refuted, and it deserves the attention this book gives it.
Vallée taken seriously. The folklore parallel is a genuine finding about the reports, whatever produces them.
The disciplinary analysis. How fields decide what is not worth studying, and what that costs, is a question with wide application.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in the intellectual history of psychical research, which is more interesting and more respectable than its reputation.
Read it if you have had an anomalous experience and found that the available frameworks all require you to either believe too much or dismiss it.
Read it if the sociology of knowledge interests you, since the disciplinary argument stands alone.
Do not read it for evidence. It offers none and does not claim to, and readers wanting the experimental case should go to the parapsychology literature instead, with appropriate scepticism about that too.
What is worth carrying from this book is a specific discomfort. Most people who have not thought about it hold that anomalous experiences either happen or do not, and that the answer is known. Kripal's four figures suggest the situation is messier: that the question was live within serious inquiry for a period, that it was closed by a process that had more to do with professional boundaries than with evidence, and that a large body of human experience now has no respectable place to be discussed. You can conclude that the closing was correct. It is worth knowing that it was a closing rather than a discovery.
Four thinkers who refused to choose between believing and debunking.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of where the book evades its central question is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Authors of the Impossible about?
Jeffrey Kripal's 2010 study of four thinkers who took paranormal phenomena seriously, and his argument that such experiences should be interpreted as texts rather than tested as claims.
Who is Jeffrey Kripal?
An American scholar of religion, long based at Rice University, known for work on mysticism, sexuality and the paranormal, and for arguing that religious studies has wrongly excluded anomalous experience from its subject matter.
Which four thinkers does he cover?
Frederic Myers of the Society for Psychical Research, Charles Fort the collector of anomalies, Jacques Vallee the computer scientist and UFO theorist, and Bertrand Meheust, a French sociologist of the paranormal.
What does authors of the impossible mean?
That these writers made a space in which the impossible could be discussed, and also that paranormal events behave as though authored, appearing structured like stories rather than like natural regularities.
Does he claim paranormal events are real?
He declines the question as posed. His position is that the real and unreal categories are what fail here, and that the experiences are meaningful events requiring interpretation rather than verification.
What is the reading metaphor?
His central proposal: that a paranormal event resembles a text, arriving with symbolic structure and apparent intention, and should be approached with the methods of interpretation rather than those of measurement.
Who was Frederic Myers?
A classicist and founder of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, who coined the term telepathy and developed a theory of the subliminal self that anticipated later depth psychology.
Who was Charles Fort?
An American writer, 1874 to 1932, who spent decades collecting newspaper reports of anomalous events and publishing them in books whose method was accumulation and mockery rather than explanation.
What is the main criticism of the book?
That interpreting without adjudicating avoids the question that matters. Critics argue that whether these events occur is prior to what they mean, and that the hermeneutic move sidesteps rather than resolves it.
Is it academically respectable?
It is published by a university press and written by a chaired professor, and it is contested within the field. Kripal has argued at length that the exclusion of these topics is a disciplinary choice rather than a scholarly necessity.
How is it written?
Accessibly and with evident enjoyment. Kripal writes better prose than most academics, uses personal anecdote, and the book is considerably more readable than its subject matter suggests.
Who should read it?
Readers interested in the intellectual history of psychical research, in the sociology of what scholarship refuses to study, or in a serious treatment of anomalous experience that neither debunks nor believes.
Two moves, and neither is thinking
When someone tells you something impossible happened to them, watch what you do. Most people execute one of two moves immediately: they decide the person is mistaken, or they decide the person is right and something wonderful is going on. Both moves end the inquiry in under a second and both feel like judgement. The uncomfortable third option is to stay with the report, ask what it was like, notice its structure, and decline to file it. Kripal spent a book making the case that scholarship should learn to do this. Most of us cannot do it for five minutes in a conversation.
Sources & References
- Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2010). Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. University of Chicago Press.
- Myers, F. W. H. (1903). Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
- Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned and the later collections.
- Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia and the folklore parallel.
- Méheust, Bertrand. Work on animal magnetism and the sociology of the impossible.
- Society for Psychical Research, published proceedings from 1882 onward.