Seen through Deep Time: Occult Clairvoyance and Palaeoscientific Imagination

Abstract

Dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, prominent paranormal researchers in Britain and the United States began to claim that they could see through time. Using clairvoyant powers, they proposed to solve the mysteries of geology and palaeontology, not least by filling in the missing links in the evolution of life. This article explores the literary outputs of these figures, with an especial focus on the Anglo-American ‘psychometers’ William and Elizabeth Denton and selected members of the Theosophical Society, including Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. I argue that clairvoyants’ narratives of exploration in the prehistoric past were heavily indebted not just to the technical concepts of mainstream palaeoscience, but also to the figurative language and visual iconography used by palaeoscientists and science writers, including their metaphors of necromancy and visual spectacle. The vivid language of Victorian palaeoscience, crafted to see the unseeable events of prehistory, has been studied in depth by students of literature and science; recently, literary scholars have paid increasing attention to the imaginative prose of occult science writing. I bring these bodies of scholarship together, contesting that Romantic conceptions of science motivated paranormal researchers to literalize the figurative language of time-travel deployed by more orthodox palaeoscientists. Examining the work of the Dentons, Blavatsky, and others, I show that that the vivid literature of palaeoscience inspired a realm where practitioners on the fringes of elite science could make bold if precarious claims, instilling individual agency into the abysm of deep time.