Hélène Smith

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hélène Smith: Martian from the séance on August 22, 1897, printed by Flournoy (1900)
Hélène Smith: daughter of Jaïrus (1913)
Martian landscape (detail, no year)
Des Indes à la Planète Mars (1900)

Hélène Smith (actually Catherine-Élise Müller ; born December 9, 1861 in Martigny ; died June 10, 1929 in Geneva ) was a Swiss painter and medium .

Life

Catherine-Élise Müller was the daughter of a Hungarian businessman and worked in a commercial shop.

From 1891 she worked as a medium in spiritualistic sessions. She claimed to have communicated in séances with the successful writer Victor Hugo, who died in 1885, and from 1894 with the magician Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795). She saw herself in further cycles as the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette and the Indian princess Simandini from the 15th century. She later claimed to have had contact with the Martians . The Geneva psychology professor Théodore Flournoy took part in the seances that Smith held with a group in Geneva from 1894 onwards. He noted what she said and structured a dictionary. He asked her to write down what she said and translate it.

Flournoy published the study Des Indes à la Planète Mars in 1900 , in which he traced Smith's unconscious inspirations back to real conditions in her world of experience. The linguistic structures of the Martian language were therefore based on French. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was also consulted by Flournoy when analyzing Smith's “Indian cycle” and took part in séances. For Flournoy, Smith was a linguist and poet. In later considerations, the connection with the public debate about the (supposed) Mars canals discovered in 1877 was emphasized.

After Flournoy's publication, Smith separated from him, and she claimed in vain for the copyrights of the book in which she was extensively quoted.

Smith found a wealthy American woman around 1900 who made her further séances possible and who came up for a living. Smith now also devoted himself to painting with Christian motifs. After her death, the Geneva Art Museum organized an exhibition with her pictures.

The Surrealists saw in Smith a protagonist of the Écriture automatique .

literature

  • Théodore Flournoy : Des Indes à la planète Mars. Etude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie . F. Alcan, Paris 1900 Link .
    • The seer of Geneva. With a preface by Max Dessoir . Meiner, Leipzig 1914
    • Spiritism and Experimental Psychology. Leipzig, 1921
  • Victor Henry : Le langage martien: étude analytique de la genèse d'une langue dans un cas de glossolalie . J. Maisonneuve, 1901 Link
  • Waldemar Deonna : De la Planète Mars en Terre Sainte, art et subconscient: un médium peintre, Hélène Smith . E. de Boccard, Paris 1932
  • Mireille Cifal : Théodore Flournoy: la découverte de l'inconscient . Le Bloc-Notes de la psychanalyse, No. 3, Paris, 1983
  • Leonard Zusne, Warren H. Jones: Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking . Routledge, London 1989, ISBN 0805805087
  • Daniel Rosenberg: Speaking Martian , in: Cabinet , Heft 1, 2000/01 Link
  • Roberto Giacomelli : Lo strano caso della Signora Hélène Smith: spiritismo, glossolalia e lingue immaginarie . Libri Scheiwiller, Milan 2006
  • Huub Engels: Understanding the Glossolalia of Hélène Smith, the Famous Spiritist Medium , in: Jacques Arveiller (Ed.): Psychiatries dans l'histoire: actes du 6e congrès de l'Association européenne pour l'histoire de la psychiatrie = Psychiatries in history : proceedings of the 6th congress of the European association for the history of psychiatry . Presses universitaires de Caen, Caen 2008, pp. 141–148

Web links

Commons : Hélène Smith  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A current article (2000) by Daniel Rosenberg about Hélène Smith can be read in the New York magazine Cabinet on the Internet.
  2. ↑ Bernhard Dotzler : Four question marks and one death , in: NZZ , February 23, 2013, p. 30
  3. ↑ Psychic Hélène Smith and Surrealist Automatism  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at artlark, July 10, 2016@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / artlark.org  
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Hélène
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Müller, Catherine-Élise (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss medium and painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Martigny
DATE OF DEATH June 10, 1929
Place of death Geneva