Hélène Smith and the Martian Language

Primary source

• Théodore Flournoy, Des Indes à la planète Mars: étude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, 1900, Ch. Eggimann, Geneva, and F. Alcan, Paris; ch. VI, §III, 'Remarques sur la langue martienne'The Martian texts, alphabet and glossary printed together with Flournoy's own dismantling of them: 'le martien n'est que du français déguisé' and, of the idiom as a whole, 'un travestissement enfantin du français'. Both phrases were read in the OCR of this edition. This is the entry's central fact — the claim and the refutation are the same volume.
• Théodore Flournoy, trans. Daniel B. Vermilye, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia, 1900, Harper & Brothers, New York and London; ch. VI, §I 'Verbal Martian Automatisms' (p. 198ff.) and §III 'Remarks on the Martian Language', pp. 241–256The particulars, in Flournoy's own terms. Martian phonetics are 'only an incomplete reproduction of French phonetics': every Martian sound exists in French, while two French sounds were never heard in it — 'the hissing j or ge (as in juger)' and 'the double sound x'. On the page the shortfall is five letters, not five sounds: Martian has twenty-one letters, all with exact French equivalents, and French 'has five others which Martian lacks; j and x' and 'q, w, and y, of which there is a double use, with k, v, and i'. Also: 'The order of the words is absolutely the same in Martian as in French'; the one-to-one correspondence of Martian and French words, which Flournoy notes holds in no real language; the twelve written texts comprising about 300 words, 'of which 160 are different'; and the language's birth at the séance of 2 February 1896 with the translations from 2 November 1896.
• Théodore Flournoy, Nouvelles observations sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, 1901, Archives de psychologie de la Suisse romande 1, no. 2 (December 1901), pp. 101–255; 'Remarques sur la langue martienne et ultramartienne', pp. 173ff.That the further texts did not escape the finding, and that they are texts of 1899–1900 published in 1901, not texts of 1901: text 42 is 'du 7 septembre 1899', text 43 'du 23 avril 1900 avec traduction française du 27 mai', and the trilingual vocabulary comes from the séances of 13 May, 27 May and 17 June 1900. Of that vocabulary (texts 44–47) Flournoy writes that Martian 'continue de la façon la plus naïve à mouler ses formes structurales sur celles de notre langue': every Martian noun carries the same gender as in French and is regularly preceded by té or ti zi according as French says du or de la. The same pages give the further planetary idioms — Ultramartian, then Uranian and Lunar — the press attacks of January 1900 and Flournoy's reply printed in the Journal de Genève of 19 January 1900, Müller's letter that the science she had served showed her only its ingratitude, the sightseers crowding the offices where she worked, and the reserved dossier which she opened to Lemaître in mid-March 1901 and whose oldest sheet is dated 15 October 1900.
• Victor Henry, Le langage martien: étude analytique de la genèse d'une langue dans un cas de glossolalie somnambulique, 1901, J. Maisonneuve, Paris; chs. IV–VIII, the French, German, Magyar, English and Oriental vocabularies, pp. 74–120; conclusion p. 138That a professor of Sanskrit and comparative grammar in Paris gave a whole book to terrestrial etymologies for the Martian vocabulary, admitting influences beyond French — the separate study that followed Flournoy's, and the reason the Martian analysis should not be attributed wholesale to Saussure. Cited from the volume's own contents and pagination; not read at first hand.
• Ferdinand de Saussure, Letters to Théodore Flournoy, 15 October 1899 and 14 and 16 May 1901, 1901, printed in Olivier Flournoy, Théodore et Léopold: de Théodore Flournoy à la psychanalyse (La Baconnière, Neuchâtel, 1986), pp. 205–211; quoted by CifaliSaussure's position in the letters Cifali quotes: that once time had let him form a general judgement on the 'Sanskrit', his own first printed attempts to interpret the unintelligible words looked to him a little ridiculous (15 October 1899); that on 14 May 1901 Victor Henry's Magyar etymologies for Martian rested on a single coincidence and were 'frisant la divagation pure', verging on pure raving; and that on 16 May he made 'toute réparation' to Henry and wondered whether his own conjecture on atiéyâ had been the indirect inspiration for it. That Saussure took a leading part in the Sanskrit analysis is Cifali's characterisation of him introducing the quotation, not a statement in the letters.
• André Breton, Le message automatique, in Minotaure nos. 3–4, 1933, Paris, December 1933, p. 64, reproducing a painting captioned 'Hélène et son ange gardien'The Surrealist afterlife: Breton reproduced one of Müller's paintings in his essay on automatism. The URL is the Centre Pompidou catalogue record for the painting, which cites the Minotaure reproduction and notes that the canvas is catalogued to 1912 while Breton's caption dates it 1922.

Scholarship

• Mireille Cifali, À propos de la glossolalie d'Élise Muller, et des linguistes, psychologues, qui s'y intéressèrent, on the author's site, among her articles of 2003–2006; no volume or year stated on the fileThe Saussure letters as quoted above, at second hand from Olivier Flournoy's 1986 volume; Élise Müller's first glossolalia of 26 May 1895 from Auguste Lemaître's unpublished notes; and Flournoy's 1901 review of Henry in the Archives de psychologie, in which he calls it piquant that a professional linguist should devote a volume to an idiom that exists only in the subconscious imagination of a somnambulist.

The tradition itself

• Théodore Flournoy, Des Indes à la planète Mars, 1900The esoteric reading given on this entry

Further reading

• Sonu Shamdasani, Encountering Hélène: Théodore Flournoy and the Genesis of Subliminal Psychology, introduction to From India to the Planet Mars, 1994, Princeton University Press edition, subtitled A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages, with a foreword by C. G. Jung and a commentary by Mireille CifaliThe standard modern framing of the case's place in the making of subliminal psychology. Listed as further reading: not consulted for any claim made here.
• Daniel Rosenberg, Speaking Martian, in Cabinet no. 1, 2000, Cabinet, issue 1An accessible account of the séance of 2 November 1896 and its word-by-word translation, of Victor Henry's etymological method, and of the further planetary romances that followed the book. A magazine essay, and a route into the primary texts; no claim in this entry rests on it.
• Claudie Massicotte, Hélène Smith: Occultism and the Discovery of the Unconscious, 2023, Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in Western EsotericismThe current book-length scholarly treatment of Müller and of what the case did to the history of the unconscious. Listed as further reading: not consulted for any claim made here.