In her 1917 book, How I Know that the Dead Are Alive, Fanny Ruthven Paget offers one of the most vivid and detailed near-death experiences ever recorded. While not clearly stating her illness, one might infer that Paget, a resident of Houston, Texas, suffered from severe pneumonia for several days during 1911.

      "All about and above me I could see nothing, but fancy my astonishment if you can, when looking down, I saw my body resting peacefully on the bed, representing what is commonly called a ‘dead person',"  Paget recalled. "I could not move my eyes from it; it fascinated me as it lay in the cold whiteness, robed in a gown of lavender silk, with dainty laces and ruffles...The deep blue ‘windows of the soul,' the eyes, were at half mast; the soul being absent the light was gone; the lips slightly parted wore just a suggestion of a smile; the left hand rested lightly on the breast - the engagement ring scintillating as brightly as ever; the right, which no doubt had been lifted unconsciously at the shock of impact, had fallen a little apart from the body and lay, palm upturned.  How peaceful it looked!

       "Thus every detail of the clay image fastened itself upon my consideration as I viewed it dispassionately, realizing that it was a cast-off garment for which I had no further use.  However, I felt a protective kindliness toward it; it had been a faithful servant, executing my every wish and whim and now that I had passed beyond the range of its services, it pleased my fancy to robe it in the white, pearl-be-decked dress, the wearing of which had meant so much to me in quite a different way."

        Paget then concerned herself with her fiancé in another town and found herself being propelled by a vibratory sensation to his sleeping body. "As I looked upon him I saw the shadow body more distinctly than the physical.  Viewed from the other side of life, the ‘shadow' body seemed the original and the physical the duplicate, the soul the real, the body the unreal.  Within and interpenetrating all was a light, which I had not before perceived as being a part of the spiritual anatomy.  This light penetrated from within, both the shadow and physical bodies, maintaining through and about the body an aura or illumination which enveloped it; clothing it, as it were, in a magnetized illumination.  How wonderful this three-in-one life-manifestation seemed, especially when we generally recognize only the one - the physical!"

        Talking to the Living

        Moving closer to her fiancé, Paget attempted to converse with him, but he slept on, even though his soul, which was not sleeping, responded joyously and tried to help her penetrate his physical consciousness as he moaned and turned restlessly in his sleep. After a few moments, he cried out, "Fanny, Fanny," and sat up in bed, wide awake. As he turned on a light and reached for his glasses and a magazine, she tried to communicate, but he did not react to her words.  "I am dead, that is why he cannot hear and see me," she thought, further recalling that she felt more alive than she had ever felt.  "There was something pitiably painful about being so near one beloved, seeing him plainly and hearing him distinctly, even knowing that he was thinking of me, and yet having him utterly ignore my presence, and above all knowing that he would never recognize me again - never hear my voice no matter how ardently I called, while I was the same in every way minus the physical body."

         Then she perceived that her vibratory environment did not harmonize with his.   "Mine was the vibration of perpetual motion - his more like a ‘dead sea' into which these vibratory currents ebbed and flowed, and it seemed such an easy matter to move out of the ‘deadness' into the ‘ebb and flow' that I waited and watched a long time before I realized that he would make no effort to do so."

       Realizing that she would not be able to penetrate his physical consciousness, she bade him farewell and attempted to move on; however, the vibratory force seemed to restrain her.  "Persistently the force held me, as though inviting me to further considerations of earth interests, but I had none.  My material possessions were disposed of as I desired; there was no life-work I was leaving incomplete; I had no children, no one depending on me; nothing held me to the earth.  My desire had been to go beyond it and now that I had done so, I was well pleased and wanted to go on to the joys I felt awaited me beyond the influence of earth.  Yet the force held me, try as I would to pass beyond it, until, instead of struggling against it I tried to understand it - to wrest from it its reason for thus detaining me, feeling that there must be some reason for such marked persistence.  Almost instantly the lesson sank into my consciousness and I realized that the long arm of mundane interests can reach into the Beyond and hold its victims within the shadow of earth - pitting its magnetism against the promise of higher things."

      She then felt herself moving in an undulating way within the propelling vibration and was suddenly enveloped in oppressive heavy darkness, feeling alone in eternity and waiting in awesome uncertainty.  She perceived that the darkness was really within her and could be eliminated only from within.  "There were loved ones and many others welcoming me and rejoicing that I was with them."   Her spirit guide, who identified himself as Meon, was also there.  She now felt light and carefree.

       Visiting "Hell"

       Meon then told her to follow him, "and with a soft, bluish light playing about and enveloping us, we floated out on the undulating waves of space."   As they were propelled by vibratory waves, they encountered a "red darkness" where she found herself among many others.  "I was listening, trying to hear what they were saying but the vibrations were evidently not in harmony, so I could not hear distinctly, and after a long time of vain effort I turned to Meon, and asked ‘What place is this?'"    Meon explained that they were in a place still very much within earth's magnetism, or spiritual gravitation.   Paget asked why the souls were detained there and Meon informed her that some desire it while others were not yet strong enough to progress beyond that point. "Earth interests hold them," he explained.

       "There was no bar to their going on but they did not want to; some did not know they could not give up the earth life," Paget related.  "In this dark earth-magnetized region disembodied spirits lived the mundane existence much as the psychic lives the spiritual while yet in the mundane - one in progression, the other retrogression.   Disembodied spirits living the mundane life do so at the expense of human beings in the earth life, while the mundane person living the spiritual life is obeying the law of evolution and progression."

        Paget observed spirits of love and mercy attempting to help those souls stuck in this "hellish" realm, but most of them had not yet acquired "spiritual hearing" and did not respond to the offers of assistance.  There were some, however, who heard and struggled up from the vortex.   Meon informed her that no soul was irretrievably lost, no matter how many aeons it may remain in the darkness.

        Paget began to wonder if this was to be her new abode, but Meon assured her that it was not.  "Did not the Christ descend into this place before his ascension?" he addressed her concern. 

        "Far out beyond the red-fringed darkness I could see light, in which rainbows seemed to play, pale as the dawn, of a gray-weird loveliness, coming and going as though flirting with the darkness, for to embrace it would be to destroy," she continue on.  "For delicate beauty it seemed I had never seen anything more fascinating or alluring than this kiss of the dawn and the darkness in the Soul world - it was like kissing death goodbye."

        The Dawn World

       They passed into what seemed to be another world.  Paget called it the "Dawn World," since it seemed that the light began to neutralize the darkness. "There were houses, flowers, trees, everything was so life-like it amazed me. I almost fancied I had returned to earth."  The inhabitants conversed with her, but they did not seem to realize that they were in the "after life," as they were not entirely free of earth's magnetism.  Paget witnessed some of them going earthward, as though drawn by something of paramount importance.  "While there seemed  no doubt that these people once inhabited the earth, I saw no one I had ever known in this life.  They had possibly progressed there out of the darkness and would go back to help those less fortunate into the higher condition which they had attained."

      Meon and Paget vibrated onward in ever increasing light.  "So enchanting was this riding on vibratory waves of space in a gentle undulatory way, that I felt like going on forever, and forever, never tiring, never stopping, but after abandoning myself to the witchery of it for some time, I perceived the vibrations changing, merging into a quivering sensation, even more exquisite, and then, as if part of it, my feet came upon something different, something firm and reliable."

       She now found herself in a city of light, one of whiteness, boundless in expanse. "It seemed I had reached the limit of my ability to float in space.  It seemed that I was heavier than my surroundings in some way.  Everywhere were the most exalted souls I had yet seen.  Some came forward and greeted us, addressing Meon as though he were one of them, and then, together, we entered into a building immeasurable in space and height, the veritable soul of architectural magnificence.  The material had the transparency of glass of a variegated whiteness, into which colors, harmonizing in the most delicate way, were coming and going, ever changing. Electricity seemed to be the power which held it all together, as the electric blue would merge into violet and play incessantly, in a serpentine way, into which almost imperceptible yellowish streams seemed to flow. It was self-illuminated...It seemed that all the wisdom of all the ages was mine as I stood there. Life and death gave up their mysteries, and I no longer wondered but observed as one who understood.   The machinery of earth existence was operated and regulated by and through the power of this plane.  It was actually in contact with the earth.  No happening on earth escaped the observation of the great spirits who seemed to have nothing else to do but watch over the beings of earth, to teach them, to lift them up through darkness, watch over reincarnations, create teachers and place them where they were most needed.   With these teachers they were in direct communication at all times and knew exactly what was going on through some form of wireless telegraphy or telephony, perhaps, but they communicated as though there were no distance.

      "They seemed to draw the highly evolved souls of earth up to them mentally, and these cooperated consciously, responding unerringly.  It was marvelous to watch the process or rather processes, as there were many phases of this supervision.  There were coming and going all the time.  I saw many go out and disappear into the depths, all rejoicing in their work, the uplifting of humanity.  The souls were countless, the space immeasurable, yet there was no confusion - it was system idealized, each recognizing his mission and doing it.   Truly, it was the Christ principle manifested, for they were laboring for others, not themselves."

       Meon took Paget even higher, where the influence of earth was not felt.  A great soul came forward and asked her if she would like to return to earth.  She said she would like to return only if she could do good by telling others what she had experienced.   The being warned her that many would not believe her and that she might suffer from her efforts, but Paget said she was up for the challenge.

      A Life Review

      Paget then felt alone with bowed head. She then saw a little light vibrating directly before her. It began shaping itself into something.  "It was not unlike a moving picture."  She began to see figures and a small girl emerged.  She soon realized that the young girl was herself and she was reliving her life on earth.  She saw herself reveling in her grand passion, music, which held her in bondage as she grew in the joy and mastery of it.  "How the little, white fingers, too small to span an octave, subconsciously caught fragments from the ‘choir invisible' and imprisoned them on the piano! 

     She saw herself grow through college and into a proud, self-centered woman.  There appeared before her three roads, one labeled "Good," one "Evil," and the other, the center, was unlabeled.  She found herself on the center road, which had many more people than either of the side roads.   "These roads were guarded by invisible creatures, according to the indicated propensities of each, who were always calling to those who traveled in the center, in an endeavor to influence them to more determined tendencies.  Ever and anon there were paths leading from the center to the outer roads and from one outer road to the other, showing how easily one can change ones course at will."

      Paget then saw the young woman dreaming of becoming a great singer, the compensation being the homage of the world.  "I saw her holding to heart in enchanted fancy, as the only thing worth while, the emptiest of all life's coveted cups - Fame."  There was no one to remind her that ‘by ambition fell the angels."   

       The "movie" of her life continued on to the time she came down with a severe case of laryngitis and lost her singing voice.  She saw herself cursing God and being enveloped by a shadow-stained covering of materialism.  She saw both her parents pass into the spirit world, leaving her alone, fighting the bitter fight.  She saw even the most trivial matters in her life review.  "Its faithfulness to detail was perfectly marvelous. Nothing was hidden, nothing slurred over.  It was all there. I was standing face to face with my earth life just as I had lived it, awaiting its condemnation or justification."

       When the life review ended, Meon stood waiting.  He told her that the purpose of the review was to build an edifice on the ashes as she returned to earth life.

      ‘Meon and other spirits were hovering about me.  I could feel the electrified essence, which had manifested its presence everywhere during my voyage, drawing itself away - letting me go, as it were.  Then the burden of physical life was full upon me and what a misfit I was!"  

     Theodor Flournoy, a world-renowned University of Geneva psychology professor, once opined that the name Frederic W. H. Myers should be joined to those of Copernicus and Darwin, completing "the triad of geniuses" who most profoundly revolutionized scientific thought.

       Pioneering psychiatrist William James, wrote that Frederic Myers "will always be remembered in psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it."

      "Frederic Who?" you ask.   Put Frederic William Henry Myers into a Google search and the first thing that pops up is a Wikipedia entry identifying him as an English poet and essayist, hardly a reason to justify the glorious comments by Professors Flournoy and James.

       Everyone knows the name of Sigmund Freud, but very few know that of Frederic  Myers, a man who seems to have been ahead of Freud in developing a systematic conception of the subconscious mind. 

        Although not educated as a psychologist, Myers, a Cambridge classical scholar was a de facto psychologist who referred to the subconscious as the "subliminal."  When, in 1911, Freud joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was co-founded by Myers in 1882, he wrote an article making it clear that Myers' "subliminal" was not the same as his "unconscious."  Essentially, the difference was that Myers saw a soul enveloped in the subconscious, while Freud accepted atomic materialism, which denied the existence of a soul.   

        Why isn't Myers remembered today?  Perhaps, because, as Aldous Huxley saw it, Freud was focused on the "rats and beetles in the cellarage," while Myers was more interested in the treasures and birds in the attic, something Freud, who was a mere teenager when Myers began developing his ideas of the subconscious, ignored.        

      In a newly-released biography of Myers, Immortal Longings, author Trevor Hamilton explains that Myers is not remembered today because the prevailing paradigm in those early years of psychology, as it remains today, was the Wundtian approach, which holds that the only things that make sense are those which can be scientifically measured and quantified.  The soul was not subject to scientific measurement, so was rejected.  

       Huxley saw Myers as a classical scholar, a minor poet, a conscientious observer, and a platonic philosopher, someone who "was free to pay more attention to the positive aspects of the subliminal self than to its negative and destructive aspects," as with psychologists and psychiatrists of then and now.  Hamilton quotes Huxley as saying that  Myers' "unconscious" was superior to Freud's in that it was more comprehensive and truer to the data of experience.  How much Myers influenced Freud is not clear, but there is little doubt that Myers' ideas significantly influenced William James and Carl Jung.

      Sir Oliver Lodge, the esteemed physicist and electricity pioneer, stated that Myers had, before his death in 1901, been "laying the foundation for a cosmic philosophy, a scheme of existence as large and comprehensive and well founded as any that have appeared."

      In his autobiography Lodge wrote that Myers had a remarkable interest in science and a portentous memory.  He knew the Ǣneid by heart and could recite many of the Bab Ballads without difficulty.  Lodge remembered attending one of  Myers' lectures on the poet Crabbe, calling it a remarkable tour de force. "He had no notes," Lodge recalled, "but after speaking of Crabbe and his poetry in unexpectedly eulogistic terms, he recited from memory whole reams of Crabbe's poetry, which I had never heard before, and was ignorant of."

      It was Myers, Lodge explained, who broke down his skepticism and showed him the reasonableness of the survival hypothesis.  "He it was who put evidence in my way such as gradually convinced me of the truth of the doctrine."

         Dr. Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, said:  "If Myers was not a mystic, he had all the faith of a mystic and the ardour of an apostle, in conjunction with the sagacity and precision of a savant."

       The latter part of the 19^th Century was a time of despair and hopelessness for many.   "We were all in the first flush of triumphant Darwinism, when terrene evolution had explained so much that men hardly cared to look beyond," Myers is quoted by Hamilton in explaining why he set out in search of the soul.

       As with so many other educated people, Myers, the son of a minister, had lost his faith, and life had become a march toward an abyss into nothingness. He recognized that there were many who were "willing to let earthly activities and pleasures gradually dissipate and obscure the larger hope" during life's death march, but, perhaps because he was a deep thinker, Myers was unable to effectively use the defense mechanism called repression to overcome his death anxiety and his concomitant fear of extinction.      

       Subtitled "FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death," Hamilton's  book details the efforts of Myers and several of his colleagues to make sense out of various paranormal phenomena which seemed to suggest that the world is not totally mechanistic and that consciousness does survive physical death.

        Although Professor William Barrett, a physicist, is recognized as the prime mover in setting up the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, he relinquished the leadership roles to Myers and his two Cambridge friends, Edmund Gurney, and Professor Henry Sidgwick.  Their objective was to scientifically study the phenomena, including hypnotism, telepathy, multiple personalities, and mediumship, to see if they offered any evidence that mind was not totally dependent on brain and that there is something beyond the five sense.  But they had to do it discreetly, cautiously, and indirectly.  "To admit the literal reality of the ghost was to move back to the dark ages," Hamilton explains their dilemma.   There were simply too many "newly enlightened" people in the upper echelons of society who could not make a distinction between matters of the spirit and the superstitions of the church they had left behind and now scoffed at.

        "It is too simple to represent Victorian England as a pious, fundamentalist land shaken by the advances of a materialistic and iconoclastic science," Hamilton states, pointing out that the census of 1851 revealed that well over five million people did not attend church on Sunday, March 30, 1851.  However, it was clear, Hamilton adds, that the educated middle classes and upper-middle classes were emancipating themselves from their evangelical roots as a result of the scientific and scholarly advances.   Darwinism might have been the crowning blow, but this emancipation had begun well before Darwin, during the "Age of Reason."

       Drawing from Myers' diary, a short autobiography written only for his friends, and other references, Hamilton explores Myers' early life and the influences which shaped his beliefs and disbeliefs. He acquaints us with his days at Cambridge, when he was called, "Myers the superb," and then discusses his conflicting love interests as well as other trials and tribulations.  He tells how Myers hooked up with Gurney and Sidgwick and how the three intellectuals complemented each other in various ways - Myers often brash and assertive, Sidgwick reserved and cautious, Gurney meticulous and somewhere in between Myers and Sidgwick in his enthusiasm for their mission.

        The SPR exposed many fraudulent mediums, although there is controversy over some of the exposures, including that of Madame Blavatsky.  The mediumship of Eusapia Palladino was also very controversial, some members of the SPR convinced that she was a charlatan and other that she was a genuine medium, whereas the truth seems to be that she was a "mixed" medium - producing genuine phenomena at times and faking some at those times when her powers failed her.   Theosophists, in the case of Blavatsky, and Spiritualists, in the case of various other mediums, argued that the researchers simply didn't understand the phenomena and were applying terrestrial science to celestial matters which they didn't understand.    

        As Hamilton sees it, Myers was caught in a Victorian dilemma.  "One set of desires, the yearning for the immortal, spiritual universe, was opposed by another set, which was the wish for privacy and the hiding of any evidence that breached the unimpeachable façade of familial and moral behaviour," he writes.  "His need to prove and even preach survival was counterbalanced by his reticence over intimate evidence."

         That "intimate evidence" involved a number of evidential messages coming to him through different mediums from Annie Marshall, his great love of the early 1870s (although apparently a platonic affair because of her marriage to Myers' cousin).   When Annie killed herself because of her many frustrations, Myers grieved deeply.  When he later married the beautiful and wealthy Eveleen Tennant, their marriage was troubled somewhat because of Annie's communications with Myers from beyond the veil - communications which Myers kept private and which were destroyed by his wife after his death. 

           Myers died at age 57 of  Bright's disease, a kidney disorder.  William James, who was present in Rome when Myers, his friend, died, wrote that "his serenity, in fact, his eagerness to go, and his extraordinary intellectual vitality up to the very time the death agony began, and even in the midst of it, were a superb spectacle and deeply impressed the doctors, as well as ourselves."

        After Myers death, various mediums began receiving messages purportedly coming from Myers.  Some of these messages were very fragmented and made no sense until they were collected and pieced together to make complete ideas.  "The whole process seemed at times like a giant Victorian word game (anagrams, cryptic puzzles, strange puns and rhymes), of which, in fact, Myers and his colleagues...were inordinately fond," Hamilton explains.  These so-called "cross-correspondences" were interpreted by other researchers as attempts by Myers, as well as by Gurney and Sidgwick, both of whom preceded him in death, to overcome some of the objections to mediumship, including fraud and telepathy.  "[They suggested] a high level of collective design and purpose, implying character, intention and personality," Hamilton states.

   One of the more simple cross-correspondences came through on  January 17, 1904, when Alice MacDonald Fleming, the sister of author Rudyard Kipling, received the biblical reference I Cor. xvi, 12 from Myers by means of automatic writing.  Living in India at the time, Fleming was instructed by Myers to send the message to SPR headquarters in London.  He further told the SPR that he tried to get the entire wording through in Greek but could not get Fleming's hand to form Greek characters, and so he gave only the reference. On the very same day, thousands of miles away in England, Mrs. Margaret Verrall, an automatic writing medium who was a member of the SPR, also received the same biblical reference from Myers by means of automatic writing.  This biblical passage, "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong," was the wording inscribed in Greek over the gateway of Selwyn College, Cambridge, under which Myers frequently passed. 

       One message for Sidgwick's widow, Eleanor, who had been very active in the SPR, read, "Now, dear Mrs. Sidgwick, in future have no doubt or fear of so called death, as there is none."

      In another communication, Myers gave this message about the afterlife:  "The reality is infinitely more wonderful than our most daring conjectures.  Indeed, no conjecture is sufficiently daring."

       Myers was apparently ahead of the times in the area of physical fitness as well.  His diary indicates that he ran two miles most days, one day finishing his run in 13 ½ minutes.   "Beside the record of his time he added ‘Inextricable sadness,'" Hamilton writes. "Through his life, while he was fit enough, one hazards that these runs, at times virtually every day, coincided with periods of intense spiritual and emotional disturbance."

       On a trip to the United States in 1865, Myers  decided to test himself by swimming across the Niagara River, from the Canadian side to immediately below the falls.  "I plunged in; the cliffs, the cataract, the moon herself, were hidden in a tower of whirling spray; in the foamy rush I struck at air; waves from all sides beat me to and fro; I seemed immersed in thundering chaos, alone amid the roar of doom." Myers wrote in his diary.

      Hamilton concludes the book by asking if Myers' quest had been successful.  "In personal terms it was," he opines.  ""He became convinced, on the basis of the intimate sittings he had with both Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson, that he had communicated with human beings (however different their nature and post-mortem existence) who had survived bodily death.  This belief was underpinned by his wide ranging reading and research in paranormal and abnormal activity across Europe and in the United States.  It led to him bearing the onset of death with a kind of joyous resilience, almost even insouciance..."

      On the other hand, Myers obviously failed in his wider hope of establishing immortality for the spiritually-challenged masses.  While the search for immortality continues today, more than a hundred years later, the foundation established by Myers and his colleagues seems to be slowly but increasingly appreciated. 

       Hamilton offers a very interesting, intriguing, informative, in-depth, and even inspirational look at one of history's most overlooked and unappreciated contributors.   One wonders if or when modern psychology will ever escape from the muck and mire of scientific fundamentalism and catch up with Myers. 
        Immortal Longings is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.com.UK