Late nineteenth-century popular fiction reflects a fascination – shared with the mind sciences, occultism, and psychical research – with the supernatural powers and experiences of psychical automatism. This fiction often sensationalizes imbalances of power between entranced or somnambulized minds and the minds of those instigating or controlling them. These mind-control fictions were productive spaces in which to examine the common perception that the minds of women, children, people with disabilities, and the subaltern were more passive and susceptible to psychical automatism than those of white men, particularly those attributed with an educated scientific objectivity. Scholars have explored gendered aspects of this power imbalance in late-century fiction,¹ including texts like George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), which reiterates it, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “John Barrington Cowles” (1888) and The Parasite (1894), which feature powerful female characters who subvert it,² and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which, as Nina Auerbach argues, begins with the male psychic dominance of Dracula and ends with the triumph of the New Woman Mina Harker.³ Critics have also shown how views on mental illness and criminality are reflected in reiterations of mind control,⁴ and Daniel Pick has provocatively tied the trope to contemporaneous fears of mental susceptibility made visible by the allure of popular fiction, public entertainments, advertising, and other sources of mass persuasion.⁵ Laura Habbe has shown how the trope can represent epistemological control, analyzing the example of the overthrow of Western rationalism by the villainous, colonially located mesmerist Penclosa in Doyle’s Parasite.⁶

This chapter builds on Habbe’s observation to analyze the power dynamics of mind control in relation to race, racial hierarchy, and racialized knowledge in the late nineteenth century. Mind-control fictions frequently upheld the sociopolitical dominance of the white male mind, reflecting assertions by mental physiologists that such minds possessed a unique ability to resist trance states. Conversely, they also reflected the common (though by no means universal) assumption in occultism, mesmerism, and hypnotism that white males were most likely to possess the strong, active mind required to instigate trance states and control the automatist mind. This chapter explores a contrasting subset of mind-control reiterations in late-century popular fiction that I call “mind invasion.” In these texts, the subaltern and similarly othered beings – the extraterrestrial and the future human – psychically dominate educated white men. I argue that these depictions dialogue with concepts of evolutionary mental hierarchy proposed by the very white male experts represented in these stories. Reversions of the normal power dynamics of mind control sometimes maintained the white expert’s claim to be positioned at the top of such hierarchies. However, they also enabled subversion of this claim, a collapsing or inverting of hierarchy with disparate but often related aims, including antimaterialism, a defense of occult experience, and a decolonizing attack on the very concept of racial hierarchy. Reiterations of mind invasion thus reflect both fear and desire that the knowledge or psychical power of the subaltern mind would undermine the dominance of Euro-American mental science and the colonial right to rule that it was perceived to uphold.

Researchers have shown that the unconscious mind played a key role in differentiating race in the period, particularly in America,⁷ and that it served as a site for imagining reversals of colonial hierarchy and oppression in well-read mind-control fictions like The Parasite and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897).⁸ However, while much attention has been paid to the often monstrous orientalism of subaltern minds in such texts, there has been little discussion of the whiteness and white supremacy of the Euro-American minds involved, or of the scientific racisms that underpin this supremacy. Some reiterations of mind invasion uphold colonial power dynamics; others subvert them. In both cases, distinct racist biases are embedded in these stories as a result of their dialogue with scientific theories that associated subaltern minds with the powers and experiences attributed to automatist mental states, and white expert minds with a lower susceptibility to automatism and higher resistance to its delusive effects.

Scientific Racism and the Automatist Mind

These theories were formed in a context in which automatist mental states acted as a nexus for competing views of the mind, its neurological connection to brain and body, and its potential for paranormal psychical abilities. Though largely marginalized in terms of medical and physiological respectability by this period, mesmerism had transformatively revealed the existence of unconscious mental states, unknown and unremembered by the conscious self but accessible through artificial trance states, most often instigated and controlled by white male operators. Mesmerism impacted a number of late-century currents centrally imbricated in mind-control fictions to this day. Occultist currents like Theosophy, Spiritualism, and ritual magic embraced mesmerist theories of the unconscious, the trance state, and the various psychical powers associated with this state, including automatic writing, spirit mediumship, divination, clairvoyant vision, and mind-reading. Mesmerism also gave rise to hypnotism, which, following founder James Braid, stripped away the magical and spiritual associations of its predecessor, attributing trance states and their effects solely to automatic processes in the brain. Hypnotism theorists were closely networked to psychical research, which saw automatist mental states as a likely site in which to discover scientific explanations for a wide range of psychical and paranormal phenomena. Fictional reiterations of the mind-invasion trope dialogue with all of these framings of the automatist mind and its potential abilities in an overlapping manner that reflects the frequent real-life blurring of different backgrounds and approaches. Following mesmerist tradition and reflecting the racial and gender dynamics of the period, all these currents tended to view the white male mind as less prone to automatist states and more likely to instigate and control them, potentially unlocking psychical powers like clairvoyance and spirit communication in the more receptive minds of others. The mind-invasion trope often reverses this normative understanding by attributing subaltern characters with occult power and psychic control.

I want to focus, however, on how mind invasion reverses the white supremacist assumptions behind the framing of the automatist mind in mid- to late-century mental physiology. This naturalistic current of mental science, sometimes called “psycho-physiology,”⁹ was motivated by a series of discoveries which established that many thoughts and actions could be attributed to the automatic functions of what W. B. Carpenter called “unconscious cerebration,”¹⁰ diminishing the idea, dominant in mental physiology to that point, of the mind as an autonomous, soul-like entity, controlling the body through faculties like reason and will.¹¹ Most psychophysiologists accepted the existence of an unconscious mind that could be accessed through artificial trance states, but they opposed the use of these concepts to legitimate paranormal experience or advanced psychic powers. They pathologized both automatist mental states and the occult experiences and abilities they were perceived to unlock. For Carpenter, they were unconscious “self-delusion” resulting from suspension of “the will and discrimination”;¹² for American neurologist William A. Hammond they were the result of “cerebro-spinal” disease.¹³ Though some researchers found therapeutic and diagnostic value in hypnotic practices, others, like American physician George M. Gould, saw artificially induced trance as a “mental vivisection” that cut away at the proper relations between the conscious mind and its automatic processes.¹⁴

This imbalance between conscious and unconscious mind in automatist states was held responsible for the delusions of paranormal experience. When not ruled by higher conscious functions like “judgment, comparison, reality, logic, etc.,” said Gould, the mind became susceptible to “acceptance of the most astounding nonsense” and “the inability to distinguish between subjective and objective fact.”¹⁵ Gould, writing in 1890, was worrying along a path already inscribed by psychophysiologists including Braid, Carpenter, George Beard, and Henry Maudsley. All assigned the belief that the self had experienced occult phenomena like ghost-sightings and clairvoyant visions to hallucinations experienced in automatist states brought on by trance, dream, illness, or insanity, when the rational faculties were at their weakest.¹⁶ The mind control of mesmerist somnambulism and hypnotic suggestion was not required for these automatist hallucinations to take place, but it had a central place in this pathology of paranormal experience because of its rebalancing of the relationship between conscious and automatist mental processes. Indeed, Maudsley specifically described the delusions associated with automatism in the discourse of mind control. Even without an external operator or supernatural influence, he argued, paranormal experiences like hearing voices are, for a person capable of rational thought, “forced into his mind against his will,” producing ideas and experiences that do not match the experience of his conscious self. He is left “possessed by a mysterious power which subtracts it from his real self, dominates it, and thrusts it into the operations of the latter with the sort of impish perversity and persistence of a demon in possession of him.”¹⁷

Both the inability to control the automatist mind and the paranormal delusions associated with it were implicitly racialized. Accepting Herbert Spencer’s theory that species teleologically advance in progressively more complex forms, psychophysiologists assumed that reason represented the highest degree of mental complexity, and tended to attribute the most capacity for reason to themselves.¹⁸ An evolutionary hierarchy of mind was created, with the reason, logic, and empirical knowledge of the educated white male at the pinnacle and automatist concepts like reflex, instinct, habit, trance, and paranormal experience at the bottom. These latter traits and mental states were perceived to dominate the “primitive” mind, not yet evolved to the level of conscious control found in modern Euro-American civilization.¹⁹ This primitivity could still be found in Euro-American societies, as an atavistic recursion to which the weaker minds of women, children, the lower classes, and those with mental illness or disability were prone, but its best survivals were believed to be found, to varying extents based on perceived levels of civilizational development, in the “savage” or “barbarian” minds of racialized populations around the globe. This colonial hierarchy of mind was just one of a number of scientific racist hierarchies that explained, and were explained by, the widespread view that Europeans were furthest advanced along a teleological evolutionary timeline toward mental, physical, moral, and cultural perfection.²⁰ Mental science thus upheld the assumption of superiority required to legitimize colonialism, while at the same time, as Nancy Stepan observes, colonially motivated racial biases were “constituent elements of that science.”²¹ Graham Richards emphasizes the vital centrality of such projects to white supremacy, arguing that in the wake of abolition they replaced “older means of colonial/slavery-oriented subjugation and white hegemony.”²²

This colonial mental hierarchy enabled psychophysiologists to link the paranormal theories and experiences of mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought, and other esoteric currents to “primitive” recursions in Western societies. This link is only implicit in the work of theorists like Beard and Carpenter, but others more explicitly racialized automatism and its paranormal delusions. “Evolutionally,” Gould argued, “hypnotism is an atavistic return to primitive and savage mental processes. All barbarous and semi-civilized peoples exemplify an hypnotic state of mind … the lower in the evolutionary scale, the greater the automatism and mechanicalism of mind that offers itself as the readiest tool of the hypnotizer.” Gould explicitly connected this atavistic automatism to the “chronicled delusions, tyrannies, manias, and inexplicable aberrations” of history.²³ Similarly, Maudsley argued that “spirit-forms that are evoked and exhibited at so-called spiritual séances” were not at the developmental level of other modern conceptions of the soul, but of the “savage,” who did not possess the faculties to determine that “the ghost so seen is a trick of the nerves, a hallucination of sense.” “[I]n his undeveloped mind,” said Maudsley, “with its few and child-like ideas of the concrete … he is at the same time more susceptible to hallucinations and less capable of correcting them.”²⁴

Conversely, Maudsley and other psychophysiologists racialized themselves as both more capable of judging the reality of occult phenomena and much less likely to experience them. In addition to the evolutionary superiority of the Euro-American male mind, they also believed themselves advantaged by what neurologist George Beard called the “trained intellect” of the “expert” scientist.²⁵ The trained expert filtered valid experiences from impossible illusions with a faculty Carpenter called “an enlightened ‘common sense,’”²⁶ a trained, automatic habit with which the scientist could develop, in Alison Winter’s phrase, an “automatic sense of what was right and sensible.”²⁷ The expert was thus reliable not just as a reasoning scientific thinker but as an objective instrument of observation. The concept of the trained expert was rooted in a longstanding objectivist ideology in which the scientist himself was idealized as automaton – an “epistemological ideal of self-sacrifice, or even self-annihilation,” which would distance the observing researcher from emotion, belief, identity, and cultural influences.²⁸ Carpenter defined common sense as “the intelligent embodiment of the general experience of mankind,”²⁹ but the trained expert was implicitly racialized. As Richards observes, “Apparently at the pinnacle of the evolutionary, political and social scales [white male psychologists] inevitably viewed the rest of the species as from an Olympian height, and, thus centered, could not differentiate this viewpoint from ‘scientific objectivity’ itself.”³⁰ This perception of the self-mastery of the educated white male over his own automatist mind directly recapitulated the logic of empire. English physician J. J. G. Wilkinson made this explicit, arguing that reason “govern[s] the modes of the brain … governs its imaginations, and, in a word, civilizes the savage countries of the original head.”³¹ Thus, both the automatic processes in the brain and the automatons found outside in the “irrational” and “superstitious” reaches of colonized spaces were believed to be better off controlled by the rational faculties of the educated white male. The hierarchical dichotomies constructed by nineteenth-century mental science – expert–amateur, male–female, active–passive, reason–automatism, white–subaltern – created spectrums of human possibility along which educated white researchers could locate the minds and capabilities of all humanity: their own on the side of reason and accurate perception, and everyone else’s on the side of delusions and superstitions that suggested a need for guidance and control.

Invasions of the White Expert Mind

In the best-known fictional reiterations of mind invasion, subaltern minds undermine empire at the same time as they subvert white male reason and common sense. Marsh’s shape-shifting Beetle, who is manifoldly “oriental to the fingertips,”³² easily controls white male minds, though notably the novel’s genius engineer character, Sydney Atherton, is able to resist their mesmerist powers where others are not. Helen Penclosa of The Parasite is similarly described as a “monstrous parasite,” able to “dominate [Dr. Gilroy’s] nervous organism” with mesmerist powers acquired in Trinidad.³³ As Habbe argues, Gilroy’s defining weakness is precisely his belief that his scientific expertise will enable him to resist Penclosa’s forced automatism.³⁴ The Jamaican Harriet Brandt of Florence Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire (1897) does not consciously control her seductive, vampiric power over the minds of young white men, but her victims are powerless to resist it. Marsh, Doyle, and Marryat embed these mind invasions in a gothic context. The depraved Penclosa, villainous Beetle, and succubus Harriet derive their hypnotic power from subaltern knowledge, and the minds of the latter two are explicitly racialized. Their underminings of the evolutionarily superior white mind are visually presented in nightmarish terms. Each is a creature of psychical otherness; they represent the colonized other that, if not dominated and controlled, threatens to establish itself as equal to, perhaps even superior to, colonizing elites.³⁵ Each character must be forced back into the exotic terra incognita from which they have escaped in order for the novel to reach a satisfying conclusion for the colonizer reader.

I want to examine a group of novels that represent the automatist control and associated psychical power of the subaltern mind invader in a more nuanced manner, undermining, to varying extents, both colonial hierarchies of mind and the trained expert claim to onto-epistmological authority. Of these, Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–3) most radically rebalances the racial dynamics of automatism. The novel depicts a number of imbalanced mind-control relationships between three children, born, unbeknownst to each other, to a white plantation owner, Aubrey Livingston Sr., and Mira, a Black woman under his physical and psychical control. Aubrey Sr. is a mesmerist author and practitioner; Mira his suitably passive automatist subject, whose clairvoyant and prophetic abilities he unleashes as a parlor trick for guests. Fast-forward a few decades and the children meet in Boston. Reuel Briggs – who is aware of his mixed-race heritage – and Aubrey Livingston Jr. – who is not – are junior doctors who both fall in love with Dianthe, eventually revealed to be their sister. Reuel wins Dianthe’s hand but Aubrey, aware of Reuel’s blackness (but not his own), secretly uses this knowledge to prevent him from getting medical jobs in America. He encourages Reuel to travel to Africa on an archaeological mission to find a lost city of ancient Ethiopia. With Reuel gone, he uses his mesmerist abilities to enslave Dianthe’s mind and marry her.

Interpretation of Hopkins’ novel has focused on its representations of Black minds, finding both emblematic suppression and the potential for a regenerating sublimation of the Black unconscious in Hopkins’ reiteration of the mind-control trope.³⁶ Indeed, for Caroline Levander, “African American consciousness” is Hopkins’ “exclusive focus.”³⁷ However, Of One Blood also has much to say about white minds. Hopkins subverts the trained expert claim to mental superiority by representing the white male as susceptible to mind control and elevating the present strength and future potential of the subaltern unconscious. This subversion is particularly evident in the moral degeneracy of Aubreys Sr. and Jr., who combine the roles of slave owner and trained medical man. The Livingstons are white male conquerors of the unconscious in both the psychophysiological sense – the trained expert resistant to trance – and in an occultist vein – the active male mesmerist exerting psychical power by virtue of superior will. They use this power to enslave and control the Black unconscious of Mira and Dianthe. However, the penalty for this misuse of white expert knowledge and mesmerist control is severe. After Aubrey Jr. psychically forces Dianthe to drink poison she had intended for him, judgment is meted out on him by the very African mind that the white expert profiled as primitive. Reuel arrives back in America, having discovered and been crowned king of the hidden Ethiopian kingdom of Telassar. He has Ai, a leader of this advanced African kingdom, hypnotize Aubrey and psychically force him to seek “death by thine own hand.”³⁸ Whatever Aubrey’s power over the minds of others, and whatever the trained common sense and rational faculties he possesses as a Harvard-trained medical doctor, they are insufficient to defend him from the specifically African mind that strips him of his volition and forces him to suicide. Ai’s dominance reverses the Livingstons’ pattern of enslavement, while also undermining both the presumed superiority of the white mind and perceived primitivity and automatism of the subaltern.

Reuel is also a “man of science” (471), a “recognized power in the medical profession” and an “authority” on “brain diseases” (462). In specific contrast to Aubrey, however, Reuel also pursues knowledge of psychical abilities, some rooted in automatism, and develops them in himself. Joshua Lam shows how Reuel’s psychical experiences exemplify the “compromised agency” of “the black automaton.” In the balance though, Reuel’s unconscious is, as Susan Gillman argues, less hereditarily submissive than “racially evolutive” thanks to his “‘blood’ inheritance and the occult sciences he studies.”³⁹ Indeed, the utopian arc of Reuel’s psychical and intellectual development brings together the racialized associations of the white and Black unconscious. The sources of his research are those of white mental science – he marvels over extracts about trance phenomena from a psychical research essay called “The Unclassified Residuum” (442), attributed to Alfred Binet but actually quoted verbatim from William James’ “The Hidden Self” (1890).⁴⁰ Reuel develops new knowledge of the unconscious mind from this and other sources that helps save Dianthe from a coma-like “dual mesmeric trance” after she is involved in a train wreck (472). His white expert superiors at Harvard have already left Dianthe for dead; Reuel’s apparent reanimation upends their existing common sense, representing a subversion of post-Enlightenment rational materialism.

There is more to Reuel’s achievements than a simple triumph of (passing) white expert over white expert, however. The trained expert mind is also undermined within Reuel himself. In addition to his scientific genius, he is capable of self-induced trance states that enable clairvoyant vision. The two halves of Reuel’s mind – the scientific, rational medical man and the “far-seeing” automaton (524) – are explicitly racialized. His rational mind is structured by his Harvard training and his reading of mental physiological texts, but his “mysticism and his occult powers” are genetically inherited from his mother and grandmother – well versed in “voodoo” and African folklore (603).⁴¹ Reuel’s training and mental strengths thus unify the faculties and abilities artificially aligned with the whiteness of the trained expert – rationalism, scientific training, resistance to delusion – and the Black unconscious of his African heritage – automatist clairvoyance, unconscious intuition, self-mastery.

This unification is displayed in Reuel’s approach to the power dynamics of mind control. Unlike any other character in the novel, he resists exercising mind control over others, even when Dianthe begs him to amplify her clairvoyant powers with the “benefit of your powerful will” (475). Moreover, it is not Aubrey, passing as the trained white expert, who possesses the strength of will to avoid being automatized by others, but Reuel, who embraces both racialized aspects of mind. The Ethiopians of Telassar manage to render him unconscious but Hopkins pointedly depicts them using narcotics rather than mental powers to do so. Avoiding such imbalanced psychic relations, the only person who can mesmerize Reuel – and the only person he casts into a trance state – is himself. Sitting in the desert on his journey to Telassar, Reuel hears Dianthe calling for help. Combining his intellectual knowledge of mesmerism with his hereditary abilities, Reuel is eventually, “after several ineffectual attempts,” able “to concentrate his powers for the exercise of the clairvoyant sight of the hypnotic trance.” “Sitting statuesque and rigid beneath the magnetic spell,” Reuel is able to remotely view Aubrey’s nefarious actions far away in America (525). A number of racialized concepts and structures of automatism can be read into this self-hypnosis. It could be interpreted as Reuel’s active white mind transfixing the easily automatized mind of the “primitive,” reiterating the power imbalance sought by the white supremacist mesmerism of his father and brother. Alternatively, we could read the subverting power of his mother’s Black unconscious into Reuel’s unlocking of latent psychical ability. Ultimately, however, his achievement reflects an autonomy of mind gained from the unification of primeval African power and wisdom with the mental scientific training and aptitude associated with whiteness. Hopkins collapses racialized psychological distinctions in Reuel to dispense with the hierarchies of nineteenth-century science and imagine an advanced, futuristic mind that supersedes the limitations of mental or epistemological racialization.⁴²

The Past Invades the Future

Reuel’s harmonization of materialist science, Western esoteric concepts like clairvoyance and mesmeric control, and African religion and folklore indicates that reiterations of mind invasion were as much epistemological as they were psychical. In addition to dialoguing with the asserted superiority of white expert minds, mind invasion depicts a clash between white expert epistemological frameworks and subaltern knowledge perceived to be as irrational and supernaturalist as the “primitive” minds who formed it. Of One Blood undermines this perception by locating the superior, futuristic knowledge of the Ethiopians in an occult substratum shared with Western culture, but ultimately antecedent and still in advance of it. As a number of critics have discussed, Hopkins’ novel rewrites the European track of history, placing Africa, via Egypt and an even more ancient kingdom of Ethiopia, at the epistemological and evolutionary center of human development.⁴³ The rediscovered Ethiopians of the novel remain culturally, spiritually, technologically, and mentally advanced over the industrialized West, which, as Ai assures Reuel, “is yet in its infancy” (551).⁴⁴ Reuel sees something similar to the “abstract science of occultism” in Telassar’s scientific supremacy (574). As Gillman illustrates, occult knowledge thus acts as a mediating forum in which the novel “twins rather than opposes Euro-American science and African spiritualism,”⁴⁵ parallel to the way in which the mind of the trained white expert and the Black unconscious converge within Reuel. Hopkins believed, as did a number of Black activists in the period, that Western esoteric sciences like mesmerism vindicated the knowledge of African and African American magical traditions.⁴⁶

This was a consciously racialized version of a futurist atavism common in nineteenth-century occultism. Esoteric thinkers portrayed paranormal phenomena like occult mental powers as facts which, while empirically elusive in the present, would be borne out by future scientific discoveries.⁴⁷ At the same time, however, occultists also found existing evidence for these phenomena in historical testimonies.⁴⁸ In contrast to psychophysiologists like Carpenter, who sarcastically observed that “‘occult’ agencies” had been cited from “the very earliest times” to substantiate “ideal marvels possessing no foundation whatever in fact,”⁴⁹ occult scientists and psychical researchers found empirically verifiable explanations for antique esoteric experiences in modern “agencies” like animal magnetism and automatist mental states. Thus, for example, English mesmerist William Gregory argued that phenomena once confined to “priests, adepts, magicians, sorcerers, and perhaps astrologers and physicians” could now “be referred to natural causes, connected with mesmerism in some of its innumerable developments.”⁵⁰

This futurist atavism undermined the connection between “primitive” minds and supernatural belief assumed in anthropology, mental physiology, and other sciences. If the supernaturalist claims of earlier developmental stages of European civilization were given back the epistemological respectability denied them by modern-day materialist science, then the knowledge of subaltern civilizations could, by extension, be similarly valuable for understanding the nature and potential abilities of the automatist mind. To take another example from the influential mesmerist tradition, Frenchman Baron Dupotet offered reams of evidence to prove that the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were “well acquainted with the phenomena of somnambulism,”⁵¹ but also allowed that “it would appear as if all nations – the most unlettered and barbarous” seem to have relied on mesmerist principles in “their charms, their incantations, their ceremonies, however whimsical.”⁵² Hopkins deploys the link between the Euro-American and subaltern mind made possible by futurist atavism to overturn European civilizational hierarchies. Of One Blood reiterates the mind-invasion trope in order to launch the past into the future, placing not just the “primitive” minds but also the knowledge of Africa at the pinnacle of future scientific achievement.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1861–2)⁵³ also represents futurist atavism in mind invasion, though it is less intent on undermining the white expert and post-Enlightenment knowledge frameworks. The imbalanced automatist relationships of this sprawling novel are between white minds, but knowledge of the occult unconscious and how to control it is imported from colonized spaces. Mind invasion and its occult effects are focalized by the novel’s trained expert hero, Allen Fenwick, a medical doctor. He begins the novel as a strict materialist, rejecting the possibility of phenomena like magic and mesmerist clairvoyance. As he battles the villainous occultist Margrave for control of the mind of his beloved Lilian, however, Fenwick experiences mental states and occult events he cannot explain within his materialist paradigm. Among other experiences, he is placed into trance states by Margrave and Fenwick’s friend Sir Philip Derval. Both have gained their abilities from “occult studies [in] those Eastern lands in which they took their origin, and still retain their professors” (I, 310), including one Haroun of Aleppo, who possesses “truths of nature” which are “despised as dreams in Europe” but “revered as truths in Asia” (I, 146).

Margrave’s ability to automatize him leads Fenwick to doubt the reliability of both his expertly trained mind and scientific common sense: “I, unimaginative disciple of austere science, should be the last to become the sport of that witchcraft which … science casts aside into the mouldy lumber-room of obsolete superstition” (II, 16). Struggling to find physiological explanations for what he has seen and experienced, Fenwick turns to his mentor Dr. Faber – another white expert – who proposes that the solution might rest entirely in automatism – in the control or suggestion the minds of those with “peculiar and rare temperaments” might exert on others (II, 213). “The old tales of magic and witchcraft” could then be explained by the ability of one mind to imprint impressions on the unconscious of another.⁵⁴ This concept merges occultist and mesmerist ideas of automatist control with the psychophysiological idea that occult experience can be traced to the hallucinatory tendencies of the unconscious. The result is a fiction-based theory very similar to the theory of telepathy proposed by members of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. This explanation for occult experience proposed that esoteric experiences and events were the result of images and sensations received telepathically (whether purposefully sent by another mind or just intercepted from the ether), then processed automatically by the unconscious before being manifested to the conscious mind as actual events and perceptions.⁵⁵ Faber’s evidence for his theory of telepathy avant la lettre is found in mesmerist writings by Dr. John Elliotson and Chauncy Hare Townshend (II, 211),⁵⁶ but he also cites the knowledge and experience of the “savages”: the “native tribes of Australasia,” the Laplanders, and the Obi of Africa (II, 216). A Strange Story would thus seem to repeat Hopkins’ subversion of the white expert via knowledge and abilities sourced in a futurist atavism that brings together non-European epistemology with the modern sciences of the automatist mind.

However, A Strange Story resists Of One Blood’s guillotining of the white expert. Fenwick sees Faber’s attribution of occult experience to telepathized impressions on the unconscious mind as a theory in which “we get back into the legitimate realm of physiology” (II, 217). Bulwer’s text does undermine the white expert claim to resist trance states and their delusions, but this naturalistic explanation for occult experience ultimately comes close to the psychophysiological tendency to assign the paranormal to automatist delusion. In the end, the legitimacy of Faber and Fenwick’s theory is connected to their white expert perspective rather than the “oriental” knowledge of Margrave. This is made clear as Fenwick rediscovers his common sense at the same time as he successfully defends himself and Lilian from Margrave and his Arab and Indian accomplices in an encounter in the Australian outback. Western rationalism and scientific naturalism carry the explanatory day against various subaltern representatives, on the geographical terrain of Aboriginal peoples Europeans assumed to be at a decidedly lower stage of mental and cultural evolution.

Anthrofuturism: The Expansion of Evolutionary Mental Hierarchy

The relationship between the othering of race science, the occult phenomena made possible by automatist mental states, and the power dynamics of automatist control is perhaps most clear in nineteenth-century texts that depict invasions of the unconscious by extraterrestrials. White identity is often projected into these imagined beings, but their invasion of the human unconscious via advanced mental powers also recapitulates the logics of colonialism while representing a dramatic reversal of the colonial fate of European subjects. As John Rieder has shown, this reversal is a common ingredient in reiterations of extraterrestrial encounter, which “estrang[e] the colonial gaze by reversing the direction of the gaze’s … anachronism of anthropological difference.”⁵⁷ The invasion and automatization of the white mind provides the mechanism for this reversal in a number of late-century extraplanetary adventures. Mirrikh, or a Woman from Mars (1892), by prolific pulp novelist Francis Worcester Doughty, is an example that explicitly racializes both automatism and extraterrestrial mind invasion by connecting them to the mystical powers of South Asian fakirs and lamas, both connected to automatist states and abilities by Western occultists and mental physiologists alike.⁵⁸

Two young American men, George and Maurice, are joined on an adventure in South Asia by the novel’s white expert, a British medical doctor named Philpot, who also works as a Christian pastor. Philpot is the novel’s representative of empiricist mental science – both knowledgeable about the phenomena experienced at Spiritualist séances and mesmerist demonstrations, and dismissive of them. Indeed, his two professions combine scientific and Christian establishment skepticism toward the occult. After the three men experience a number of paranormal phenomena, his initial explanation aligns with mental physiologists who accepted the reality of hypnotic control but feared its ability to cause delusion through automatism: “There is a power existing in certain mental organizations enabling them to control weaker ones, and to deprive them for the time being of their individuality; to make them believe that black is white” (73). However, this attribution of occult experience solely to the delusions of automatized minds is challenged. The three men encounter a Martian named Mirrikh, who, in addition to a proven ability to levitate and communicate telepathically, can control the minds and bodies of the three men. Notably, Mirrikh is not the only one who can perform this feat. As the party proceeds into the fastness of the Himalayas, they meet Tibetan lamas who are capable of the same degree of mind invasion. This psychical similarity to powerful subaltern minds enhances the figurative connection between extraterrestrial and racialized other. The dual color of Mirrikh’s face, “black below, yellowish white above” (56), contributes to this racialization. Notably, his connection to the colonized other and their mental powers is based in Western fantasies rather than any sort of scientific or observational representation. Both Mirrikh and the encountered lamas resemble the Mahatmas that Theosophists believed to have astrally communicated secret occult knowledge to Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and others from unknown Himalayan locales.⁵⁹ Moreover, Mirrikh’s complexion is adopted from the visions of Martian physiognomy experienced by eighteenth-century Swedish seer, Emanuel Swedenborg in a dreaming trance state (78).⁶⁰ Doughty thus attributes the automatist capabilities of the subaltern to the extraterrestrial in order to reiterate the subversion of nineteenth-century scientific racism endemic to the mind-invasion trope, but draws on the previously racialized knowledge of Western occultism to do so. Despite his extraplanetary origins, Mirrikh’s automatist control over the three white adventurers undermines colonial mental hierarchy to the same degree as Reuel Briggs.

Gustavus W. Pope sets the moment of first contact between Martians and Earthlings in a similarly combined context of colonialism and automatism in his 1894 Journey to Mars. The encounter is predicated on racial difference. The Martians observe that the novel’s narrator, Frederick Hamilton, is “white … of the Earth born race,” while the complexions of the strange visitors are “of red, yellow and blue colors.”⁶¹ Rather than dominating the mysterious new race he has encountered as an American in the exotic locale of Antarctica, Hamilton is forcibly cast into a trance state by an alien named “Phero zar Hypnotos,” who is racialized as “red like Indians” (45) and described as one of the Martians’ “most distinguished mesmerists or magnetizers as you call them” (58). Upon feeling “a wonderfully magnetic and soothing influence” under the alien’s “remarkably penetrating” gaze, Hamilton attempts to “resist his powerful influence.” His efforts, however, are in vain: “my will was held captive” (51). Zar Hypnotos then places Ascopion, a blue Martian, into a “mind reading trance” (58), allowing Ascopion to form an automatist link with the forcibly somnambulized Hamilton, in which he reads his “mind and memory” and learns his language (58). Significantly, Ascopion is able to translate the power unleashed in his unconscious trance into an ongoing conscious ability to read Hamilton’s mind. He assures the “terrestrian” that other Martians are able to do so as well, and that some “possess far greater powers” (66).

Hamilton recognizes something similar in all this to “a few experiments in what is called mind reading by self styled professors of mesmerism, psychology, etc.” (59), but Ascopion’s power seems “outrageously incredible” (60). “That is quite beyond the abilities of any mesmerized or clairvoyantized subject I ever heard of,” he protests. “They can only manifest the power while in the clairvoyant trance” (60). He approaches the problem with the psychical researcher’s mix of curiosity and skepticism, demanding proof of Ascopion’s claims, which is duly provided. Hamilton, not yet aware that Ascopion is an extraterrestrial, is forced to admit with amazement, “I never dreamed it possible that any human being could be endowed with such powers” (66). This amazement, however, is localized in the secular materialist expectations of modern America. The response of Hamilton’s aide John, an Indigenous Pacific islander, suggests the association in the minds of white intellectuals like Pope, an American physician, between automatist psychical power and the “primitive” mind. “He be terrible witch man,” shudders John, connecting the mesmerist powers of these extraterrestrials to the automatist abilities of the shamans and sorcerers of colonized spaces (58).

The encounter with the Martians thus has the structure of reverse colonialism; yet, the novel represents this psychic invasion in terms of utopian possibility rather than gothic menace. Hamilton is not consulted before his mind is seized or interrogated and is initially threatened by the idea that an entire race can read his inmost thoughts. Upon consideration, however, he concludes that a more utopian Earth might result if such “tremendous psychological power” could be developed “by the cultivation and advancement of psychological science among us terrestrians” (66). This utopian musing is a direct reminder that whether the extraterrestrial is imagined as a hideous degenerate or advanced superbeing, it is always, as John Rieder argues, “a version of the human race’s own future.”⁶² Journey to Mars and Mirrikh are examples of science fictional texts of the period that bring together anthropological and psychophysiological attributions of occult powers to the colonial other with contemporaneous theories that alternate or future evolution would produce beings with enhanced psychical powers. These ideas were widely floated in occultism,⁶³ but also in psychical research, where Frederic W. H. Myers wondered if the tendency for hysterical automatist states might be a “progenerate” sign of human evolution,⁶⁴ and psychology, where Richard Bucke argued that humanity was in a process of psychical evolution that might result in “not one superior race only, but … several,” one with “clairvoyant powers,” another with “miraculous healing powers; and so on.”⁶⁵ These conceptions represent an inversion of colonial hierarchies of mind based in futurist atavism. The automatist states and associated mental powers of the “primitive” are projected into the future-human, expanding humanity’s evolutionary horizon in order to relegate the rational consciousness of the white expert to the bottom of the developmental ladder.

Bulwer-Lytton’s second-last novel, The Coming Race (1871), explicitly finds this anthrofuturism within the extraterrestrial in its depiction of an evolutionarily superior race that threatens a rather less utopian future for humanity. The “Vril-ya” rule the world inside the hollow-earth, a popular nineteenth-century fictional space in which to imagine the encounter with the alien other. They share a primeval evolutionary ancestor with humans, but radically expand the nineteenth-century evolutionary horizon because they have evolved to be able to psychically manipulate “vril” – a universal, electromagnetic force similar to that which Bulwer believed to mediate occult impressions between minds.⁶⁶ Their ability to control this occult force makes them telepathic and telekinetic, but it is their ability to forcibly automatize humans that makes clear the evolutionary imbalance between the two. The Vril-ya easily control the mind of Tish, an American who has fallen into their world. The power dynamics of mind invasion precisely represent Tish’s new place in the evolutionary hierarchy, as “repeated trances” are inflicted on him without his consent or conscious awareness: to learn his language, to heal him, and to control him when his emotions are heightened.⁶⁷ The degree of psychical difference between the two species is emphasized when “all power of volition” is taken from Tish by a Vril-ya child (179). Relative to such evolutionarily superior beings, Tish is little advanced past the “savage” and “barbarous” hollow-earth races (82, 123), or even the actual machines that he sees the Vril-ya control with their minds, “automaton figures” that he finds it “scarcely possible to distinguish … from human forms endowed with thought” (127).

The Vril-ya are not just figuratively anthrofuturist – they literally threaten the future of humanity. As a result of the occult power of their hyperevolved brains, they are “destined to return to the upper world, and supplant all the inferior races now existing therein” (91), just as Maudsley and other intellectuals of the period imagined that the mental and moral development of advanced Euro-American peoples would result in the “degeneration and extinction of the inferior races.”⁶⁸ The Coming Race thus reflects entangled anxieties surrounding psychical and colonial power, a fear in the dark fictionalizing unconscious of the white male that the assumed superiority of the Euro-American mind and its knowledge might one day be undermined, taking with it the colonial dominance this mental hierarchy upheld. Whether utopian or dystopian, all three of these extraterrestrial fictions dialogue with this anxiety of dominance by redrawing the period’s hierarchies of mind. They display the contingency and artificiality of the white male claim to evolutionary superiority by expanding the horizon of mind to include abilities linked to or anchored in automatist mental states.

Yet, at the same time as these texts seem to undermine the claimed superiority of the white mind, they also project normative assumptions of whiteness into space or inside the Earth, lessening their potential to subvert contemporaneous racism and racial hierarchy. There are a number of potential explanations for this paradoxical willingness to undercut white expertise while maintaining whiteness, but one visible motivation, uniformly discoverable in all the texts I have discussed, is a resistance to the reductionism of scientific materialism. These extraplanetary fictions root this antimaterialism in an orientalist ennoblement of the subaltern. Even as they assume whiteness in anthrofuturist beings and civilizations, their futurist atavism projects back into these beings the psychical knowledge and ability that the white expert associated with lower levels of mental evolution. The subaltern is thus recruited as a new front in a widespread war on materialism waged by a diverse group of artists, intellectuals, and religious leaders in the period. There is a liberation offered here – a weakening of the alliance between the white expert claim to mental superiority and the materialist structures that both emerged from and supported it. However, subaltern mind control in most mind-invasion reiterations ultimately serves the purposes of what Russ Castronovo calls the “white unconscious” – the inward-looking spiritual gaze of the Euro-American mystic⁶⁹ – rather than a reconstitution of subaltern minds or ideas. White authors who envisioned the subaltern mind automatizing the white expert seem to have been more interested in accentuating magical knowledge or mediumistic minds that had been present in Euro-American culture all along, rather than actually discovering, as Hopkins did, new sources of power or new ideas in the mind of the subaltern.

Conclusion: Different Kinds of Reading

Late nineteenth-century reiterations of the mind-invasion trope thus offer mixed results in terms of potential resistance to scientific racist perspectives, consistent with the trope’s fluid, multivalent history of reiteration and interpretation. Yet it might be said, adopting Edward Said’s hopes for literary interpretation, that these depictions of white expert automatism allow a “different kind of reading,” in which an “interpretative change of perspective allows us to challenge the sovereign and unchallenged authority of the allegedly detached Western observer.”⁷⁰ Mind invasion provides direct opportunity for this different kind of reading by satirizing the white expert claim to common sense, detached objectivity, and the ability to resist automatist mental states. An additional, more complex “interpretive change” can be achieved by expanding our view past individual texts to assess the trope of mind invasion as an intertextual series of reiterations. The biases and hierarchies of nineteenth-century scientific racism can be found in a variety of tropes that developed in the popular fiction of the period, from the extraterrestrial to the vampire. Mind invasion, however, is particularly useful for understanding and deconstructing embedded race-based assumptions because it explicitly presents the reversal of epistemological and mental slavery. Even when mind invasion upholds the white expert and his knowledge, it can still promote critique of the very concept of a race-based hierarchy of mental ability. In the process, the dichotomies of nineteenth-century race science – “primitive” and “modern”; “savage” and “civilized”; “irrational” and “rational”; and, in this case, automaton and automatizer – are inverted, unbalanced, and sometimes even collapsed.