Clairvoyance - Clairvoyance and Related Phenomena Throughout History

Clairvoyance and Related Phenomena Throughout History

There have been anecdotal reports of clairvoyance and 'clear' abilities throughout history in most cultures. Often clairvoyance has been associated with religious or shamanic figures, offices and practices. For example, ancient Hindu religious texts list clairvoyance amongst other forms of 'clear' experiencing, as siddhis, or 'perfections', skills that are yielded through appropriate meditation and personal discipline. But a large number of anecdotal accounts of clairvoyance are of the spontaneous variety among the general populace. For example, many people report seeing a loved one who has recently died before they have learned by other means that their loved one is deceased. While anecdotal accounts do not provide scientific proof of clairvoyance, such common experiences continue to motivate research into such phenomena.

The earliest record of somnambulistic clairvoyance is credited to the Marquis de Puységur, a follower of Mesmer, who in 1784 was treating a local dull-witted peasant named Victor Race. During treatment, Race reportedly would go into trance and undergo a personality change, becoming fluent and articulate, and giving diagnosis and prescription for his own disease as well as those of others. When he came out of the trance state he would be unaware of anything he had said or done. This behavior is somewhat reminiscent of the reported behaviors of the 20th century medical clairvoyant and psychic Edgar Cayce. It is reported that although Puységur used the term 'clairvoyance', he did not think of these phenomena as "paranormal", since he accepted mesmerism as one of the natural sciences.

Clairvoyance was a reported ability of some mediums during the spiritualist period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and psychics of many descriptions have claimed clairvoyant ability up to the present day.

Early researchers of clairvoyance included William Gregory (chemist), Gustav Pagenstecher, and Rudolf Tischner. These were largely qualitative experiments in which selected participants sought to identify a concealed target image, or to provide accurate information about the history of a target object. Charles Richet, the noted physiologist and, later, Ina Jephson, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, introduced more quantitative methods. A significant development in clairvoyance research came when J. B. Rhine, a psychologist at Duke University, introduced a standard methodology, with a standard statistical approach to analysing the data, as part of his research into extrasensory perception. Perhaps the best-known study of clairvoyance in recent times has been the US government-funded remote viewing project at SRI/SAIC during the 1970s through the mid-1990s; at least those studies amongst these that did not involve "agents" visiting or being otherwise aware of the target sites.

Some parapsychologists have proposed that our different functional labels (clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, etc.) all refer to one basic underlying mechanism, although there is not yet any satisfactory theory for what that mechanism may be.