Gray - The immortalization commission: science and the strange quest to cheat death

Darwin attends a seance F. W. H. Myers and Henry Sidgwick, founders of the Society for Psychical Research, arrange to send messages after they have died Automatic writing and the cross-correspondences Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection and convert to Spiritualism Sidgwick on the search for an afterlife and a black hole in ethics Darwin on the immortality of the soul George Eliot discourses on Duty at twilight in Trinity College garden Some varieties of the afterlife Myers and posthumous evolution Sidgwicks message from beyond the grave: I seek still Two versions of the unconscious The subliminal self and the power of impersonation Henry Sidgwick and Madame Blavatsky Sidgwick, Myers and gay sex Myers and a secret love Arthur Balfour on science, faith and doubt Balfours long-dead love sends him a message Palm Sunday The cross-correspondences, the Story and the Plan Post-mortem eugenics and a messianic child A letter from Mars The appearance and disappearance of Clelia, Myers unearthly muse A subliminal romance comes to an end Ouspensky on eternal recurrence Flames over London

H. G. Wells arrives in Russia and falls in love Moura, Maxim Gorkys confidante and Wells Lover-Shadow Robert Bruce Lockhart, Moura and the Lockhart plot Wells discovers Mouras secret life Mouras laughter The smell of honey Wells, Darwin and Dr Moreau: beasts that perish There is no pattern of things to come Maxim Gorky, God-builder Anatoly Lunacharsky, occultist and Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment Vladimir Bekhterev, neurologist and parapsychologist, pays a visit to Stalin Lamarck and Lysenko The humanism of the White Sea Canal Gorky on the extermination of rodents Immortality and rocket science: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Stalin, an enormous flea Gorkys travelling suitcase Gorkys last word Leonid Krasin, Soviet minister, money-launderer and cryogenics pioneer Nikolai Federov, Orthodox mystic and techno-immortalist The Immortalization Commission Kazimir Malevich, Cubo-Futurist and inspirer of Lenins tomb Victory over the Sun Two Chekist supermen Stalins coffee machine The death machine Eau de Cologne, ashes and freshly baked bread Walter Duranty, disciple of Aleister Crowley and apologist for Stalin Method acting and the show trials Mouras bonfire

From automatic writing to cryonic suspension Freezing and starving yourself to everlasting life Global warming and the mortal Earth Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity Artificial intelligence and virtual evolution Immortalism, a programme for human extinction Science as a machine for generating insoluble problems Natural laws or primordial chaos Rain The sweet scent of death in Casablanca The fall of a leaf

. Henry Sidgwick (Getty)

. F. W. H. Myers

. Alfred Russel Wallace (Corbis)

. Balfour with George V (Lady Kremer)

. Mary Lyttelton

. Winifred Coombe-Tennant with Henry (Lady Kremer)

. Street scene in Petrograd (from Russia in the Shadows)

. Robert Bruce Lockhart (Corbis)

. Wells, Gorky and Moura Budberg (Special Collections Library, University of Illinois)

. Lenin and Wells (from Russia in the Shadows)

. Stalin and Gorky on the steps of Lenins tomb (Getty)

. Building Lenins tomb (David King)

. Menzhinsky (Corbis)

. Edward Thomas (Getty)

During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century science became the vehicle for an assault on death. The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science was used against science and became a channel for magic.

Science had disclosed a world in which humans were no different from other animals in facing final oblivion when they died and eventual extinction as a species. That was the message of Darwinism, not fully accepted even by Darwin himself. For nearly everyone it was an intolerable vision, and since most had given up religion they turned to science for escape from the world that science had revealed.

In Britain a powerful and well-connected movement sprang up aiming to find scientific evidence that human personality survived bodily death. Psychical researchers, supported by some of the leading figures of the day, believed immortality might be a demonstrable fact. The seances that were so popular at this time were not just Victorian parlour games invented to while away dreary evenings. They were part of an anxious, at times desperate, search for meaning in life a quest that attracted the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, author of a study of ethics that is still read today, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection and a convert to Spiritualism, and Arthur Balfour, at times British prime minister and president of the Society for Psychical Research, who was drawn late in life into corresponding through automatic writing texts produced without conscious awareness in which another personality seems to be guiding the pen with a long-dead woman, whom some believed he had loved.

The psychical researchers search for evidence that human personality survived death was driven by revulsion against scientific materialism. Very often, though, their quest had other, more personal motives. Members of an elite that protected itself from scrutiny by keeping to a code of secrecy, leading psychical researchers used their investigations into the paranormal to reveal, and then again conceal, aspects of their lives they or their culture could not or would not accept. In one case, only made public nearly a century later, they became involved in a secret scheme to conceive a messianic child. Communicating with the dead via cross-correspondences, thousands of pages of text composed by automatic writing over nearly thirty years, these psychical researchers believed they were part of an experiment undertaken by deceased scientists, working in the after-world, which could bring peace to the world here below.

At the same time that sections of the English elite were being drawn into psychical research another anti-death movement was emerging in Russia. As in England science and the occult were not separate, but mingled in a current of thought that aimed to create a substitute for religion. Nowhere was this clearer than among the God-builders a section of the Bolshevik intelligentsia that believed humans could someday, maybe quite soon, conquer death. Along with Maxim Gorky, the God-builders included Anatoly Lunacharsky, a former Theosophist who was appointed Commissar of Enlightenment in the new Soviet regime, and Leonid Krasin, a disciple of the Russian mystic Nikolai Federov, who believed the dead could be technologically resurrected. Krasin, who became Soviet minister of trade, was a key figure in the decisions that were made about preserving Lenins remains by what came to be known as the Immortalization Commission.