CLAIRVOYANT

Subject: CLAIRVOYANT Tue Jul 12, 2011 9:37 pm

The faculty of clear-sightedness, the supposed paranormal ability to see persons and events that are distant in time or place. Clairvoyance may be roughly divided into three classes— retrocognition and premonition; perceiving past and future events; and perception of contemporary events happening at a distance, or outside the range of normal vision. Clairvoyance may include psychometry, second sight, and crystal gazing. Prophecy is a form of clairvoyance extending back into antiquity, and second sight is also an ancient form. It is notable that Spiritualism in Great Britain was directly heralded, about the third decade of the nineteenth century, by an outbreak of clairvoyance. Among clairvoyants of that period was Alexis Didier, whose phenomena suggested that telepathy at least entered into his feats, which included reading letters enclosed in sealed packets, playing écarté with bandaged eyes, and others of a like nature. Clairvoyance remains a prominent feature of the Spiritualistic séance.

Although there exists a quantity of evidence, collected by members of the Society for Psychical Research and other scientific investigators, that would seem to support the theory of supernormal vision, it must be acknowledged that many cases of clairvoyance lend themselves to a more mundane explanation. For instance, it has been shown that it is almost impossible to bandage the eyes of a medium so that the person cannot make some use of his or her normal vision. The possibility of hyperesthesia during trance should also be taken into account, as should telepathy, which may conceivably play a part in clairvoyant performances.

A private detective agency could also be a possible source of some of the knowledge displayed by the professional clairvoyant. The crystal is, as has been indicated, a favorite mode of exercising the clairvoyant faculty, presumably because the hypnotic state is favorable to development of supernormal vision; however, it could also be that the condition thus induced favors the rising into the upper consciousness of knowledge previously stored in the subconscious.

The term clairvoyance is also used to describe the power to see discarnate spirits, and is applied to mediumship generally.