In Geneva during the 1890s, a medium known as Hélène Smith described life on Mars, produced unfamiliar speech and writing, and enacted episodes from supposed earlier lives. The psychologist Théodore Flournoy attended her séances and investigated the narratives, their languages and their possible sources. His account, published in English in 1900 as From India to the Planet Mars, remains unusually detailed. It preserves both the attraction of the séances and an investigator’s attempts to separate apparently external revelations from memory, expectation and suggestion.
The source and the people behind it
The main source here is Flournoy’s contemporary study in Daniel B. Vermilye’s 1900 translation. Its name Hélène Smith was a pseudonym for Catherine-Élise Müller, also known as Élise Müller. Flournoy was a professor at the University of Geneva. His introduction says that Auguste Lemaître, a teacher at the College of Geneva, invited him to séances in December 1894. He describes Smith as a non-professional medium who received no payment.
Flournoy used his own attendance, other sitters’ notes and further enquiries. Readers therefore need to distinguish a sitting he witnessed from an earlier report he reproduced. His account is also an intervention in the events: his questions and explanations could become material for later sittings. He acknowledged that the developing narratives were affected by the people around Smith. The study should be read as an observer’s argued reconstruction, with documented limitations, rather than an unedited transcript of everything that happened.
From table movements to continuing narratives
In chapter III, Flournoy reproduces another participant’s brief notes on the first meetings. They begin on 20 February 1892 with a group experimenting around a table. A later February entry records Smith’s first attempt at automatic writing. By March the notes include a visual experience and a longer written communication. These early entries were supplied to Flournoy; they predate his own introduction to the circle.
Over subsequent years the material became more elaborate. Flournoy organised it into three continuing cycles: an Indian life involving the princess Simandini and the prince Sivrouka; a royal life associated with Marie Antoinette; and journeys to Mars with recurring inhabitants, landscapes and a language. Leopold, a guiding personality who claimed a connection with Cagliostro, mediated many communications. Those identities were claims made within the sittings. Their recurrence gave the séances continuity but did not independently establish reincarnation or contact with another world.
A dated journey and its terrestrial audience
The Martian chapters connect the early development with Lemaître and the bereaved mother of Alexis Mirbel, one of his former pupils. Flournoy traced the first distinctly Martian séance to 25 November 1894. In the narrative that developed, the dead youth had another existence on Mars. The setting offered a way for a grieving mother to receive a communication presented as coming from her child.
A sitting on 2 February 1896 provides a particularly detailed sequence. Flournoy describes Smith’s unfamiliar speech, an enacted journey in a vehicle without wheels or horses, distinctive gestures on arrival and a return to communication with Mirbel’s mother. The alleged journey was represented through behaviour in the room and interpreted by the guiding personality. Nobody in the account physically accompanied Smith to another planet. That distinction keeps the emotional and theatrical events accessible without turning their stated explanation into an established occurrence.
The language could be compared and tested
The language study in chapter VI provides transcriptions, translations and reproduced writing. The printed caption to figure 21 dates the first written Martian text in that sequence to 22 August 1897. Flournoy examined the system’s sounds, grammatical forms, word order and vocabulary. His central objection was structural: despite its unfamiliar words and characters, it repeatedly followed French patterns. A vocabulary can look strange while its organisation remains familiar.
This was more specific than simply declaring the utterances meaningless. Repeated expressions could be compared across sittings, and apparent equivalents checked against their French translations. Flournoy drew attention to homonyms and other features that seemed to reproduce accidents of French. He treated the language as a creative production rather than evidence of an independent Martian community. The reproduced documents let later readers inspect parts of that argument, although the translation and recording still depend on the séance situation.
Smith disagreed with the investigator
On 13 February 1898, according to chapter VII, Flournoy told Leopold that the linguistic correspondences convinced him of a terrestrial origin. The disagreement did not immediately change later texts. In October he raised the issue directly with Smith while she was awake. His account of her reply is revealing: she maintained that the visions and language came from outside herself, even if their precise planetary origin was left open.
Flournoy then explained more of his comparisons and subsequently described an additional, more remote planetary language, which he called Ultra-Martian. He regarded the development as evidence of the effect of suggestion. This is a test with an unusual limitation: an observer challenging a claim also alters the expectations surrounding its future production. The later change supports discussion of that influence; it does not supply an independent journey or a recording made beyond Earth.
The Indian names and the book in the library
The investigation of the Indian cycle followed a different trail. In chapter VIII, Flournoy describes searching historical and geographical works for the names and dates supplied in the sittings. He eventually found a history of India by De Marlès containing Sivrouka, the fortress Tchandraguiri and the date 1401. That provided a possible written source for apparently obscure information. It did not show exactly when or where Smith had encountered the book.
Flournoy consulted specialists, including the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, on the supposed Sanskrit material. Their comments identified some recognisable words alongside doubtful constructions and unexplained syllables. Flournoy favoured forgotten memories as a source, but expressly left the precise origin of some language and historical details unresolved. Finding a matching passage was evidence for a possible route of information; proving Smith’s exposure to it would have been a further step.
A more qualified conclusion than either side might expect
In his conclusion, Flournoy explained the principal narratives through psychological processes, suggestion and cryptomnesia: the reappearance of information whose acquisition is no longer consciously remembered. He interpreted the recurring personalities as states of Smith herself, rather than foreign beings possessing her. These were his historical interpretations; they should not be converted into a present-day clinical diagnosis of a person who cannot be examined.
He also retained a belief that he had encountered some telepathy and telekinesis, while rejecting the evidential value of many purported spirit messages. It would therefore misrepresent the book to describe it as either confirmation of the séance world or a declaration that every phenomenon was conscious fraud. Its value lies partly in those distinctions and admitted gaps. The translator’s enthusiastic preface supplies another voice again, and should not be mistaken for the author’s final assessment.
Reading the surviving case
The material supports a history of documented séance performances, evolving narratives and a sustained dispute over their explanation. It does not establish that Smith visited Mars or recovered memories of royal and Indian incarnations. A modern presentation of the 1900 volume supplies another route to the scan and drawings. Those drawings are records of her reported visions and artistic activity, not photographs of the places described.
For comparison, see UKPX’s accounts of Leonora Piper’s English sittings and the Palladino experiments at Cambridge. They show other ways investigators tried to test mediumistic claims. This case is located broadly in Geneva; no private séance-room address is published, and the account should not be used as a guide to visiting a former home.