On August 22, 1897, a woman sitting beside a rain-darkened window in Geneva asked for a sheet of paper.
Her name was Élise-Catherine Müller, although the surviving account calls her Hélène Smith. She was a shop assistant, a medium and, during certain Sunday séances, a frequent visitor to Mars. Smith had already described seeing the planet during trance. Mars, according to her reports, contained pink mountains, blue-green lakes, unusual plants and inhabitants who wore robes. They traveled in carriages without horses and lived in houses with fountains on the roof. Sign us up.
On that August evening, the communication became written. Smith said she could see three Martian figures holding narrow white tablets covered in black characters. Someone handed her paper and a pencil, she began copying what she saw.
The result was three lines of looping, unfamiliar script. It was written from left to right and accompanied by a French transcription: Astane esenale pouze mene simand ini mira.
This was, according to the record, the first complete text Smith produced in Martian. The fluency rate has since declined.
Good news, the paper still exists!
Smith began attending Spiritualist circles in Geneva in the early 1890s. During séances, she entered trances, heard voices, produced automatic writing and adopted identities belonging to what her observer would later call her “romantic cycles.”
There was a royal cycle, in which she channeled Marie Antoinette. There was a Hindu cycle, in which she inhabited the life of a fifteenth-century princess named Simandini. Then there was the Martian cycle.
Her guide to the planet was Astané, a Martian who had reportedly known her during an earlier earthly incarnation. Through him, Smith received descriptions of Martian life, landscapes, customs and language. She eventually produced drawings and paintings of what she saw, creating an archive of extraterrestrial travel without leaving Geneva.
In the room was Théodore Flournoy, a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva. Flournoy attended Smith’s séances for several years, recording her movements, speech, visions and writings. In 1900, he published the material in From India to the Planet Mars: A study of a case of somnambulism with glossolalia.
Flournoy did not think Smith had been to Mars. He believed her visions were elaborate productions of the subconscious, assembled from forgotten memories, childhood reading and the creative possibilities of trance. He used the term “cryptomnesia” for knowledge remembered without being recognized as memory.
The Martian language received particular attention.
Smith could speak it, hear it, write it and translate it into French. It had its own vocabulary and visual alphabet. What it did not appear to have was an independent grammar. Its word order and sentence structure followed French with suspicious loyalty.
The symbols looked extraterrestrial. The sentences they formed, however, felt familiar. This did not make Smith’s achievement less impressive. Producing an invented language consistently, while in trance, is still an extraordinary feat. The alternative to “communicating with a Martian from Mars” is not “nothing happened.” Something happened in that sitting room. The disagreement concerns what that something is.
Smith did not appreciate Flournoy’s conclusion. From her perspective, he had taken years of experiences she considered real and rearranged them into evidence of subconscious invention. His book made her famous, but it also separated her work from the meaning she gave it.
“Her guide to the planet was Astané, a Martian who had reportedly known her during an earlier earthly incarnation.”
The archive continued to travel without her.
Decades later, the Surrealists (members of the 20th-century artistic movement) encountered Smith’s writing and claimed her as their own. They were less interested in whether Astané existed than in what Smith’s work seemed to demonstrate: that the mind could produce images, voices and languages beyond the supervision of ordinary consciousness.