Hélène Smith

Hélène Smith, born Catherine-Elise Muller in Martigny (1861) and died in Geneva (1929), was a Swiss medium of the late 19th century. Her sessions were documented by the psychologist Théodore Flournoy, and the Surrealists regarded her as the muse of automatic writing and a symbol of their idea of the surreal.

The daughter of a Hungarian merchant, she worked as an employee in a commercial house. In 1891 she discovered spiritualism and joined a spiritualist development circle. Her manifestations moved from raps and table-tipping to somnambulistic trances, during which she described distant places, a civilization on Mars and past lives, and afterwards wrote out in French what she said she had received. Flournoy explained her cycles as childish imagination and forgotten memories, and coined the term cryptomnesia. Her book From India to the Planet Mars, published in 1900, made her famous. Soon after, a wealthy American admirer offered her a salary that allowed her to devote herself fully to her experiences. She also began to paint her visions, especially religious images of Christ.

André Breton mentions her in Nadja, and the television series The Man in the High Castle refers to a patient inspired by her who influenced Carl Gustav Jung.