In approved manner of late nineteenth-century sexologists, Krafft-Ebing, say, or Havelock Ellis, let us begin anecdotally, with several case histories. In 1900 Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy, professor of psychology at University of Geneva, published From India to Planet Mars-an investigation of case of Helene Smith, a celebrated spirit medium active in Genevan spiritualist circles in 1890s. While in a state of hypnotic trance Smith claimed to have had three previous incarnations-as a fourteenth-century Indian princess named Simandini; as an inhabitant of planet Mars; and as Marie Antoinette, doomed queen of France (fig. 1). During her seances, which she conducted with help of a mysterious control from spirit world named Leopold, who communicated by rapping on a table, Smith was able to relive these past lives in precise, often bizarre detail. Flournoy, an experimental psychologist with an interest in spiritualism and occult, began observing Smith's trances in 1894, and in his book offered an account of these visionary while also speculating along Freudian lines about their psychological origins.' The Hindoo and cycles were outlandish enough: in fourteenthcentury India, Smith revealed, she had lived at court of a ruler named Sivrouka; on Mars, she had been an individual named Pouze Ramie. While entranced she was able to produce long passages of automatic writing-sometimes in a language resembling Sanskrit (of which she claimed no conscious knowledge) and sometimes in a so-called Martian dialect. Flournoy devotes several chapters of meticulous philological analysis to these fascinatingly cryptic compositions.2 Yet Marie Antoinette cycle was, if anything, even more colorful. Were one to give it an attention proportionate to its importance in Smith's somnambulic life, Flournoy observed, a hundred pages would not suffice.3 Smith's royal romance typically began with a communication from Leopold, her spirit control. Leopold, it was revealed, was an otherworldly manifestation of eighteenth-century Italian magician Joseph Balsamo, otherwise known as Cagliostro, who had once-at least according to Smith-been passionately in love with Marie Antoinette. While under Leopold's spiritual control, which she experienced as a kind of possession, Smith spoke in the deep bass voice of a man, used masculine gestures, and frequently professed her love for ill-fated