Precognition and Clairvoyance in Legend, Lyric, and Lore
By Daniel Bourke
Foreword by Gregory Shushan, Ph.D.
In the 1970s, a rural Finnish woman offered the following memoir to Leea Virtanen, former professor of Finnish and comparative folk poetry studies:
My mother had the gift of knowing in advance when visitors were coming and who they would be. She had this gift all her life.
Occasionally, she has been mistaken, but then it has turned out that the person intended to come but was prevented.
Some decades earlier, in his autobiography, English writer Osbert Sitwell stated, rather unceremoniously, regarding his time at boarding school, that: I knew beforehand when my mother, my brother, or my sister was coming to see me. Infallibly, invariably, and without being informed of it, I became aware the previous day, and even when it appeared most unlikely that such a visit was impending. Equally, I could tell if it had to be postponed.
While a couple of anecdotes may not impress, such experiences are surprisingly common and involve the seeming reception of knowledge about someone’s approach to one’s own location at a time when this couldn’t have been conventionally known. This, as we’ll see, might be a visitor known to the informant, a loved one, a stranger, an animal, or even entire armies, and may become known by way of a dream, a vision, a footstep, a voice, a scent, or a sound. While there is no agreed-upon terminology to describe what seems to present as “clairvoyant” or “telepathic” experiences, they are nevertheless widely found. Renowned novelist Charles Dickens wrote in his journal of just such a thing, a dream regarding which he made it clear that “all the circumstances” were “exactly told.”
Dickens saw a lady in a red shawl who identified herself as “Miss Napier.” Dickens wondered in the morning why on earth he would dream such a thing, noting he had never heard of a Miss Napier. That same night, however, the identical lady in the red shawl turned up in his retiring room, and her name was Miss Napier. She had been traveling to see him with two others he knew.
Vardoger (vard-deh-ay’-grr), or roughly “spiritual predecessor,” is the Norwegian term most closely related to these experiences, and unlike the numerous strange and seemingly “extrasensory” phenomena that have been so well described over the past half century, these mysterious vardogers, and especially their relatives, have gone mostly untouched.
They have certainly been acknowledged to some degree; how much they have been historically and cross-culturally represented, however, remains significantly and conspicuously unexplored. These phenomena themselves, as it happens, are found not just among a variety of folkloric sources, but literary, allegorical, anecdotal, anthropological, and legendary sources on every continent. Here, we hope, for the first time, to give a much firmer indication in this regard. Furthermore, the extent to which these mysterious accounts have been neglected warrants the relatively bulky presentation that will be our first and longest chapter here, the first port of call in our explorations of these “telepathic tales.”
WORLD OF VISIONS AND VARDOGERS
While these phenomena are most commonly associated with Norse and some Scottish sources, such visions, dreams, and intimations are to be found in impressive abundance much further afield, for example, among Africans, Polynesians, Siberians, and the First Peoples spanning the Americas. Even those spread liberally throughout the present chapter are only indicative of a much greater trove of accounts that have rarely, if ever, been related to their more recognized northern European counterparts.
Award-winning American folklorist Barre Toelken was himself greatly impressed with such incidents—which fell under the category of “moccasin telegraph,” as it is often referred to among the Navajo Indians—and gave numerous examples. One of the particularly striking characters from 1956 had the author driving over three hundred miles from Salt Lake City to a reserve in Blanding, Utah. When he arrived, Toelken found an old Navajo woman preparing food. Upon speaking to her regarding his arrival, she said, “Of course, that’s why I cooked up all this food!” Toelken expressed great disbelief, noting this woman had no way to know they were coming—no electricity, phone, or even windows. The rather measured folklorist had “no doubt” these things happened, although he made clear the difficulty in explaining them. While again, singular stories may not impress, Toelken observed that these anecdotes are common and that, while surprise was often the reaction of outsiders, for the Navajo themselves, it was rather taken for granted.
According to Danish polar explorer, author, and anthropologist Peter Freuchen, when he visited an old friend called Manasse in Ikamiut, a settlement in western Greenland, he was, upon his arrival, greeted with a smile before Manasse noted that “he had known we were coming because his last few dreams had told him of our arrival.”
English ethnologist and folklorist Charles Hill-Tout, who worked primarily in British Columbia, heard of an elk man and his wife who lived among the Canadian Salish and Dene Indians “long ago.” Their daughter left home to seek an old aunt who lived somewhere far to the south. She had not, however, traveled long before her aunt, who was a very wise woman, learned in a dream that her niece was on her way to seek her out.
Strange Connections
Something of interest here is the extent to which these events are often incidentally referenced, presented dispassionately by those recording them, and divorced from any vardoger-specific or otherwise strange or spiritual/psychical context. The social scientists, in fact, have independently recorded innumerable examples and often express great surprise at their occurrence. Like Toelken, Elmer Miller, anthropologist and former chair of the Anthropology Department at Temple University, Pennsylvania, gave multiple anecdotes of this kind. While in the Gran Chaco region of South America on August 11, 1960, Miller briefly noted in his chapter that a practicing Toba pastor, Acosta, had a vision of their coming the night before he and another colleague set out to visit him. In relation to this vision, Elmer wrote that, Despite more than a year in this cultural milieu, I was perplexed.
Considering how little has been written on these prophetic intuitions, it is unsurprising that ethnologists, folklorists, and, as we’ll see, hagiographers (the biographers of the saints) rarely make the connection between their own records and those of the relatively more established visions and vardogers of the north. Nevertheless, they persist. In another diary entry, Miller writes of a man, Jose, who dreamed that Miller’s daughters were coming to visit, and the author later confirmed the dream to Jose by presenting photographs upon their actual arrival. He also wrote, seven years earlier, in his diary, that while visiting a man named Jose Braunstein, another named Valentin Moreno arrived because he dreamed Braunstein would have a visitor, and says nothing more.
These are by no means unprecedented reports among academically oriented travelers to those particular regions. Psychotherapist Bradford Keeney, after arriving in Curuguaty, a village in Paraguay, heard from a great shaman there that he had dreamed he was on the way and that he had informed the community they might be prepared for his arrival.
Mystery Across the Americas
Among the Sibundoy of southwestern Colombia, it is particularly strongly believed that people can dream of a visitor’s coming before they arrive. One Sibundoy gave an example, which echoed Sitwell’s and, like Toelken, later referred to their ubiquity. I dreamed of so and so, the informant’s father used to say, “and then truly the next day in the evening that person would arrive. And so it was true.” The Sibundoy, indeed, have a saying, genti-mi muscu-chi-mi, caya-ndi chi genti chaya-ngapa ca, which McDowell gives as meaning You are made to dream a person, the next day that person will arrive.
