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Andrija Puharich

The fourth idiom. Puharich, a physician and parapsychology researcher, ran the channeling sessions whose entities called themselves the Nine.123

Documented core

Through the medium Phyllis Schlemmer, the communicating “Council of Nine” claimed to be directing human civilization; the session material was published as The Only Planet of Choice (1993). Puharich’s parapsychology career and his investigation of Uri Geller are documented. The elect is now a channeled council — the idiom secularizes into the vocabulary of contact and reaches toward television.

Edges

Held-open / discard

The idiom’s “reach toward mass media” runs through Gene Roddenberry, who attended Puharich’s Ossining sessions in 1974–75 and was commissioned to write a screenplay from the material — documented in Jeffrey Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics (2011) and the transcript volume The Only Planet of Choice (1993). What is not documented, and is discarded rather than softened: that the sessions shaped Star Trek’s cosmology, and that Deep Space Nine is coded from the Council of Nine (the series postdates Roddenberry’s death). The documented fact is the attendance and the commission; the rest is reader-supplied.

Role in the thesis

Articulation, fourth idiom. Puharich’s own core (the Nine, the transcript, the Geller work) is documented; the Roddenberry link — the part that makes it “reach mass media” — is documented as attendance and a commissioned screenplay, no more.


  1. Phyllis Schlemmer, The Only Planet of Choice (1993) — transcript record of the 'Nine' sessions run through Puharich's circle ↩︎

  2. Andrija Puharich's parapsychology career and his investigation of Uri Geller (Uri, 1974) ↩︎

  3. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics (2011) — scholarly account of the Puharich circle and its media reach ↩︎