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Andrija Puharich

People · Articulation · 1918–1995 · documented

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 ↩︎

Edges — what this node connects to. Hover (or tap) to preview each.

Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.

  • Two Testimonies — “The Nine. Andrija Puharich's decades of channeled-entity research centered on a council calling itself the Nine, claimed to be directing human civilization; the transcript record is The Only Planet of Choice.”
  • The Child Grown Up — “The esoteric register's fourth idiom had already reached television — Gene Roddenberry, whose attendance at Puharich's sessions is documented and whose medium was a network franchise — and the screen the grown child now faces is the same delivery system, running a formula it bought from a myth-book.”
  • The Seed — “Neither did the later esoteric idioms descend from him: Annie Besant was his rival and no student of his; Alice Bailey drew her Hierarchy from a Theosophy he had no part in; Andrija Puharich's séances came half a century on, through people who had never worked off a line of his.”
  • The Hinge and the Four Idioms — “The Nine. Andrija Puharich, a physician and parapsychology researcher, ran channeling sessions across the 1970s whose communicating entities called themselves the Nine and claimed to be directing human civilization.”
  • A Great Deal of Reading — “Puharich's circle transcribed a voice that called itself the Nine in the 1970s.”
  • Either Way — “Crowley set it into a received book in Cairo in 1904; Besant built an institution around a living boy at Madras and lost the boy's father in a London court; Alice Bailey, who had walked out of Besant's movement, chartered her own hierarchy in New Jersey; Puharich's circle transcribed a voice in the 1970s that had never heard of the other three.”