The inner life
Frederic Myers
Direct answer
Frederic Myers (1843 to 1901) was an English classical scholar and poet who helped found the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 and coined the word telepathy in the same year.
$0 today, then $19/month after 7 days. Cancel anytime.
At a glance
- Also called
- frederic w h myers, f w h myers, who coined telepathy, myers subliminal self
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Telepathy, Society for Psychical Research, Parapsychology, Automatic Writing
Frederic Myers (1843 to 1901) was an English classical scholar and poet who helped found the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 and coined the word telepathy in the same year.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
Understand the chapter you are in.
Your life’s turning points, measured from your birth.
Walk through Alex’s whole example first
Prefer to explore first?
The Road of AgesThe turning points of your whole life, from your own chart
Walk my road
Who was Frederic Myers?
Frederic William Henry Myers was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and earned his living as an inspector of schools. His life's question was whether any part of a person survives death, and he pursued it by collecting and sifting evidence: apparitions seen at the moment of a distant death, trance speech, automatic writing, hypnosis. He gave the field much of its vocabulary, including telepathy and supernormal.
His chief idea was the subliminal self. Ordinary consciousness, he proposed, is a small part of a wider mind most of which lies below the threshold of awareness, and it is through that hidden part that genius, dreams, hypnotic effects and, he believed, telepathy come. William James admired the theory. Psychology kept the idea of mental life outside awareness and dropped Myers's use of it as a bridge to survival.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The sixth sense.
What sets Frederic Myers apart
Myers came to the subject as a man of letters, and it shows in his method. He classified experiences as a scholar classifies texts, ranging sleep, hypnosis, hysteria, genius and trance along one scale from the ordinary to the extreme, and arguing that they differ in degree. The notion that useful mental work goes on outside awareness was radical when he set it out and is commonplace now. His purpose, to make survival of death credible, was not adopted.
- Lived: 1843 to 1901; born at Keswick, died in Rome
- Profession: classical scholar, poet and inspector of schools
- Coined: telepathy, in 1882; also supernormal
- Joint work: Phantasms of the Living, 1886, with Gurney and Podmore
- Major work: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 1903
- Central idea: the subliminal self, a wider mind below the threshold of awareness
Often mistaken for something else: Freud's unconscious is chiefly a store of what has been repressed; Myers's subliminal self was a larger and partly higher mind, open as he believed to other minds.
The story behind Frederic Myers
He was born at Keswick in 1843. With Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore he wrote Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886, a collection of some seven hundred cases. He was president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1900 and died in Rome in January 1901. His long work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published in 1903. For some thirty years afterwards several automatic writers produced linked scripts, the cross-correspondences, that claimed to come from him.
Why Frederic Myers matters
The language of the subject is largely his, and his aim of proving survival explains why early psychical research took the shape it did.
How to read Frederic Myers
Historians of psychology cite him for the subliminal self; writers on psychical research treat his two books as founding documents.
Frederic Myers in practice: an example
A reader who uses the word telepathy is using a term Myers built in 1882 from the Greek for distant and for feeling.
Where readings of Frederic Myers go wrong
The cases he gathered are testimony, often recorded years after the events, and his own belief in survival coloured how he read them.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- frederic w h myers, f w h myers, who coined telepathy, myers subliminal self, frederic myers psychical research
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
See Frederic Myers in your personal almanac
A definition tells you what it is; your own birth chart tells you what it means for you. The Oracle casts your real chart and answers for your love, your work, and your year ahead, in conversation. It opens with the 7-day Oracle trial.
Speak with the OracleRelated terms
More in Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Internal Family Systems
- Nightmare
- Quantum Entanglement
- Sixth Sense
- The Prince
- Xenoglossy
- Bridey Murphy
- Dharma
From the reference page to your own chart
Every word here
is in your own chart.
- Your life’s turning points, measured from your birth
- A practical next step to consider
- It opens with 7 days free: the AI Oracle on thirty hidden arts, and your daily horoscope
$0 today, then $19/month after 7 days. Cancel anytime.
Common questions
Who was Frederic Myers?
He was a Victorian classical scholar, poet and school inspector who became one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. He spent some twenty years gathering evidence on telepathy, apparitions and survival of death.
Who coined the word telepathy?
Frederic Myers, in 1882. He formed it from two Greek words to mean feeling at a distance, as a neutral replacement for the older phrase thought transference.
What did Myers mean by the subliminal self?
He meant the part of the mind that lies beneath the threshold of ordinary awareness, which he held to be far larger than the conscious part. He thought it the source of inspiration and dreams and the channel of telepathy.
