Star Rover: Jack London’s Astral Adventures

The more tightly the prisoner in Jack London's novel is confined, the more freedom he finds for astral travel into other lives in other times.

I just read a curious novel by Jack London titled The Star Rover. I looked for it thirty years ago, to add to a collection of astral travels I drew from in Dreamgates, but couldn't find the text back then. I did find George du Maurier's novel Peter Ibbetson, in which a prisoner manages to leave his body in his jail cell to meet his lover in many locations. A peculiarity of du Maurier's romance is that the lovers can only meet in a counterpart version of a place that one or both of them has visited in ordinary reality.

The prisoner in The Star Rover is not hampered by any such restrictions, though he does not have a constant lover and can't even be sure where he is going on any occasion when he leaves his body and his cell. Jack London's character is  a professor of agronomy, Darrell Standing. He is in solitary confinement in San Quentin, having been sentenced to life for murdering a fellow-professor under circumstances that are not explained until near the end. He is sentenced to death, while in jail, for punching a guard. A sadistic warden believes a false report that Standing  knows the location of dynamite smuggled into the jail as part of a plot for a mass escape and has him tortured, eventually by having him strapped into a strait jacket for as long ten days at a time.  The pain is excruciating until he learns to travel beyond the body.  

In his first days he distracts himself by “a method of mechanical hypnosis”, focusing his attention on a piece of straw from his pallet placed so light strikes it. “I stared myself unconscious by means of a particle of bright, light-radiating straw.” This frees him to travel in a dreamlike state for a while. In his spontaneous dreams, he is also out and about, giving lectures and attending seminars as if he is still a professor, planning an ideal farm according to his ideas about the most efficient use of land.  

“But these were dreams, frank dreams, fancied adventures of my deductive subconscious mind. Quite unlike them, as you shall see, were my other adventures, when I passed through the gates of the living death and relived the reality of the other lives that had been mine in other days.”

A veteran of solitary confinement, knuckle-tapping through the wall, becomes the professor’s mentor in travel beyond the body. This method starts by willing the body dead so it can be left behind like a corpse. “The trick is to die in the jacket” – says Morrell – “to will yourself to die...The thing you must think and believe is that your body is one thing and your spirit is another thing. ..You don’t need any body.” 

In a spirit of “empiricism”, as he insists, the professor learns to will his body dead. He starts with one of his little toes, seeing and feeling it become lifeless. When he works his way up to his head there is an explosion of light and he is out among the stars. Soon he discovers that from starry space he can plunge into vividly sensory adventures in different bodies, in different times. His experiences are different from those of his mentor. While Morrell remains himself when he is out of the body, dropping in on people and places he knows in the San Francisco Bay area, Standing may find himself in any time and location. The increasingly emaciated body in the jacket feels no pain or thirst while he is away. 

He can never seem to control where he goes. He simply finds himself in another body, in a certain environment, generally full of danger and sometimes romance. He is a boy in a wagon train in the dust bowl, facing the combined attack of Indians and Mormons, and dies with all his family. He is a hermit in a desert cave, a follower of the heretic Arius. He is often a blond beast: for example, a Norseman in a Roman force under Pontius Pilate, or a Viking-like English adventurer in the South Pacific who goes to Korea and wins the love of a princess. And so on and on. Just when the reader may start to wonder whether he experienced life as a woman, he says that he has, again and again. “I have been woman born of woman. and borne my children.” But he omits details. 

“Through these five years of death-in-life I managed to attain freedom such as few men have known,” he declares. “Yet I have never been able to guide any journey to a particular destination." The professor bounces around the world map and across calendar years in these experiences. He tries to pull together stories of other lives with a beginning, middle and end as he edits a supposed memoir while waiting to meet the hangman.

Lovers of Jack London's more famous adventure yarns won't be disappointed by the vivid description of many landscapes and all the action scenes. London must surely be writing from some personal experiences, though I'll bet he also heard from former convicts who got out and about from their cells through some kind of astral projection. His descriptions of the jacket used for punishment at San Quentin were  based on interviews with a former convict named Ed Morrell, who spent five years in solitary confinement. London became an advocate for Morrell's pardon and after his release Morrell was often a guest at the novelist's Beauty Ranch.

In The Star Rover (published in Britain as The Jacket) London seems to be pushing a message about prison reform rather than about spiritual evolution or transformation. However, there is vigorous confirmation that spirit is not confined to the body and doesn't perish with it, and that we have lived in many times - and can step into any of these dramas if we have a way to leave the body behind. “The spirit is the reality that endures. I am spirit, and I endure.”  

As his date with the gallows draws near, London's character gives us Pascal: “Pascal somewhere says, “In viewing the march of human evolution, the philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not as a conglomeration of individuals.’” Nothing about bardo states of transition between all these lives. After a few pages of nostalgia for women he has loved in different bodies, he flings this assertion to the stars: “After the dark I shall live again, and there will be women.”