Yram: Astral Projection's French Engineer

Yram is a pen name. The man behind it, Marcel Louis Forhan, was a French electrical engineer who spent his career wiring tram lines and wireless stations, first in France and then in Shanghai. He wrote three books in French about out-of-body states late in his life. Only one was ever translated into English, and it is the only reason most English readers have heard of him at all.

Forhan was born on 17 November 1884 in Corbeil-Essonnes, France. He trained as an electrical engineer specializing in tram and wireless (TSF) installations, and shortly before the First World War his employer sent him to the French concession in Shanghai, where he designed the power station that supplied the French-built tramways and worked on wireless broadcasting installations. He married Suzanne Garbe on 17 August 1914, in Shanghai, and the couple had three sons: Max, born 1915, Marcel-Andre, born 1919, and Robert, born 1920. Biographical accounts place him joining the Theosophical Society around 1911 and beginning to investigate psychic phenomena and hypnotism alongside his engineering work, though this detail rests on secondary sources rather than a documented membership record.

Forhan published three volumes under the name Yram, all while he was alive: Aimez-vous les uns les autres (volume 1, 1925), Le Medecin de l'ame (volume 2, 1925), and L'Evolution dans les mondes superieurs (volume 3, 1926). Only the second volume was ever translated into English, appearing in London in 1935 as Practical Astral Projection and reprinted in 1966. Volumes one and three have never had an English edition. An English-only reader who knows Yram at all knows roughly a third of what he actually wrote.

Forhan died on 1 October 1927 in Shanghai, of dysentery that developed into sepsis, at 42. The English translation that carries his best-known name did not appear until 1935, eight years after his death. He never saw the title Practical Astral Projection, and never knew it would outlive every other detail of his life in the English-speaking world.

Practical Astral Projection is short on step-by-step technique. Yram's method leans on mental discipline: quieting the mind to a point of complete stillness, rhythmic breathing and physical relaxation, and sustained concentration on a single object. His central claim is that negative states, egotism, greed, malice, lower a person's vibration and block projection, while cultivated love and morality raise it. He also describes encountering what he calls virgin matter in non-physical states, a substance resembling freshly cut ebonite that does not respond to thought or will, which he treats as some kind of root material underlying ordinary matter. The book is closer to a spiritual discipline than an instruction manual, and reviewers who come looking for a checklist tend to leave disappointed.

Before his marriage, Yram describes projecting to meet his fiancee across physical distance, and writes about what he calls astral sex as a merging of two souls rather than a physical act. Readers who arrived at this site through the twin flames category will recognize the shape of the claim: a bond experienced as continuing outside the body, decades before the phrase became a wellness-marketing staple.

Strip away the metaphysics and what is left is a discipline: quiet the mind fully before attempting anything, treat your own emotional state as the variable that determines results, and be honest that a personal account, however detailed, is not a method with reproducible steps. Yram never claimed otherwise. The gap between his book's reputation and its actual content is the more interesting story.