Did you know that Hergé could have become a great author of fantasy literature?

The father of Tintin had a marked taste for the strange and the invisible. Georges Rémi, known by the pen name Hergé, from the French pronunciation of his initials, was an erudite man who was sensitive and open to many other dimensions than the known worlds. This passion for the occult sciences - theosophy, alchemy, divination, kabbalah and others - and secret societies transcends his work.

If you keep this in mind, you can discover plenty of clues to this fascination by rereading your Tintin albums, where you will easily find

allusions to a number of recurring themes: the magical powers of Indian fakirs, the curse of the mummies, premonitory dreams and visions, clairvoyance, astrology, levitation, telepathy, superstition, paranormal and extraterrestrial phenomena, dowsing and magnetism, and extraordinary animals.

When Numa Sadoul, who interviewed Hergé at length in Brussels in 1971, asked him, "If you had not been a comic book author, what would you have liked to do?" Hergé answered, "I would have liked to discover lost civilizations."

Let's take a random album, "Tintin in Tibet", and see the sources that inspired its creator. They undoubtedly include the adventures and works of the explorer Alexandra David-Néel, the first European woman to see Lhasa and author of "Les Enseignements secrets des bouddhistes tibétains, la vue pénétrante ("The Secret Teachings of the Tibetan Buddhists, the Penetrating View). In the album, Blessed Lightning, a monk from the lamasery of Khor-Biyong, a Tibetan monastery lost in the mountains, experiences visions when he... levitates and reveals to Tintin where to find Chang! Hergé's friend and collaborator, Bernard Heuvelmans, founder of cryptozoology (the study of hidden animals), must have told him about the yeti, which Hergé made one of the main protagonists of the adventure. For the cover, the designer was inspired by the photos of the yeti's footprints taken by American mountaineer Eric Shipton in 1951. In each album, readers can conduct an investigation that will reveal the author's interest in the mysterious.