Dangers of forgetting the past

Dangers of forgetting the past

 Gareth Hewitson-May in Dark doorway of the Beast (New World, 1992) starts with the following paragraph which I feel is very relevant to people such as myself who are interested in taking things apart to see how they work.

The utter devastation that has swept through the esoteric fraternities for the last two thousand years has unfortunately completely dissolved the coherence of attitude that is necessary to the understanding of the system. It is therefore of monumental importance that all attempts to recover such complete doctrines should be abandoned as futile. The very fact that language, understanding, communication, terminology, relevance of material are now so very different, that it is plainly obvious that the 'return' of any such 'recovered doctrines' in today’s culture would only serve to confuse, rather than to illuminate.

I feel that this paragraph is very important and it does point out that there will be (at best) problems if we try to truly recapture, recreate and practice an ancient tradition exactly as it was practiced in the past.  We have changed, the world has changed and so our interface with magic must also change.  We have moved away not only from the mental processes which our ancestors followed, but even our physiology has changed – we are very different to our ancestors.

An often quoted[1] example of this transformation concerns Homer’s reference to the wine-dark sea.  In no way can the Mediterranean Sea be said to be “wine-dark”.  Part of this “evolution” seems to stem from how our thinking processes have changed from being a tribal consciousness (which was perhaps closer to a group mind) to an individual consciousness.  In antiquity perhaps this shift was still happening and we did not necessarily have the same consciousness then that we have now.  This transformation is continuing and even within the lifetimes of our grandparents we can spot differences.

As another example, consider how our use of the English language is always mutating and we use different terms and phrase things differently in modern times.  I remember that at school during the 1980s the word “wicked” was used to describe something which was totally brilliant, nowadays “wicked” just means very bad again and like people using “swell” or “fab” its use in the schoolyard has thankfully declined.

For another example of this consider how we find different things funny.  Modern sitcoms have a very different humour to sitcoms written only 30 years ago and (for example) Terry and June is vastly different from say One foot in the grave even though they both involve a middle-aged couple living their life. Perhaps I am speaking personally, perhaps not, but the older comedy seems much more dated and arguably less funny that the later.  In 20 years time One foot in the grave will also seem dated compared to whatever is shown in our future.  It is sobering to contemplate that many people from the generation reading this blog will be the generation satirised in that future comedy.

As a final example, Victorians used to entertain themselves in the evening by watching jellies wobble. To our minds that seems to be the formulae for the most inconceivably tedious evening. And whilst cannabis was perfectly legal, acceptable and obtainable in the Victorian era I don’t think that can account for this mad behaviour.

Some of this change is driven by technology.  For example before the creation of gas lighting, human sleep patterns were very different to what they are today, with people commonly going to bed at around 6pm, waking up for an hour or two around midnight and then returning to bed until morning.  Literature referred to people having a first and then a second sleep.  Interestingly the liminal period between first and second sleep was the “witching hour” where people were more likely to see ghosts.  I suspect that this is due to the effects of the first sleep on brainwaves.

Author and Enochian magician Scot Stenwick recently gave a fabulous interview[2] on the awesome Deeper down the rabbit hole series of podcasts.  He makes the point in relation to Enochian scrying that a short burst of alpha/theta from a mind-machine prior to scrying makes everyone a seer.  I suspect that this is the state many people are in between their first and second sleep and thus being highly psychic are able to pick up on anything which may be around them.  Similarly the entities which people pick up on during sleep paralysis are detected because whilst the brain is in a highly receptive state when awake; even though the body is “asleep” – actually paralysed by the body in order that dreams are not acted out.  The paralysis is purely physiological and definitely not supernatural.

So, we have changed and we will continue to change as our past recedes into the distance and we humans are continually reinventing ourselves. 

So, I am not sure what to think when we read about modern magicians seeking to recapture an authentic tradition and attempting to reconstruct it exactly as it was. Could this be the equivalent of trying to compile and run a computer program written in say Java 1 with a Java 7 compiler?  Sure you may get something working but also lots of errors given that we are so substantially different to the magicians of antiquity.

I feel that one engine of change which affects us is language and perhaps this is the most fundamental driver of all, since we frame our thoughts in language even though it is in a continual state of flux.  Whilst our true selves are deeper than just a conscious layer which processes the input from our perceptions on a linguistic/semantic level and which equates to our everyday conscious selves, researchers since Freud and Jung have shown that we are far deeper than that.  So there is the question as to how much our language influences our thinking?  This idea is referred to in linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which proposes that a person’s language sets constraints upon how they think. This idea is by no means universally accepted, but it does seem to be partially accepted as one of the factors which influences our thought processes.

Cliff Pickover in Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves gives several examples of how language shapes and constrains things. In one example he illustrates how language compartmentalises words. Let us consider the words “Strawberry, Raspberry, Mulberry and Blueberry”, all words linked by the suffix “berry”, which we can use to link these as examples of “berries”. Thus through the English language we can process these words and categorise then as examples of “berry” without any further information.  We will know without actually needing to examine the objects exactly what class they belong to. 

Now let us consider the French equivalent of these words – “Fraise, Framboise, Mure, Myrtille”. Clearly they do not share any common parts such as a “–berry” suffix.  Any thinking processes working with these cannot unify them except with a knowledge that is larger that the words themselves, a meta context which places them into an information-order.

We frame our thoughts in language, and so without any form of mystical practice, our thoughts become very much limited by that language. Mysticism is accessing the ineffable, takes us to places where language cannot describe because these are places not visited by evolutionary humans developing language; and so we often come back “mind-expanded” but at a loss for words to describe the experience, often in trying to reach for the language we have to stretch to metaphor and/or take the risk of sounding nuttier than the average squirrel’s dinner.  Our languages have evolved, growing out of the human experience and so are strong in describing deeper experiences; concepts such as food, sex, fight, flight etc.  They are however weak in describing deeper spiritual encounters which are rarer and less embedded within our day-to-day consciousness; particularly now since we have grown more materialistic over time. 

Perhaps we can learn something from the emerging culinary art of molecular gastronomy.  Chefs such as  Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria are true alchemists literally applying the alchemical processes of “salve et coagula”; divide and recombine; to create new experiences that push the limits of taste into creating interesting new sensations. Whilst I think that in pure food terms what these researchers are achieving is phenomenal, I also think that we can learn a lot from them and apply these ideas back to magic.

As an aside (which may or may not be relevant) I don’t think we can eat food such as Heston and Ferran cook every day. As ever a good diet based on organically grown natural produced ingredients seems to be the key. Whether this also applies to magic remains, I believe, to the discretion of the magician.

Just to give you a taste of what I am on about, here is an article on Ferran which I think is particularly profound in that it discusses Ferran's thoughts.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2008/nov/25/foodanddrink-chefs

Most importantly from the clip:

He kept referring to a new language and that to create a new language you need a new alphabet, new grammar, new tools and processes. He argues that his style of cooking is this new language and that, with every new technique, he's building up the alphabet.

I think that this is vitally important; taking things into a modern direction needs this sort of mentality, this sort of fresh angle.  Austin Osman Spare wrote about an alphabet of desire; this is exactly what chefs like Heston and Ferran Adria are doing, breaking their “reality” down into base ingredients and processes and building things up from there – solve et coagula. 

Let us go back to Hewitson-May’s original quote.  How much of this do I actually accept? 

Part of the problem with magic is that unless one were lucky (or unlucky!) enough to have been born as a natural psychic producing a continually repeatable result is actually very difficult, especially for a beginner.  So whilst with chemistry we know that every time we mix hydrogen and oxygen we will get an explosion and water, this does not happen so readily in sorcery.   The magical arts are not repeatable in the same way that a scientific process is.

This makes it incredibly difficult  to quickly and efficiently build up a toolbox of magical techniques where one can go from meditating one day to raising demons a week later.  These things take time whilst we learn to meditate, tune our visualization abilities and begin working with an energy practice such as opening our chakras (or using the Middle Pillar exercise enough) that we then start realising that our psychic awareness is tuned enough to then begin making contacts and eventually obtain useful and practical information from spirits.  This is the point where we really begin to become a magician and can change the universe.

It has taken humanity a very long time to work out the above usually in scenarios where the trailblazers had much more free time on their hands to think and to practice.  I very much doubt that we will get very far at all if we literally bin everything we know (or think we know) and say something like “Ok how do I make the universe do this” then work out how.  It will be easier for a Stone Age society to discover physics and then decide to build a rocket to the moon. 

The problem with discovering physics however is that I suspect it is like working with the operating system of the universe.  Once you start working with that however you are also limited to its rules.  With magic I very much see us learning how to hack the machine code which underlies but is not dependant upon physics.  You will not be limited by annoyances such as the speed of light or the Planck length and I feel in principal that one is able to do absolutely, literally anything; however it is very very difficult to get out of the fact that we ourselves are composed of matter which is part of (and therefore limited by) the operating system, by physics itself.

So I have to disagree with Hewitson-May up to a point.  I do not think that we should bin the past and of course to forget the past is also to forget the lessons of the past.  I do agree however that we are different now that we will need to recalibrate our knowledge to reflect the fact that we are different.

Much as I have argued against the incompatibility between science and magic elsewhere on this blog; science has and will continue to push human development for the foreseeable future and most importantly science has lead us down a path where humanity does not and should not take things as gospel, but rather we must ask, question and evaluate then more on.  This is true for every field we look at, as true for physics as it is for sorcery and whilst I still stand by my argument that physics and sorcery are incompatible and we will never arrive at an explanation of one using the other, the “method of science” to quote Aleister Crowley is still valid in all human endeavours since it is a methodology, a way of thinking rather than a solution or an explanation within itself, even though paradoxically the method of science can be limiting when its light is fully turned onto psychic experience which is holistic in nature and dependant upon a human and the universe; a reductionist interpretation required by Popperian science erodes the magic.

There is still a massive value in researching and understanding the past.  There are fragments of lore which we still need to learn, things to rediscover and reweave into our practice; not forgetting that our practice is constantly new.  The power in Andrew Chumbley’s reboot of traditional witchcraft in the Azoetia is that it itself is not traditional but rather it is contains traditional elements which have been reformulated to be of relevance to the modern mind.   Perhaps even more prominently work such as the corpus left by the respected Kenneth Grant gives us keys to sort the information and understand what worked in the past ready for us to mould ready for future work.  Grant powerfully left us whole connected strands of interpretation which not only shows how concepts evolved, but how concepts stretch from our deepest unconsciousness out to the light of our everyday right-brain selves.

Similarly we can inherit a lot of techniques which have been knocking around for millennia such as the qabalistic middle pillar exercise, Austin Spares method of creating sigil-entities (which actually goes back to Agrippa) or even reformulate a practice of creating a tulpa based upon Tibetan Bon techniques but using a qabalistic rather than a Bon/Tantra paradigm.  There are massive differences between a true Tibetan style Tulpa and a thoughtform as I will be examining in a future post.  These techniques are still present and waiting to be practices and understood from a modern magical mindset, something humanity has yet to fully achieve.

However I feel that we must be mindful always that a lot of what we have inherited are dry techniques, divorced from their spiritual underpinnings.  Communication and interaction with spirits may not be the only component in magic, in fact it may not be the most important component.  However it is an important component of all magical practice and whilst I feel that this is somewhat downplayed by the Golden Dawn and its inheritors this is something which needs to be remembered.

I feel that one of the biggest points to be almost lost is that we are in danger of losing contact with the spirits; and these always mediate the magic.  Magic as taught by the offshoots of the GD seem more about visualisation and banishing rather than actually learning to still the mind and speaking to those presences which are around us.  As I dig deeper and learn to effectively use practices such as Enochian and Hoodoo I find that taking this as literally true becomes more useful than an abstract idea that this may be my subconscious talking; an idea which I do not accept.  Ultimately it does not matter but for someone like me who gets bugged by the tiniest details it is important and whilst it does go against my scientific knowledge, accepting the literal existence of spirits is the most honest way I can move forward.  It doesn’t really matter if I am wrong since acting in this way creates results, which is definitely the most important thing.

This avoidance or even fear of spirits seems endemic to many modern groups.   Newbies then either go goetia crazy and try to hold everything in a triangle of art – a barbaric offshoot of a medieval mentality which leads to a nasty albeit symbolic (at least on our level) torturing of spirits to compel them into obedience.  This always ends very badly and I feel that authors such as Joseph Lisiewski are particularly wrong here.  His background is in physics and it seems that he is trapped in a philosophy which leads him to act as if magic is a recipe book such as depicted in Harry Potter.  He does not understand the underlying principals and so is stuck in the medieval mindset which the writers of the grimoires existed within.

There are other examples here, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki of the Servants of the Light in her “Ritual magic workbook” instructs students not to investigate ghosts or touch Enochian, despite these activities being two excellent ways in which we can learn to reach out and touch the spirit world.  How can people learn to be mediators and magicians if they are forbidden to speak to spiritual entities!   I find it interesting that Dolores then goes off to recount her own Enochian experiences – a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do”.

This spiritism is a vital part of magic and whilst I have no idea as to what the underlying “physics” is as to what is happening (if that is even a valid question – perhaps it is liking asking about the physics of the dream world I found myself in last sleep!), working with entities whether we are talking about contacts in the sense that the esteemed WE Butler describes, venerating the Vudou Loa or pestering ghosts to see what happens is vital stuff.   This approach gives a range of results ranging from inner knowledge to outer experiences and at the very least helps to develop ones psychic perceptions.  That alone is vital since it teaches one to realise that personal experience is important, regardless of what sceptics such as Susan Blackmore might say.

So let us remember that we have changed, the past is past and not totally relevant to us.  However it is still very important and digging through ancient practices and techniques will give us a vast wealth of otherwise impossible to obtain knowledge which we might not be able to rediscover today.  Ultimately this will help us to grow into a new understand of magic, tempered by modern concepts and consciousness and really evolve as individuals.  We must never however forget that in missing out the spiritist perspective we are potentially ignoring half of creation.

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[1] First in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Dr Julian Jaynes

[2] http://deeper-down-the-rabbit-hole.com/2012/06/episode-61-scott-michael-stenwick-discusses-mastering-mystical-heptarchy/

Is there ever really a case for the academic study of the occult?

I originally wrote this several years ago for a forum I used to run, however decided that it was time to update and refresh it.  I have added a few biographical details here at the beginning since I feel that the whole piece makes more sense if I describe where I am coming from and why my attitude is as it is. 

I did intend my last posting on “Liminal Whispers” to be my last piece on the social and scientific impact of the occult for the time being but on reflection I wanted to get this one out there first to close these thoughts for a time, freeing myself to write about something more experiential next, probably something new on tulpas if I can get all my material together in a coherent fashion.  I also feel that in getting all this out there I had drawn myself a line and can move on from the fundamentalists on all sides of this argument.

I am writing this as someone whose background has always been scientific and “rational” despite a firm acceptance of the existence of magic and the paranormal.  This is mostly due to a number of very strange experiences growing up that have convinced me that there is a larger reality out there than the likes of Dawkins and Randi can dream off in their limited philosophies.  So for me it is not even really about trying to prove that the paranormal is real, it is very much my trying to live in and understand the world with both a scientific and a magical worldview. 

This has probably left me a little eccentric in my views, which is fine with me.  Frankly I am surprised that I cope so well since many in my family have either gone nutty-religious or nutty-materialist.  I have managed to disentangle and dispel some of the more religious aspects of my family to the extent that they no longer think that I am a diabolist and my mother has been known to borrow and read my Crowley books, not that I think too highly of Aleister Crowley, which is a story for another day.  The materialists are actually more trouble since they are convinced I am bonkers and that it is their job to make me see reason.  However I suspect in at least two cases this is more a fear reaction to their own psychic sensitivity.  My sister in particular is very psychic but wants nothing to do with the paranormal which is really annoying on those days when I need a really good seer…

For example, there is one experience which happened when I was quite young and playing with my younger brother back in our house in Lincolnshire.  We both stopped for a moment and I remember seeing an apparition of our niece, Jennifer standing just next to us.  Aaron (my brother) asked me if I had just seen Jenny there.   I said yes and we were both a little started by that.  We could both describe the image identically including the fact that she was wearing her yellow dress etc.  Since the house was empty apart from us and Jenny was 20 miles away in the nearby town of Boston it couldn’t have been her physical self.  My nasty rationalist mind has pondered and broken down this event for 25 years or so now and I still can’t explain this in “rational terms” although I can draw on a number of paranormal theories to explain this.  It doesn’t really matter to me what the explanation is as much as the fact that events like this show that the phenomena is real and that we are immersed in it as a part of out reality.

I know that modern psychologists would try to explain this sort of thing away as a shared fantasy or shared hallucination or something.  However they would be utterly wrong.  There was no two way discussion of details where this could happen.  I saw the apparition and my brother described it exactly how I saw it.

My education was formally academic up to MSc level, and at the time I dallied with the idea of taking a PhD which would have probably been in a mathematical or computational subject.  One of my regrets however is that I did not study physics to A level and if I could live the early part of my life over again (or win the lottery) I shall certainly take an A level in physics and use that as a springboard back into academia and some hard sciences.  This is more for personal interest however rather than feeling a need to prove anything to the world. 

I hesitate to use the word “psychic” to describe myself.  Despite a number of very odd experiences which are only explainable in terms of the paranormal, my day-to-day mindset is generally analytical and left-brained.  I have had to (and continue to) work very hard to open up to different consciousness and experience the paranormal in a willed sense.  Years of meditation and visualization exercises have helped, however the biggest switch on point was joining the ghost club and actually experiencing a number of hauntings where I found that the psychic part of me switched on very quickly to dramatic effect and I have found subsequently that it is much easier for myself to switch this on now that I know what that state feels like and have developed my own personal routine to activate it.

I am generally my own worst enemy however in that I try to over analyze when I should be sensing.  This is something which I am working on however and it just takes time, effort and self-control.  I can easily see this taking another twenty years or so, in fact it is probably a lifetime task.

Those states of mind where the psychic facility is active however are fascinating to me, and alike those dreams which we get sometimes, that seem deeper and more “real” than other dreams, than “reality” itself sometimes.  I assume that I am fairly average in the sense that most (if not all) other people have similar weird experiences and dreams, so I am frankly a bit surprised that most other people are not really interested in the paranormal or occult except as in a vague voyeuristic way and in fact many people are openly hostile to it.  I have really given up trying to persuade people to be interested in the extraordinary things which happen around us all the time and see myself basically as an explorer, exploring solely for myself to learn and find out rather than find the proof to enlighten humanity. 

I am at heart a bit of an academic however in that I like things to be nicely and precisely defined all with terms of reference etc.  I am all for furthering occult knowledge, however I feel that given the experiential nature of the experiences it is not something which works well within the academic environment.  I have commented elsewhere on this blog my issues with physics and the paranormal.  However conversely with magic we also have to deal with the concept of studying spirits, in fact of communicating with the spirits you wish to study.

So, let us start by defining the term “occult” so we are all on the same level here.  Occult derives from the Latin “occultus” which means “hidden” or “secret”.  The association of this word with the paranormal or magical began somewhere around the 17^th century.  I tend to use it synonymously with “paranormal” to denote the range of phenomena ranging from psychicism to haunted houses to the effects of ritual magic.

I think that academia itself is quite odd and in many ways academics are a law unto themselves. They see themselves as the holders and the guardians of sacred knowledge and the only ones who can grant access to it, knowledge which is not academic is often seen as not quite acceptable.  A person outside that community often finds that it is very hard to be accepted or even printed in Journals such as Nature. This causes massive problems in that subjects which are seen as “politically” bad choices for research are automatically ignored. Placing them below the discussion threshold means that this can happen without debate.  We see this happen frequently with the rise of the sceptical movement, totally dismissing (and even name calling) researchers such as parapsychologists.

I see this “political correctness” as the first barrier with regards to the academic study of these subjects.  Doubtless over time it will be overcome and if there is any truth in these subjects then eventually proper study will come about.  However to expose them to an environment of disbelief could bring about considerable short term damage preventing them from being studied for much longer.

We see a similar situation arise with the evolution debate.  Broadly (very broadly) speaking the argument is polarized between monotheists who either argue for the old Garden of Eden chestnut, or slip their God in with the intelligent design sophistry.  The other side of the argument is dominated by sceptics such as Dawkins who insists upon the literal truth of Darwin’s model for evolution; “Natural Selection”.  Before Wallace and Darwin independently postulated “Natural Selection” as the mechanism behind evolution there were other theories which have long been discredited such as “Lamarckian inheritance” where acquired characteristics are passed on.  So a Blacksmith would have strong arms and we would then expect his children to inherit this trait.  Clearly this is not what happens.  Darwin himself however had some doubts as to whether Natural Selection explains everything but it is widely accepted as the whole story.

As far as I am concerned we (humanity) came about by evolution, so I have no time for the monotheists arguments at all.  However I am a bit annoyed that these monotheists are the only ones causing a fuss here – We don’t see Odinists arguing that mankind was made from trees as some Northern traditions suggest.  It all seems to me to be all about a big mouth middle-eastern storm deity who now has a lot of big mouthed followers.

However the problem arises when one wants to study the mechanism of evolution to a deeper level.  To scientifically suggest that there may be more to the theory is academic suicide and any actual problems with the theory are suppressed to the favour of the purist neo-Darwinian argument.  

A number of noted academic such as Lynn Margulis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis (beware Wikipedia is a bit one-sided))  have raised theories such as the endosymbiotic theory which argues that Eukaryotic (complex) cells can assimilate less complex cells to build up their complexity.   Other researchers have raised questions such as noting that bacteria is the most prolific of all life on earth and is also very simple, then asking where is the impetus towards more complex life forms evolving including humans coming from. 

These are totally slated by the neo Darwinists, however I think that Margulis etc have a point that questions still need to be answered, these questions still agree with the mechanism of evolution, even with natural selection as the mechanism by which evolution (at least generally operates) but (as with any science) there are quibbles and questions about the details which need research.   However the political climate has suppressed and largely ridiculed this kind of research whilst it wastes time with the children who still think their God did it in 6 days.  Remember we are talking about cases where peer review and research should come to a scientific consensus rather than a spat between a sect of religionists and a sect of scientists.  A cynical part of me suggests that perhaps the neo-Darwinists are going after the easy targets rather than having to try to break down the research built up by the likes of Lynn Margulis.

Another slightly older example occurred with the dating of the Sphinx in the 1990s.   I remember the outcry among archaeologists when John West and Robert Schock argued for the water erosion of the Giza Sphinx. In the Horizon documentary it was reported that geologists were given pictures of the Sphinx with the head taped over (so it looks like any mass of rock). Many (if not all) argued that this was water erosion until the tape was removed, revealing the familiar Sphinx, They then refused to be associated with the work since it was not politically correct at the time to question the archaeological "history" in place.   It seems that archaeologists might be even less flexible than the neo-Darwinists when it comes to opposing scientific theories.

Similarly we have Robert Bauval's Orion correlation. As far as I know no academic would even look at the research.  Regardless of whether the correlation is true or coincidental it should have been looked at since the work was brought to the academic gatekeepers as a well-developed theory, not a “loony new-age” idea.   Refusing to look at research keeps these ideas below the threshold of debate, entrenching set ideas and reinforcing set positions and textbook sales. 

As a minor digression, nowadays I am more included to accept Andrew Collins work on a Cygnus correlation which seems to place a tighter correlation between the stars and the pyramids and also correlates with other objects on the Giza plateau.  However what I or anyone else thinks is not really relevant in the larger context.  Both ideas should be subject to peer review and studied, rather than the case at the moment where we break into the Collins or Bauval camp on the subject.

Finally we have the case of the sceptical parapsychologists such as Richard Wiseman, putting on a show to enforce their ideas (and hide their bad science).  Wiseman is a very poor researcher however he is very good at whipping up a sensationalist fervour which the media love.  One piece of “research” involved his stunningly unoriginal thesis that scary places make people imagine ghosts.  There seems to be a global academic belief that ghosts are not real and that therefore they must be imagined.  This is nonsense of course, since the dawn of history, consistently across all cultures, ages, both genders, a broad range of intelligence and education, ghosts are consistently experienced by people.  Parapsychologists should be asking questions such as what exactly is being experienced rather the belittling the actual experience.

Wiseman’s “research” means getting a lot of silly people to scare themselves in his academic ghost train, to a lot of media witnessing so he can make his sweeping and uninformed statements.  His research does not come anywhere towards looking at the broad spectrum of ghostly phenomena which gets reported including crisis apparitions, poltergeists and possession.  Stepping back for a moment there doesn’t seem to be much thought amongst academics regarding psychic perception in cases of apparitions and people are still looking for (and expecting to photograph) ghosts made of a form of matter.  Our state of knowledge in these areas is now so tenuous that people like Wiseman; who have clearly and absolutely no experience with ghosts or the paranormal in general; defining “reality” and “knowledge”.  This is a reversal of the work open minded Victorian investigators such as Sir Oliver Lodge accomplished who went into the field with an open mind and brought back knowledge gained from experience.

Wiseman and many others often use a tactic of ridiculing serious researchers or battling the more dodgy and fringe people in the field, then using their inevitable victory to blanket-declare it all “woo”.  Richard Dawkins argues against phenomena in “The Blind Watchmaker” by using the example of statues moving and discussing the number of atoms which would need to move for this to happen, James (The amazing) Randi spends his time tilting with Uri Geller and Sylvia Browne using the absurdity and question marks which often surrounds these people as ammunition for an assault against more serious people such as Rupert Sheldrake, Dean Radin or Brian Josephson.   Finally they resort to name calling. Randi (I know he is not an academic but he is used by academics in supporting their claims - eg the Jacques Benveniste "water memory" episode) labels us all WooWoo's. Dawkins labels atheistic scientists "Brights".

There are a lot of scientists out there with a genuine interest in the occult and the paranormal.  However the noise created by posturers such as Randi and Dawkins or “nobbers” (to use his word) such as Brian Cox means that their chances of funding are reduced to practically zero.

I could go on here, but there are many examples available on line and an attack of these sceptics is not so much my concern as is my question as to whether magical subjects really need a place in academia.

When we do find a supporting academics who at least research the subject and seriously consider the evidence; luminaries such as Jacques Vallee, or John Mack in UFO research; they do produce often startling and paradigm shifting research which is often worth the hassle we get from the rest, however these true pioneers are rare and often caught in the quagmire of backwards thinking from the mouthy establishment which are more interested in protecting the status quo, watching each others backs or the "validity" of their latest book. A kind of “old boys network” kicks in and established myths become self perpetuating in a strange sidereal way as illustrated in Borges "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" where a false and synthetic archaeology and history begins to supplant real history.

So, it will be a long uphill battle to get these subjects ever studied academically.  However I also believe that even with acceptance the academic approach will cause problems. I think that should magic and psychicism ever become accepted there are limits to where academia can go. Perhaps we should ask ourselves what role academia plays in magic?

Should it should be there to record occult history, recording the acts (and claims) of magicians throughout history and if this is the case, what purpose does this serve? Most people are not interested in magic as I have shown above, and occultists will already know the histories of other magicians. Also the academic “fact” ignores the mythic element - as a magician I am more interested in the mythic Merlin rather than any historical person who may or may not have even existed.

Let us take Dr Dave Evans’ recent “The History of British Magic After Crowley: Kenneth Grant, Amado Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, the Left Hand Path, Blasphemy and Magical Morality” at face value and pretend that it did not have the following faults:

• Lack of Accuracy, in that he doesn’t make incorrect assertions such as Dion Fortune founding the Servants of the Light
• Lack of Relevancy: He waste time discussing pointless questions such as how many occultists are in the UK or devoting an overly large part of the book to the very minor Amado Crowley
• Poorly referenced with a reliance on anonymous anecdotes. 

Even if such a book (or rather the Phd to which this book is the dramatization) were to exist, would it have any value to anyon? It is only recording history within a very narrow band (in terms of time and scope) and has only limited use.

Speaking academically I think his use of anonymous people such as "Starbeam" rather damning.  A historian relies on a paper trail and spends a lot of time looking at documents and other evidence rather than hearsay which is effectively what it is. I have no way of tracking his sources and for all I know he might have made them up. This means that no future work can build on this “history” of magic and I cannot see how this contributes to the sum of human knowledge given its inherent unreliability - not even necessarily because bits are wrong, but simply because we cannot verify them.  His PhD supervisor must have cotton-wool for brains if he accepted this.

As a digression, it does seem to be a factor of both the occult community and the internet community to live under pseudonyms which I find rather silly.  This goes back to at least Edward Alexander Crowley becoming “Aleister” and then taking on a myriad of other names (obviously some as a joke).  However here, Aleister became an identity which he could be recognised under.  The internet, with its myriad of forums all with people speaking authoritively under pseudonyms leaves me rather speechless.

In the world of “Dennis Wheatley”, academic study of magic is often life-saving, especially when the Duc de Richleau runs off to the British Library to look up a rare ritual before returning in time to save the day. In reality I doubt that de Richleau would even get past the guards at the door of the British Library who are far more brutal than Cerberus ever was.

However this sort of research (at least on a non fictional level) doesn’t seem to interest academics and it is scholar-occultists such as Kenneth Grant or Jake Stratton-Kent who study folklore and magical tradition within the context of the occult who do this work so admirably.  Then it is the occultists who use this work to magically bringing through a gnosis of lost knowledge to light documenting and exploring these fragments, which can then be used to form a ritual capable of keeping the likes of Mocata at bay or in reality enable a user to expand their magical horizons.

However magicians also have a great deal of insight which comes about from their own personal gnosis. This is something which does not have a paper trail and whilst of massive value to us as magicians not something academics will be able to work with.   That is one of the reasons why we are all told to keep diaries.

I would like to differentiate the study above of the occult or esoteric; with the study of genuinely useful history and archaeology which is generally about an aspect of life which is interesting to us.  So academic books “Curse Tablets and binding Spells” by John Gager, “The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation” by Hans Dieter Betz or the wonderfully written (and titled) “Magico-Medical Means of Treating Ghost-Induced Illness in Ancient Mesopotamia” by JoAnn Scurlock are all wonderful studies, not because they are studies of magic.  They are studies of archaeology which happen to be of interest to magicians. 

They do not care about whether this “mumbo jumbo” works or not, which is very different to Evan’s questions as to whether Kenneth Grant is giving genuine accounts or whether ghosts and OBEs are a reality.  In stunts such as questioning the reality of trans Yuggothian planets, Dr Evans is failing to keep his work as a history (such as his title suggests) and ineptly beginning a step into a field of magical parapsychology.   Something which (as I have suggested) the stars are not yet right for mostly for political but partially for practical reasons.

Having said all that I do believe that there is value in a rigorous academic study of the history of magic in that it does bring a perspective on the state of societies and how they change over time. It must be accurate however or there is a risk of placing undue emphasis on history and personality rather than magical practice, which must be the most important thing.  The danger there however is that it slowly begins to morph into either debunking under a materialistic world view, or religion under a mystical world view.  With the magic not being present within the structure it will tend to distort then fall apart.

As a magician it is the magic which interests me the most, and a grimoiric mishmash of traditions can have much value to an occultist, even though it is historically inaccurate or even made up.  An example of this is Andrew Chumbleys’ reboot of traditional witchcraft with the “Azöetia” where he pulls elements from Egyptian Magic , Qlippothic practice and Enochian to form the whole.  None of this is really traditional witchcraft, but it can become a working system which could replicate the results of traditional magic.

Perhaps we need to ask with work such as this; which many people find valuable; is this value coming from Andrew Chumbley as a scholar or Andrew Chumbley the Magician? My money is on the latter, the working practices of the magician are imperative. However the pedantic bastard running in my soul also wants to ask whether we are not better working with the sources afresh rather than working with someone else’s vision.  Well, I think the answer to that is actually yes and no.  Yes, since one forges ones own path, however there is value in others paths which show people what to expect, what sort of things work and so on.

However until the politics of research sorts itself out and our generally materialistic society decide that it will open up a new stream of knowledge, magic and the paranormal as itself, separate and independent to physics and certainly and most definitely and clearly defined as different to the vulgar “history of magic” it seems that academically we are going nowhere. Which is a pity since a title such as Doctor of Practical Magic at Oxford University sounds like a great job and a damn site more interesting than corporate IT.

Until then however and speaking as a psychical explorer I don’t really feel the need to seek academic justification to my beliefs and actions. Maybe we have all achieved an initiation of sorts in we known such things as ghosts and spirits exist and have encountered them, have worked with them and even made deals with them, whilst academics are either debating their existence or denying it entirely.

Language and magic

Some time ago, I got to discussing Psychic Questing with one of the guests who was at a talk I delivered on psychic questing.  The talk in question is actually reproduced elsewhere in this blog.  This lady (apparently a psychologist) seemed very obsessed with labelling things and fitting things into these labels, using a hammer if necessary. It was clear that throughout this she didn’t really understand a lot of terms common in our culture such as "wiccan" as well as common terms such as "group". Part of this can of course be put down to the academic use of words which occasionally has become so specialised that they lose any real meaning in the real-world. She seemed to have particular problems with the term "group mind".

All this has got me thinking a little and I started wondering what the impact of the language we use is to the understanding and practice of magic. Judging by this woman’s reaction I believe that she never had very clear definitions in her head of what she was talking about and this lead to her labelling people completely out of context. I feel that labelling people and generalising is dodgy at the best of times, however when one doesn’t even know the meaning of the terms being used it becomes linguistic and social suicide.

My first thoughts on this is that in magic we have inherited a very messy jargon and often peoples meaning of these words has changed, often in a very imprecise way leading to much confusion. Sometimes the words have stuck even though the original ideas leading to these words have died. Another problem is that we have several different definitions of the same word which can cause further problem.

For example we often find the word "Etheric" bandied about. I would imagine that this word entered the vocabulary in the later years of the Victorian era. Physics at the time was working on how light (as a wave) propagates across an area and postulated a "fluid" substance between the points where light is shining called the "Luminiferous Ether" or just "Ether". It is the vibrations in this fluid which is the medium on which the light waves travel, imagined in a similar way to how sound waves travel in air.

I should be clear here that my use of the word "fluid" is not meant to intend a liquid such as the common use of the word implies, rather it is a substance filling a volume in the same way that a liquid might - this nicely illustrates the confusion the use of an incorrect word or jargon can cause and emphasises the importance of defining terms when speaking about complex technical subjects such as magic or physics. Science certainly wasn’t postulating that space was filled with a liquid which would be a possible misconception readers might have if I were to not define the word "fluid".

Anyway, physicists early ideas on fluid were initially popular and much mention of this was made in the relevant journals. This was jumped on by the Theosophists who incorporated this term in their jargon to describe the vessel which carried the consciousness in an out of body experience. It has also been used by magicians, spiritualists etc and was seen as science catching up with magic and as a consequence the scientific terms of the day were pulled into the jargon.

Sadly science moved on and the ideas of a Luminiferous Ether were discarded. One of the nails in its coffin was Einstein’s Special Relativity which redefined many concepts previously expressed through "ether physics" with electrodynamics theory (Maxwell’s rule etc) which proved more accurate. These showed that ether was not necessary for light waves to propagate across a space. It was finally killed off when it was realised that particles possess wave/particle duality so a medium for waves to travel were not required in order to explain the observations. Wave/Particle duality itself is a big problem still being worked on, however it has left us in a world where ether has been superseded; mostly by Einstein’s General Relativity.

This is great because it allows a much more interesting universe to exist (or at least be described) and (very importantly) allows us to frame concepts in physics such as Time Travel which were previously not possible. I believe that in the future this greater ability to frame concepts will have a tremendous influence on magic. That’s a whole different discussion however.  It also sadly means that I will never get to buy a Luminiferous Etheromatic detector which sounds too cool for words.

For occultists however a consequence of all this is that journals stopped publishing papers on the Ether. At this point in history the scientific canon of knowledge was much smaller that it is today and it was very possible for someone to know everything known. As knowledge increased this became harder and harder until the need for specialisation developed. This was also the point at the turn of the 20th century where a lot of new concepts started emerging all at once. General Relativity was being discussed in the "New Scientist" type journals of the day, Quantum theory was just around the corner and Science was ablaze even though Einstein (one of its founders) hated many of the consequences of it. Science also started getting very inaccessible for the layperson. I suspect this is why it took so long for occultists to start bringing these ideas into magic.

For example it was relatively recently when Peter Carroll reframed the four elements in terms of the four basic natural interactions (Gravity, Electromagnetic, Strong Nuclear and Weak Nuclear). I am not sure this was altogether a good idea on Carroll’s part simply because it makes them even more inaccessible. How many people get a feel of the elements from the original terms (Earth, Air, Fire, Water compared to those who get a feel for terms such as "Weak Nuclear force"?

The Ether was left in the jargon of the occult however as a relic. It wasn’t simply relevant anymore and clearly not linked to the 21^st century science. In practice this has not really been a problem as we can say that Ether is still something, just not the same sort of thing physics was talking about.

I think that one thing we can learn from this is that I don’t think we need to connect magic and science or seek justification of one in another. One is experiential, the other empirical, both are fantastic and I don’t want to be seen as dismissing science as it has formed a large chunk of my academic background and I am not deserting it, merely trying to place it in context.

I also feel that we are in danger of making the same “etheric blunder” by comparing and trying to redefine magic in terms of “quantum theory”, “chaos theory” “brane theory” or whatever the next big topic will be. Parts may have similarity with magic but we need to see this in context not just draw on elements which match a small part and disregard the whole. Perhaps we are looking at the trees but missing the wood.

At this point in history I do not think that Science is able to explain how magic works. I am being very careful with my words here. Science can not and should not explain magic (in the explaining away sense); to do so would be to accept that magic is really a part of physics and I don’t think that it needs bringing under this umbrella. Neither magic nor science needs to seek justification in each other and I personally have no problems living in a universe where the two (or more) world-views are inconsistent with each other.

Inconsistencies seem to be a part of reality. For example Quantum theory and classical theory are inconsistent with each other and there is no (known) way to map the two together. We might be able to understand this by looking at Godel's theorem.

My use of the term theorem here is important, and I don’t want to lapse into jargon. A theory is something which looks likely based on the observed evidence however can never be completely proven because to do so we would need to examine every case of the phenomena in question. For example I could have a theory that all swans are white based upon my observation of swans, however I could never be sure of this as to do so would be to examine every swan that ever lived. A theorem is however a mathematical proof and it is something we can be certain of. For example Pythagoras's theorem that a² + b² = c² is shown to work for any right angled triangle mathematically - we don’t have to measure every such triangle to test this.

My swan example is also interesting as it shows how to disprove my theory that all swans are white. Rather than test all white swans (impossible), all one needs to do is produce one black swan. As we can see science works by disproving things. Again we have the instance where the need to be sceptical forms the basis of scientific enquiry which would be antagonistic to the demonstration of magic which requires a level of belief. I also suggest that a sceptical approach means one will not be open to holes in ones model of the world which might allow such phenomena.

For example if we consider the case for apports. The record of peoples paranormal experience suggests that apports exist. However physics in lacking a mechanism to work with the phenomena can only look at each individual case and attempt to dismiss the case. It cannot look into the underlying mechanism behind the phenomena to understand how one might be generated. This failure in epistemology is I believe the problem experienced when physics hits any paranormal subject.

Kurt Godel was a logician who postulated two incompleteness theorems. The theorems themselves are largely incomprehensible in their technical statement - I refer you to the relevant wikipedia pages for an idea of this. However what they bottle down to is saying that no system of description can be perfectly consistent - eventually inconsistencies and strange loops will become apparent which form paradoxes.

For example "This statement is a lie” cannot be resolved. If true, it becomes false and if false becomes true. So it will be eternally flipping between one state or another. The works of MC Escher provide a more graphical example of a strange loop such as shown with his picture of hands drawing each other

This shows that inconsistencies and paradox are actually a part of reality and that we (are lucky enough to) live in such a world where we can express and produce examples of paradox so simply, perhaps shows that the universe has no problem with paradoxes.

Actually I think that that might depend on the nature of reality and dimensionality. A paradox will be invisible to anyone caught up inside it, and to see it one needs to step outside. The inconsistent sentence above provides an example of this. Each time it is read it remains internally consistent. It is only when it is read and evaluated does its meaning crystallise and immediately change its nature.

Similarly with MC Escher’s hands it is only by looking from outside onto the image does the strange loop become apparent. In their own context each hand is existing in a perfectly consistent reality.

So, I don’t see a problem with a universe consisting of numerous descriptions - magic, science, various creation myths etc all conflicting with each other yet forming a part of a greater pattern. We don’t need to resolve whether science or magic is true just because the two are inconsistent with each other, the universe has shown us that it doesn’t mind inconsistencies - and we have just demonstrated this both artistically and linguistically.

In fact these inconsistencies might need to be necessary at least with regards to magic. If we step back and consider results magic for a moment, it generally works following the path of least resistance and generating a coincidence. Crowley made a comment once (I think it was in Confessions) where he mentioned a working to get a friend to write to him. He reported success and also suggested that the working had to reach back in time as the letter must have been posted before his working was performed in order to reach him the next day.   To make one change means that all of reality will need to be rewoven.

Similarly often I feel the energy for a working building the whole day before it starts (usually in the evening). Occasionally this has happened even when I achieved an invite for an evening working without expecting it - ruling out autosuggestion, which is given far too much credence than it really deserves.

I don’t think in either case we can say that the magic is reaching back in time. I would rather suggest that magic works (or at least reaches) outside the current context and somehow is able to reweave part of reality in order to achieve its results from outside. In this sense it is the hand drawing itself, but it is not possible to perceive that from the angle we are looking from.

I feel I have digressed somewhat so lets get things back on track talking about language. Western magic is left in a somewhat embarrassing position in that we have very little native jargon of our own. The most common terms we have are inherited from a number of sources including:

i. Science or Superseded Science
ii Eastern Sources such as tantra
iii Sources inherited from a particular tradition such as Qabalah. Often these are used generically.

This is no bad thing and the eclectic nature of magic brings in many philosophies. Each of which may (or may not) be equally valid. However a confusion of the terms can cause problems and lead to all sorts of situations. For example in Tantra we have the concepts of the Chakra's. In the West we often find systems based upon this and use a system of Chakra's which is not necessary the same as what was taught in the east. This too is fine. What I have problems with is when terminology such as chakra's is used (for example) to describe the sephiroth in the middle pillar.

We see this everywhere for example a scan through recent publications shows that there are now

• Voodoo and Enochian Tarot Decks
• Goetic Reiki
• What next - Satanic healing?

I think that there is a potential "physical" danger in this with people bringing in Eastern breathing techniques which should really be taught on a one-on-one basis being mixed with whatever system the writer thinks would work well - for all we know with no experience on the authors part apart from a bit of reading.

I think an equally dangerous result of this is also that all this mixing is going to create a lot of white noise. Very specific terms get diluted too much and we lose the meaning of the original terms. "Chakra" becomes synonymous with any energy centre regardless of the underlying philosophy, "Reiki" might start referring to any form of healing etc

My view is this can cause problems. Whilst there are similarities in practice between working with kundalini energy by activating each chakra in sequence, compared with performing the Qabalistic Middle Pillar there are also massive differences and (for example) the Yesod Sephiroth does not correspond to the Svadhisthana chakra although (like anything) correlations can be found. Each term is really the produce of different philosophies and will inherit a ton of cultural baggage. I don’t have any problems with cultural appropriation (maybe I should?) but I think that if we are going to do this, as well as the respect needed to take up any spiritual practice, we also need to maintain a rigorous discipline to understand the background and history of the practice as much as possible and not take in terms in a woolly sense. To use an analogy this really needs the equivalent of a PhD level study in the subject – something we should all have in our chosen subjects anyway; regardless of the need for a formal academic paper.

We frame our thoughts in language but it is more that that, because our language arises out of experience - in part what we are taught from our parents as we learn to speak, but afterwards from out own thoughts, they define what we focus on and at least for myself most of my vocabulary, my use of words and concepts which (as with everyone) grow beyond childhood proto-conversations through experience in life, study choices and also a desire to play with words. In this sense our language is as much dependant upon our thoughts as our thoughts are upon our language. Again, we have another strange "self defining" loop constantly reiterating and redefining itself.

My language itself took a quantum leap when I discovered Kenneth Grants Typhonian trilogies. Initially I found Grant very difficult to read even through his wordplay evoked such scintillating worlds in my mind. Grant stretches language to its limits, finding the language to express that which is often ineffable. Speaking for myself I have found that taking these concepts and allowing them to expand the mind provides a bridge across the inconsistencies in the fabric of reality enabling us to explore these worlds.

I think this is vital. If we take a view that our thoughts are dependant upon language and the act of expanding our language and the concepts expressible in our language will expand our minds and ultimately our magical reach.

Solve et Coagula

Solve et Coagula

An optimistic look at how we can progress the study of paranormal and occult subjects.

I have been thinking a great deal about quantum theory recently and the increasingly popular claim that we will find the answer to mysteries such as psychic phenomena and magic within its folds. I must admit that whilst I would be happy to see a comprehensive, and above all working theory of this phenomenon emerge, I am sceptical, highly sceptical in fact that this is the direction we need to be looking in to explore this phenomena.

Even since the earliest "scientists" looked at the world and concluded that reality was composed of four elements; earth, air, fire and water, magicians have been jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that these components were also the substrata of magic. For example let us look at the Victorian idea of the luminiferous ether which was proposed as the medium through which light as a wave propagates as it travels. The idea is that just as a sound wave travels through air, so therefore if light were a wave it must also travel through a substance analogous to air; this substance was dubbed the ether. As soon as this idea was proposed it seems that occultists (particularly Theosophists) jumped on this and used the term etheric in an occult context; claiming that the substance of the bodies we walk about in when experiencing an "out of body experience" is etheric. Science moved on and disproved the idea of the ether, leaving us with some rather embarrassing jargon.

We see another example of occultists trying to appropriate scientific concepts with another favourite, DNA. Theories arise which attempt to explain phenomena such as reincarnation with "Genetic Memory" because it sounds scientific and therefore attracts a pseudo-acceptability and proxy-respectability. Let us disprove that one now as a quick aside. Many accounts of reincarnation include a description of the subjects’ death. If genetic memory were an explanation I would like to know how these memories get into the DNA since one is very unlikely to have children to pass on the DNA at or after death. As a final nail to its coffin, let us remember that (with the exception of the odd random mutation) DNA does not change through life, so the idea that it is a reservoir for memory is preposterous, since if it doesn’t change therefore it is not the store to which new memories are added.

Another example concerns uninformed people putting the effect of the moon down to gravity, which is pure nonsense. I do not doubt in the slightest the emotional effects of the moon; in fact Selene is happy to give me a full dose of depression whenever she is fully lighting our sky, however gravity clearly cannot be the answer. First of all, the amount of moon does not change through its 28 day cycle, all that changes is the amount of the moon which is reflecting light; the position of the sun dictates how much illuminated moon-surface we can see from Earth; that is all. So since the gravity of the moon does not change, that cannot be responsible for the common mood-swings many many people experience in sympathy with the moon.

The more astute person might cite the tides as evidence of the moons effect, however whilst; with the correct equipment; it is perfectly possible for the tides in a teacup to be detected; I doubt that they are relevant here. Tides work because the gravitational pull of the moon changes due to the location of the moon in relation to the earth (or more particularly bodies of water on earth). So as the moon travels round the earth it is basically pulling the water with it. If I were to stand perfectly still for 24 hours, the moon may well pull the various fluids in my body with it as it circles us. However this must have a cancelling effect since I do not stay very still during the day, and probably face each direction for an approximately equal period each day.

Please remember (and I will repeat this) that whilst I am totally against these pseudoscientific explanations I do not doubt that the phenomena that it is trying to explain exists. Elemental Magic does work, Out of Body experiences do happen and memories reaching back into to past lives do exist. I have experienced each of these on occasional and absolutely accept their existence. It is the explanation of the phenomena that I am objecting to since it is leading us onto a blind path.

I feel very much that we are doing something very similar with quantum theory. It is as if people are taking something which they don’t understand such as psychic phenomena and then taking something else that they do not understand such as quantum theory and saying that this mysterious thing explains that mysterious thing. It is very worrying logic and I feel that it is of a similar vein to what occultists have been doing since we first discovered that we can travel out of out body, pick up on thoughts and emotions and encounter ghosts and other entities and then desperately trying to make it acceptable by plugging in the science of the day.

In "The Character of Physical Law" super-genius Richard Feynman said "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics". This is true and quantum theory is very unintuitive. It, along with Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity are the two most tested theories in all of human history. Both are shown to be correct to a high degree of accuracy and alleged superluminal neutrinos at CERN aside, it is fairly safe to say that both models of reality describe our universe very well and whilst there are incompatibilities between the two models; quantum and relativity; these will doubtless be ironed out in time with a theory of everything. It doesn’t even matter if exceptions to these laws are found such as the recent CERN news, between them, they still describe the (physical) universe to both an infinitesimal and cosmic level of detail. Newton’s models of celestial mechanics also break down in certain areas such as close to a black hole. It doesn’t mean that they is wrong, just that it is only accurate to a certain scale; which in this case happens to be finer that that described between quantum and relativity physics. If Newton were wrong we would not have been able to get to the moon using his laws of motion, if Einstein were wrong, in-car Navigation systems would not work since the constant triangulation calculations they need to make must factor in relativity.

As an aside, we must also be wary of sensationalism. The media are happy to claim that Einstein has been proved wrong with the finding of alleged superluminal neutrinos, however even if this is the case; general relativity (which is general because it includes gravity in its description of nature) only says that one cannot accelerate from rest to the speed of light and beyond. There is nothing about starting from rest then moving straight to a superluminal speed or of particles travelling this fast without ever slowing down (although we do not have a clue how to do this or whether it is possible). Theories and mathematics have also modelled particles called Tachyons (small fast ones) which only travel faster than light and these remain within the allowable parameters of relativity. Like Newton’s celestial mechanics we will doubtless find exceptions to Einstein’s rule in areas such as nanoseconds after the big bang where the rules break down and that is fine, all we are talking about are levels of accuracy. All these areas within our universe are explainable by science, and the fuzzy bits which we cannot explain will one day be explained.

I also feel that is it imprudent to attack science and say that these are only theories. The term theory is often used to say that "therefore scientists only think this is the case". In mathematics we can produce theorems which are seen as a proof because the expressions of mathematics show that such a theorem is universally true.

So if we consider Fermat's last theorem that "no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two". For a long time the proof to this statement was a mystery; in fact Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation pondered this in an episode. However in 1994 a mathematician Andrew Wiles established a final proof that this was the case 358 years after Fermat scrawled a note in a margin of a book describing something he knew but did not elaborate upon.

Basically a theorem such as we find in mathematics can be indisputably proven. Let us take another theorem; that of Pythagoras who stated that in any right angle triangle, the areas of the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This can be expressed as a² + b² = c². There is not a single right angled triangle in the universe which breaks this rule and this can be shown because every single right angle triangle in the universe can be mathematically modelled and expressed within Pythagoras’s theorem.

Theories rather than theorems are what are found in physics. This is because at its root physics is concerned with observing and describing nature and then making predictions upon its behaviours. Because philosophically we cannot check all of nature in an exhaustive way such as we can verify all of mathematics, we refer to these models as theorems.

Let us take an example. I have a theory that “all swans are white.” I cannot call this a theorem because in order to do so I would need to examine all swans and show that each one is white. Since that is impossible we can never we absolutely sure; however since each scientist, using concepts such as repeatability and peer review always comes up with the same results we can be fairly sure that as a description of reality, this is accurate. So, let us not get hung up on the term “theory”. To all practical intents and purposes they can be treated as “practically proof” and whilst exceptions may be found, all that this means is that that the theory will need fine-tuning, it is still basically correct. With the recent CERN results; supposing that they are vindicated in peer review; all that it means is a tweak to relativity; it will not be a sensationalist case of throwing relativity out of the window, whatever reporters tell you.

The other point I wish to make with regards to scientific models is that generally they are all connected to each other and never really stand in isolation. The exception seems to be the apparent inconsistency between quantum mechanics and relativity. However generally speaking, the findings of physics, chemistry and biology are all interconnected and consistent. We can use the physics explanation of electron shells to explain the properties of a particular chemical in chemistry and the chemistry of a protein; DNA; to explain the properties of a particular organism etc. This is important because the consistency between the physical sciences show that a unified and consistent model of reality is being built up; a fact which further adds to its strength as a valid description of nature. To find a fatal flaw in one of these is to find a flaw in everything and such an unthinkable finding would go against the conclusions of many modern researchers in the field.

The above statement is very important because it shows that research is more-or-less on the right track. There is of course room for new things, however the consistency of each description of reality suggests that science is unlikely to experience any paradigm shifts such as discovering a fifth force. If such a force were to be discovered, the mathematical models which describe the physical mechanics will fall over, which means our models in chemistry will fall over and so will our models of biology etc. The fact that everything fits together so consistently strongly suggests that this is unlikely to happen and that science is therefore correct in describing (physical) reality.

One aspect of quantum theory I have particular trouble with in relation to the paranormal is quantum entanglement. This is described very well on its Wikipedia page. Essentially it has been shown that two particles (typically electrons or photons) which have been paired show predictable behaviour in particular defiance of Heisenberg when separated. This occurs when paired properties (such as energy and location) are measured. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal shows that with a single particle you cannot measure both properties because the act of observation affects the properties.

The relationship between entangled particles is profound however. If you were to measure a property of a single entangled particle, say spin (which can be either up or down) and find it is an up spin, the entangled particle will always be the opposite. This is an important feature of the system, that the quantum superimposition of the two will be zero. If one particle has a property value of 1, the other particle will have a property particle of -1. So, it doesn’t matter how far apart the two particles are, you will be able to find the properties of the distant particle at the same time you “read” the properties of the near particle, meaning (sort of) that the information has travelled faster than light; a fact which bothered Einstein a great deal.

In a thought experiment, Einstein, Podolski and Rosen showed that Heisenberg’s uncertainly principal and the violation of the speed of light limit are both consequences of entanglement. With a single particle, Heisenberg showed that it is impossible to measure it location and its energy accurately, you can have one or the other; there is no magic here; the act of measuring one property affects the state of the other property. However with two entangled particles you can use a timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly way around this limitation, since you can measure the location of one particle, and the energy of the other particle. Since the net effect of properties will always add up to zero, you can not only work out the other property and violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal, you can get the answer at superluminal speeds even if one of the entangled particles is on the other side of the universe; thus violating relativity. This is referred to as the Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR) Experiment or sometimes as the EPR Paradox. This really bothered Einstein, however I do urge everyone to research why there is a speed-of-light limit in the first place; it is beyond my scope here however very interesting.

So, entanglement allows us to gather some information faster than light and in defiance of both titans, Einstein and Heisenberg; violating relativity and the uncertainty principal. However one property of this information is that it is fairly useless. To quote Michio Kaku (Physics of the impossible, Page 61 and Location 1324 of the Kindle edition):

“You cannot send a real message, or Morse code, via the EPR experiment even if information is travelling faster than light.

Knowing that an electron on the other side of the universe is spinning down is useless information. You cannot send today’s stock quotations via this method. For example, let’s say that a friend always wears one red and one green sock, in random order. Let’s say you examine one leg, and the leg has a red sock on it. Then you know faster than the speed of light, that the other sock is green, Information actually travelled faster than light, but this information is useless. No signal containing non-random information can be sent via this method.”

I would be remiss however if I also failed to point out the entanglement is proving to be critical in the new science exploration of teleportation. However don’t reach for your Blake 7 video’s yet, teleportation works by using entanglement to transfer properties from one pair of entangled particles to another. This is wonderful, brilliant stuff, but I feel not of interest from an occult perspective.

I hope that I am wrong, however for something like entanglement to serve as the mechanism behind telepathy it is not enough to say that one entangled particle is in each one persons head, and the other particle in the other persons head. We have seen that the sort of information transmitted by entanglement is limited to the state of the particle. Even if we could encode information relative to concepts viable on a human scale (such as don’t travel on that plane, or that the lottery numbers on a given week are 1, 5, 12, 15, 17, 29) into this and transmit that information from entangled particle A to it sister-particle B, we would need a mechanism for that to happen in and a decoder in the recipients brain. Furthermore, we have occasions when a number of psychic people pick up the same information. Entanglement only links pairs of particles so there would need to be a mechanism which propagates the entangled state onto other particles. Such a mechanism is not impossible and in fact recent advances in teleportation suggest that this is at least partially possible, however on the scale where psychic information becomes meaningful to humans it seems to me that this is very unlikely to be the mechanism behind it. I also feel that I must point out that effects such as entanglement require some fairly exotic technology to demonstrate, suggesting further that these effects are not in action when humans experience the paranormal.

Rather than filling us with dismay this should thrill us to the core. It means that we do not need a scientific model to valid our experiences. Let me be clear that I fully accept that paranormal phenomena exists and happens, I am not trying to disprove it but show that the explanation for its existence does not lie within physics and our models of the world. In accepting that this phenomena is real and that it is not a part of the standard models opens a door to a more mysterious and wonderful reality than we can yet imagine.

This also explains the objections of alleged sceptics such as James Randi and Richard Dawkins. If we can imagine people who have not experienced any phenomena and then experienced the wonder of science at its greatest, separate from academic funding, we can understand why they can have such issues with the subject. To me it doesn’t matter, the tiniest experience trumps the greatest scientific model so my world-view has no issues with accepting this sort of phenomena. However my intellectual understanding also accepts that physics is correct with respect to its status as a description of physical reality I feel the need to stand up and ask questions when we are perhaps over enthusiastic of using quantum theory as the explanation to psychic phenomena.

There is further evidence that we will not find the explanation to paranormal phenomena within physics, which is by looking at its track record in studying psi within laboratory conditions. Apart from a few threshold results as suggested by experiments such as those carried out by JB Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s science has returned a practically total blank in generated psychic effects in the lab. Let us compare this with what is experienced in the field, where poltergeists (generating physical effects) get encountered relatively frequently, cryptids defy common sense and so many people experience psychic dreams and accurate out-of-body experiences with regularity. Speaking from experience it is easy to visit a genuinely haunted house, and as soon as one puts down the distracting toys and “tunes in” experiences, even shared experiences are easy to find.

I feel that part of this comes down to scientific methodology. Do you remember my swan example, elsewhere in this essay? A scientist in testing the rigor of a theory cannot believe in White Swans. Rather he or she must be sceptical and look for the black swans which break the theory. Remember that without finding the crucial black swan (which should be easy if they exist) he or she must check that all swans are white, something philosophically impossible. In physics a scientist can (in fact should) be separate from the experiment or that being observed and so can dispassionately record the results and evaluate accordingly. However this is not possible with psychic phenomena, so much depends upon a group-mind being generated which serves to energise (be careful with this word), shape and direct results. However when one approaches this as a sceptic the group mind fails to form properly preventing results from occurring (even if one is working with genuine psychics). This in fact is why parapsychologists who “believe” get results whilst those that don’t believe fail to receive results.

Where therefore do we stand as psychics, occultist and magicians? How are we to work with concepts such as telepathy if there is not a general theory underlying their existence? Can we expect to find hidden forces which point to the explanation of this sort of phenomena? Well, ultimately I do not think that underlying theories matter. In fact basing a magical philosophy on physics will serve only to limit rather than inspire ourselves. In science there is always a list of impossibilities, things such as the superluminal barrier which we cannot transgress; a list which has poisoned the intellects of the like of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, in magic we can transcend this unless we believe otherwise.

Dion Fortune was very clear about not confusing the planes, confusing the worlds where we are investigating and I feel that this advice is crucial to our evolution as occultists. Science is impregnable in its home area and I feel that, just I do not believe that we should use scientific models to explain the paranormal; we also must shy away from arguing that science has it wrong. This may appear to leaving myself backed in a corner as I still stand firm in insisting that paranormal effects are real, however all I am really trying to do is open up research in areas which will be more relevant (and certainly more fruitful) in the investigation of magical and psychic phenomena.

We already have a toolbox to help us explore this phenomena and this toolbox has tools rooted in a myriad of cultures, traditions and interpretations. Whether we chose to use Tibetan methods to explore Bardo states, Hindu Tattwa’s to explore elemental planes within the astral light or simple meditation to go with the flow, I guarantee you will get better results than you would with spectrometers and infra-red sensing technology.

I hope that with this essay I am helping us to disregarding those aspects of investigation which are not really relevant for psychic and magical exploration. In releasing this conceit that physics will explain all, we open ourselves to a world of real magic which underpins physical reality, makes it more interesting and meaningful and most of all frees us from the paradox that psychic phenomena works, however it cannot be explained by physics. We need to accept this and then use our own methods to investigate, explore and study. Let us not confuse the planes!

I do welcome further discussion on this subject however so please do argue and feedback. :)