First published in 2010 by
Aeon Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2010 by Duncan Barford
The right of Duncan Barford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-90465-836-8
Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
Dedicated to Alan Chapman.
Two mages with a lot of welly,But which one’s Dee and which one’s Kelley?
INTRODUCTION
If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.
(Charles Fort, 1997: chapter 1).
The book you are holding is rooted in personal experiences. Indeed, the first essay in the collection aims to show how scientific explanation of subjective paranormal experience will often miss the point and end up destroying what it set out to define.
But if science destroys the paranormal, should we not wonder whether the paranormal was really there in the first place?
This is a noble and rational point of view. However, to adopt it assumes that the faeries at the bottom of our garden possess (or ought to) some quantifiable attribute that we can seize hold of (or not) and thus state definitively whether the faeries are there.
The view put forward in this book is that faeries are far subtler and cleverer.
In most instances, a paranormal event cannot be cleanly separated from its effects on the witness, or from his or her beliefs. The “event” may indeed be disproved (or at least shown to be not what it appeared), yet the effects will continue to reverberate within the witness’s life, and the beliefs or misconceptions that predisposed him or her to the experience may also persist. Put more simply: it is theories that are proved or disproved, whereas experiences themselves are simply what they are. There is no “seems” in an experience, paranormal or otherwise. I can only experience seeing a ghost; I can’t experience “seeming” to see one.
None of this is new—of course—and philosophers have investigated these issues more rigorously than will be my aim1, but what I hope is original about this book (its unique selling point, if you like) is its use of the tradition of magick to inform the exploration of the paranormal.
I’ve followed the convention of appending a “k” to the word in order to distinguish this philosophical tradition (which, in the West, can be traced back to the ideas of the Ancient Greeks—see Goodrick-Clarke [2008]) from stage magic and from popular notions of impossible super powers.
No doubt my disparagement of “science” at the beginning has halved my prospective audience, and now the mention of magick has probably halved it again. Never mind. This is only due to the common misperception of magick as “trickery”, “superstition”, or “devil worship”.
As I aim to show, magick is a more insightful and useful tool than is commonly supposed. The discipline of magick is alive and well in the 21st century and there are more magicians active in the community than many readers might suppose. Contemporary magick is the discipline of using belief to investigate or construct realities; or, as one recent expert in the field has put it: “Magick is the art of experiencing truth” (Chapman, 2007, 14).
If science destroys the paranormal, then magick—on the other hand—is a tool for creating it. In the essays that follow I will discuss instances in which consciously practised techniques give rise to paranormal experiences. I will also discuss instances in which unconscious practice of magick may have produced the same result.
Using magick as a tool for exploring the paranormal may sound at first like adding silt to already muddied waters, or shovelling gullibility onto a waiting pile of credulity. But mag-ick, it should be remembered, entails conscious use of belief. For instance, in the second essay I describe how the magical technique of “remote viewing” was used to retrieve information about the scene of a possible haunting. To gain the information it was necessary to go through the motions of believing that remote viewing actually works. Yet to make use of that information and to assume that the information gained is real are two different things. The discipline of magick enables us to separate and distinguish between them. In short, it is a consideration of the meaning of a paranormal experience that often casts more significant light on what happened than attempting to decide simply whether an experience was real, because (from the subjective perspective, at least) “real” has very little meaning.
The essays that follow were not written to a rigid plan, but following Fort’s suggestion at the head of this introduction they represent five arbitrary starting-points around the circumference of a single circle.
The first essay discusses some first-hand experiences of the paranormal from my early life; the second explores in depth the experience of a close friend, who even now (several years later) is still affected by the events described; the third examines the relationship between space, time, and consciousness; the topic of the fourth is religion and spiritual experience; and the final essay explores naturally-arising altered states of consciousness, such as lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, and astral projection.
Fort’s “circle”, his “underlying oneness of all things”, seems centred about the nature of consciousness itself. This was what I discovered beneath the experiences and ideas presented in the book. It returns in each essay, again and again.
When we supplement our investigations with the tools offered by magick, what we find in the paranormal is not something “out there” but equally “in here”—or perhaps more accurately, something that is at once in both and neither.
I’ll let the essays speak for themselves and will end here by hoping that the reader finds in this book something I’ve certainly discovered to be true: that paranormal experiences do not happen only to special people and on rare occasions. To experience the paranormal we need only turn our attention to the nature of consciousness itself.
Duncan Barford January 2010 http://oeith.co.uk
Note
1. Phenomenology and Pragmatism are two schools of philosophy that can come to the aid of a magician when he or she is called upon to defend their world-view.
CHAPTER ONE
My sister wore our granddad’s ghost
We were travelling home by train, some friends and I, when—without knowing it—I started work on this book: I asked each of them to tell me the strangest thing they’d ever experienced.
We had not got far when the stranger in the seat opposite interrupted.
“You’re talking about the paranormal,” he said, “and it’s doing my head in.”
He was swigging a can of beer but seemed good-humoured. And he had a point: for a public place our conversation was rather odd.
“I’m not fascinated by that