Table Of ContentFirst published in 2010 by Aeon Books Ltd
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Copyright © 2010 by Duncan Barford The right of Duncan Barford to be
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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
1
these issues more rigorously than will be my aim , 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
e 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
Wme 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 stuff,” the man said, raising his voice over my
friend’s story about the night her mother sighted a ghostly figure in the garden.
“In fact, I think you’re talking garbage.”
“Well, I respect your opinion,” I said.
Some of the other passengers were pricking up their ears.
“Anyway,” the man said, settling into a more conversational tone,
“paranormal stuff happens to people who look into things more deeply than
others. Let’s say my pen started to roll over the carpet: I would think nothing of
it. But because you are into paranormal things, anything that happens to you out
of the ordinary, you’d think: ‘Oh My God!’ Whereas I just think: ‘Well, that pen
rolled over.’ To you it means something. To me it doesn’t.”
“So doesn’t it boil down to whatever is in your head is real?” I said.
It was naughty of me, but without telling him I’d pressed the button on
my digital recorder. (Hence the striking realism of this dialogue, as you’ve
probably already remarked.) Something unusual was taking place: a
conversation with a stranger, plus a crowd of other passengers listening in while
pretending not to do so. (A couple of them later overcame their politeness and
started to chip in their comments.)
“I pray that the stuff you’re talking about is true,” the man with the beer
