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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 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 can said. “But I won’t believe it until it happens. I really pray for myself and my two kids that it is true, but I don’t believe there’s anything after death. It’s a horrible belief and I don’t want to be like that. At least you’ve got something to hope for.”

“Your point of view is a strong reason to make the most of life,” I said, glossing over the fact that by not believing in something he was not actually ruling out its existence.

“I don’t see why you’re put on this earth for 60 years to work away and graft,” continued the man, “and then die for nothing. I graft bloody hard and don’t particularly enjoy it. If there was something afterwards, that would be great. But if there is someone above looking after you, then I don’t understand why you have to work. My experience of life is I have to work for 60 hours a week to pay my mortgage. If there’s something afterwards, why should I do that?”

What if he ran into a ghost later that night, I wondered; or if he got off the train and was abducted by aliens. (Or, at least—if he had some kind of experience that he understood in that way.) Taking him at his word, this would be all he needed to quit his job and stop paying the mortgage. I imagined him joining his local Spiritualist church and channelling the wisdom of the Ascended Masters, or putting on a sky-blue shell suit and joining the alien contactee lecture circuit.

Isn’t this precisely the fascination of the paranormal for all of us: proof that everything we know is wrong, and the liberating realization that there’s no point in playing any longer the tiring game of normality?

“I’ve heard that it never happens to people who don’t believe,” the man said. “I had a granddad who died 20 years ago. He was one of the greatest. I used to go around his house all the time from when I was eight. If you were to tell me he would come and stand by my bed tonight, well—at first I would shit myself. But I would long to see that.”

He paused at this point and looked surprised.

“Freaky, actually, because I’ve just realized that today is his birthday.”

“You think that’s coincidence?” I smiled at him. “How do you know this conversation isn’t his way of letting you know that he’s in touch?”

For a moment there was a look on his face that made me wonder if I’d gone too far. But luckily for me he seemed to decide to take it in the way I’d intended.

“Oh, don’t give me that! Don’t tell me he’s talking to me through you! Anyway, what experiences have you had?”

“Well, years ago,” I said, happy to shift the focus, “I used a Ouija board to call up a spirit and …”

“Whoa! Wait a minute. You don’t just go and do something strange like that. I would never use the Ouija board. If something happened, I would shit my pants. You just don’t do that.”

“You do when you’re 13.”

“What do you mean, you ‘called up a spirit’? You can’t just say: ‘Hello, spirit, here we are!’ There you go already, you see; I don’t believe you. You cannot just say: ‘Spirit, here we are, please move the glass!’”

Yes you can, I thought. Really, you can. But if you do, don’t count on paying the mortgage again.

What I hadn’t confessed to him were my credentials: I’m a magician. Not the sort that does card tricks and saws women in half—they are “illusionists”, by the way. No, I mean the “occult” kind. You’ve heard of Aleister Crowley, probably? Well, that sort of thing. (Please don’t mention Harry Potter.)

Much of the news these days is generated by secular rationalists on one hand squaring up against religious fundamentalists on the other. Or vice versa. You do not hear much about the third path, far less travelled, which treads a course between. Some regard it as the sanest alternative, although the majority—certainly those on the two extremes—view it as even more despicable than their opposite. This third path is mag-ick, the occult. You won’t hear it discussed in the mainstream media, which is a shame because, unlike how they would have you believe, magick is not all about worshipping Satan, dancing naked in the woods and curdling your neighbour’s semi-skimmed. Magicians might do these things, but they do much else besides.

The life experiences that forced me off the straight-and-narrow track of secular rationality into the path of the oncoming juggernaut that was magick are the reason why this book is different from your standard “strange-but-true” pot-boiler. It was some close shaves with the paranormal that proved to me forever how reality has nothing in common with what we like to call “everyday life”.

We say goodbye to our beer-drinking friend on the train at this point. We are done with him. We will leave him to his decision to believe only in what happens, while he makes well and truly sure that certain things never ever will.

I’m going to wax autobiographical.

By the time I’d reached my thirties (I’m older than I sound) I’d settled into a steady job, working with computers, making money and feeling like a grown-up at last. Yet the more “successful” in conventional terms I became—in other words, the more stuff I owned and the more people who looked up to me—the less happy I felt.

I couldn’t have said why I was unhappy. I had money and a lovely girlfriend. We went shopping every weekend and flew off on holidays. I was healthy and liked the gym. But I was also often stressed and miserable, even though my job was not particularly demanding. I was also drinking quite a bit; a nightcap every evening, and sometimes the pile of bottles in the recycling bin was a little embarrassing.

I remember the day I announced to my girlfriend I was going to explore magick. “Because I know the world just isn’t like this,” I said, gesturing at all the stuff and gadgets I’d accumulated in my home.

“You’re not going to go weird, are you?” she said.

How I’d come to the conclusion that what people call “reality” is actually a pack of lies dated back to puberty when (as I’d revealed to the man on the train) I began meddling with the Ouija board.

For those who have never used one, the Ouija board is sold as a sort of novelty or toy. It is an oblong piece of pasteboard with letters of the alphabet printed upon it, the numerals zero to nine, and the words yes, no and good-bye. With the board comes a piece of heart-shaped plastic mounted on three legs, which has a transparent circle in its centre. This is called the “planchette”. The board has to be operated by a group of people. (I’ve never got it to work on my own, although some people have claimed successful solo use.) The planchette is placed on the board and each person puts a finger on it. Questions are addressed to the board, and—here’s the strange part—it’s often found that the planchette, in response, moves—apparently of its own accord. A letter or number becomes visible through the transparent circle in the planchette, which, followed by subsequent characters, spells out a message. Many have supposed that the Ouija board is a means of talking with spirits.

The board was invented in the United States during the mid-1800s when the Spiritualist craze was at its peak. It was patented in 1891 by Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard, but in 1901 production was taken over by William Fuld, whose name these days is that most closely associated with the “Ouija” trademark. The precise origin of the board’s peculiar name is lost in legend, but one of the nicest stories is that the Ouija board itself dictated the name to Kennard.

It was 1981 when I first used the principles of Ouija to make contact with a spirit. I remember the song Ghost Town by The Specials was playing on the TV as I sat nervously at my parents’ dining table with some friends. Today, I have a classic 1970s version of the board, produced by Parker Brothers, which a fellow magician bought through eBay and permanently loaned to me (I suspect because he’s too scared to keep it in his own house.) I did not have a proper board back then, so instead we cut out squares of paper and wrote on the letters with felt-tipped pens. For a planchette we had an upturned jar that had once contained pickled cockles. It worked just as well and scared me just as badly as any commercially-produced board.

I was never certain who was pushing the jar, but definitely someone was. I never believed it moved “of its own accord”, or that it wouldn’t stop the moment we took our fingers away. The rational explanation for how Ouija works, routinely repeated by debunkers, is “the ideomotor effect”.¹ This is the psychological principle, established by controlled experiments, that muscular movements can occur independently of our conscious awareness or intention. In other words, one or more members of the group push the planchette but do not know they are doing it.

Looking back, if we were truly talking with disembodied spirits, they were extremely patient and uncommonly interested in the affairs of 13-year-olds. The events that we asked the spirits to predict—who would marry whom; who would take whom to the next school disco, etc.—consistently failed to come true, with no exceptions, consolidating my impression that it was merely mortal hands at work.

There was one entity who showed up whenever we used the board, supposedly my mother’s long-dead great uncle, named “Jack”. He insisted on communicating even though in life he had been illiterate and apparently had not learnt much since he had died, to judge from the meaningless jumble of letters he served up. Sometimes he hinted that more literate spirits were queuing up behind him, but he never let them take a turn.

Despite explaining the Ouija board to myself as an instance of “the ideomotor effect”, it still gave me sleepless nights. Maybe I was dimly aware of the fine line between explanation and “explaining away”. Okay, maybe it was our muscles moving the planchette without us being aware, but then who was instructing our muscles to move? Evidently, no one that we or the scientists who had made the experiments could locate or put a name to. Which was more bizarre: Uncle Jack steering the cockle jar, or this unnameable “other” working us like meat puppets without our permission?

My friends and I soon upped the ante. We ditched the Ouija and asked the spirits to signal their presence through direct physical manifestation. At first, the results were disappointing, until one day my sister came in from school looking scared and beckoned me away from our parents.

“Touch the air around my hand,” she said.

I reached out and my fingers encountered something peculiar. The space around her arm was “alive”. It felt vibrant, like static electricity. It gave me that tingling sensation you feel on the surface of a television screen, or on a rubber balloon after rubbing it against nylon clothes. But, more than that, it was warm. The sweat glands on my hand prickled in response to its heat.

“Hot, isn’t it?” said my sister.

I nodded. But even as she had spoken, the sensation passed, as if my hand had pierced a delicate membrane and destroyed it. I groped in the air around her arm, but couldn’t find it again.

“It’s granddad,” she whispered.

During their lunchbreak at school, she and her friends had each summoned a dead relative. Each girl’s dear-departed had manifested as a kind of thermal bangle, which had lasted—on and off—for the remainder of the afternoon.

This was the first time I felt that unique rush, which I always get from bumping up against the paranormal. Many experiences expose us to the otherworldly: drugs, illusions created by various forms of entertainment, but the “feeling” of the paranormal (for me, at least) is quite distinct, composed of amazement yet also of a creeping sense of danger, because what is happening is supposed to be outside the everyday world, and yet it’s here. And it’s real.

When you reach out to occult forces and receive a response, not only does it feel “super-real”, there is also an experience of sentience. To say it feels like you’ve touched something “alive” is the wrong word, but thereis a sensation that it is certainly out there, and it knows you are here. It is talking to you and sees you where you are.

A month after my sister came home wearing granddad, I was idly rolling a couple of dice across the lounge carpet, when I wondered if they might also be used for spirit communication.

I stared hard at the little plastic cubes and mentally commanded them: Dice, I request that you move if the next throw is a double six.

Nothing happened, of course, but I rolled them anyway. The score was reassuringly random. Once they had come to rest I repeated my command and rolled them again. I don’t know how long I sat there. I simply decided I wouldn’t budge until I had a result. I’d got it into my head that the dice must perform because I wasn’t going anywhere until they had. After I’d repeated the sequence so many times that I wasn’t thinking anything any more, suddenly I sat bolt upright.

The dice had been lying on the carpet where they fell, close to each other, but had then “jumped” apart. You might argue—like the man on the train—that they simply hadn’t finished rolling yet. But it was not that. I’d allowed a good few seconds between each roll whilst I mentally repeated my “command”. It was a movement of a couple of centimetres; exactly the kind of movement you would expect to see if two magnets had been placed side by side with their like-poles facing, so that each repulsed the other.

Nervously I picked them up and rolled again. They felt quite normal as I set them loose. Was it imagination, or did they seem to tumble more slowly than gravity ought to have allowed? But beyond doubt was the result: double six.

So there it was. The most astounding, most mind-blowing paranormal experience I’ve ever had in my life: two plastic dice rolled on a carpet. There were no witnesses and it happened only once. Despite my best efforts, the dice never repeated their feat.

Moving dice that predict their own score? Dead relatives returning as thermal bracelets? Twenty years later when I decided to take up magick it was these experiences that had bubbled up into my mind. How—I reasoned—could I possibly sign away my days to a job, family life, the government, and all the other institutions that decide for us what existence is and how it should be lived, when—obviously—the reality they decree is nothing like the full story?

I once talked over my dice experience with a rational friend. The only way she could fit it into her world-view was to suggest it must’ve been a “false memory”.

I’ve thought long and hard about this. Of course, it’s a possibility. If she’s right then I’ve thrown away my career and filled my head with trash because of something that never happened. But the more I thought, the more I realized that the difference between a memory and an actual event isn’t the issue, because even if it hadn’t happened the way I remembered, nevertheless I’d lived my life since that moment exactly as if it had. That day shook my beliefs to their roots, influencing what I thought, the books I read, the life-decisions I made. So what was the difference between an accurate memory of what happened and a false one? In terms of how I’d lived my life, it had indeed been “true”. And even if I decided now that it had been “false”, the only way to do that was to make a conscious choice it had been so, and change my behaviour once again from that point onwards. In both cases the “truth” or “falsity” of the memory boiled down ultimately to the way I chose to live my life.

Truth, in the abstract, has a very minor influence on human life. That is why we should pay far less heed to both the scientific rationalists and the religious fundamentalists than they demand. For instance, it is most likely “true” that the world’s supply of oil is running out, but it is not “true” for the majority of us until we discover we cannot buy petrol any more. At this point we might decide to change our habits. The kind of truth that has an actual impact on human beings always arises from experience.

But imagine if you had the power to decide what you experienced as the truth. If you made a particular idea or experience true, then you could change yourself by it, and also—in effect— change the world. The reason why some people live more ecologically than others is because they experience as true the unsustainability of our current lifestyle. They experience that truth not in some abstract concept, but in their daily lives.

Some people have developed more advanced techniques for achieving this kind of thing. They are the people we call “magicians”. They create truth from their experiences, rather than clinging to ideas or beliefs laid down by others. This is what sets them apart from both scientists and religious fundamentalists.

Susan Blackmore, a former parapsychologist (i.e. someone who scientifically studies the paranormal), wrote a memoir that takes up this very theme, but from the opposite direction. She began her intellectual career with a passionate interest in the paranormal, yet her attempt to explore it on a scientific footing led her to disillusionment and a more orthodox scientific outlook:

I was interpreting the “realness” and vividness of my own experiences as meaning that they were “paranormal” or “occult”. It is an easily made and common mistake, and it took me many years to see it for what it was (1996: 19).

What happened here was that science supplied Susan Black-more with an experience of the falsity of her experiences! Before she began looking for “proof” of her experiences, she seems to have had a talent for reading tarot cards, and she once underwent a spontaneous out-of-body experience that lasted for three hours, during which she was able to describe bizarre visions on the astral plane verbally to her friends, who were seated next to the body she had “vacated”. These anecdotes make me wonder whether her fascination with science perhaps hampered an innate psychic gift, or was her way of defending herself against it.

Blackmore assumed her perception was mistaken. Putting her tarot readings through statistical tests, to determine if they were any more accurate than chance, all she encountered was the frustration of a repeated failure to design an experiment that could conclusively rule out fraud, bias and statistical artefacts. Ultimately she was forced to conclude it was impossible to determine what she was supposed to be measuring in the first place!

And indeed it is. Because a good tarot reading—or any kind of fortune-telling—always boils down to a purely subjective experience of the relationship between the reader and the questioner.

When I get out my tarot cards, people often challenge me that the meanings of the cards are so vague and general they could be applied to anyone at any point in their lives. “Wow!” I exclaim. How much wisdom must be packed into those cards, if they’re so universally applicable? Arguing that the tarot means anything to anyone is tantamount to admitting that it works, if what we mean by “works” is that the cards provide an experience of truth.

Anyone who attempts to “verify” the paranormal according to science is missing the point, because the paranormal overturns the dualisms on which science depends, such as the distinction between observer and experience, or between subjectivity and reality. Take telepathy, for instance: if I can read your thoughts, then how are they “yours”? If the phenomenon we seek to prove actually exists, then a person’s thoughts can no longer be confined only to one person’s experience, so something is already in play that the assumptions of our experiment cannot take into account.²

Could a statistical study ever prove that telepathy occurs? It might be regarded as suggestive, but if one form of the paranormal is entertained then there is immediately no reason to exclude any of the others; and in that case who is to say my apparent “telepathy” is not precognition—peering into the future to gain knowledge of the answers the test subject will give?

By enticing us to prove the unprovable, the paranormal makes fools of us all.

When I was a student I lived for a year in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. It turned out to be the unhappiest year of my life.

I shared a basement flat in Clarendon Square with a girlfriend and another woman. Firstly, relations with our housemate broke down and then my girlfriend and I proceeded to tear each other apart.

The flat was big and seemed luxurious when we first viewed it, but once we moved in it proved damp, dark, and cold. The couple who lived upstairs could often be heard screaming and throwing things at each other.

“You’ve got a little palace here,” our landlord used to insist in a thick Brummy accent, when he came around to read the electricity meter. Towards the end of the tenancy he once turned up so drunk he could not read the dials. “Let’s just call it a fiver,” he slurred. Concerned that he would regret his largesse in the morning, we suggested he came back another time. That was the last we ever saw him. When we rang the university at the end of the year to enquire why we hadn’t been asked to pay more bills and why our deposits hadn’t been returned, we were told our landlord had been found floating face-down in the river. The verdict was suicide.

That flat had a cursed and malevolent air. Years later, I discovered that Aleister Crowley had been born and grew up a couple of doors down. I doubt he was responsible for the misery that seemed to hang over the area, but I understood from where he might have acquired his urge to travel.

Another peculiarity were the huge spiders, which we never saw alive. They turned up dead on the carpets in the mornings, scrunched into agonized balls.

The paranormal proclivities of the place became more overt towards the end of our stay, as second-year examinations loomed into view. One night, I was woken by a peculiar sensation. My bed was being shaken. I lay still, wondering if it was an earthquake and waited to see when it would stop. After a minute (when it had not) I got up sleepily and went to my girlfriend’s room.

“My bed keeps shaking,” I explained.

A few weeks later an old school friend came to stay for the weekend. We had not seen each other in a while. We went drinking and caught up on events in each other’s lives. During the course of the evening, he announced that he was gay.

That night, after he had gone and I was asleep, the bed started shaking again. Due to the alcohol, this time I simply couldn’t be bothered to get up. Thankfully, in the morning it had stopped.

I sometimes suspect that most tales of the paranormal fall into a category like this one, where the usual categories of “subjective” and “objective” blur together in our experience. Imminent exams and my friend’s sexual revelations: these were disturbing circumstances, possibly the root of both experiences. It certainly felt to me as if the bed were being shaken, yet—on that first occasion—it stopped as soon as I got out. Maybe our old friend the “ideomotor effect” was at work again. Quite possibly, my own body provided the physical force for the shaking, yet once again it was that unknown “other” who provided the will and inspiration for the usual inscrutable reasons.

Psychology can take us a certain distance towards what these events might signify. If I’d omitted my description of the circumstances that led up to the shaking bed (“weird flat”, “unhappy days”, “exams”, “sexual revelations”) it would have been completely inexplicable; not substantial enough even to form a story worth telling. As it stands, there is a possible “motive” here for the shaking: my unconscious emotional response to an upsetting environment. Yet why it took the form of a vibrating bed, and what was achieved or expressed by this, remains obscure.

Another personal experience is perhaps more illuminating in this respect. It took place between the moving dice and the shaking bed, on the eve of an A level examination when I was about 18 years old.

I was nervous and unable to sleep, which served to make me even more anxious about my probable performance in the exam. To make matters worse, the family cat had managed to escape from downstairs, where she was usually confined at night, and had come into my room. I heard her paws on the carpet as she crossed to my record player, and then (as was her habit) she began sharpening her claws on the back of the wooden speakers. I suffered the noise for a while, but when there was no sign she was going to stop I got up and turned on the light. Immediately, the scratching stopped. I bent down to pick her up from behind the speaker.

Only—there was no cat.

When I checked later, she had been downstairs all along.

But something had made a sound like an animal with paws across the carpet. Something had scratched and bumped behind the speaker. Indeed, my sister in the next room had also heard the noise. I checked thoroughly all around, but found no explanation.

Psychoanalysis provides us with a useful notion: the “ symptom”. Certain cases of mental illness arise, psychoanalysis declares, because in the unconscious lies an urge that is in conflict with social mores, or with the interests of the sufferer’s conscious personality. This urge is repressed by the conscious mind but it remains active in the unconscious and may lead to the formation of a symptom.

For instance, imagine that someone did not want to sit an exam, even though it was vital to his future. In a case like this a symptom might be formed: the urge to flunk the exam would not be allowed direct expression, but by manifesting instead as some kind of illness it might be able to make itself heard. If the symptom were severe enough to prevent the sufferer from sitting the exam, then it might even realize its full and secret intention, albeit by a roundabout route.

Some of the girls in my sixth form sat their A level exams with their arms in bandages. One of them had woken in bed and discovered she had scraped the skin off her arms while she was asleep. After she had shown her injuries to her friends, a couple of them woke the next morning and discovered they had done the same.

The anxiety of these girls had taken on quite a direct manifestation. Perhaps my anxiety was also making itself felt. Luckily for me, it hitched a ride not upon a bandwagon of self-harm, but upon the idea of a ghostly cat.

Our cat was a playful, mischievous creature. She sat and lazed on pieces of paper even as I was trying to write on them. To her my pen was a toy. She had a personality that ideally suited her to become the kind of double-edged symbol (“domestic pet”—”untamed”) that psychoanalysts since Freud have uncovered at the root of many a symptom. Perhaps my anxiety that night manifested itself in the form of an unruly moggy. We can call those noises I heard an “hallucination” if it makes us feel better.

In magick, however, there is a concept closely allied to the psychoanalytic idea of the symptom, but it demands a radically different mind-set. It is called a demon.

Aleister Crowley wrote: “The spirits of the Goetia [i.e. demons] are portions of the human brain” (1995: 17). Contemporary magicians, such as Lon Milo DuQuette and Christopher S. Hyatt, often make even more explicit the links between psychotherapy and demonology:

Psychology … deals with people’s fears and doubts. Psychologists label many of these fears as pathology. Psychologists have carefully followed in the footsteps of the Priest, who in his non-scientific but simple way labelled these things as evil or demonic possession. The average clinical psychologist is no more scientific than the priest (2000: 11).

Despite its technical-sounding terminology, psychoanalysis is widely disparaged as “pseudo-scientific” by the more sci-entistic branches of psychology. Part of the reason is perhaps that the aims of magick and of psychotherapy are strikingly similar: both seek to help the individual gain control over and make sense of his or her experience. The magician seals himself inside a magic circle, recites incantations, evokes demons and makes a pact with them, harnessing their power to his will. The psychoanalyst’s approach is not so very different: her “demons” are the patient’s symptoms; her “magic circle” is the formal relationship with the patient, governed by the rules that regulate the practice of psychotherapy.

Foremost among these rules are those that discourage therapists from sexual relations with their patients. Because of its powerful sensations and emotions, its intense effect on consciousness, sex has long been used by magicians as a tool for injecting energy into or “raising power” for any kind of endeavour. The way that psychotherapy also seeks to maximize erotic tension within the therapeutic relationship, by ensuring that it remains unconsummated, is a technique that might have been lifted straight out of a book of spells. Louis Culling, in his occult classic Sex Magick, writes at length on what he calls “Dianism”: the magical use of a sexual experience in which climax is intentionally avoided (1992: 21–49). In one particular type of magical working, climax is postponed in order to maximize ecstasy, so that the magician’s partner can assume the elevated form of the “Holy Guardian Angel” or “ideal self”. In therapy, similarly, because there is no possibility of consummating the relationship, every little word, gesture, and interpersonal incident becomes highly charged, filled with significance, and in this way the patient’s fantasies are stoked until they blaze.

The equivalent of the magician’s “incantations” is the conversation between the analyst and patient, which draws the patient’s unconscious to the surface. The “evocation of the demon” and the “bargain” made with it occur as the analyst encourages her patient to re-enact within the consulting room his habitual ways of relating, with the aim of replacing unhelpful behaviours with more effective patterns of action.

Ramsey Dukes has written on how we can work creatively with our “personal demons”. He advocates a technique that he calls “consciousness sharing”. If we project our human moods and motives onto external objects, abstractions or situations—for instance, onto malfunctioning computers, the stock market or “my inability to find a decent job”—then we will have “reaped a whole universe of meaning and meta-meaning” (2005: 28).

In other words, by treating external phenomena as real and alive we heighten our awareness of them and most likely increase the respect and intelligence in our manner of dealing with them. This is where we arrive at the advantage of dealing with “demons” rather than “symptoms”. For all its lowliness, we respect the power of a demon; we recognize that if we could harness that power for other ends then it would be to our advantage. However, we are also wary of becoming too friendly with something that will damage us if not properly controlled. If we choose to regard the demon merely as a metaphor for our personal psychological hang-ups, the dynamics of the relationship remain fuzzy.

But what made the scratching noise behind the speakers? What moved the dice and shook the bed? Another advantage of a “demon” is that we are not committed to internalizing the experience, the way that psychotherapy invariably does. The difference between magick and therapy is that, for mag-ick, truth lies in experience, whereas therapy is concerned with questions of “meaning” and “interpretation”. The therapist traces the meaning of symptoms back to the unconscious, over and over again. In other words, issues on the surface are exposed as being the product of issues hidden at a lower level. It is all “about” issues. Magick, on the other hand, enables us to experience issues directly as something else—as a “demon”, an “angel”; as something other.³

A paranormal experience might be regarded as an instance in which personal experience becomes so intense, or so different or alienated from ordinary consciousness, that what we regard as “internal” spills into the “external” world. If this sounds far-fetched, a friend once told me about an acid-trip in the woods with friends, during which the trees rewarded them with ready-made staffs that dropped from the branches into their hands. When the drug wore off, they were still holding them. The inner experience and the external world had become inextricably interwoven under the intense experience of the drug.

All cases of synchronicity (a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung to describe “meaningful coincidences”) possess this quality of a blurred boundary between the mind and external reality. It prompted Jung to invent another special term, psychoid,⁴ to describe this level at which the mental and the physical coincide. Magick appeals to this level and aims to immerse our experience within it. Psychology shuns it with horror, associating it with hallucinations and psychosis.

Of course, there is always the possibility of natural explanations for seemingly paranormal events, and these should not be discarded where they can be determined. When trying to establish the truth of an experience it must be admitted that there are always other possibilities. Maybe it was indeed the family cat that made those scratching noises behind the speakers after all. She never did enjoy being shut inside at night. Perhaps, in her frustration, she had astrally projected herself upstairs.

Notes

^1. The term was coined (1852) by English physiologist and naturalist William Benjamin Carpenter.

^2. I recently read about an investigation into telepathy where one of the experimenters noticed a charming correlation: that positive results were recorded only on those days when birdsong was audible inside the laboratory (Foxx, 2006. See sleeve notes: “Thought Experiment”).

^3. The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the terms “translation” and “transformation” to discuss this difference (1996: 46ff). As is well known, to change yourself through therapy takes years. This is because (in Wilber’s terms) therapy merely “translates” our issues between unconscious and conscious; Wilber’s model suggests that this “translation” is simply movement of issues within the same level of personal development. Magick, on the other hand, encourages “transformation” by presenting us with our experience as something other. Magick can provide a much faster track for self-development, although it is probably fair to admit that the effects may be more volatile.

^4. “[W]e do not know whether that we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic …. They may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience” (Jung, 1936).