You’ve all heard the monomythic tale of Prometheus: the guy who defied the gods by stealing their Olympian fire to return it to humanity in the form of knowledge, technology, and civilization.
Sometimes I feel like Prometheus’s idiot cousin who climbed up Olympus, felt some heat, couldn’t really tell where it was coming from, and came back down with nothing but a weird story to share.
People who’ve followed me for a while know that I’ve had a deep curiosity about all kinds of woo for most of my life—but I also try to maintain a level of skepticism and materialist grounding with it, edged by playfulness and performance.
About three years ago, I started an independent research project to seriously investigate woo (and more specifically, claims about magick) via direct experience, literature surveys, and interviews with practitioners. I wanted to figure out what was nonsense and lies, what might be practically useful, and what could actually be observed and understood.
This led to quite a few expansive project threads on the topic of ritual, magick, and (broadly) High Weirdness:
Reading many dozens of the most highly-recommended books from both practitioners and skeptics
Hiring a team of contractors to summarize hundreds of additional books for me in a Roam database so that I could survey and cross-reference point topics
Interviews (both public and private) with a wide range of people who claim direct experience or skill with different kinds of practice
Digging deep into the history, practices, experiments, and beliefs of different relevant groups, from archaic alchemists and ritualists to modern memetic magicians, military research, and parapsychologists
Direct experimentation with practices spanning meditation, consciousness hacking, ritual and sigil magick, divination, and manifestation (among many others)
You might think that for all of my Promethean enthusiasm to go out and find something useful for people on top of the wild mountain of chaotic disinformation around these topics, I might have taken a bit more time to sit down and consider the reward that Prometheus earned for his efforts—but for better or worse, I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have any fire to share with you.
After three years of looking at this as carefully, deeply, and open-mindedly as I could, all I’ve got is some weird stories and a healthy dose of confusion.
For a very long time on Twitter (and elsewhere) I’ve tried to avoid making hard claims without solid evidence to back them up. I still don’t have any particularly extraordinary claims I feel comfortable making. But here are some observational takeaways from three years of looking at this space with far more breadth and depth than the majority of people might:
Most forms of what people call “magick” or “energy work” seem to be operating through perception or emotion “hacking” of the self or others—consciousness and experience are more highly malleable than we tend to realize
Most forms of ritual (of any kind, from occult ritual to daily meditation) are different methods to perform this experiential hacking, and they consistently work to induce target states when applied with knowledge and intent
Humans are capable of transmitting this experiential hacking to other humans via a variety of mechanisms—some look very mundane (memetics, frame control, even language) and some look extremely surprising and have no satisfying conventional explanation (although there are plenty of theoretical explanations, some of which seem to point at very real, understudied interpersonal mechanisms in human biology and psychology)
Transmission tends to be imperfect and unpredictable, with practitioners themselves often unable to explain exactly what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, what impact to expect, or who might be susceptible
There is a much wider range of weird conscious experiences that normal humans can have than you would expect, and most people don’t talk about their weird experiences
It can be extremely disorienting, frightening, and destabilizing for people to have to integrate novel experiential manipulation via a mechanism that they can’t easily fold into their current assumptions about reality
It might sound like you can boil these claims down to “humans can affect the conscious experience of themselves and others non-verbally, and people experience weird things sometimes, which can frighten them,” but I want to stress that you should probably expand whatever priors you have about how malleable experience can be and how many forms transmission can take, in addition to accepting the idea that these can be intentionally developed skills.
Basically all esoteric practice comes down to different methods to hone the ability to either intentionally create/trigger or become more receptive to weird conscious experiences, and in some cases directed experiences. Some of these are useful. Some are detrimental. There seems to be wide variation in utility, innate ability, and receptivity.
You can’t go too far down this rabbit hole without smashing into questions about consciousness, reality, variations in subjective experience, and philosophy. If you accept my prior claims, I’m really talking about the ability to adjust conscious individual experience. Asking “What can magick actually do?” is like asking “What can consciousness actually do?”
Consciousness defines your entire experience of reality, scope of malleability unknown.
I don’t know the actual degree to which either your reality or “objective” reality (to the extent that it exists), is malleable by any extraordinary means. Some of the more extraordinary claims made by people who perform faith healing, for example, if we assume they’re doing something with consciousness-or-experience affecting transmission, force hard skeptics to deal with things like the possibility of an unconventionally-triggered (and perhaps turbocharged) placebo effect that works just as it does for conventional doctors… that is, unreliably and with varied degrees of scope, but still some level of efficacy.
Harder questions come up around the degree to which these practices might actually be bending “reality,” when you get into things like parapsychology experiments around ESP and remote viewing providing concrete information that the readers shouldn’t have access to… just not reliably.
The “it works but not reliably” problem is at the heart of the entire scientific debate around woo. For some people, this is a deal-breaking issue that makes it neither verifiable nor disprovable and points to the obvious fraud and self-deception of anyone confused or gullible enough to buy into the attendant frameworks.
For others, it points to a need to try to explore the reasons behind why this apparent interplay of consciousness and reality distortion produces sometimes verifiable but inconsistent effects, and all we can do is test, observe, and theorize.
One of my favorite parapsychology scientists and writers is J.E. Kennedy, who has exhaustively discussed some possible explanations for this within the last two decades. Other writers I respect who look academically, critically, and professionally at the possibility space and have interesting things to say include Jacques Vallee, Dean Radin, and Erik Davis, all of whom approach their subjects with a healthy mix of skepticism, empiricism, and open-mindedness.
For all of the research, experimentation, and investigation I’ve done here, I really wish that I had more that was concrete and interesting to share with you. Nothing I’m saying here should be particularly eyebrow-raising for anyone, and I’m disappointed that all I can offer you in lieu of fire is a bit of smoke (and not even mirrors).
Ultimately exploring this path leads you down to questions of philosophy, belief, and faith, which might be why the overarching unifying experience of woo-adjacent exploration is more openness to spirituality broadly and less overall confidence in the mainstream narratives of the possible—something which has been noted and remarked upon by many of the leading voices in the academic study of these topics.
I’m probably more confused in both directions about the “real” impact of woo than I was when I started this endeavor. I’m more skeptical of claims along some boundary lines (particularly those that claim to directly manipulate tangible consensus reality), but more persuaded of claims about perception influence and information access via extraordinary (though inconsistent) means that can lead to tangible impacts on consensus reality.
Ironically and perhaps infuriatingly, this muddled confusion is exactly what I was told I would find three years ago by one of my first (still-skeptical) tarot spread throws when I asked about the personal impact of seriously researching woo in this way.
I’m forced to add that eerily prescient divinatory experience to my list of weird coincidences; yet another unverifiable example of something that could just be random chance, faulty memory, or self-deception—and yet, for me, it remains an unsettlingly uncanny synchronicity that playfully teases at something more profound and important to discover, just beyond my grasp.
Anyone who believes that they’re chasing genuine flashes of Olympian fire through the deeper reaches of woo should remain cautious that they’re not just pursuing ephemeral will-o'-the-wisps into a psychological quagmire of self-delusion. As I noted when I wrote my primer on the risks of studying magick, there are plenty of dead ends and sinkholes along the path that can lead people into psychologically, socially, or even physically damaging outcomes (and all from entirely mundane or materialist influences). It’s all too easy to get lost in the sauce of fantastical claims and novel, bizarre experiences—especially with so much evidence hinting that there’s something real and tangible to be discovered in the broad exploration of High Weirdness.
Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. However, any chaos magician will tell you to ignore the evidence and just do things if they work for you. The truth, as it always has been, is muddy and distorted.
As for me, I remain (as ever) in my dual stance of skeptical, open curiosity. To me, there absolutely does seem to be something valuable here that’s worthy of further study and experimentation…
I’m just still not quite sure what it is.
I would like to make a respectful reflection (need to say this because words can look different written than spoken). I don't think one can meaningfully engage the occult from a research perspective. I mean, yes, data can be collected and crunched, but ultimately occult practices are about practice, not theory… an embodied phenomenological approach is required. And that practice requires a level of dedication that most don't have (no value judgement here).
I understand that many people don't want to make the investment of time without knowing the value of what they are trying to achieve… the proof that it works. It's a paradox from the outside, but from the inside, from the viewpoint of a practitioner, there is no choice, only a creative impulse to practice that must be followed.
Ps, thanks for the wonderful interviews you did on your podcast around this topic, particularly with Daniel Ingram. I loved listening!
Have you watched the documentary series "Hellier" in your woo journey? I'd be super interested to hear your take on it, given the perspective you describe is so tantalizingly balanced!