Mailbag: Why I Am Not a Supernaturalist

Following my predictable banning from the Fruitcake Factory (aka The Temple of Thelema forums), a relatively new regular engaged with me briefly in private message correspondence regarding my lack of belief in the supernatural (by the way, to be fair to Eshelman, he tolerated the presence of critical questions on his forums much longer than I thought he would, even if he refused to answer them. So, credit where credit’s due. I definitely made my point).

In the thread right before the banning took place, I was explaining how I didn’t start off life as some rabid materialist: for a time, I even believed in supernatural things. And, as I said on the thread, one of the reasons I don’t believe in this stuff anymore is that I wised up and realized that daydreams and subjectively trusting how it all feels to me doesn’t demonstrate the actual existence of “powers” or “other worlds.

This prompted a question from my interlocutor: “How did you go about ‘wising up’? What was your process of ‘realization’?

He follows this up with speculation about me, musing that perhaps I was “not able to manifest results and so [I] determined that results are not manifestable.” Ah, classic believer script "you aren't doin' it right!"...

The question he asked, though, is a really good one, and one I’m not sure I’ve written about on the blog before. My response to him resembled an answer I gave to a similar question elsewhere on those forums, so for this post, I’m editing my responses together to give as comprehensive an answer (and hopefully as instructive an answer) as possible.

Read on for my answer to this question.

How did you go about "wising up"? What was your process of "realization"?

When I said that I believed these things, I meant that I thought they were true because I thought I was personally experiencing “results” from them.

For a period of several years, I engaged in practices including Enochian (scrying the aethyrs and invoking beings for practical workings), invoking deities, charging talismans, the middle pillar, banishings, and some consecration-type rituals (Opening by Watchtower and Reguli were among my favorites).

I didn’t just jump into these practices. I spent a substantial period of that time performing the basics. Banishing rituals (the LBRP more times than I can count, eventually switching over to the Star Ruby for a boatload of times) and meditation (Liber E-type exercises) were the bread and butter of my practices, along with Resh. I also engaged in regular study of the Holy Books to “enflame myself with prayer.”


I experimented with “developing” my psychic abilities to “scry” and explore “astral” realms in the “Body of Light.” I made a fairly comprehensive study of the Enochian system (mostly Golden Dawn, but I did enough reading to see where the “mistakes” in their system are), including drawing and coloring my own Enochian tablets.

I worked very slowly and diligently, and I produced results. Or so I thought. On many occasions, coincidences followed my workings that seemingly fulfilled the purpose of the operation.

I’ll give an example of a typical working method: I would determine the sort of angel that would be useful for my purpose and dig an appropriate name out of the corresponding Enochian tablet. I would banish, open the temple in the appropriate element, recite the necessary calls, and recite a summons in Enochian. A lot of people say that Enochian is the most "powerful" system of magick, and they say this for good reason: if the rite is properly performed, an angel appears every single time. Once the angel appeared in the circle, I would converse with it and make a request before giving it a license to depart. I got a lot of the things I asked the angels for, sometimes through coincidences that appeared "miraculous."

When I say that angels "appeared," I mean I could "see" them in my imagination and could have conversations with them, in which I actually didn't know what they were going to say next (in a very similar way to creating a character in a short story or novel and just "watching" the imagination to see what this character would do in a certain situation, not knowing beforehand how the character will act: made up characters really do have "personalities" of their own and do take actions -- sometimes unexpected actions -- powered by the imagination of the creator).

The best analogy I can come up with for this stuff is that I was doing something akin to an actor slipping into a role: in order to act effectively, an actor has to at least partially convince himself that he is the character he's playing. Something very similar happened: I threw myself into my magical performances, and I had to -- for the duration of the operation -- convince myself that I really was a magician conversing with a spirit being.


But did I really believe that playing make believe in my attic was causing coincidences to occur? Looking back on all of it over a decade later, I can only speculate how seriously I believed that there was actually something supernatural going on. My practices were certainly fun and weren’t hurting anybody, and I think I had kinda talked myself into a murky position of saying, “Gee, physics says everything’s made of energy, so who’s to say that my vibrations of these mystical words aren’t subtly influencing that energy and “nudging” manifestations of reality in the direction I want?” You know, the kind of dafto nonsense that I would laugh at today. On another level, though, I think I was perfectly aware that my “workings” wouldn’t hold up to any kind of real scrutiny, so I sort of compartmentalized the supernatural stuff. In other words, I told myself all kinds of silly lies and platitudes to keep up the fun game playing.

So, to answer your question in a really roundabout way, I believed in this stuff because I thought I was causing results to happen. Visions, explorations of “other worlds,” and coincidences within the “mundane” world.

So why did I stop believing all of that?

I eventually wanted to be sure that these beliefs were actually accurate and not just some security blanket to make me feel better. I started to care about truth, to be blunt about it. And I knew the best way to do this was to subject my beliefs to critical scrutiny, for the truth has nothing to fear from investigation.

The thing that prompted me to embark upon that investigation was looking around at the world and seeing how incredibly common self-delusion is, particularly in “spiritual” matters.

For starters, every single religion is populated by people who claim they have “experiential knowledge” of certain metaphysical claims, and these metaphysical claims are all mutually-exclusive with the metaphysical claims made by people in other religions. There are lots of people who have “personal experience” of the Catholic god and lots of people with “personal experience” of the Baptist god and lots of people with “personal experience” of the 1816 Revised Council Baptist god, lots of people with “personal experience” of the Hindu pantheon, etc., etc.

There are other people who have “personal experience” that all these gods are true and are different ways of expressing One Truth. This metaphysical claim is mutually exclusive with all the other metaphysical claims listed above.

All of these mutually exclusive positions are supported by “personal experience.”

Now, it’s obvious that all these different claims can’t be right at once. In fact, only one set of these metaphysical claims – at most – could possibly be right, which means that everyone else is deluding themselves (or is being misled by demons or something).


Further, lots of people think that they can work magic to affect the physical world (whether they call this magic “prayer” or “spells” or whatever). Of course, this magic is either trivial (“I prayed to St. Anthony and found my lots keys! Huzzah!”) or stuff that probably would have just happened on its own anyway (“We prayed for Grandpa, and his cancer went into remission! Huzzah! What’s that? Cancer naturally goes into remission all by itself without prayer? Go away.”) Certainly, there’s no reason to think that any of this magic is causing anything to happen (a study a few years back, funded by a group that was trying to prove that prayer works, demonstrated that praying for sick people has no effect, except that the ones who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications).

When we combine the magic-stuff with the mutually-exclusive-metaphysical-claims stuff, we really see the problem. People attribute their undemonstrable prayers/magic to their metaphysical claims, the ones that conflict with each other.

Basically, this demonstrates that nearly everyone is deluding themselves, and nobody has any way to know which set of metaphysical beliefs, if any, is correct. Which means that every one of these people is accepting claims supported by insufficient evidence.

Now I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if this “spiritual” stuff were nothing more than a harmless hobby, like using silly putty on the comic pages. You know, something you just do for fun and then set aside when you live the rest of your life. But it’s not. Beliefs inform actions.

Routinely, people do awful things because of undemonstrated beliefs. As an obvious example, religious folks flew planes into two buildings back in 2001 because they thought their invisible buddy wanted them to do it. People think their invisible buddy “hates fags” so they oppose homosexual rights. They think their invisible buddy wants them to oppose reasonable science education, sex education, history education. They horribly oppress women, give donations to odious rings of child-abusing con-men, tell people that it’s their duty to stay in loveless or abusive relationships and lots and lots of other insane-o things. And all that is without mentioning the crusades and the dark ages and witch burnings, quaint little historical episodes that drew their direct support from spiritual texts…thankfully, the enlightenment dragged the Christian religion kicking and screaming out of the dark ages, which is precisely why no one is trying to burn Thelemites at the stake for practicing “magick” and why no one is trying to stone unruly children, which is what the Bible says to do to them. Unfortunately, no one’s bothered dragging our Muslim neighbors out of the dark ages, which is why we still sometimes hear about women in Islamic countries being executed for the crime of letting themselves be raped.


Irrational beliefs lead to terrible consequences, and even the relatively harmless religious moderates, like the fluffly new agers, lend credence and cover to these noxious beliefs by approving the idea of accepting claims without sufficient evidence. I know that many supernaturalists aren’t *directly* harmful (although a lot of them are), but they support irrational worldviews that make a virtue out of having low evidentiary standards. Sure, many of those supernaturalists might agree with me that the people I discuss in the above paragraph are doing awful things, but they fundamentally agree with those other people that it’s okay to accept claims because one feels like it or because one (thinks) that one has “experienced” these claims as true.

If you hold supernatural beliefs – or “paranormal beliefs” or whatever you want to call them – you are an enabler.

[Incidentally, it’s no help to your position to bring up Hitler and Stalin, both of whom were dogmatic believers in irrational things.]

Please be aware that I’m not trying to present a consequentialist argument. I’m not arguing that irrational beliefs are wrong because they lead to bad actions. I’m saying that the bad actions comprised one reason for my turning a more critical eye to these beliefs, and that critical evaluation led to the realization that they’re not supported.

So that’s more or less the background. Once I realized that it’s easy to delude oneself – and that we are forced to conclude that literally everybody, except for maybe one group, is deluding themselves – I had to make sure that I wasn’t one of the people deluding himself. And to do that, I couldn’t just accept claims because I “felt” they were true or because I got the warm and fuzzies when I did a practice or because some coincidence happened that seemed to fulfill a (vaguely defined) “goal” of a magical operation. After all, that was the same kind of evidence that the deluded people were using.

So that forced me to think about what “real” actually means. What do I mean when I say that something is “real” or that a claim is “true”? Basically, when I say that I think a claim is true, I’m saying that it’s demonstrable in some way that distinguishes it from nothing.

As an example, let’s say we’ve got someone who is completely colorblind. How could you prove to him that color exists? This is a fun example, because some dumbass believers sometimes compare non-believers to the colorblind (“You just can’t experience what I’m talking about! So trying to ‘prove’ this claim to you would be like trying to ‘prove’ color to the colorblind!”)

But, unfortunately for the believers, it’s easy to prove that color exists. Just put the colorblind guy in a room with five boxes, each painted a different color. Then put a ball in the red box, leave the room, and let the colorblind guy mix up the boxes. Then come back in the room and immediately tell him which box has the ball in it.

If you could do that over and over again – which you obviously could – you will have proven to the colorblind guy, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that there is something enabling you to detect where the ball is each time. That’s because color is a real thing that has real effects in the real world. It’s detectable and demonstrable, and you don’t have to see it yourself to be able to know that it’s demonstrable.


And that’s the thing about these supernatural claims. There’s no evidence that demonstrates that they are anything at all. Trust me, I’ve looked. The history of investigations into these “paranormal” phenomena is failure after failure after failure after failure. Meanwhile, if some of these paranormal things actually existed in the way that practitioners claim that they do, it would be child’s play to demonstrate them.


Look, it’s great that you’re holding out hope for some of these claims – and as soon as there’s evidence, I’ll be the first one to say that I was wrong – but how many failures do there have to be before you admit (at least tentatively) that there are better avenues to investigate? If I claim that throwing an egg off your roof will instantly make you a millionaire, how many eggs do you have to splatter on the ground before you say, “Gee, this claim probably isn’t true”? A hundred eggs? A thousand? Sure, you can’t categorically prove that my claim is false, but how many failures before you say that it’s probably not worth the time to keep investigating, especially since it flies in the face of everything we already know?