Occult Experiments in the Home. Duncan Barford

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