Occult Experiments in the Home. Duncan Barford

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