Paranormal Science

The ParanormalScience.org site could use your help.  We’re looking for people to write news articles summarizing the latest in the scientific study of the paranormal as well as people to collaborate on research.  The Members’ Section has a number of useful collaboration tools including FAQs, Wiki, personal blogs, shared files, forums, and more.  We’d like to encourage you to come and make use of these tools.

We’d also like to thank Dr. Dean Radin, who, while not able to actively participate here due to a very busy schedule, has graciously allowed us to syndicate his personal blog articles.  You can read them here (in the Syndicated News category)  or at his blog site here.  We hope to add other select, quality news feeds as soon as we obtain permission from the authors.

You can find all the local posts without the RSS feeds under the General Category by clicking here.

This comes from a good fried of the webmaster here:

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This is a call for speakers for a esoteric conference coming up on November 12-14, 2010 in Northampton, Massachusetts.The modern world is (sometimes painfully) beginning to integrate the reality of the “inexplicable” and “unseen” into our existing views of reality. Sometimes it seems that scientists studying quantum physics are reaching the same conclusions about reality that magicians have been describing for centuries. At this conference we are trying to bring together those who have studied these effects from every venue- from science and magick, from folklore and religion, dowsers, and mediums and healers. When we pool our findings, we will be able to start building on them, and make practical use of these phenomena (as well has having the fun and satisfaction of understanding better how the world works).
We are still looking for speakers- especially those who aren’t worried about rubbing elbows with the “kooks”. Please look at our website and see how valuable your contribution would be; we look forward to hearing from you.

Previously, I blogged that The Hidden Whisper was available on Apple products through their iBooks...

"A series of quantum experiments shows that measurements performed in the future can influence the present." Read the article in Discover magazine.

Those of us conducting and publishing experiments in presentiment and precognition have been empirically demonstrating varieties of retrocausation for decades.

I look forward to the day when prejudices decline to the point that we don't have to wait for a few physicists to seriously entertain a topic before popular science editors feel comfortable enough to report on well established empirical effects.

Daryl Bem's article, "Feeling the future," is now in press in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, an American Psychological Association high impact journal. You can download a preprint of the article from here.



The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was .21, and all but one of them yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of .42. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi
are also discussed.

Following up the last post, here comes a report on the esotericism panels at the IAHR in Toronto, organized by Marco Pasi. As you can read about below, they go straight into a central debate in the field of esotericism studies at the moment.

On Thursday and Friday, we had three sessions dedicated to exploring one of the persistent conceptual and methodological problems in research on esotericism: The qualifying term “Western”. Whence from, why, and what to do with it?

With a total of ten papers, I won’t go into details on all that was said (also, the second post over at Heteropraxis talked about this). In stead, I can systematize them into three groups: Historical reflections on the origins of a “western” identity for esotericism; theoretical and methodological reflections on the analytical content, usefulness, restrictions, and future of the word; and specific case studies, dealing with the east-west dynamic in esotericism research.

In the latter category belongs Henrik Bogdan’s paper on the obscure Holy Order of Krishna, based in India, which appropriated parts of Aleister Crowley’s thelemic doctrine and fused it with Hindu conceptions. An interesting and little known case indeed, based on Bogdan’s research for the recently published book Brother Curwen, Brother Crowley: A Correspondence, which presents the documentary evidence. Accidentally, another Crowley-related paper may be mentioned in this category, namely John L. Crow’s analysis of the geographic distribution of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and its spread over time. The most interesting thing about Crow’s paper was his demonstration of the use of quantitative data and mapping techniques based on the skillful use of software for analysing modern and contemporary esoteric currents. Finally, a paper which certainly went from discussion of case, but in the direction of questioning more analytic conceptions, was Gordan Djurdjevic’s, on the analysis of tantric and yogic practices, texts and currents under the rubric of esotericism. This led to an interesting debate, which I think touched the core of the problem: whether the term “esotericism” should be used as a largely ahistorical analytic construct, or taken to signify specific historical currents (more on that in a bit).

Next, however, I should mention the (in my opinion) very interesting work which is now being done into digging up the genalogy of the notion of  esotericism as a western phenomenon. Here we had two papers in particular, that follow each other only to a certain point.

First, my colleague and supervisor Wouter J. Hanegraaff has spent the last half decade researching this and related issues (sneak advertisement: his next book will clarify all of this…). Put (very) shortly: Wouter sees the concept of esotericism (as opposed to the word on the one hand, and the specific authors, currents, texts, etc. typically covered by it on the other), i.e. the idea that certain streams of thought and practice have something in common which is now recognized by the academy as “esotericism”, as arising from a complicated set of historical processes. We may however attempt to identify two major steps: one “positive” the other “negative”.

The first is the formation of a certain way of remembering the past, of historiography if you will (but more properly, perhaps, mnemohistory), in the renaissance. This has to do with such concepts as prisca theologia and philosophia perennis – visions of wisdom and truth, about religion, the world, and, well, everything, being passed down from primordial sources (such types as Moses, Hermes, and Zarathustra), or alternatively the idea  that such ultimate truth is always present through the ages, and emerges through certain historical spokespersons. At any rate, you get genealogies of wisdom and capital-T “Tradition”. In Wouter’s thesis, the prominence of this way of thinking (or remembering) is tied up with the concept of “Platonic Orientalism” – the notion already present in late antiquity, that great philosophers had their insights from travels to “the East” and encounters with the sages of Egypt, Chaldea, or even India. At any rate: What matters here is that, in the renaissance, this gave rise to attempts at including pagan authors in the Christian, or “pre-Christian Christian” canon. And with it the revival of magic as a part of Christian religious praxis.

This, then, is largely what “renaissance esotericists” such as Ficino and Pico were all about. But the identification of these and other authors (now including the whole field of Hermeticism, renaissance Platonism, Christian Kabbalah, etc.) as one large related historical entity – actually, a single related heresy – was the joint invention of Protestant and Enlightenment polemicisers, according to Wouter. The so-called anti-apologeticism of some Protestant reformers saw a threatening “hellenization of Christianity”, which to them was equal to a lapse into paganism. And hence the process of extirpating anything hellenic – hermetic, platonic, magical – started. Accidentally, in writing new histories and once again turning the mnemohistory of the “West” around, these instances of “Platonic-Hermetic Christianity” became “rejected currents” which, later – in the 19th century, were covered by the term “esotericism”.

In short: By replacing the emergence of a historical concept of esotericism in a set of polemical discourses, and their construction of collective memory, Wouter Hanegraaff argues that we find new reasons for seeing esotericism as a uniquely Western, indeed perhaps European, phenomenon.

For the full argument you need to wait for Wouter’s book.

In the meantime, on to our colleague Marco Pasi’s paper. Marco similarly takes a historical approach, but locates the idea of the “Western” in “Western esotericism” somewhat later: in the context of 19th century occultism, to be precise.

The point is the internal splits and controversies in (particularly English) occultism in the last quarter of the century, which Joscelyn Godwin has earlier described as “the parting of East and West”. Historically, this has to do with the tensions created by the dominance and high profile of the Theosophical Society – as well as, perhaps, certain expected consequences of the colonial eclecticism of Victorian occultists searching for exotic truths. We may even see this in combination with the genealogies of wisdom mentioned above: by the Victorian period, Hermes and Zarathustra got competition from Krishna, Buddha and Laotze. With the Theosophical Society’s increasing emphasis on “the East”, the “Hermetic” currents (such as the Hermetic Society, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to mention the notables) – interestingly quite in opposition to what Platonic Orientalists had been thinking – started signifying a Western identity. At this point, then, we get an internal polemic which differentiates between “Eastern” and “Western” schools of “mystery traditions”.

At this point, I will silently pass Steven Wasserstrom’s paper on hermetisms between arabic, jewish and christian contexts (a topic he in my opinion has written much better about before than he was able to show in the paper), and go directly to the last category of papers: the theoretical and methodological ones. Funnily enough, this group is all Nordic, made up by Kennet Granholm, Søren Feldtfos Thomsen, and myself (in addition, the Swedish Satanism specialist Per Faxneld was added to our panel with his paper on the uses of Lilith, after his own “Satanism studies” panel had been cancelled).

At any rate, there were some interesting overlaps in this theoretical panel. First, Kennet gave an overview of the many and ambiguous meanings of “the West”, and discussed some implications of Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilizations” in that perspective. In short, “the West” is not only imprecise and unanalytical – it also carries with it certain connotations which have wider political and cultural bearings. Kennet’s suggestion is to drop the term altogether, and stick with “esotericism” alone, however we define it.

A somewhat different approach was taken by Søren, who argued strongly for more deductive approaches in esotericism research. This point ties in with a distinction which has been made in recent years between “typological” and “historical” approaches to esotericism in the academia, where it is the historical ones that have emphasised the qualifier “Western”. The typological ones tend to be universalist and “deductive”, whereas the historicist ones are particularistic and “inductive”, in the sense that their aim is to describe phenomena. Søren’s point was that, whereas the historical-inductivist approaches have dominated the field over the last 20 years or so, there is much that could be gained from embracing deductive programmes – such as the “integral” discursive model developed by Kocku von Stuckrad. Particularly, these would be able to allow for a new and more robust comparative study, and through this forge new and more solid links with the academic community which esotericism research is supposed to be a part of: the history of religion.

I am not going to say too much about my own paper at this point. However, it took off from Søren’s point, but went in a somewhat different direction. My own analysis is that there exists a situation in which there are a number of different and irreconcilable research programmes which lay claim to the concept of esotericism – i.e. typological and historical programmes. Since these programmes have embedded the concept into very different sets of research goals, questions and methodological frameworks, I think that there can be no reconciliation in terms of definition. Not on any rational level, at least. Therefore, coming from a “science studies” analysis of my own field, invoking boundary-work, Lakatosian research programmes, and boundary objects, I argued that the solution must come rather from a political negotiation of these irreconcilable differences, and the creation of a sort of “boundary discipline”, focusing on “esotericism” as a “boundary object”. We must live with it as elusive, but we can try to agree upon a division of labour, a recognition of differences, and lay the polemical boundary-work behind us.

Enough said.

Now, there are promising prospects about a publication resulting from these sessions. If that happens, I think we will get a central and important contribution to the development of this young but blossoming field.

As shamelessly advertised on this blog before, there were several esotericism-and-science-related things happening at this years quinquennial world congress of the International Association of the History of Religion (IAHR) in Toronto. There was a three-session panel on esotericism, organized by my colleague Marco Pasi, and a two-session panel on science, religion and the arts in the early 20th century (under the title Seduced by Science), organised by my colleague Tessel Bauduin and myself. Having had more than a week now to overcome what was only a minor jet lag after all, it is time for a short report on events.

As there appears to be quite a lot to say about all this (the kind of thing you only find out when you start writing), I will split this post into two installments. In part one I will report on Seduced by Science, in the second post we will look closer at some, in my view, very interesting and important debates in the study of esotericism which came to the fore in the second panel.

First then, some quick comments on my own Seduced by Science panel. We had two sessions on Tuesday. In the first one we heard about the various uses of science  in the publications of the Rosicrucian Order AMORC (Cecile Wilson); changes in the “religion of art” as represented by certain “scientific connoisseurs” (George. C. Duncan, Richard Charles Jackson, and Ernest Savory) of the Edwardian era (William Ramp); and the influence of occult discourse, particularly Theosophy and Spiritualism, on the one hand, and scientific concepts of time and space on the other, in the art of Kandinsky and other avant-garde artists (Tessel Bauduin).

In other words there was an art theme, which was thoroughly explored in the half-hour discussion round afterwards. Some interesting distinctions emerged at this point about the influence of changes in the ealry 20th scientific culture, particularly the strain between two different tendencies: one towards increased professionalisation, the other towards popularization. Tessel’s artists were clearly chipping in on the cultural prestige of science by reading up on popularising accounts on revolutionary discoveries. William’s connoisseurs were seriously trying to apply their scientific training in methodology and the application of new devices in order to establish the authenticity of works of art (an in my view illuminating analogy was made to Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle’s hero solves mystery precisely by the type of trained observation associated with the new forensic sciences and professionalised investigation practices) – while also engaging in new ways of fooling the uninitiated by creating elaborate forgeries. Another interesting distinction arose from the fact that William, a Durkheimian sociologist of religion, employed Durkheimian notions of implicit religion to interpret the culture of art, while Tessel was looking at more explicitly “spiritualising” perspectives on art, and the influence and appropriation of ideas formulated in occult contexts. Unfortunately, though, all these interesting aspects gave us less time to discuss the strategies employed by AMORC.

In the second session Gemma Kwantes talked about the 20th century Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag and the genealogy leading from his democratizing and sometimes scientizing vision of Kabbalah down to present-day organizations such as the Kabbalah Center and Bnei Baruch. This paper gave occasion for a discussion of certain tensions, i.e. the simultaneous fascination and disgust triggered by science in certain religious spokespersons. Ashlag tried to scientize parts of his own system, and wielded at times a decent understanding of recent scientific discoveries in his articles, while at the same time arguing for its degenerative effects on society and upholding Kabbalah as a superior form of knowing.

Orlando Fernandez then entertained us with a paper on David Bohm, the eminent quantum physicist who became a disciple (or at least eager correspondent) of the failed Theosophical messiah, Jiddu Krishnamurti. Orlando tried to show us how Bohm, in his later career an icon for parts of the New Age movement, went from an esoteric understanding of the cosmos whenever he attempted to formulate grand cosmological ideas – particularly regarding “the Implicate Order”.

The final paper was Francisco Santos Silva’s, about Aleister Crowley,  his concept of the unconscious, and its role in Crowley’s theorizing about magic and religion. In short, Francisco went from Crowley’s short essay, the “Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic”, circulated with his edition of the Goetia of the Lemegeton. This is an interesting essay, as it shows Crowley developing a disenchanted, physiological and psychiatric idea of magical efficacy (I have actually written quite a bit about it myself, including in this blog post). This is an important moment in what I personally see as the “naturalization of magic”.

All in all an interesting program, which drew quite a crowd (but maybe that’s got to do with our competition with the not always as popular “cognitive theory of religion”-crowd – which was extremely visible at the conference).

In part two, I will look closer at the three sessions on esotericism, which focused on a particularly pertinent and persistent conceptual, methodological, possibly even political, problem in research on esotericism. To round off this one, though, I add some pictures that are relevant enough for the science-and-esotericism theme: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, the church of the Christian Science crowd in Toronto. It happened to be just a block away from my hotel.