Thoughts on "Psychic Attack"

SoulJournings has an interview up with Jason Miller of Strategic Sorcery in which Jason discusses his views on psychic and magical attacks. Jason and I have disagreed on this topic a number of times in the past, both here and over at his blog. He believes that effective magical attacks are relatively common, whereas I'm of the opinion that a person claiming to be under such attack is much more likely to be mentally ill than under some magician's curse. Some of that disagreement is undoubtedly due to differences in our experiences. Just about every person who has ever approached me for help with a psychic attack situation has turned out to have serious psychological problems. From the interview it sounds like Jason, on the other hand, has run across a lot of people who he believes are dealing with genuine magical attacks.

Throughout the last 20 years, even before I started officially doing magick professionally, people always seemed to find me when they needed this kind of help. Even other Witches and Magicians, with more years of practice behind them, have looked for help because when the situation came up, they were not prepared for it.

As an aside, it really surprises me that anyone with years of experience practicing magick wouldn't be able to do an effective banishing ritual, but I guess the question here is whether these people had years of practice or years of study. Just knowing how to do something won't necessarily solve a problem if you have little or no experience applying that knowledge. There are methods you can use to cast a curse that can't be easily banished, but most practitioners I've run across aren't familiar with them so I doubt that they are widely used. The LBRP/LBRH combination will shut down most curses, and anything that can survive a banishing field like that can still be stopped by a decent Saturn or Mars evocation. Those two planets can be used for cursing, but they can also shut curses down because they are the "rulers" of that class of phenomena.

Though it is true that many people who seek help with psychic attack are either bringing their problems on themselves or just having a normal run of bad luck, it is also true that some practitioners, especially those with training in Western systems like Wicca or Ceremonial Magic, tend to dismiss any claim at psychic attack out of hand. This is because, in an attempt to make Witchcraft and magick more palatable to the general public, the books all reiterate how safe it all is and how no real Witch or Magician would ever do harmful magick because of the Wiccan Rede or Karma or something like that.

If somebody comes to me with a claim of psychic attack, I do have a tendancy to dismiss it - but not because I believe in the Wiccan Rede or the bizarre Western notion of how Karma works. I also couldn't care less whether or not magick seems "palatable to the general public." Rather, I think it's a simple matter of mathematics. In my experience only a small percentage of the population has the requisite combination of aptitude and training for producing effective macrocosmic magical effects, and while most of those magicians will cast a curse on someone from time to time it isn't what they spend the majority of their time doing. On the other side of the equation, about one person in four in our society has some form of mental illness. These numbers suggest that while there are a lot of people with psychological problems, far fewer will have actually been targeted with curses performed by effective macrocosmic magicians. However, Jason follows the comments above with a good point that I had not really considered.

The truth is that most magickal attacks do not emanate from other people, but from spirits or nature or places that are reacting to how our human lifestyle (air pollution, damming rivers, dumping trash, country music, etc.) infringes onto their space. The primary role of the shaman was to address these imbalances, and even today, this is a huge part of medicine in traditional cultures.

My image of a psychic attack is one individual or group using some sort of magick against another, and perhaps this is a bit shortsighted of me. I tend to separate out curses cast by individuals or groups from what Jason calls a "crossed condition," which is caused by exposure to certain sorts of environmental magical energy rather than the result of an targeted attack. Jason groups them together on the grounds that from a practical standpoint they are addressed in much the same way, so perhaps part of our disagreement over this is just terminology. Most magicians including myself have at times found themselves in situations where something environmental seems to be disturbing their spiritual energy, though I will say that I have yet to come across one of those that survives my usual daily practice regimen. Also, as far as I can tell magicians who keep up a solid, regular practice seem to be less susceptible to them.

That said, attacks from other Magicians and Witches do happen more often than most people are willing to admit. Anyone that stocks a lot of material used in Hoodoo, for instance, will find that cursing materials are a big seller.

I don't deny that there are a lot of people out there trying to curse other people, but what I dispute is how effective those people really are. Casting a spell with a targeted, measurable macrocosmic effect is not easy. If it were the effectiveness of magick would be an undisputed scientific fact. Part of the reason that spells are so difficult to test empirically is that so few people can perform them in such a way that they produce noticeable, tangible results. An effective curse consists of a lot more than hitting up the local occult store for some Anna Riva war water and splashing it on somebody's doorstep. The power comes from the magician, the materials just help to focus the effect.

Often, however, people that have been cursed or suspect that they have been cursed will have someone in mind as the attacker. They either know that they have ticked off someone that knows magick and is not morally opposed to using it for justice or revenge (largely a matter of perspective), or they know someone that might seek a professional’s services in doing the same.

One of the things that makes me most skeptical about any claim of psychic attack is when the purported victim has no idea why they have been cursed or who might have done it. I would go so far as to say that I think anybody who is under a curse cast by a magician (as opposed to a crossed condition or other environmental effect) is going to know what they did to provoke it and who they did it to. That's because cursing is not generally done casually or on a whim by practitioners experienced enough to get tangible results. This is also true of individuals who hire magicians to cast curses for them - I have a hard time imagining somebody paying a practitioner a lot of money to cast a curse "just for the heck of it."

Thankfully, the treatment for imaginary attack and real attack is the same. Just do the cleansing and protection; It wont hurt. If people keep coming back again and again because they are claiming that they are constantly under attack, then there is a good chance that they are imagining it or creating the situation for drama.

See, the latter is what I keep running into whenever I get approached by somebody who's supposedly "under attack." In those situations, psychiatric drugs generally work better than counter-curses. It's always possible that in reality I'm the one with the unusual set of experiences and genuine attacks are much more common than I currently believe, but so far I haven't seen much evidence of it in my daily life. It would be interesting to try and put together some sort of a study to resolve the question, if such a thing is even possible given all the variables that would have to be taken into account.