So Veggie-Devil is Real?

Veggie-Devil was supposed to be a joke. An acquaintance of mine came up with it many years ago after dealing with one too many gothy kids in the Twin Cities occult community running around calling themselves Satanists, when really they were more like fashion victims. For whatever reason, one of the things that the members of this group seemed to all have in common was a deep-seated hatred of hippies. Thus a legend was born.

The basic idea is pretty simple. Satan is a hippie. He's vegan because he's part animal and doesn't want anyone hurting his friends. He wears tie-dye and special Birkenstocks that fit his cloven hooves. He smokes pot. He's environmentally conscious and wants world peace. And so forth. So whenever one of those black-clad, would-be Satanists would start going on about what a bad-ass Satan was, we would regale them with tales of Veggie-Devil.

Most of them laughed it off, but there were a few people who seemed generally bothered by the idea. The more parallels we could draw between hippies and Satan, the more upset they got. Needless to say, in true primate fashion, that prompted even more stories, and eventually an entire ethos that we dubbed "Eco-Satanism." It taught that the apocalypse was really an ecological catastrophe, so Satan opposed God by working to save the environment.

At one point on my old website I even created a satirical "Eco-Satanist Home Page." Sadly, a search through the Internet archive failed to turn up a cached version of it, but in my opinion it was pretty darn funny. Maybe I'll post it here someday if I can find a saved version of it on one of my home machines. At any rate, Veggie-Devil being a joke and all, imagine my surprise when I came upon the following on my Facebook feed.

Horror Movie Demons are Out to Get You

A few weeks ago Pat Robertson said something reasonable, pointing out just how silly Ken Ham and his young-Earth buddies are for insisting that Bishop Ussher's interpretation of Bible chronology somehow rises to the level of scriptural infallibility. However, anyone hoping that the prominent televangelist might have turned over a new leaf incorporating critical thinking will be disappointed by his latest comments. According to Robertson, horror movie demons can attack you. Or possess you. Or, at the very least, mess up your car.

The octogenarian televangelist responded to a viewer who told him that she had been watching “a horror movie the other day on the recommendation of others” and a few days later got into “an accident leaving church.” She asked Robertson (God only know why) if the “creepy movie caused a curse — or the Lord’s protection to be lifted from me?”

Robertson, of course, went for it, and suggested that by choosing to watch the ”creepy movie” might have given a demon “permission” to possess her — or to cause a car wreck. Or something. “This thing may be living around you and what you need to do again is speak it — command this thing to leave — and ask God to forgive you. I know that’s weird but these things can happen.”

It's kind of amusing to see Robertson essentially advocating a position taken by some of the more extreme chaos magicians, that fictional entities can produce physical events. While it's true that magicians can create artificial spirits or servitors that can go on to cause magical effects, a fictional character is just that - fictional. It exists within the microcosmic realm only unless a talented magician decides to use it as a model for some sort of specific creation. That requires a real magical procedure, so it can't just happen by accident.

Meet the Deadraisers

Resurrection has been part of the Christian tradition since its inception. Not only is Jesus said to have risen from the dead, but according to the Gospels he famously raised Lazarus as well. In the modern era, the most extreme case of using resurrection for personal advantage was probably that of David Koresh. The preacher better known for his role in the Waco standoff previously challenged a rival for control of his sect to a sort of "resurrection duel."

Koresh obtained a corpse, challenged his rival to resurrect the body at a predetermined location, and then rather than actually show up to try it himself just called the cops. The rival was arrested and jailed for tampering with a dead body, and thus was no longer in a position to challenge Koresh - who went on to take over the group and renamed the sect "Branch Davidians" after himself.

Now according to this story, a new group may be giving Koresh a run for his money. A group called the "Dead Raising Team" led by an evangelical Christian named Tyler Johnson is appearing in a new documentary called Deadraiser. The film follows the group as they visit mortuaries and hospitals looking for bodies on which to practice their faith healing techniques. Spoiler alert: it never actually works.

Johnson is unwilling to provide successful case studies. And in general, the proof that believers cite is a bit unconvincing ­– for example, there is an American heart surgeon who allegedly brought a heart attack patient back from the dead with prayer … oh, and a defibrillator. Other doctors find the story entirely unremarkable. One wonders why.

Introduction to the Great Table

The following is the text of a presentation I gave over the weekend at Leaping Laughter Lodge based on material from my latest book, Mastering the Great Table, as a follow-up to my previous Introduction to the Heptarchia Mystica presentation. The procedure outlined here is Dee's grimoire evocation method, but the book includes an expanded template that shows how to incorporate modern ritual forms into the basic structure.

The Enochian magical system of Dr. John Dee and scryer Edward Kelley has inspired ritual magicians for centuries. Dee’s spirit diaries were first published in 1659 by Meric Causaubon, a clergyman who sought to discredit personal spiritual revelations by making the case that even John Dee, one of the most intelligent men of his age, was nonetheless taken in by evil spirits. Causaubon’s sixty-page preface to this effect was mostly ignored, but his edition of the diaries, A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (normally abbreviated TFR by modern magicians) made Dee’s work available to an audience for the first time.

Birth Season and Brain Development

Twenty years ago when I was considering going for a graduate degree in neuroscience this was one of the studies that I wanted to perform if I eventually became a research scientist. It occurred to me as an undergraduate that some of the tenets of astrology might be derived from observations based on birth seasons. I live in Minnesota, where the seasonal variations are quite severe, and it only made sense that the month in which a child was born would influence how they experienced their first year of life, and potentially set them on a cycle of activities that could influence their personality development. For example, a baby born at the beginning of winter would spend his or her first several months indoors, while a baby born at the beginning of summer would have access to outdoor exposure right away. Now a neuroscience researcher has performed such a study, and identified a specific brain characteristic that seems to correlate with birth seasons.

The season we’re born in can have far-reaching consequences. For instance, Spring babies are more likely than others to develop schizophrenia later in life, whereas Summer babies tend to grow up to be more sensation seeking. There are many more of these so-called season of birth effects. Scientists aren’t sure, but they think such patterns could be due (among other things) to mothers’ and infants’ exposure to viruses over the Winter period, or to the amount of daylight they’re exposed to, either or both of which could influence genetic expression during early development. Now Spiro Pantazatos, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Center, has studied links between season of birth and brain structure in healthy adults. He thinks the association between season of birth and psychiatric and behavioural outcomes later in life could be mediated by genetic factors that affect the growth of the brain.

Pantazatos has analysed MRI brain scans taken from 550 healthy men and women at hospitals in London, England. In one analysis he looked to see if there were any particular areas of the brain that differed between people according to the season they were born in. He defined the seasons as follows: Winter (Dec 23 to March 19); Spring (March 22 to June 19); Summer (June 22 to September 21); and Fall (September 24 to December 20). For the men only, he found that those born in the Fall and Winter tended to have more grey matter in a region known as the left superior temporal sulcus (STG), as compared with men born in Spring and Summer. Looking month by month, men born at the end of December tended to have the most grey matter in this region; men born at the end of June tended to have the least.

This particular correlation between season and brain structure only seems to hold for men, but with the way that protosciences work that could be enough to suggest a relationship between birth season and particular traits. The sifting process of information gathering in such disciplines is based on holding onto information that seems to valid and discarding relationships that fail to hold up over time. It is far more vulnerable to error and cognitive bias than formal scientific inquiry, but the observations thus accumulated can suggest potential areas for more rigorous inquiry. It's too bad that anything dubbed "paranormal" has gotten so little attention in academic circles, but some of that is starting to turn around with studies like this one and others relating brain activity to altered states of consciousness such as those employed in both meditation and magical operations.

Studying Out of Body Experiences

Here's a fascinating case study, a Canadian graduate student who claims to be able to induce out-of-body experiences at will. One of the biggest problems with studying OOBE's is that usually it's hard to predict when they will occur. Therefore, controlled scientific experiments on this phenomenon pretty much require at least a small population of such subjects. Experimenters are hopeful that more will be found, as the woman only brought it up during a psychology class that discussed how rare such experiences actually are. She thought everybody could just do it.

The 24-year-old "continued to perform this experience as she grew up assuming, as mentioned, that 'everyone could do it.'" This is how she described her out-of-body experiences: "She was able to see herself rotating in the air above her body, lying flat, and rolling along with the horizontal plane. She reported sometimes watching herself move from above but remained aware of her unmoving “real” body. The participant reported no particular emotions linked to the experience."

An unusual find, wrote the scientists, University of Ottawa researchers Andra M. Smith and Claude Messier--this is the first person to be studied able to have this type of experience on demand, and without any brain abnormalities. Instead of an "out-of-body" experience, however, the researchers termed it a "extra-corporeal experience" (ECE), in part because it lacks the strong emotions that often go hand-in-hand (such as shock & awe, for example).

To better understand what was going on, the researchers conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of her brain. They found that it surprisingly involved a "strong deactivation of the visual cortex." Instead, the experience "activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery," such as mental representations of bodily movement.

Even without the strong emotions, I think it's likely that what the subject is experiencing could very well be the same process. Those strong emotions could be the result of cognitive dissonance stemming from the surprise of such an unusual experience, whereas the intensity just won't be the same for someone who does it all the time. The cognitive dissonance would also imprint the memory of a singular experience much more strongly.

While it's fascinating to see the brain activity during an OOBE, I'm hoping that researchers will take the next step and see if the woman can actually obtain new information while "out of her body." With a subject who can do it at will, that's extremely easy to test - just write down an unknown word and put it someplace where she could only see it by floating or something similar. It would really be a shame for no such tests to be conducted just because researchers assume that nothing paranormal is going on.

Alchemy and Modern Science

When I talk about a pre-scientific discipline I prefer the term "protoscience" to "pseudoscience." Skeptics, on the other hand, like the latter mostly because it's more pejorative. The idea that disciplines failing to conform to the formal scientific method are useless is simply wrong. They may not be as useful in terms of producing reliable results, but they can still reveal phenomena that may prove amenable to scientific inquiry down the road.

A classic example of this is herbalism. Traditional systems of herbology do in fact identify useful medicines, many of which have been picked up by mainstream pharmaceutical manufacturers. The difference is that in such disciplines the process of discovery is more organic - over a long period of time, a sort of sifting process retains herbal medicines that seem to work while discarding those that don't. It's much slower and more susceptible to error than double-blind studies, but much of the time it can reach similar conclusions.

According to this article from Smithsonian, the same may be true for alchemy. Alchemical writings are difficult to study because alchemists used codes and allegories to conceal the nature of their work from the uninitiated, but as it turns out many of them were doing real protoscientific work that would later become the basis of modern chemistry.

Great Table Presentation

For those of you who live in the Twin Cities area or happen to be passing through, I will be presenting an introductory lecture on the Great Table or Watchtowers this Saturday, March 8th, at Leaping Laughter Lodge in Minneapolis, Minnesota at 7:30 PM. The talk will be based on the ritual template from my new book, Mastering the Great Table.

Like my previous presentation on the Heptarchia Mystica, it will focus on working with the angels of the Watchtower quadrants along the lines of the original system as revealed to John Dee and Edward Kelley, rather than the Golden Dawn approach or "Neo-Enochian" methods that combine techniques like pentagram and hexagram rituals with the original grimoire system.

A link to the event can be found here, and directions to the Lodge can be found here. For those of you in the area with an interest in Enochian magick, I hope that you will be able to make it. In addition to the lecture itself I will have books available for sale and will be on hand to answer any questions you might have about the Enochian system.