Psychic Ability Versus Intuition

Back in April, Vice posted an article about a recent study in which almost one in five American claimed to have psychic abilities. I actually don't find that number particularly surprising, since the question was about psychic ability in general. Lots of people have experiences that seem psychic, which is why paranormal beliefs exist in the first place. Psychic abilities are "real" in the sense that people keep experiencing them. The debate is over what their actual nature is.

A new survey of 2,000 adults from Talker Research found that 19% of respondents straight-up believe they have psychic abilities, another 71% lean on intuition at least some of the time, and over the past year, the average person logged around 18 moments they’d describe as psychic. Only 11% said they don’t buy into it at all. So what’s actually happening?

Nobody was predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers. The experiences people pointed to were more like: knowing something was off before anyone confirmed it (33%), clocking that someone was lying (28%), or just feeling like it was time to leave a situation (26%). Twenty-five percent had a bad feeling about something before it went awry. Twenty-four percent thought of someone right before that person texted. Psychic or just paying attention? Depends on who you ask.

Adam Dickinson, a former FBI intelligence analyst, didn’t dress it up. “Intuition is your body compressing years of experience and pattern recognition into a clear signal you can feel right now.” The people who sensed dishonesty before it surfaced, or finished someone’s sentence before they got there—they’re reading data. They’ve just been doing it long enough that it no longer feels like work.

The part of the survey that deserves more attention is the anxiety overlap. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they genuinely can’t tell the difference between a real gut feeling and anxiety spiraling. Dickinson’s way of separating the two: get still, get neutral, and notice whether the inner voice feels steady or frantic. “That urgent, demanding tone is usually anxiety trying to control uncertainty,” he said. Not intuition. Just the nervous system doing its thing.

While this is a skeptical take that assumes psychic senses could not possibly exist, otherwise I don't really disagree with most of it. There is a difference between psychic awareness and intuition, but a lot of the time what is happening when you get "a feeling" about something is definitely the latter. Psychic abilities aren't called "paranormal" for nothing, after all.

Poor Oppressed Christians Target Prayer Group

No, not a Christian prayer group, a Jewish prayer group. That's the entire point here. Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jewish man living in University Heights, Ohio wanted to hold a prayer group with his friends at his home. No big deal, right? Most Christian churches start out as Bible study groups or prayer groups that meet in members' homes, and this goes on all the time with nobody saying anything about it. Extending that same privilege to a member of the Jewish faith, though, was not something that the Poor Oppressed Christians in the community could stand. The city targeted Grand, insisting that he could not pray with his friends in his home without a special permit establishing it as a "place of religious assembly." Then, when he tried to do just that, the city turned him down.

Attorneys with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and Alliance Defending Freedom represent Daniel Grand, who, in January 2021, e-mailed a dozen friends to invite them to his home to pray as a minyan, a “threshold requirement for the most sacred acts of Jewish communal worship,” that upcoming Sabbath. But when city officials found out about the e-mail, and before any minyan convened, the city demanded that Grand “immediately cease and desist any and all” uses of his home as a “place of religious assembly” unless he first obtained a special use permit, which the city requires for houses of worship in residential districts.

When Grand filed a lawsuit, federal courts closed their doors because Grand had not completed the permitting process—even though successfully obtaining a permit would have required Grand and his family to leave their home. “Every American has the right to host a prayer gathering in his home, and he certainly doesn’t need a city permit to do so. When government officials forbid that, courts must hold those individuals accountable, immediately,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “The city’s actions underscore a troubling trend of weaponizing zoning laws against people of faith while allowing other gatherings of the same size, like book clubs or poker nights, to meet without issue. We’re pleased the Supreme Court will hear this case.”

The reply brief filed in May in Grand v. City of University Heights explains that city officials targeted Grand because of his religious practice. He was never trying to establish his private residence as a synagogue; he was simply hosting a prayer gathering with friends. City officials went so far as to order police to spy on Grand’s home and encouraged his neighbors to file complaints if anyone visited. The city then issued unfounded property violations, unlawfully withheld his certificate of occupancy and tax abatements—which cost him thousands of dollars in additional taxes—regularly failed to collect his trash, and engaged in a broader pattern of harassment that went far beyond ordinary zoning enforcement.

The brief further notes how Grand canceled his planned minyan as ordered and tried to comply with the city’s directive by submitting a permit application. But neighbors opposed the permit with letters protesting, “I am not Jewish, and I do not want our neighborhood labeled as Jewish.” The city then broadcast a public hearing marked by overt hostility to Jewish religious practice.

This is the playbook that these Poor Oppressed Christian snowflakes always use. They feel oppressed by the mere existence of any religion but theirs, and will stop at nothing to stamp out anyone just trying to exercise their religious freedoms. A group of friends getting together to pray is not a synagogue and should not be treated as such. City zoning codes are intended to deal with, for example, large numbers of people converging on a place of worship that could stress city infrastructure. But this minyan was a quorum of about a dozen people. That's the same size as a regular house party, which as far as I know is still legal in Ohio.

This case is now before the Supreme Court, which will decide whether or not to take it up. I would like to think that would be a good thing, since it seems to me that religious expression is explicitly constitutionally protected and any reasonable person would see that. I would also hope that the Christians on the court would realize that allowing a city to harass a Jewish prayer group would allow it to do the same to Christians. With today's court, though, I have no idea what their ruling might be. They seem so in line with the Poor Oppressed Christian agenda that their recent religious rulings make little sense.

Mass of Nuit and Babalon for 2026

This Tuesday, June 30th, we will be performing the Mass of Nuit and Babalon at the Ritual Workshop. This is the full script for the ritual, which we have been celebrating for a number of years now around the Summer Solstice with some pretty impressive results. Doors will open at 7:30 PM with the ritual to start around 8 PM.

0. The Temple

The ritual space is set up with the Holy Table and Sigillum Dei Aemeth in the center. The banishing dagger, invoking wand, and bell chime are arranged on the Table. The pitcher containing the Eucharist is placed in the center of the Sigillum. All present should have their own cups or glasses. Holy images of Our Lady Nuit and Our Lady Babalon, including the Star of Babalon, may be prominently displayed. The Lust card from the Crowley/Harris Thoth Tarot can be used as a meditation focus, if desired.

Programming the Universe - Babalon Rising 2026

This is my fourth and final presentation from the Babalon Rising Festival this year. This material will be included in my new book Thelemic Sorcery, which I am currently in the process of writing.

There is a long history of new technologies serving as models for magical and spiritual processes. When electricity was first discovered, for example, energy work was sometimes explained as the interaction of the electric and magnetic forces. In the 1970’s the new technology was computers, and today the new technology is the Internet. Both computer programming and networking have a lot in common with how magick is generally explained, since they rely on symbolic manipulation and the transfer of information structures.

Many different models of magick, and by extension sorcery, have been proposed over the years. Some models are based on spirits doing all the work. Others are based on personal psychic abilities. Still others are based on the idea of some sort of subtle energy that magicians direct to accomplish their goals. Paranormal skeptics treat the whole process as psychological, though in my experience most people who work with practical magick do not have to do it for very long before they encounter paranormal effects of some sort.

The problem with each of these models is that they try to reduce magical effects to a single mode of operation. I have found that I can make magical operations work using only my own psychic abilities, but I get bigger probability shifts when I also call in spirits. And when I employ energy work techniques, generally Qigong in my case, it enhances the effect further. I do often describe practical magick to students as a martial art for psychic abilities, but at the same time you will not get the best effects relying on personal psychic ability alone.

Revisiting the Equations of Magick - Babalon Rising 2026

This is the third of four presentations I offered at the Babalon Rising Festival this year. It is based on a updated version of this post from back in 2008. This material will also be found in my new book Thelemic Sorcery, which I am currently in the process of writing.

Decades ago, I once asked a much more experienced magician who I had a lot of respect for what the limitations of magick were. The answer I got was something to the effect of “Well, does it have any limits?” There may be a sense in which that answer is true, since given nearly infinite time the probability shifts created by magick might allow us to do almost anything. However, it was an answer I found entirely useless. Real things have limits – this is precisely the point of the physical sciences – and understanding those limits is how we understand all phenomena. We cannot assume the omnipotence of the mind without any evidence, and likewise we cannot fall into the common skeptical assumption that if you can do anything paranormal you must be able to do everything that could possibly be described as paranormal.

That conversation proved valuable in motivating me to embark on my own exploration of magick’s exact practical limits One thing we do know is that numerous factors go into figuring out how successful a magical operation will be. One of the early attempts to quantify those factors was a series of equations published in Peter Carroll’s 1992 book Liber Kaos. The chaos magick movement in the 1980’s and early 1990’s represented a significant step forward for practical magick. Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin first broke magick down to what they considered its essential components. They then approached magical experiments in a scientific way – or at least as scientifically as was practically achievable. Liber Kaos was released around the same time as my fateful conversation, and it proved to be a good starting point for my paranormal research.

Peter J. Carroll passed away on April 22nd of this year at the age of 73. I submitted the proposal for this talk prior to that date and had no idea that he would have passed by the time I would be presenting it at Babalon Rising. While the central thesis of this presentation has to do with places where I disagree with his formulation of magick, it is important to note that he was a true pioneer in this area. Prior to Liber Kaos nobody had ever even floated the idea of probability equations for magical operations. Without his work I would have had nothing to build on, and might never have arrived at any of these revisions.

Too many modern practitioners talk about the “chaos” in chaos magick as something akin to “anarchy.” But while the chaos magick system does reject hierarchy, the original meaning of the term referred to chaos theory, an emerging branch of mathematics. Chaos theory describes systems with arbitrarily large degrees of freedom, independent variables that are nonetheless loosely interlinked. Phenomena that conform to chaos theory principles operate as if any point in this network can act as a critical point, at which a small probabilistic influence can propagate itself into a much larger overall effect.

The Star Sapphire - Babalon Rising 2026

This is the second of four presentations I offered at the Babalon Rising Festival this year. It is based on a updated version of this post from back in 2016. I have done a lot of work with this ritual since then, and am happy to be able to share my insights. This material will also be found in my new book Thelemic Sorcery, which I am currently in the process of writing.

Aleister Crowley's Star Sapphire ritual is one of the most difficult rituals to work out in the entire Thelemic canon. It's not that the ritual instructions are difficult so much as they are so frustratingly vague. If you have seen the Hellier documentary all the way to the end you will see the paranormal investigation crew figure out that a paranormal message they received is telling them to do this ritual. They then completely freak out reading the instructions and decide that it would take them years to learn, let alone attempt.

I was halfway tempted to email them and just offer to do it, since at the time it was a big part of my daily practice. In fact, one of my students did wind up writing them with the same offer but never got a response. Maybe that means they were not quite as freaked out by it as they were suggesting, or maybe it means they had no real intention of following through on it. Whatever the case, Crowley’s vague instructions do no one any favors. He describes the ritual itself in one chapter of The Book of Lies and describes the Holy Hexagram that is traced to the four quarters in another. That’s everything we have to work with.

The Star Sapphire is Crowley's version of the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram, just as the Star Ruby is his version of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. He described the latter as an "improved" version of the pentagram ritual, so I think it's safe to say that he probably considered the Star Sapphire an improved hexagram ritual as well. It is certainly true that both rituals incorporate more Thelemic symbolism than the Golden Dawn rituals that Crowley sought to improve. There is more than that, though. The structure of the two rituals represents an evolution of the Golden Dawn rituals he originally learned.

The Enochian Great Table - Babalon Rising 2026

This year I offered four presentations at the Babalon Rising Festival in Springville, Indiana. I have decided to post those presentation here on the blog for the general public and anyone who attended the festival but was unable to make it to my talks due to scheduling issues. If you are interested in seeing presentations like this in a festival setting, I highly recommend the Babalon Rising Festival. It happens every year during the second weekend in June. This presentation is an updated version of this earlier presentation that I gave at Leaping Laughter Lodge in 2014. It covers material from my book Mastering the Great Table and walks through how I do evocations of the various Great Table spirits.

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.

By 1700 the first attempt to integrate the Dee material into the canon of Western magick was published as the Treatise on Angel Magic, attributed to one "Dr. Rudd." In this volume we find some curious attributions that were passed on by early Enochian authors, such as attempts to mix Goetic and Enochian spirits. While there is some overlap between Enochian and Goetic practitioners, the two systems in fact have nothing to do with each other. That did not stop Rudd, though, from creating his own versions of implements such as the seven Ensigns of Creation that added Goetic spirit names to Dee’s designs. His Table of Art is also an odd synthesis of Dee’s Holy Table and other magical containment structures of the period.

The most famous system of Enochian magick was developed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century. The Golden Dawn system was influential enough that for much of the twentieth century it was what everyone thought of as Enochian magick. Aleister Crowley’s version was derived from the Golden Dawn version and similar enough that it was essentially a dialect of the system. But in the 1970’s and 1980’s Enochian magicians started going back to the original sources, most of which were maintained by the British Museum. Today these documents are available as online scans, making Dee’s original work more widely available than ever before.

What We Occultists Have to Deal With

I keep coming back to this idea of how fundamentalist Christians consider occultists some sort of existential threat based on made-up nonsense about who we are and what we do. A friend forwarded this video to me and it's a perfect example. The story is absolutely ridiculous, and it's nothing any occultist would ever do - for reasons I will get into.

It's obvious to me that this woman suffers from sleep paralysis and dreamed most of this, at least if I give her the benefit of assuming she's telling the truth. She could be making this all up, of course, since that's pretty much what fundamentalists do whenever they get into any details about magick, but let's just take the account on its face. If we do, it becomes clear that this is something no magician would ever bother with.

First of all, why is this "warlock" spending so much time and effort to attack this woman? Is she important? Like, at all? I have no idea who she is and apparently she has enough of a media presence somewhere to get interviewed. But just cursing random Christian people for no reason is stupid. It's a waste of time. There are better things you can do with magick to improve your life, so you should save your curses for those who are actively impeding your will or threatening your loved ones.

Second, the setup for this spell is ludicrous. You have a whole group of witches "flying around" to create a perimeter? If she's talking about physical flying that's flat-out impossible. If she's talking about some sort of "astral flight" why bother? I can see where you could use a physical perimeter to target a spell - I've done that personally - but the whole point is that the physical perimeter serves as an anchor for the spiritual force you are sending. It would do no good to have a bunch of witches astrally flying around the house so that a "warlock" could astrally project inside.

As astral perimeter for astral work does nothing. You need something physical, but that's easy enough to do with a set of talismans. You can make them out of ordinary objects like coins and place them at key points around your target. You don't need people to do any of it. Now let's talk about astrally projecting with an "astral knife" to attack someone. To cast a curse you don't need to any of that, and it makes little sense to me why anyone would do it. Once you have your perimeter, that's a magical link that you connect with your containment structure and then just use a targeting link like a photo.

So a magician would have to be really, really bad at magick to think something like this would work. Appearing to your target is silly. Curses work much better without warning, which is also why a good magician will never threaten. They just act. And anyway, a target wouldn't be able to take an astral object from you and use it. Their hand would slide right through it. There are way too many problems with this account for it to have anything to do with real occultism. It's basically made-up fundamentalist nonsense about what magicians - oh, I mean "warlocks" - actually do.

Persecution makes Christians feel important, and the best persecution is made-up persecution because it poses no actual threat and involves no actual risk. If the Poor Oppressed Christians even encountered real oppression, I wonder if they would even know what to do with it. They certainly wouldn't charge at real oppressors yelling "Dominion! Dominion! Dominion!" That would just get them killed.

So... sleep paralysis. This is caused by the body partially waking up while dreaming. Much of the dream content is present and the dreamer usually perceives a sense of threat or dread. They initially can't move, which means they try to exert effort to do so to no avail. This is because we have a physiological mechanism that impedes movement while we dream, to prevent things like sleepwalking. Then, when the mechanism finally turns off, the person can thrash around and bruise themselves without remembering anything but what they were dreamining about.

If this woman is being honest, that's what happened. And, of course, if she's making it up maybe none of it did. This is one more case where if people had a real idea about what magicians do, they would understand that not only do we not bother with such things, the mechanism described is also entirely unworkable.