Alternative Religions and Psi

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.

I Samuel 15:231

In our culture, psychic phenomena are hospitably received in Spiritualism, the New Age movement, and modern-day witchcraft. The three movements share common elements, and in a variety of fashions, they are at odds with the establishment. None of them have institutionalized in the manner of government, industry, academe, or mainline religion. Few of the groups within these movements have buildings or permanent paid staffs, and if they do manage to institutionalize, it is usually only briefly. None of the movements acknowledge any central authority; control is local. The movements are marginal and antistructural in many ways, but it is within them that one can find discussion of, training in, and use of psychic abilities.

Spiritualism

The religion of Spiritualism is dated as beginning in 1848 in Hydesville, New York with the mysterious rappings discovered by the Fox sisters, Kate and Margaret.2 The rappings communicated intelligently and purported to be from the spirit of an itinerant pedlar who had been murdered in the Foxes’ house. Word spread rapidly and crowds as large as 500 persons soon flocked to their home to listen to the rappings. In short order the family came to nationwide attention. Many others began contacting the spirits, and a new religion was born. Spiritualism’s central tenet was that humans could communicate with the deceased through mediums. The religion presented itself as scientific and empirical. No faith was required—one only needed to consult a medium and witness the phenomena.

Mediums didn’t just give general, vague messages and spout platitudes; they provided verifiable information for their sitters that was seemingly unknown to the medium, except by spirit contact. Mediums also levitated tables and produced messages on slates without any anyone touching them. These apparently miraculous occurrences led to their philosophies and exhortations becoming markedly influential. Most mediums were not prominent in other areas of life, and their views would have otherwise gone unheeded. Their paranormal phenomena convinced many of the legitimacy of Spiritualism. In Max Weber’s terms, these were manifestations of pure charisma.

The followers of Spiritualism numbered in the millions, and the movement was broadly based, reaching from plebians to the highest levels of society. Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were among the supporters; Lincoln attended séances in the White House. D. D. Home gave séances for Czar Alexander II, Napolean III, and Queen Sophia of Holland. It is curious that despite its extraordinary following and wealthy supporters, Spiritualism did not develop a hierarchical structure nor even a strong central organization. Cornell University history professor R. Laurence Moore in his In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (1977) noted that in America, Spiritualists built only one church structure of any size, and the vast majority met in homes or in rented halls. In addition, a recent analysis of the architecture of Spiritualist summer camps showed that they were far more liminal than those of orthodox Christian groups. Considering the available resources and the prominent social status of many participants, the anti-structural characteristics are remarkable.

Mediums frequently went into trance and allowed spirits to speak through them, a phenomenon shared with shamanism. Altered states of consciousness played an important role in both Spiritualism and shamanism.

Spiritualism inherently blurs the life-death binary opposition and calls into question the boundary between the two. Mediums served as mediators between those oppositions—a function that some trickster gods also fulfill. Further, it was the Fox sisters who are given credit for founding the movement, and women were prominent from its beginning, thereby inverting the usual male-female hierarchy. Important male mediums were involved, but women played a much larger role in Spiritualism than in the established religions.5

Other trickster qualities can be seen in Spiritualism. Its subversive tendencies are highlighted in the titles of Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits (1989) and Howard Kerr’s Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals (1972). Spiritualism was associated with abolitionism, women’s rights, and free love. A number of its followers were advocates of what now would be termed holistic health, thus challenging the medical establishment. The darkened séances provided opportunities for sexual liaisons; divorces of various mediums attracted public attention and disrepute, and segments of the Spiritualist movement advocated birth control rights. Mediumistic trickery hardly needs mention. The trickster characteristics of disruption, deception, lowering of sexual inhibitions, and display of paranormal powers are all prominent in Spiritualism.

Spiritualism still exists today but with a much smaller following than in the nineteenth century. Robert Ellwood, a professor of religion at the University of Southern California, studied Spiritualism and provided an insightful discussion of it in his book Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979). Ellwood has a real appreciation of Victor Turner’s concept of liminality. He noted that Spiritualist congregations are fluid, and many who attend services are not members. The churches now draw from lower, marginal classes, and they attract few large families to services. Even the church buildings change hands frequently, further evidencing Spiritualism’s ineffectiveness at institutionalizing. Spiritualism has an inherently marginal, anti-structural nature.

The New Age Movement

The New Age movement is a loose network of people and organizations involved with such causes as holistic health, channeling, spiritual seeking, Eastern religions, personal transformation, and ecological awareness, among others. It is amorphous, unstructured, and impossible to define crisply. The New Age is more ambiguous than the other two movements discussed in this chapter, and many aspects of it are not religious, but some are.

According to The New Age Almanac (1991), the New Age movement emerged as a recognizable entity circa 1971, though many of its ideas had long been part of American culture. Those ideas, however, were somewhat submerged and did not receive much attention from science and academe. James Webb points out in The Occult Establishment (1976) that the ideas were kept alive among the beats, hippies, etc., that is, on the margins of society.

Mediumship and channeling (a newer name for mediumship) played a major role in establishing, defining and maintaining the New Age. The works by and about Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” brought many their first exposure to New Age ideas. The books of Ruth Montgomery, who reported contacts with discarnate entities, attracted others, as did the Seth books by channeler Jane Roberts. Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles (1975), another channeled work, drew still more to the New Age. Thousands of others, who gained no national attention, became channelers, and groups formed around many of them. The burgeoning popular interest in shamanism is yet another instance of New Age influence. In all of these examples, altered states of consciousness play a central role.

Marilyn Ferguson, one of the most articulate persons expressing the ideas of the New Age, noted that there is no central authority defining the movement. In her book The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), she emphasized its informal, fluid networks, decentralization of power, and lack of structured hierarchies. New Age concerns typically include feminism, the environment, and alternative healing, and women play major roles. In addition, it is open to astrology and other forms of divination. All of this is a bit subversive to the establishment. Overall, its properties define it as anti-structural.

Modern-Day Witchcraft And Neo-Paganism

Modern-day witchcraft and neo-paganism saw an explosion of growth in the 1960s and 1970s, similar to the New Age movement. Some might consider witchcraft as part of the New Age, but with its strong emphasis on ritual and magic it has a sufficiently distinct identity to warrant separate comment. A central feature of witchcraft and neo-paganism is the use of ritual magic for practical ends, and as such, direct contact with the supernatural is salient. There is a great diversity of beliefs, and an individual practitioner or group may borrow from a variety of traditions. For instance, Egyptian, Eastern and extraterrestrial concepts may be merged into one system. Neo-paganism is highly syncretic. The movement has an intellectual component, and some of the practitioners have produced sophisticated scholarly works describing the religion. Notable are Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon (1979) and Aidan Kelly’s Crafting the Art of Magic (1991).

Women play major roles in the groups, and primary worship of the goddess, as opposed to a masculine god, is a common feature. Witchcraft is organized around the coven, which typically has from 3-20 members, and if one becomes too large, others “hive off.” Some groups are involved with umbrella organizations that facilitate networking, but those hold no theological or institutional power over the individual coven. There is no central authority. Because of this antistructural nature, many covens do not have a long-term existence, though some continue for years.

There are other anti-structural aspects to witchcraft. Drugs and explicit sexuality are part of some neo-pagan religious rituals, though not as much as some of the popular media portray. A number of practitioners have an interest in parapsychology, and I know several who were influenced by the writings of J. B. Rhine. Modern witches are frequently aligned with feminism and ecology. In all of these areas, their beliefs challenge the status quo and dogma of established science and religion, and Aidan Kelly states: “Neopagans tend to be extremely anti-authoritarian.”13

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann provided a detailed commentary on magical practices in her Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1989). That book was based on a study of witchcraft practitioners in England. During her investigation, she took courses on ritual magic, practiced assigned exercises, participated in rituals, and came to have anomalous experiences. The exercises evoked modes of thought similar to those of the mystics mentioned by Victor Turner. She tells us that a: “feature of esoteric knowledge is that magicians often say that the truths of the Mysteries are conveyed through images. The classic training manual in the Western Mysteries grandly asserts that the mind cannot comprehend the truths of the Mysteries rationally, but that the human can understand them when they are couched in imagery. Witchcraft is said to engage a different mode of thought than analytic rationality. In that mode, ‘verbal understanding is limited; [the mind] communicates through images, emotions, sensations, dreams, visions and physical symptoms’. [Luhrmann quoting Starhawk (1979, p. 21)] There is knowledge that has content, but is understood in terms of images and communicated neither verbally nor in rational terms.”

“In magic, non-ordinary states have a practical, this-worldly purpose. Magical rituals are meant to concentrate forces and direct power. According to the theory, this happens only when magicians sink into altered states of consciousness in appropriate ritual conditions and visualize images with great intensity. In order to manipulate the subtle currents and interconnections of their world, magicians are said to need to step outside the normal ways people think and communicate, to step over the barrier which Western conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity place between self and world. They are trained in techniques intended to make this possible.”15

“Theirs is a conceptual world of images, myths, symbols and their associations, in which poetic evocation is more highly valued than analytic evaluation, and the force of a poetic analogy is strong.”

Clearly, such uses of altered states of consciousness tend to be subversive to Western rationalistic conceptions of reality. Indeed Luhrmann even noted that practitioners’ understanding of ritual magic is in non-rational terms. The very practice of it leads to anti-structural thought. Magic denies the primacy of verbal, rational knowledge. Luhrmann’s own reaction to all this is particularly instructive, and she was very frank about her preconceptions and motives. She explicitly rejected psi, saying: “The only reason I continued to think of myself as an anthropologist, rather than as a witch, was that I had a strong disincentive against asserting that rituals had an effect upon the material world … The very purpose of my involvement … would have been undermined by my assent to the truth of magical ideas.” Even so, few anthropological works have as much insight as hers, and Luhrmann’s candid admission reveals academia’s fundamental hostility to psi and her need to align herself with academe.

Summary

All three of these movements have loose boundaries. It is often difficult to tell if someone is part of them or not. Many who attend Spiritualist services are also members of established religions; New Age followers are drawn from all faiths. Witchcraft and neo-pagan groups are perhaps more distinct, but ambiguity reigns there as well with vast differences among them. Within covens, beliefs and rituals can change with the whim of the high priestess or priest. There is no higher ecclesiastical authority or common text that solidifies dogma or mandates what, how, or when rituals must be performed.

These three movements have striking similarities. In all altered (i.e., destructured) states of consciousness play a major role. Women are prominent, as are the issues of feminism, the environment and healing. None recognize a central authority for their movement, and they engage in virtually no institution building. All of the movements are considered subversive by the establishment; they court direct involvement with paranormal and supernatural phenomena, and all display elements of the trickster constellation.

The most vocal opposition to these movements comes from two sources: establishment scientists (exemplified by CSICOP) and conservative and fundamentalist religious groups. Both of these antagonists are typified by large, male-dominated, status conscious, hierarchical institutions—the antithesis of the targets of their scorn. Both have produced massive amounts of literature denouncing the New Age proponents and modern pagans, and similar attacks were directed at the Spiritualists of the nineteenth century. While some of the political and social goals advocated by the “deviants” have been partially incorporated into science and mainstream churches (e.g., feminism, ecology, alternative healing), the establishments’ most vehement attacks remain directed at paranormal and supernatural practices.

CHAPTER 15