E-Book Overview
An encounter with the paranormal can change a person’s life forever. Duncan Barford was one of them: poltergeists, conversations with the dead, spirits of nature and of place, mystical states, lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences.
In this book he explores the significance of experiences like these for our understanding of reality, and of how his engagement with the theories and practices of western magick has developed his views.
E-Book Content
OCCULT EXPERIMENTS IN THE HOME
OCCULT EXPERIMENTS IN THE HOME Personal explorations of magick and the paranormal
Duncan Barford
First published in 2010 by Aeon Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2010 by Duncan Barford
The right of Duncan Barford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-90465-836-8 Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain www.aeonbooks.co.uk
Dedicated to Alan Chapman. Two mages with a lot of welly, But which one’s Dee and which one’s Kelley?
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ix
CHAPTER ONE My sister wore our granddad’s ghost
1
CHAPTER TWO A nice place to meet dead people
21
CHAPTER THREE I’m the urban shaman
45
CHAPTER FOUR The absolute truth
57
CHAPTER FIVE Dream yourself awake
87
REFERENCES
113
INDEX
119
vii
INTRODUCTI ON
If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere. (Charles Fort, 1997: chapter 1).
The book you are holding is rooted in personal experiences. Indeed, the first essay in the collection aims to show how scientific explanation of subjective paranormal experience will often miss the point and end up destroying what it set out to define. But if science destroys the paranormal, should we not wonder whether the paranormal was really there in the first place? This is a noble and rational point of view. However, to adopt it assumes that the faeries at the bottom of our garden possess (or ought to) some quantifiable attribute that we can seize hold of (or not) and thus state definitively whether the faeries are there. The view put forward in this book is that faeries are far subtler and cleverer. In most instances, a paranormal event cannot be cleanly separated from its effects on the witness, or from his or her beliefs. The “event” may indeed be disproved (or at least shown to be not what it appeared), yet the effects will continue ix
x
INTRODUCTION
to reverberate within the witness’s life, and the beliefs or misconceptions that predisposed him or her to the experience may also persist. Put more simply: it is theories that are proved or disproved, whereas experiences themselves are simply what they are. There is no “seems” in an experience, paranormal or otherwise. I can only experience seeing a ghost; I can’t experience “seeming” to see one. None of this is new—of course—and philosophers have investigated these issues more rigorously than will be my aim1, but what I hope is original about this book (its unique selling point, if you like) is its use of the tradition of magick to inform the exploration of the pa