I can't remember when I first started to get the definite idea that, when occult and pagan practitioners spoke about "raising energy" and so forth, that they were in fact describing a physical phenomenon. Since then I've come to realize that there are subtle exchanges of physical energy—the kind of thing that I was brought up to understand, rational and scientific—involved in the manipulations of human magic and ritual.
I bounced hard off the 1999-2001 pagan scene in Seattle, despite the vague but powerful longing for Hellenic spirituality that grabbed hold of me after my time in the SDSU Classics and Humanities department‚ for a lot of different reasons. But this loosey-goosey "energy" business was near to a deal-breaker at the time. I couldn't make myself believe it. I couldn't make myself believe most of what I was being told, and it's taken decades of patient deconstruction of mental blocks in order to defeat even some of the inhibitions that latched onto us when we tried dabbling in American paganism and magic for the first time.
Now in retrospect it makes more sense: we were still a long long ways away from realizing that we were attempting to function despite extreme dissociation, and much of our behavior was supplied by the frantic shuffling of various fictive and factive introjects, popping into and out of our headspace and assisting us through certain tasks. We'd been to Caltech so we picked up a lot of riders...more than we ever bargained for, I daresay, but we don't know the full extent of the problem yet. We forcibly ejected Robert A. Millikan a while back but given the confusion of our system he's probably still lurking somewhere in a basement laboratory, heaven knows where in our headspace. Which may, for all I know, comprise a substantial fraction of the Universe, as collectively depicted in the Western fictional canon. We used to read a lot, without always knowing why we stuck to things.
I'm pretty sure Jack Parsons made us read "Battlefield Earth". We couldn't put that fucking trash book down and it is HORRIBLE. J. K. Rowling is Proust compared to L. Ron Hubbard, as a fiction writer. But I don't think Parsons could help himself. How on Earth could he resist, after his history with L. Ron Hubbard?
Anyway our headspace was full of scientists and chess players and stuff. They didn't want us reading frickin' Silver RavenWolf! Ugh. Now I sort of understand why our tastes got so starchy for a while, and our orthography so British. Anyway it has taken a looong time to learn how to quiet all those folks down enough that we can at least think about this stuff a bit, although it's still desperately difficult to make ourselves do anything. I expect we'll have to trace down some particular source of panicky horror that our body wants to do (gasp!) some ghastly spiritualist hooey like tarot cards. The very fact that I used the word "spiritualist" at least suggests that some of the objections are old-fashioned, which would be unsurprising.
Hence it is partly for the benefit of the science-nerds in my head (Alyx Woodward included) that I try to analyze these things in what scientific terms I know. I like to think that I've acquired a decent lay understanding but we are desperately in need of much refreshment in multiple areas, and the task has so far been intimidating—all the more so because it seems we have more serious traumatic damage than I thought in terms of educational experiences. There's something rather foul hiding in the past with respect to school, which I'd ignored because of worrying excessively about early childhood. Anyway it's been damaging our ability to do math and science.
Phew I'm wordy. It's a sign I'm talking around a difficulty. Onward!
Well do I remember my dismay when I first ran into someone in the Seattle Wiccan scene—almost all the neo-paganism I ran into in 1999-2001 was Wiccan or similar, and I guess that was the fad at the time, it was in movies and everything—and heard my first sample of New Age talk about "energies" and "vibrations". The surprising thing is that it all turned out to be true, if extremely vague and sloppy language, so generic as to be almost useless. Sloppy...but not wrong. That's the key point. "Vibrations", physical oscillations, are very important, but it's very difficult to piece together a coherent macro-scale picture of the Universe solely in terms of "vibrations" because of the piecemeal and atomistic way in which American (and Western) children are taught about science and the structure of things.
Consider something that used to seem ridiculous to me, the idea that one can impart "energy" to a stone through magical manipulations. Holding it, say. Exposing it to Sunlight or Moonlight. Rubbing things on it. Burying it in the ground for a while. The "rational" view says that these things do nothing, but there's a subtle error in the "rational" view: it objectifies the rock into a particular thing—inert matter—and therefore forgets that the material composition of the rock is actually quite complicated and not entirely static. The surface chemistry of any rock is fearfully complicated, because solid materials attract all sorts of surface layers of substances and biofilms and so forth, things scarcely invisible to the eye unless the rock is really dirty, though they're likely to impart subtle differences in texture. To interact with the rock in most ways is, therefore, to change it somehow. One leaves traces of substances on the surface of the rock. Furthermore, slow chemical changes still occur even in crystallized minerals. Mechanical stresses may be developed or relaxed away. Irradiation might knock an atom awry somewhere, especially if the stone is mildly radioactive, which is likely if there's any significant potassium in it. All of these processes have one thing in common: they transfer energy in some way.
Energy is a sensible generalization and the magical practitioners' intuitive usage of "energy" was wholly correct. What's more, certain forms of energy raised in rituals must in fact be quite obvious and easy to feel. Consider, for example, feeling suddenly flushed, and as if one's breath is suddenly warmer than usual. There's been a physical change, a dilation of capillaries, because your body's suddenly wanting to dump a lot of excess heat—i.e. a definite change in energy. Sudden vibrations in the body, tremors or shudders, signal a change in kinetic energy, stored in a physical vibration. Suddenly I think about how descriptions of such odd phenomena during religious or magical rituals are generally laughed at by the "skeptics". Suddenly feeling like singing? Did you get to feeling burning hot for no reason? Pooh, nothing! It means nothing. It's noise, psychological noise, especially from weak-willed [use your imagination here, folks.]
I've been gradually realizing this for years now, but I've finally managed to embrace something like Charles Fort's attitude towards evidence: if you think you've got "good reasons" for rejecting evidence then maybe you'd better think twice about it. He knew what the problem was: hidebound authorities rejecting evidence out of hand merely because it came from a disreputable source or because it was something they could easily sneer at. "Natural phenomenon" is just about as vague a phrase as "natural flavors" on a box of Cheez-Its, and yet a great deal of American intelligentsia regards "natural phenomenon" (or some equivalent, dismissive phrase) as a sufficient explanation for a gigantic range of phenomena. Our much-vaunted empiricism is bunk, riddled with too many holes to trust. We've got mountains of "data", much of it trash, and we've got no idea what data isn't being collected.
Right now if I could find the person who coined "data-driven" as a euphemism, I'm going to have Joseph K. beat him to death with a volume of actuarial tables. I think K. might be feeling just a bit feisty lately.
~Chara of Pnictogen
