The paranormal proclivities of the place became more overt towards the end of our stay, as second-year examinations loomed into view. One night, I was woken by a peculiar sensation. My bed was being shaken. I lay still, wondering if it was an earthquake and waited to see when it would stop. After a minute (when it had not) I got up sleepily and went to my girlfriend’s room.
“My bed keeps shaking,” I explained.
A few weeks later an old school friend came to stay for the weekend. We had not seen each other in a while. We went drinking and caught up on events in each other’s lives. During the course of the evening, he announced that he was gay.
That night, after he had gone and I was asleep, the bed started shaking again. Due to the alcohol, this time I simply couldn’t be bothered to get up. Thankfully, in the morning it had stopped.
I sometimes suspect that most tales of the paranormal fall into a category like this one, where the usual categories of “subjective” and “objective” blur together in our experience. Imminent exams and my friend’s sexual revelations: these were disturbing circumstances, possibly the root of both experiences. It certainly felt to me as if the bed were being shaken, yet—on that first occasion—it stopped as soon as I got out. Maybe our old friend the “ideomotor effect” was at work again. Quite possibly, my own body provided the physical force for the shaking, yet once again it was that unknown “other” who provided the will and inspiration for the usual inscrutable reasons.
Psychology can take us a certain distance towards what these events might signify. If I’d omitted my description of the circumstances that led up to the shaking bed (“weird flat”, “unhappy days”, “exams”, “sexual revelations”) it would have been completely inexplicable; not substantial enough even to form a story worth telling. As it stands, there is a possible “motive” here for the shaking: my unconscious emotional response to an upsetting environment. Yet why it took the form of a vibrating bed, and what was achieved or expressed by this, remains obscure.
Another personal experience is perhaps more illuminating in this respect. It took place between the moving dice and the shaking bed, on the eve of an A level examination when I was about 18 years old.
I was nervous and unable to sleep, which served to make me even more anxious about my probable performance in the exam. To make matters worse, the family cat had managed to escape from downstairs, where she was usually confined at night, and had come into my room. I heard her paws on the carpet as she crossed to my record player, and then (as was her habit) she began sharpening her claws on the back of the wooden speakers. I suffered the noise for a while, but when there was no sign she was going to stop I got up and turned on the light. Immediately, the scratching stopped. I bent down to pick her up from behind the speaker.
Only—there was no cat.
When I checked later, she had been downstairs all along.
But something had made a sound like an animal with paws across the carpet. Something had scratched and bumped behind the speaker. Indeed, my sister in the next room had also heard the noise. I checked thoroughly all around, but found no explanation.
Psychoanalysis provides us with a useful notion: the “ symptom”. Certain cases of mental illness arise, psychoanalysis declares, because in the unconscious lies an urge that is in conflict with social mores, or with the interests of the sufferer’s conscious personality. This urge is repressed by the conscious mind but it remains active in the unconscious and may lead to the formation of a symptom.
For instance, imagine that someone did not want to sit an exam, even though it was vital to his future. In a case like this a symptom might be formed: the urge to flunk the exam would not be allowed direct expression, but by manifesting instead as some kind of illness it might be able to make itself heard. If the symptom were severe enough to prevent the sufferer from sitting the exam, then it might even realize its full and secret intention, albeit by a roundabout route.
Some of the girls in my sixth form sat their A level exams with their arms in bandages. One of them had woken in bed and discovered she had scraped the skin off her arms while she was asleep. After she had shown her injuries to her friends, a couple of them woke the next morning and discovered they had done the same.
The anxiety of these girls had taken on quite a direct manifestation. Perhaps my anxiety was also making itself felt. Luckily for me, it hitched a ride not upon a bandwagon of self-harm, but upon the idea of a ghostly cat.
Our cat was a playful, mischievous creature. She sat and lazed on pieces of paper even as I was trying to write on them. To her my pen was a toy. She had a personality that ideally suited her to become the kind of double-edged symbol (“domestic pet”—”untamed”) that psychoanalysts since Freud have uncovered at the root of many a symptom. Perhaps my anxiety that night manifested itself in the form of an unruly moggy. We can call those noises I heard an “hallucination” if it makes us feel better.
In magick, however, there is a concept closely allied to the psychoanalytic idea of the symptom, but it demands a radically different mind-set. It is called a demon.
Aleister Crowley wrote: “The spirits of the Goetia [i.e. demons] are portions of the human brain” (1995: 17). Contemporary magicians, such as Lon Milo DuQuette and Christopher S. Hyatt, often make even more explicit the links between psychotherapy and demonology:
Psychology … deals with people’s fears and doubts. Psychologists label many of these fears as pathology. Psychologists have carefully followed in the footsteps of the Priest, who in his non-scientific but simple way labelled these things as evil or demonic possession. The average clinical psychologist is no more scientific than the priest (2000: 11).
Despite its technical-sounding terminology, psychoanalysis is widely disparaged as “pseudo-scientific” by the more sci-entistic branches of psychology. Part of the reason is perhaps that the aims of magick and of psychotherapy are strikingly similar: both seek to help the individual gain control over and make sense of his or her experience. The magician seals himself inside a magic circle, recites incantations, evokes demons and makes a pact with them, harnessing their power to his will. The psychoanalyst’s approach is not so very different: her “demons” are the patient’s symptoms; her “magic circle” is the formal relationship with the patient, governed by the rules that regulate the practice of psychotherapy.
Foremost among these rules are those that discourage therapists from sexual relations with their patients. Because of its powerful sensations and emotions, its intense effect on consciousness, sex has long been used by magicians as a tool for injecting energy into or “raising power” for any kind of endeavour. The way that psychotherapy also seeks to maximize erotic tension within the therapeutic relationship, by ensuring that it remains unconsummated, is a technique that might have been lifted straight out of a book of spells. Louis Culling, in his occult classic Sex Magick, writes at length on what he calls “Dianism”: the magical use of a sexual experience in which climax is intentionally avoided (1992: 21–49). In one particular type of magical working, climax is postponed in order to maximize ecstasy, so that the magician’s partner can assume the elevated form of the “Holy Guardian Angel” or “ideal self”. In therapy, similarly, because there is no possibility of consummating the relationship, every little word, gesture, and interpersonal incident becomes highly charged, filled with significance, and in this way the patient’s fantasies are stoked until they blaze.
The equivalent of the magician’s “incantations” is the conversation between the analyst and patient, which draws the patient’s unconscious to the surface. The “evocation of the demon” and the “bargain” made with it occur as the analyst encourages her patient
