Chaos magician and author Gordon White on the blurring of parapsychology and magic.

photo by: Skeptiko

Nobody does magic quite like Disney. The sciency wizard, the wand, the spells, it’s all burned into our collective consciousness, along with the idea that it’s all silly nonsense, but hey, what about this…

(Dr. Dean Radin on RuneSoup) Sorry, I should back up a second here and say I’m talking in a way that a year ago I would never have talked, I would never have used the word ‘magic’ and I wouldn’t have talked about spirits or anything of that sort.

That’s Dr. Dean Radin, the Dr. Dean Radin, pre-eminent parapsychology researcher, pioneering researcher and he’s talking with today’s guest, author and chaos magician, Gordon White.

So, this is all relatively new for me. I know a little bit more than I did a year ago, because I’ve just written a book on this, but the thing that sparked my interest in looking into the esoteric traditions is, that I’ve been working in psi research for something like three decades, almost four decades now, and I had to think really hard for anybody whoever talked about… a couple of anthropologists will talk about the psychic and Sharman connections as real, as opposed to as theater.

In the most recent large book, which is a state of the art book on psi research called A Handbook of Parapsychology for the 21st Century, the word ‘magic’ doesn’t even show up in the index. I found this kind of puzzling because, of course, everybody’s well aware of what the Sharman’s claim to be able to do and we’re well aware of notions of what magic is, at least what is portrayed in entertainment, and I became curious as to why it doesn’t show up. I mean, I’m involved in the profession of studying magic, if we think of magic in the proper terms.

So I went through this whole business of seeing if I could synthesize, what are the basic magical practices and seeing if I could map it onto psi research and of course, it completely maps.

(Gordon White) It 100% maps, absolutely.

It a 100% match. So then I was shocked at, “Well, how come I didn’t know this?” It’s virtually because no one ever talks about it, and then, well why is that? Well, we’re being scientists, that’s why.

So, fully take that in for a minute. The leading light of psi research, Dean Radin, is telling us that psi, the stuff that’s blown the lid off of grandpa’s dopey old materialistic science, well he seems to be saying that, that isn’t really science at all, it’s maybe better termed ‘magic’.

(Gordon White on Redesigning Society) Yeah, I have this definition down to a sentence now I subsequently explain, which is, ‘magic is a culture specific way of using or interacting with the natural consciousness capacities of a particular human.’

Here’s Gordon again, this time he’s chatting it up with Phillip Watt, on his magic themed podcast, Redesigning Society, but tell me, as you’re listening, does this sound like a podcast about magic or a science podcast, because I’m not sure which is which anymore?

So, that might sound a bit circular, but actually if you look across the world at systems or cultures that have never repudiated magic in the same way that the northwest European Enlightenment did, and I’m being very specific about that in Europe because you’re actually finding in southern Europe that it’s carried on merrily in the kind of folk traditions of Itali...