Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone, it’s Angela, and welcome back to my channel.
Today we will have a special guest here in the channel, Dr Jack Hunter, a visiting lecturer from the University of Chester. Jack Hunter has published extensively on the topics of extraordinary experiences and Anthropology of the Paranormal and today we will talk about a very special topic which is; does magic exist? Is magick real? So stay tuned if you want to find out.
Hello Jack, how are you today?
Jack Hunter JH: I’m good thanks. How are you?
AP: I’m okay. Are you in Bristol now?
JH: I’m in Chester.
AP: Oh, you’re in Chester.
JH: Yeah, in a borrowed office.
AP: That’s good. Are you liking it there?
JH: Yeah, it’s good. It’s a nice place. It’s close to where I live, so it’s easy to get to and there’s a lovely department here. All different branches of Religious Studies including my weird paranormal side.
AP: Yeah, yeah, I’ve been there. There are very lovely scholars working at the Department of Religious Studies in Chester. So yeah, it must be good to be working there.
JH: There is. It’s nice.
AP: So, today we are talking about the topic of whether magic exists and is magic real and it is mainly based on an article, that Jack has published on the journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions, which is titled, “Between Realness and Unrealness” and tackles this topic and of course I will leave everything in the infobox, this article and other publications will be listed there so, of course, do check them out.
So the first question that I’d like to ask Jack is; is magic real? Does magic exist and how can we answer this question as academics, from a scientific, academic point of view? When they say…
JH: That’s a difficult question to answer.
AP: That’s why I’m asking.
JH: Well there’s a few different ways that we can think about magic and we can think about it from the kind of practitioners side of things. So there are people who practice magic, as a practice with rituals and all of those kinds of things and we can definitely say that that exists, 100% exists because we can go out and we can directly observe people doing it. But then there’s this other side of magic, which I suppose is magic, you can think of it as magic as a phenomenon or magic as a thing that might exist. And that’s when things become a little bit more tricky, a little bit more difficult to answer. Because, within academia, there’s a real kind of aversion, almost like a taboo against the possibility that things like magic or the supernatural might be real and I think dealing with these things, as academics, we’ve got to be able to confront this issue head-on. So that’s what my work has really been about. So trying to answer the question of whether magic is real or not I would say yes, magic is real but it might be real in more complicated ways than we usually would like to give it credit for. Because I think that magic is embedded within wider networks of social and cultural factors. But also in deeper kind of ecological factors as well. So yeah I think magic exists that I think that it’s probably a little bit more complicated than we usually give it credit for.
AP: How would you define magic by the way? So we can know where what we’re talking about.
JH: Good question. Well, that’s a good question. I tend to think about magic in terms of Parapsychology. So the idea, if you know, anything about Parapsychology, Parapsychology is that scientific study of phenomena that usually labelled our sign, as Psi, P-S-I, and that refers to things like telepathy, psychokinesis, different things like that, clairvoyance and there is good experimental evidence for the existence of these kinds of phenomena and people have been researching them, scientifically and rigorously, since the end of the 19th century. So within Parapsychology, there’s this whole body of evidence that demonstrates that there is statistical evidence that these things exist that we can influence random number generators and things like that or that we seem to be able to pick up messages telepathically in some way. So I think we can’t divorce magic, the idea of magic, from the wider research that’s going on and that, has been going on in Parapsychology. So it seems to be something very real but the problem is parapsychologists tended to ignore like I said before, this wider social and cultural context and I think that’s where disciplines like Anthropology and Religious Studies and Sociology have got something extra to add to this debate, to situate psi-phenomena within the real world.
So my definition of magic would probably be as a phenomenon, it is basically Psi and the possibility of spirits and then as a practice, as a thing that people do, magic is the attempt to harness those abilities and put them to use in some way.
AP: That’s a brilliant answer and I think one that most practitioners would agree on.
JH: That’s good.
AP: So can you tell us more about your research about the existence of magic?
JH: Yeah, my research, my doctoral research was on Spirit Mediums in Bristol. So I wasn’t specifically dealing with magic but I was dealing with that very much related concern of the reality of spirits. Thinking about whether spirits exist and how we could go about telling whether they actually do exist as ethnographers. But also tackling the problem of how do we incorporate our own extraordinary experiences into our writing. So I started off researching these Mediums in Bristol initially. I did research with Spiritualist Churches. I would go to their meetings and sit there and I had a couple of interesting readings from Mediums who were visiting. But I wasn’t able to build up the kind of dialogue I wanted, I couldn’t get deep, deep with the people at the Spiritualist Church because the congregation seemed to change all the time and it seemed as though people would go there it on a whim one week because maybe they’d suffered a bereavement or something that. they’d go and they try to make contact and then maybe they weren’t successful, so they wouldn’t come next week.
So the congregation was always changing, so I decided that I needed to find somewhere there was a little bit more kind of permanent and rooted, maybe, with a smaller group and by some kind of a weird coincidence I stumbled across this group called the Bristol Spirit Lodge and they were literally about a 20-minute walk from where I was living at the time in Bristol. So that was handy and basically what they did but what they still do, although they are based in Clevedon now, they would develop Trance Mediumship so they would have Mediums who would come. Initially, they were just friends. The person who sets up the group but then later, as the group kind of gained respectability, more mediums would come in and they would develop their trance in a kind of a safe environment, basically, and each week the Mediums would come back and their spirits that they can communicate to their bodies would engage in dialogue with sitters and do all sorts of things like that. The other thing that they were trying to do was to develop ectoplasm, which is an interesting thing. If you’d seen Ghostbusters they talked about ectoplasm in Ghost-busters.
AP: Yeah, yeah. I know what it is.
JH: So that was interesting and that. So they were kind of developing two different strands. They were developing Trance Mediumship on the one hand and the spirits that communicate through the Trance Mediums and then they were trying to deposit develop physical phenomena like ectoplasm and all that. So my job then, was to go in as an anthropologist and to try to understand what was going on and why they gather every week to do this. To do what, from the mainstream, seems like something that’s totally imaginary or an illusion or whatever. And what I found was right from the very first seance, that I attended, I myself had some strange anomalous experiences I suppose you could call them or extraordinary experiences. The very first seance I went to, the Medium was sitting in the cabinet, which is a kind like a curtained-off corner in the room. And there was the red light because they these red like as ectoplasm is light-sensitive so they don’t want to endanger the Medium by having bright lights on and you could see the Medium clearly. And as she was going into her trance state, she would close her eyes. She was sitting there in the semi gloom and I saw appearing, over her face, a kind of like a green mask, that just slid down really slowly. I’ve described it before – it looked kind of like it was like a bald, Chinese monk kind of face. That’s the impression that I got and retrospectively thinking about it’s quite a stereotypical kind of, if you look into Spiritualism you find all of these descriptions of oriental masters and all of that kind of stuff. So that was quite interesting.
But I kept it to myself, I didn’t mention it to anyone else in the room. Now when we went out back into the… after the seance you go back into the house and they’d have a cup of tea and a biscuit and things like that and talk about what they’ve seen. And then, independently, two other people in the room said, did you see that green face appearing over the Medium’s. I was like hmm, this is interesting, some kind of… it’s almost like we had a hallucination because it certainly seemed to me it’s a hallucination. I didn’t think that this face was actually there but I still experienced it and it was also verified by two other people and that was the very first seance I ever attempted. So it opened up this whole realm of possibility that extraordinary experiences are really the reason why people do these things. It’s the reason why people come every week to develop mediumship, to have seances and all that kind of stuff because they do in those circumstances have weird experiences. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re genuinely paranormal or anything like that, that they could be hallucinations or whatever but at the very least it’s like an experiential reason for these practices.
So that was my gateway in and then I started to do other various kinds of participatory research and developed a little bit of Mediumship myself and had a freaky experience.
AP: Oh, that’s cool. You did?
JH: Yeah, so it was interesting and it opened up the possibility that I have to take the paranormal seriously. People are having… if two or three people hallucinating the same thing then it kind of suggests that there’s something else, something weird going on there. So my whole body of work, so far, has basically been trying to make sense of these experiences and how I can talk about them sensibly and academically, in a scholarly way I suppose, and situate those experiences within a wider discussion about religion and paranormal.
AP: That actually links very well with the next question that I’m going to ask you which is; can you talk more about the approaches that the scientific community has used to tackle extraordinary experiences and magic?
JH: Yeah well, Mediumship is a really good example because there are loads and loads of different explanatory frameworks that are applied from the mainstream perspective that almost try to it’s almost as though they’re trying to explain it away. So I’ll give you a couple of examples of how mediumship gets explained in the academy. The first one is along social functional or psychological functional lines. So the idea with social functional explanations is that of Mediumship is that Mediumship performs a function for the group. So it provides people with a sense of community and all of those kinds of things. And a psychological functional perspective would be that it helps us to deal with grief and those kinds of things. So they’re kind of the mainstream standard explanations and they totally rule out the possibility that there might be a genuine paranormal or a real, magical reality underlying it.
Actually, what they do is something called “bracketing,” which is a common approach in the social sciences and we can take this right back to Evans-Pritchard. And as an Anthropologist, Evans-Pritchard basically said that the question of the reality of spirits and the paranormal isn’t something that social scientists can answer. So because of that, it’s something that we shouldn’t ask the question, we should bracket it out. But I think that bracketing is also making an ontological assumption because you are deciding, as a researcher, which parts of the pure experience are able to be explained in naturalistic terms and which parts you don’t want to touch. So you’re already starting to break the experience apart when you start to think like that and I think when we do that when we put those brackets up, we’re already losing a part of the complexity and the depth of it but we’ll get back to that in a minute.
Another explanatory framework is the psychopathological explanation which basically explains mediumship as a form of pathology, mental illness or whatever. Maybe, also we could bring into that ideas about hallucinations and things like that and again, they come with this implicit assumption that there can’t be anything genuinely paranormal or magical because they’re built from a materialistic framework. And actually, I think that this materialism underlies a lot of the research that we do in the humanities and Social Sciences even though we might not necessarily be thinking along those terms ourselves but the underlying ontology, or worldview of academia, is a materialist one. So again, my research has been trying to find ways that we can move away from this underlying materialist ontology and explore lots of different possibilities. I digress again.
Another way that Mediumship is explained away and quite commonly is with a cognitive approach. So the idea is that Mediumship or the experience of Mediumship is more or less like misinterpreting normal, natural, cognitive processes for something supernatural. And a good example is the work of Stuart Guthrie and the idea of Animism as a kind of innate, cognitive faculty that we all have, where we can identify predators and things in the trees in the wilderness or whatever. And that’s what predisposes us towards deceiving spirits and things like that, even though they’re not real. So yeah these are the kind of mainstream approaches that are applied but none of them takes seriously, like I mentioned before, the possibility of genuine parapsychological phenomena. Very few Social Scientists or Anthropologists have been interested in Parapsychology. So I think there is a body of evidence there that suggests, at the very least, there may be something more going on in these situations than these mainstream reductionist approaches than I kind of give it credit for.
AP: Why do you think there is? Why do you think there’s this reductionist approach going on?
JH: I think there’s a deep-rooted desire of the Humanities and Social Sciences to see themselves as in hard sciences. Basically, to fend off the criticisms of mainstream science that it would be “woo” or whatever to entertain the possibility that these things could exist in some way. So I think there are deep entrenched materialist things going on in the Social Sciences and yeah, we’re still feeling… even though we’ve gone through that whole process of escaping from ideas of developmentalism and evolutionism and the idea that some cultures are more primitive than others and all of that kind of stuff. Even though, on the surface, we’ve gotten rid of all of that, at the same time social sciences can’t help but try to maintain the status quo. I tried to keep the materialist ontology in place. So that’s why I think you have these problems.
AP: And yeah it is a positive one.
JH: Yeah, it goes back to the positivists. The only kind of evidence or the only kind of knowledge about the world that has any relevance is knowledge that can be empirically verified or…
AP: Measured.
JH: …measured exactly, quantitative stuff. Yet we know from our experience of the world that the most important things to us, our feelings and emotions and all of that kind of stuff, the qualitative things, we can’t measure them but they’re nevertheless real. And I think the paranormal and magic, although parapsychological experiments can detect very small statistical probabilities and suggest that there is something real going on, for the most part, the paranormal and magic are actually more like emotions and feelings and things like that than objective physical phenomena. Though there sometimes they cross the line and that’s what makes the paranormal so interesting. If that makes sense?
AP: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, I was wondering whether we can fill the gap between these scientific approaches and a more inclusive study of magic and the paranormal. I mean since the scientific community has always measured these kinds of things or studies these kinds of things in a more quantitative approach. Is it possible, do you think, to study them from a qualitative standpoint and still maintain academic credibility?
JH: Yes, I think that we can. I just want… here’s one thing that I really liked the idea of. There’s a psychologist called Charles Tart and he came up with this idea of state-specific sciences. This is a really cool idea that you can have sciences that are kind of dependent on your state of consciousness. So, for example, a kind of science that you did under the influence of LSD would be completely different to the kind of science that you do under your normal consciousness conditions. But nevertheless, both forms of science are still employing the empirical methods they’re still using experience to find out about the world. But they can be radically different and I think that this is the kind of thing the Social Sciences needs to kind of get its head around, is that Social Science is a different kind of science to hard sciences and that we need to develop new ways of thinking about things that don’t try to reduce everything down to the hard sciences. And just because we might be using different methods and different kinds of theories doesn’t mean that we’re not doing science, we’re just doing a different kind of science. And I think that the sooner we kind of get our heads around that the greater the progress we’ll be able to make on these kinds of borderland areas.
AP: That seems about right. Also, you normally talk more about the paranormal rather than magic. So, do you feel there is a difference between the paranormal and magic or that the two are related and how so?
JH: I think the way I use the paranormal, generally. I use the term… I quite like the word paranormal although in academia…
AP: It’s not really liked.
JH: …people don’t like it because it suggests the possibility that there’s more going on than our academic models kind of allow for. And academics don’t like that because they want to have a good solid picture of the world. So I use the word paranormal in the sense that it was originally intended to designate phenomena that is, currently at least, beyond current scientific understanding. And I think that you can lump all of that magical stuff into there, into the magic as a phenomenon, magic as a thing, not necessarily the practice side of things, but telepathy and all of those kinds of things. So that’s the way that I use the term and I think we need to reclaim it as social scientists because it was originally intended as a scientific term. It was put forward, it kind of evolved out of the term “supernormal” which was coined by Frederic Myers it was a classicist and kind of like a pioneering psychologist as well, as a founding member of the Society of Psychical Research. And they the reason they came up with this term supernormal and later paranormal, was to distinguish it from kind of like religious explanations with miracles and things, where they would basically say that, no it’s God that’s created this, is God that’s caused the miracle and these guys in the 19th century they thought that they could… they wanted to be scientific and they wanted to be rational and they didn’t want to rely on these old stories of God or whatever. They didn’t want to rely on religion for their explanations so they developed a new terminology to bring all of that stuff into the domain of science. So the term paranormal itself, like I said, it is a scientific term. It was intended to be used within the academy and it’s only through popular culture and that kind of stuff that it’s had its reputation besmirched.
AP: I remember one of our first conversations at the Conference of the BASR, a few years ago, it was about this topic. I was, I think, asking you why had you called Paranthropology, that you had used the word Paranthropology in the journal you’re the editor for? If I remember that correctly.
JH: Yeah, yeah. Well again, that’s because I want to be, I want to be upfront about this stuff and I don’t want to be kind of trying to sneak it in through the back door. Science and academia and all of that stuff, this should be open and happy to investigate pretty much anything that is put on the table. And I think that the too-long this thing that we has been labelled as paranormal has been neglected. And really I agree with people like Jeffrey Kripal, that we really want to understand religion as scholars of Religious Studies and things, then we need to get a grasp on the paranormal as well. Because it’s kind of like… one way that I think about the paranormal is it’s like the untamed, the wild essence of religion and then, when you get religion, it’s basically like those ideas that kind of crystallized and they become coded in doctrine and things like that. The paranormal is like wild magic, it’s the wild stuff that still exists out there and we need to be able to embrace it and engage with it on its own terms without reducing it. I don’t know if I’ve answered the question there, I’ve sort of gone off on a tangent.
AP: Yeah, I think you did. I was thinking that, yeah, of course, you also find these kinds of experiences across different religions. So it is important, I think, for Religious Studies to address it and all, not just bracket it out, as you’re were saying before.
JH: And for Religious Studies to be aware of the empirical data that there is from Parapsychology. Because we don’t, when we do our introductory Religious Studies course, we very rarely are introduced to Parapsychology or the experiments that have gone on with Mediumship and telepathy and psychokinesis and all that kind of stuff. And really that it’s like the bones and the muscles of religion isn’t it? I mean miracles and all of that kind of stuff that built on those kinds of side principles. So we don’t have any understanding of that and we’re not going to get very far we’re trying to understand even mainstream global religions which ultimately have their source in this wildness. So yeah.
AP: Yeah and also it’s interesting that normally you don’t really find these aspects of extraordinary experiences, for example, in journal articles or other publications but when you go on conferences and you get close to this scholar or this other scholar who’s had ethnographical experiences on the field, for several years, they will likely report something of the source but then you realize, yeah, but this was not mentioned in your publications. So it is a bit like… it’s a part that is, it is just assumed that you should exclude it from your work, from your academic work which is a bit bizarre, I think, but it is still the way it is at the moment, but hopefully…
JH: And that was part of the reason why I set up the journal Paranthropology because I realized that a lot of Anthropologists, with Anthropology being my background, a lot of Anthropologists have had these kinds of experiences that they don’t want to talk about them, they don’t have the platform to talk about them. Say you published your experience of seeing a ghost or something in one of the big mainstream academic Anthropology journals, well you probably wouldn’t even get it published, that’s the thing. So there needs to be a platform where people can talk about this stuff. The thing I was most interested in was how this tendency to ignore the paranormal, even though people have paranormal experiences, even Anthropologists, goes right back to the very beginning of the discipline.
You’ve got people like E.B. Taylor, he’s a founding father of Anthropology, well into Animism – coined the term – all of that stuff. In all of his writings, he’s assuming this developmentalist’s perspective where it’s primitive and it’s already been superseded by rationalism. But at the same time, he is going out into Victorian London and attending seances and things and in his private Diaries, which were released back in the 70s, and an Anthropologist, a Historian of Anthropology came across them and he’s saying, I don’t have an explanation for these phenomena. It seems as though something genuine is going on in these seances, and he had seances with some of the leading mediums of the Victorian era. Big names, even Kate Fox, one of the first Mediums, founders of Spiritualism. So it’s just interesting that it gets ignored and I think it goes right back to that issue of, is Anthropology a science or is it something else? Or is Religious Studies a science or whatever? People don’t want to open up the possibility for critique and that’s not a good place to start from.
AP: Yeah and maybe this also affects our work when we are on the field doing fieldwork as Anthropologists, since when people know that you are doing this kind of work from an academic point of view they sort of assume that you are judging them to begin with, before even entering their space or participating in whatever ritual it is. People that don’t know you but they just know that you’re an academic researcher, they would just think that you are there to judge and consider them lunatics. So I did have this kind of experience, for example, in my fieldwork and that is mostly based on this assumption that, as a scholar, you are just supposed to believe, to have that ontological standpoint regarding extraordinary experiences and magic and these kinds of things. So it is also, somewhat, affecting negatively our fieldwork and our relationship to the informant and participants in our research. Well, that is until they get to understand and know us better, I guess. Because we are more accepting, perhaps, than others but actually all the Anthropologists and scholars, that I know in the field, are very open and accepting of everything.
JH: Yeah it’s true. It’s all there, it’s just bubbling away under the surface. And it’s about time that we started to take it seriously. I think.
AP: Yeah, it’s like we are portraying this kind of idea that we are only considering the quantitative aspects and we are bracketing out the extraordinary experiences. But actually, you can tell by talking to Anthropologists and Ethnographers that that isn’t really the case with which scholars are doing this kind of work nowadays. So yeah.
JH: Sorry. Even using terms like extraordinary experience, it kind of is separating these experiences out from the rest of everything else that goes on in the society. So when we talk about we talk about magic and all of those kinds of things and even going back to Evans-Pritchard, people like that. They’re saying that we can’t separate magic or the supernatural from the life-world of these people,, there is no distinction. It’s the same with extraordinary experience, we call it extraordinary because it seems to stand out but for the people who have those experiences it’s a fundamental part of the way they understand themselves and the way they understand their place within the cosmos. So it’s kind of arbitrary to separate extraordinary experience from everything else that we study as social scientists. So yeah, I think it needs to be, it needs to be recognized that the fundamental kind of element of human whatever it is, human life.
AP: Yeah, I guess as a last question is more I know something very but I wonder do you think from your fieldwork, fieldwork experience that any person can develop Mediumship or other abilities, magical abilities of this sort?
JH: That’s a good question. I think most people probably could if they put their effort into it and wanted to develop it. There’s one thing that they say within the Spiritualist Movement is that everyone, basically, is a Medium it’s just a matter of training. At the same time, there are also, and there have been throughout all the history of magical, religious history, there are individual people who seem to have a special gift and we see this in Parapsychology, as well, there are certain people who are really good at doing these Parapsychology experiments, really good at getting remote viewing hits and things like that. So they were also seen… you could even look at things like Shamanism and how some people are born into the role of a Shaman through a family lineage whereas other people come into it spontaneously. There’s different ways that we can kind of come into practising magic. But I definitely think that some people, perhaps, from the very beginning, are more gifted than other people but that doesn’t mean that we can all develop it. We just might find it more difficult than others do.
AP: Yeah, would you like to give us all your contact details, where can people find your work and how can they contact you if they want you?
JH: Yeah, well you can find me on Facebook quite easily and I’ve got an official page on Facebook. So if you search for Dr. Jack Hunter then you’ll find that. I post all my updates and news, new publications and things on there. I’ve also got a website which is Jack dash Hunter dot webstarts dot com and again, that’s basically my online CV. It’s got everything that I do, I put it up there, so all the interviews I do and new articles and books and things. For those who might be interested, my most recent book is “Greening the Paranormal” which is an exploration of the overlaps between Anomalistics, so the study of the paranormal in all of its guises including Anthropology, Religious Studies but also Parapsychology and crazy things like Cryptozoology, all of that fun stuff. The overlaps of that stuff with Ecology and the way that the Science of Ecology understands the relationships between living organisms and it’s got big relevance to the stuff that’s going on at the moment with Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg and that climate awareness that’s in the Zeitgeist at the moment. So it kind of taps into that and explores it but from the paranormal angle. Also, my thesis will be published next year which may be of interest. I’m also working on another edited book, at the moment, with Diana Espírito Santo about ‘meta-ring” the paranormal. So how science and technology metaphors have played a role in the manifestation of the paranormal. But my particular emphasis is on how organic analogies, organic models might be a better fit to understanding the paranormal than technological models might be. Something for another day.
AP: That’s very interesting. Thank you very much Jack, for this interview. It was really, really interesting and I hope that you liked it.
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Bye for now.
Dr Jack Hunter’s Contact Details:
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/DrJackHunter/
Website: http://jack-hunter.webstarts.com
Peer-reviewed Article mentioned:
https://www.academia.edu/17918642/_Between_Realness_and_Unrealness_Anthropology_Parapsychology_and_the_Ontology_of_Non-Ordinary_Realities