Angela Puca AP: Okay, let’s go.
Hello everyone. I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Today we have a special guest here in the channel and we will talk about a very fascinating topic, which is Paganism from a psychological perspective. Our guest today is Dr Charmaine Sonnex. Charmaine is a Psychologist specialized in Transpersonal Psychology and a lecturer at the University of Buckingham. She has conducted fascinating studies on spell casting and Pagan practices from a psychological perspective and also she advocates, which I totally agree upon, the importance of studying Paganism from a psychological standpoint.
So let’s all welcome on the channel Charmaine. Hi Charmaine.
Charmaine Sonnex CS: Hello.
AP: You just appeared. Thank you for being here on my YouTube channel.
CS: Thank you for inviting me.
AP: Yeah, when I heard about your research I was totally intrigued and I thought, wow, I’ve never heard of her research before. Why haven’t I? So we absolutely have to fill the gap.
CS: Yeah, I try to present at conferences on Religious Studies as well but being a Psychologist my awareness of them is kind of minimal.
AP: Yeah, it’s good to know someone who studies Paganism from a different perspective and I know your PhD was on spell casting and the efficacy of healing spells, healing Pagan spells. So can you tell us something more about your PhD research?
CS: Yeah, so the main focus was looking at the efficacy of use, as you say, of distant-healing spells so it’s kind of a project in three parts. So for the first part, I did a meta-analysis of existing distant-healing research. So, in meta-analysis what we do is we take existing research that has already been published, as research with statistical outcomes and we will combine all of those outcomes together to get an overall view of what’s happening with the research. Because it’s one thing to do a kind of narrative review where you’re looking at all the research and you’re presenting all the different findings and you’re kind of weighing it up logically but statistically the results might be something different. And so with better analysis, you can put all of those statistics together and get a kind of overall answer and so I wanted to do that with existing distant-healing research because there’s been an awful lot of it. And so and there hadn’t been, at that point, there hadn’t been a meta-analysis done for about 15 years or something and so I wanted to get a more up-to-date overview. And most of that, in fact, none of that research, that we looked at, had been conducted using Pagan healing spells. So it was more to get the background of okay here’s what other approaches are showing us and is that something that we will then see in these Pagan healing practices.
AP: So what did you find?
CS: So we found some interesting results. We basically split the research into two categories. So we had, what we called, “whole-human” which was research where the recipients of healing were people and then we had what we called “non-whole-human.” So this was research that used plants, animals, and cells in vitro as the recipients of healing. So the cells were, sometimes they were plant cells but often they were human cells as well whether that was bone cells or maybe even things like cancer cells and to see what kind of impact there was healing of those sorts of systems as well. Because, obviously humans, even in a double-blind study there’s some kind of expectancy and so there could be placebo effects. So we thought if we looked at these kinds of non-whole-human systems then placebo is unlikely to be an explanation. I think there has been some research to show that maybe rats do experience placebo but I don’t think the same can be said of lettuces. So we felt that that was fairly safe to look at and what we actually found was that in both of those groups there was an effect of healing, that healing was effective. The effect size was small, so this wasn’t a huge impact that we were seeing but we were seeing an impact and it was across both groups. And that effect has still remained even when we controlled for quality because, unfortunately, a lot of the research into distant healing and does have some methodological issues especially around things like blinding.
So blinding is where you hide what groups the participants are in from the participants, so that they don’t then have that kind of a placebo effect and if that doesn’t happen people can guess what group they’re in and they’ll fill out the forms or their measures accordingly. So blinding is a way to help prevent that and that doesn’t always happen. And there are a number of other things that there are methodological issues with some of this research. But even when we control for that, even when we took the higher quality papers and then we were still seeing an impact. And so that was really interesting and really promising for later on down the line, when I was actually testing Pagan healing practices. Because it seems like other approaches to healing and that there were a multitude of different approaches to healing that we looked at it seems to have an effect so that was quite exciting.
The second part of the PhD was to then interview some practising Pagans to get an idea of what are the kind of core concepts of Pagan spell casting because, obviously, I was using that umbrella term Paganism and, obviously, there are lots of different traditions of Paganism, each with their own ways of doing things and of course, there’s a big community of eclectic Pagans who will kind of pick and choose what works for them. And so there is a lot of variation in practice but at the same time, that umbrella term exists for a reason. And so we wanted to see what are these core concepts within spell casting so that when we actually design the study to test the efficacy, the kind of things that we’re doing do actually reflect the way that people practice in real life. Though if a practitioner from any tradition would, kind of, look at what we were doing – even if they don’t say, oh I do everything exactly the same way, they could just say no, that does actually broadly reflect what I do.
So I had eight people that I interviewed. They’d been practising between I think it’s about 10 and 40 plus years. There’s some very experienced people from a range of different traditions. We had some Druids, we had some people who were traditional lineaged Wicca, some people who were eclectic and so we had kind of a range of different approaches in there. And so I was asking them about their about the practices what it was they did, what the core elements, how long would they expect to see results, that sort of thing. So we used that inform the final part of the PhD where I actually had a fantastic practitioner who worked with me for months, who was actually casting healing spells for participants who volunteered and that was done at a distance and that was done double-blind as well. So that means the participants didn’t know what group they were in and I didn’t know what group they were in. I was the one collecting data from them but my PhD supervisor was the person who had assigned them to groups. So none of the people involved in the data collection knew what group they were in, so I couldn’t give them any accidental hints about what group they were in. They wouldn’t know and so it’s kind of a way of ensuring that we’re eliminating the placebo effect as much as possible.
AP: Sounds extremely fascinating. I want to read your PhD thesis now. Yeah, it must have been quite fun as well, I guess. Oh, as far as a PhD can be of course.
CS: With that caveat, yes it was. It was fantastic to be doing that and to just be completely immersed in all of that for so long. It was fantastic.
AP: In your case, there wasn’t really participant observation. You were just there to collect the data?
CS: Yeah, so the practitioner was actually on the other side of the country and so we were sending her photographs of the participants, we were sending in personal items because that’s something that came through from the interviews, was needing to have a representation of the person that you’re casting for. And we also sent her spell requests. So we had the participants make a note of the sorts of changes that they wanted to see in their lives. Because that was another thing that came through from the interviews, this need to tell the healer the spells to the particular person and to the particular kind of purpose. We had people fill out what they wanted to kinda see changed in their life. We sent all of those things off to her. She would conduct her ritual and her work in and send things back and in between that time, we would be measuring their quality of life using quite a comprehensive scale. And we were to measure that four times across four weeks and it would be at a point in between then when they would receive healing. We would find out afterwards which group they’d been in and we kind of compared best scores across the different time points to see if there was a difference from kind of before the ritual was done to after ritual is done.
AP: Was the healer able to tell you how long would it take for the healing to occur in the person? Why did you set the four weeks?
CS: We set the four weeks, basically, so that we could have a baseline. So the first week would be that kind of baseline, what’s their standard measure before they’ve had anything done. We had the two weeks because we had kind of two groups so we’d split people into. And so between that baseline and first and then between first in the second week. And then we had the last week was to see if there were any kind of tail-off effects. So when we’d interviewed people they’d said that effects was seen fairly quickly and so we kind of gave it about a week. In retrospect, I’m not sure if that was long enough to really see anything or to be able to see any clear differences. And so there are things that, if I were to redo the research, I think that’s one of the things I would change – is maybe have a longer time period. But that was some of the feedback that we’ve got, that the results could be fairly quick.
AP: And were you the person selecting those who would receive healing? How did you select the people that would be healed?
CS: It’s entirely voluntary. So I advertised the research that I was doing. That made the kind of rough thing that it would involve and then volunteered to take part and basically everybody would receive healing. So, as I said, we split the group into two. We used what’s called a delayed intervention design. So we split the group into two and the first group would receive the first lot healing and so the second group would be their control and then the next week the second group would receive their healing and we kind of used this first group [as their control.] So the idea was that so everybody would receive healing because we didn’t feel that it was ethical from a Pagan perspective and Pagan ethics to promise people healing and then not actually deliver it [inaudible] well-liked around that and because there were two lots of ethics that I had to balance. I had to balance research ethics and I had to balance Pagan ethics when deciding this as well.
AP: Yeah, yeah. That’s a good point actually. That it’s not easy to balance the two things out. But you manage brilliantly.
CS: Thank you.
AP: So and which were the results, the final findings from this research?
CS: So I would say that the results were inconclusive. We did see that across the whole group, then people did improve in their quality of life from the start of the study to the end and they improved in the areas that they requested. So the measure of the quality of life that we used split quality of life into four different dimensions and it was only the physical and psychological dimensions where we saw this improvement. So environmental and social relationships, we didn’t really see a significant difference. So we did see across everybody that increase in the areas that they’d asked for, which is really interesting. But then when we broke it down into the group differences to see if one group A had had healing and group B hadn’t and group B had had healing and Group A hadn’t to see if there were any differences that we could attribute then to the practices then. Though we weren’t seeing a significant difference there and so we can’t say that it was necessarily down to this spell-casting intervention, unfortunately.
So I think it would be nice if there was more research done in this area. I think there are some changes to the methodology that can be made to be able to get a clearer idea of what’s going on. But I think the fact that we did see that initial change in everybody in the areas that they are asked for, I think, is really promising. Especially when combined with what we know about other types of distant healing.
AP: So it was inconclusive on one hand but on the other hand it was promising in that, by doing more research and more studies, you think that something more consistent might arise?
CS: Possibly. Yeah, I think you know with science but we never just do one piece of research and then take that as kind of that is exactly the outcome we look for replication which is where we do things over and over and over again to see if we get a consistent answer. So I think it would be really good to explore this and to have this type of research done more and more with Pagan healing in the way it is that you see with, for example, intercessory prayer. There’s heaps of research on intercessory prayer so it’d be nice if there were similar amounts of research on Pagan healing practices to get a kind of clearer idea of what’s going on there.
AP: Mmm, yeah, I totally agree and hopefully, in the future, we will have more of these kinds of studies and from with different methodologies as well which will really give us a better understanding of the phenomenon.
CS: Absolutely.
AP: Moving on to your current research which is on the relationship between religious orientation, nature-connectedness, and happiness, which also includes the flow state. Can you tell us more about that, about your current research?
CS: So, at the moment, we’re just finishing up data collection on this so we’re exploring the concept of nature-connectedness which is kind of self-explanatory. How connected a person feels to nature. Religious orientation which we’re talking about kind of what religions somebody is because there’s different ways of understanding what religious orientation is and so we’re looking at it from the perspective of, literally, what is somebody’s religion. And well-being or happiness, which we’re exploring from the perspective of “eudaimonia.” So eudaimonia is understanding, well-being, and happiness as not necessarily being about just, really, the presence of positive emotions and the absence of negative emotions, that’s called “hedonia.” Eudaimonia is, basically, well-being that’s around living up to your full potential and being true to yourself, living an authentic life. So we wanted to look at how all of those were interlinked because it’s been a lot of research to show that nature-connectedness is linked to both eudaimonia and hedonia.
There’s a really strong link between nature-connectedness and well-being and there is quite a strong link, as well, between religious practice, being a member of a religious organization, and well-being. There’s lots of mental and physical health benefits of following a religious path. And so we wanted to add in, you know, we wanted to add into that Paganism as well. It’s so to explore how all these things be interlinked my colleagues and I created a survey with a whole load of different measures in. So to measure nature-connectedness it included a measure of those the nature-connectedness scale. So it looks directly at nature-connectedness.
We also had a measure that looked at what are called “biophilic values”. So the biophilia hypothesis is this idea that because our evolution as humans has been so shaped by our environment on so many levels, we actually have this kind of innate yearning for experiences with nature. And there are different ways that we interact with nature and they’re called biophilic values. So an example would be, a utilitarian biophilic value would be looking at the ways in which nature is useful. And a symbolic biophilic value would be expressing ideas through nature-based metaphors and symbolism and things like that. So there’s nine different biophilic values. So we took measures of those as well to see if there would be differences there, not only in how connected people are to nature but in the ways that they connect to nature.
We also measured people’s childhood experiences of nature to see if there’s a connection there that had an influence and then we also asked people to complete a well-being questionnaire. So this is one that was created by Ryff. It’s the psychological well-being scale and it looks at well-being from a eudaimonic perspective. So it’s a whole battery of tests that people filled out along with demographic stuff about what their religious orientation is and we included atheist and agnostic in that as well. And so we’re going to be putting all of those together and seeing what relationship is. So we’re hoping that there will be some kind of link there and we’ve done some preliminary tests for a few hundred people to take part and there’s been some interesting results but, obviously, we won’t know the full results until we have the number of people that we need to complete. But we’re coming up to that now.
AP: How many do you need in order to make sure?
CS: We’re aiming for about 600. We’re pretty close, seeing as people are finding it difficult to get out into nature at the moment {COVID19 pandemic}, then we’ll probably be wrapping up data collection pretty soon and then we’ll and then we’ll see kind of what the numbers are and what sort of statistical power they have.
AP: That’s fascinating. So now people know that they have to follow you so that they can know when the paper is it’s gonna be published and know the results because this is a kind of a cliff-hanger.
CS: A little bit. I mean preliminary results have been interesting. So we have seen some differences between Pagans and non-Pagans on a number of their biophilic values and so, for example, probably not surprisingly, and I stress these are preliminary results, but in the preliminary results Pagans scored significantly higher on the symbolic biophilic values than any other group. Considering it’s a religion around nature worship with the Wheel of the Year and gods and goddesses being avatars and the sun and the moon, that’s not really surprising. We also saw differences in the connectedness to nature scale between Pagans and all other groups and some other things. So there is some interesting stuff coming out, some stuff that we anticipated, as I say, the kind of symbolic, biophilic value differences. If you know anything about Paganism that’s not absolutely surprising. There are some results that we weren’t necessarily expecting as well but we can’t really give any definite answers until we got all the data collected.
AP: That makes sense. Do you think that Pagan practices can somewhat foster eudaimonia?
CS: Yeah, that’s some other stuff that I’m working on at the moment. As well I have a paper coming out in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, very soon, which explores exactly that. But again, I’m, in that paper, I’m looking at eudaimonia as Ryff’s concept of psychological well-being and so with that theory of eudaimonia there’s this idea that there are six core elements of eudaimonia. So there is our self-acceptance, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations, and purpose in life. And so in the paper, I go through how each of those is fostered in Pagan practise because I think there’s a lot to be said for Pagan practise and all the things that it can do. So, for example, self-acceptance, I think, is something we see a lot of. There’s an acknowledgement of light and dark in Paganism, a lot of people who will do shadow work. There is an acknowledgement of both light and dark in people and in nature. You know, we see people being branded as fluffy bunnies, inauthentic Pagans if they’re focusing purely on kind of light and love and not acknowledging the darker side of things. So I think that that speaks a lot to this idea of embracing all of yourself not all the elements of yourself.
We also see things like the sacralization of the body and sex. Maybe things aren’t treated as something that’s kind of sinful or shameful. It’s a part of human experience that is embraced and that can be massively healing, not for everybody, but especially for marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ people and women, who have massive expectations put on them around their body and those sorts of things, so having that all kind of sacralized in the religion can be massively beneficial for things like self-acceptance, with autonomy, and environmental mastery. It’s obviously, for a lot of Pagans, there is this emphasis on personal agency, having control of your own practice, having direct experience of the divine. For a lot of Pagans that I interviewed, that was the thing that drew them to Paganism, was having this unmediated experience with the divine, not having to go through the clergy to be able to have that experience. And if we’re looking at environmental mastery, this idea of having mastery over your environment, having control over your environment then spells for purpose very much indicate that that is a thing you can have.
Personal growth, that’s a really important element of Paganism for many people. Magical ritual practice is as much about personal growth as it is about acknowledgement of the change in seasons or anything like that effect. Leo Ruickbie, in his research from amongst British Pagans, personal development was listed as the second most popular reason for practising. So I think that speaks a lot. To positive relations we see when people work in covens or in groups then, obviously, that’s going to be fostering personal relationships.
Douglas Ezzy in his book, “Sex, Death and Witchcraft” talks about Pagan festivals and one Pagan festival in particular and he talks about sense of “communitas” that’s fostered there, which is this idea of a deeper sense of community. So where the relationships you have are more open, they’re more intimate, and so again, that’s something that is fostered through ritual. and of course, a lot of Neopagans talk about the idea of interconnectedness and that being a way that magic works and it just being a kind of fundamental element of their belief system that everything is interconnected. So that’s obviously going to foster personal relationships if you feel that everybody is connected.
And purpose in life. I think it comes in a number of ways I mean any kind of spiritual or religious practice inherently gives you purpose in life. I think it’s one of the main draws for a lot of people as to why they might be religiously spiritual. But we also see things like being given meaning in suffering. So if there’s an acknowledgement of dark things going on and kind of pulling through that and being stronger as a result that can bring meaning to suffering, which can be really helpful for people, can really help them cope with traumatic times. If they find that there’s a meaning in there, there was something to be gained. And also with things like the Wheel of the Year and the, cyclical nature of time that is an inherent part of Paganism as well. When we talk about the Wheel of Year and the waxing and waning, life and death. These things are happening in nature but they’re also things that happen in our lives and as part of our human experience. And so having those things put into the context of this wider idea of cyclical nature of time and experience that can also then help and have put those things into perspective and give meaning to those sorts of experiences as well. Things like ageing and you know certain kinds of milestones in life. All those sorts of things can be put into this much wider context and that can be really beneficial for us as well. So this is all stuff that I want to explore because these are psychological concepts and I think that they’re really useful ways to explore Pagan practice.
AP: Yes, indeed it is. It’s also like pagans tend to attune the inner seasons with the outer seasons. Yeah, which is another form of connectedness which is the one you were talking about really?
CS: Yeah absolutely. So there’s so many of them are kind of interlinked and you see them all coming into play in Pagan ritual, in Pagan practice. So I think it’s really interesting to explore and I think it’s nice to get out there as well because there’s still, I think there’s still this idea of why do people practice Paganism? Why do people believe in this stuff? Especially when researchers come to discover that a lot of Pagans are well educated and will often have degrees and maybe in things like statistics, so they understand probability, know that this belief in magic is not just down to a kind of cognitive deficit. Then the question becomes, why would sensible people be studying this inherently nonsensical thing? And so by actually exploring all these concepts through psychological theory, I think well here’s an understanding of, actually, this is what people get from this, this is how it can be really beneficial, and how it can make sense to a lot of people. Although we’re gradually bringing weird to the mainstream, in the fact that that paper’s been published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology – which is a mainstream journal I’m really excited about. It’s part of a special edition but looking at magic mysticism and altered states of consciousness. So there’s lots of articles in there from people exploring similar sorts of concepts from a psychological perspective and it’s really exciting that a mainstream journal is publishing a special issue on this.
AP: Congratulations.
CS: Thank you. I was just invited to contribute an article but I was so happy that that is being published that it’s being put out there in the mainstream so we can maybe make it less weird.
AP: Yeah, yeah and it is important to study outliers. Which is something that I also talked about in the Q&A for the first thousand subscribers.
CS: Yeah, absolutely. You can learn as much about a culture from exploring what is on the fringes as from exploring what is in the mainstream. Absolutely.
AP: You advocate for more studies to be done on paganism from a psychological standpoint, from a psychological perspective. So I was wondering, what is the current state of academic research in the field of Psychology with regards to magical practices and Paganism?
CS: Yeah, so that there’s not so much really. I mean my focus is on Paganism rather than magical practice broadly. So I think there are some people exploring magic practices in general. But I’m not really aware of people who are, specifically within Psychology. I know myself, obviously, looking at the stuff and Melissa Harrington is a Psychologist who kind of explores Paganism. She came up with the concept of the “coming home story” of conversion to Paganism. So there are set kind of conversion stories that people have this kind of very general stories that people have where they’ll convert in specific kind of ways and she identified that none of those really reflected the experiences of Pagans and she identified this idea of the coming home theory. This idea that people have been exploring different religious and spiritual paths and when they came to Paganism this and they went, oh my god, this is how I’ve been feeling and this is what I believed all along. So she came up with that theory. But really I’m not aware of many other people and I think that that’s a shame. The majority of the research seems to be in Sociology, in Anthropology, in Religious Studies and I think that means that we’re missing out on some stuff.
So “flow” is something I’ve identified in my work. I mean Douglas Ezzy did insight again in his book in about 2014. That was when I was writing up my PhD and it was after I’d kind of picked up on this a little bit. And then I thought I’ll be publishing this, this will be completely new and then I find out that I’d been pipped the post a bit. The concept of flow has been around since the 70s when Csikszentmihalyi coined the term and I think if there had been more study from Psychology around Paganism that might have been something that we picked up earlier on. And so I think there’s lots of benefits to using psychological theory and using that as a lens that you look at Paganism through. And I really hope that more people kind of pick it up because there is this emphasis in Psychology at the moment, in mainstream Psychology, on trying to be more of a hard science. And so there’s a real focus on things like Neuropsychology and you know Cognitive Psychology in those sorts of things. And so with that comes a dismissal of anything anomalous and this idea of, we can’t explain it with current theories so there’s no point in looking at it. You know that “woo” idea which really bugs me. If we can’t explain something then surely we should be exploring it more. That to me is what science is and how we should be using it. So I would really like to see more people looking at these sorts of practices from this psychological perspective. Because I think there’s a lot that can be gained from that.
AP: Yeah I’d say precisely for that reason. Because it’s something that we don’t understand yet, it needs to be studied from an academic point of view.
CS: Yeah, you know topics in and of themselves I don’t think can be scientific or not. Science is what scientists do. It is a method of investigation. If you are exploring something using the scientific method then you are doing science. And I think there’s benefit to that.
AP: I will just say I totally agree with you. Thank you very much, Charmaine. I think that your research and your studies are absolutely fascinating and I think that you all should check out her work. I will surely do. Thank you again for being here on the channel and for doing this interview with me.
So hope you all liked this video. I’m sure you did. If you did, SMASH like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you won’t miss any future video, and, as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
REFERENCES
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Ezzy, D. (2014). Sex, death and witchcraft: A contemporary pagan festival. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Harrington, M. (2002). The long journey home; a study of the conversion profiles of 35 British Wiccan men. Revista de Estudos da Religião, 2, 18-50.
Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness Is Everything or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Wellbeing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069-1081. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.5…
CHARMAINE’S PUBLICATIONS:
Roe, C., Sonnex, C., & Roxburgh, E. (2015) Two Meta-Analyses of Noncontact Healing Studies, EXPLORE The Journal of Science and Healing, 11 (1), 11-23
Sonnex, C. (2017) Testing the pagan prescription: using a randomised controlled trial to investigate pagan spell casting as a form of noncontact healing PhD thesis. University of Northampton.
Shadrack, J., Sonnex, C. and Roe, C. (2019) Ritual Occultation and The Space Between Worlds: Exploring The Discursive Nature of The “Flow” State in Black Metal and Pagan Performative Practice. In McLaughlin, C. (ed) Trans- states: The art of crossing over Fulgur Press .
Sonnex, C., Roe, C., & Roxburgh, E. (in press) Flow, liminality, and eudaimonia: Pagan ritual practice as a gateway to a life with meaning Journal of Humanistic Psychology special issue; Anomalous Lifeworlds: Mysticism, Magic and Expanded Consciousness.
Sonnex, C., Roe, C. & Roxburgh, E. (in press) Testing the pagan prescription: using a randomised controlled trial to investigate pagan spell casting as a form of noncontact healing. Journal of Complementary and Alternative medicine.
(First uploaded 30 May 2020)