“And eventually they found them in a cupboard, hanged.” So concluded my very Catholic teacher’s caution as regards what happens to people who dabble with the occult—in this case, the victims being two girls she knew at school who meddled with a Ouija board. You always dabble with the occult, by the way—you never plunge into the occult or embrace the occult, you dabble. Perhaps that is connected to the way people do not take these things seriously these days, at most they take it in the spirit of William James and CG Jung—manifestations of your consciousness, not independent entities. For many people, schooled in modernity, they know as much as tee-vee and horror movies have taught them; and this is overlaid by Enlightenment scepticism—they always say, “What evidence? Seems improbable. Can you quantify it?”. This is their creed.
Yesterday, I mentioned the difference between the thinker and the seer, with the latter being the way to attain a spiritual outlook on life. This division was illustrated to me when I watched a few amateur ghost-hunters; seedy denizens of Britain’s council estates, decayed and on “full disability” and in customary dark glasses and with a Staffie at their heel—as only the British underclass can be.
I can smell them: the odour from charity shop clothes and cheap laundry detergent—a life lived on frozen foods. However, I will not sneer—unlike the Jewish doctor “Theodore Dalrymple”, who parades these people for laughs—because one advantage of Britain’s “mental” underclass is that they are less brainwashed and so prepared to entertained mediums and UFOs and ghosts; and they are disinclined to trust the authorities—once you have negotiated the social service bureaucracy your faith in government evaporates. The type who runs a group chat called “nonce hunters”.
So I watched these chavvy ghost-hunters as they breached abandoned haunted houses and tuned their radios to the spirit wavelength. “I’m the devil. I’m the devil,” squeaked the radio. What struck me about the ghost-hunters was that their reaction to this statement was to carry on—and I suppose this is what “dabbling in the occult” means. This is the difference between sight and intellect. You go to a haunted house and a voice says, “I’m the devil.” Well, what is that? The devil. It is what it appears to be: the phenomenon—literally, “thing appearing to show” or “to show”—constitutes its own explanation; i.e. if it says it is the devil, it is the devil. So tell it to go away.
Yet they carry on. This is because reality is unbelievable—and most people, even religious people, are tied up in beliefs (abstract ideas about Jesus). When presented with the uncanny reality the mind refuses to accept what is obvious—and this is the difference between what it is “to think” and what it is “to see”. One ghost-hunter even reported that he was followed home by an entity and found himself suffused with the smell of sulphur and rotten flesh. Yet being still indoctrinated with Enlightenment modernity, as everyone is, he refused to take adequate precautions; such people will have a minimal knowledge of Satanism, misidentify a Tree of Life on the floor as Satanic, yet will literally talk to malevolent entities in a blasé way.
This is from laziness, refusal to research the topic properly, and from ego—it gratifies to ghost-hunt live. It is also because they cannot see—all they have is a mishmash of Hollywood CGI and beliefs about “Satanists” that obscure the real thing (they are the ones talking to the devil). Since I brought up Hollywood, the same applies: people hunted for evidence that Polanski’s murdered wife, Sharon Tate, was engaged in an occult ritual when killed (or had been shortly before). The real ritual was Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, in which Satan wins—yet nobody sees this is so because it is hidden in plain sight “just a film”, not what they believe Satanism to be.