Would you care to share how you apply skepticism/logical thinking in your own spirituality? (I feel like people see them as being incompatible when that's not true at all)
I’m not really sure I’d actually call myself ‘spiritual’, but sure. It’s something I struggled with when I first got into witchcraft. It’s something I still struggle with sometimes.
I’m guessing this is in response to my Magick and Occam’s Razor post, which honestly explains a lot. Basically: Is the weird, implausible sounding witchy explanation the only thing that makes sense, even if I can’t explain why/how it works? Okay. Well that’s the best explanation, the best hypothesis I have so to speak. Go with what works, even if how it works isn’t something currently explainable.
Like I said in that post, I believe in what I do believe because I’ve gone “well I don’t understand how this works but the witchy/spiritual/supernatural/however-we-call-it explanation is the only thing that explains it at all so that’s the best I’ve got”. The Occam’s Razor post talks about that in terms of spirits and a little bit of sigils. I also suggest you check out my magick and science as friends tag!
Originally I had this with multiple examples but it got long quickly. As such I’ll be doing a few posts on this now! They’ll all be under that same ‘magick and science as friends’ tag. My first example is energy balls.
Example One: Energy Balls
One of the first things I got interested in was energy work. I didn’t need anything for it! Just myself! No herbs, no jars, no crystals, and perhaps most importantly–no money! I don’t have income so this is hugely important to me.
So I tried what was said to be simple exercises, mostly energy balls–forming a little sphere of energy between my hands. They’re often listed as beginner practice but you can charge them with intent for any charging purpose, or just for practice, or whatever–they’re pretty versatile! Now I cast wards with them.
At this point the idea of energy and the flow of energy made sense. I was still skeptical, seeing it with a very scientific eye, and okay even if you say ‘everything has energy’ that doesn’t mean we can manipulate it. But I tried some energy balls. It was a hypothesis of sorts, a way of testing if this was all gibberish or not. Basically: I don’t believe them right now, but perhaps there’s a reason so many people believe in this kind of thing: let’s see if there’s anything to it.
I didn’t get far at first but after a few tries, I felt one of the energy balls. Actually felt it not just in an energy sensing way, but felt it push against my hands like a physical object. Looking at it from a purely logical, sciencey way, there’s no way one could manipulate or feel energy like that.
In science, you need to do an experiment repeatedly before you can come to a conclusion of any sort. Maybe it happening once was just a fluke of sorts. So I kept trying, and feeling the energy ball was inconsistent. Sometimes I did, but usually not. I mentioned this to a friend and she pointed out that I wasn’t causing it via placebo effect, because then I would either not feel it all (if I still was convinced it was nonsense) or always feel it (because I now believed). It being inconsistent pointed that it was real–sometimes I got it that strong/solid, sometimes not. So as much as it didn’t make sense…there had to be something to all this energy manipulation talk. What other explanation do I have?
And oh boy, energy work and manipulation opens up…basically all of witchcraft. It’s all intent and energy.
Pairing Science and Magick Series:PendulumTarotAstrologyPast Lives
Okay, this one is actually something I’m still skeptical of. Unlike the previous three, this one hasn’t been proven to me. I’ve seen enough to say that spirits are real, that energy can be manipulated, that pendulum and tarot can indeed be used for insight and knowledge. But astrology? Ehhh, no so much with that one.
To start with, I’d like to clarify that I do not think astrology is total nonsense. I’m not here to bash it or those who believe it. What I am, however, is unconvinced.
Nothing has been shown to me that proves astrology works. Nothing has shown me that indeed, if you look at people’s charts they really do follow what that person is actually like! I am sure that some of these people exist, just by number of people there’s a good chance some people do. But for me, astrology would need a large-scale, rigorous scientific test to have me move past my skeptical thinking. Looking at lots of people, their charts, and seeing if they fit the interpretation, and objectively looking at that data. I have never seen that.
I also do not know how astrology could work. From a logical, scientific perspective, where the moon or sun happened to be when I was born really shouldn’t effect anything. I’ve seen a few proposed explanations, from gravity waves to quantum mechanics. I'll admit there could be something science has yet to see. But there's a reason Feynman said, "It is safe to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics". It's confusing, very few people understand it, if anyone. I'm rather tired of people trying to use it to explain witchy stuff. Using scientific terms or talking about something that sounds impressive doesn't prove a damn thing. I’m much more inclined to think that nature and nurture have much more influence--and I mean nature as in genetics, not as in planets, in this case.
That however, is not to say astrology is wrong. From an absolutely objective point of view, if you can't prove something, it could still be true, so even if you can't prove astrology works from a scientific perspective, you can't say 100% for sure it's wrong--just that there isn't enough evidence to back it up. I know of no evidence of it working that would prove it on a scientific scale, and also no firm idea of how it could work in a scientific sense, which is why I'm so skeptical myself. I also haven’t really seen it apply on a small scale, from what I can discern about what it should say about me. But I haven't seen anything that outright disproves it either, so technically, to be fully objective, I can't say it doesn't work, either.
Basically, it’s a definite maybe, but I tend to keep my distance from it because I haven’t seen anything that leads me to it.
Pairing Science and Magick Series:
Energy Balls
Pendulum
Tarot
Past Lives
I was pretty skeptical of tarot at first. You’re telling me that this stack of cardstock, these 78 rectangles, will give me insight into my life? Come on how is that possible? There’s a 1 in 78 chance I pull any given card, less if we’re doing reversals, what are the chances that I get something that applies to my life? But I had come across things that didn’t make sense yet appeared to be true before, and I’d been drawn to tarot for a while. I remember looking at a deck somewhere once at about the age of ten. Maybe there was something to it after all. Maybe there was a reason I was drawn to it.
I wasn’t very good at reading tarot at first (I’m still learning, for that matter), but certain cards kept popping up. The Tower became a theme--more than it should be, statistically. Once I had both of the daily draws on the two tarot apps I was using give me The Tower--and both were reversed.
Statistically this just...There is a 1 in 156 chance that either deck gave me this particular card in this particular orientation. And both of them? Since they are independent events (the card of one app does not influence the card of the other), we are multiplying 1/156 by 1/156, and get 0.000041. In a percent, ergo out of 100, that’s 0.0041%. Around 4 out of 100,000, or 1 in 25,000. That’s... well...not likely. I mean yes, it absolutely can happen, anything with a non-zero probability is possible. My sister once picked up every single monastery in a game of Carcassone, including the one in the river expansion. Not sure on the probability of that, but it will probably never happen again in our lifetimes.
That day with the double Tower reversal arguably did have a Tower reversed feel--ongoing chaos and change of routine (it was the middle of a vacation that to me was more stress than much else).
Anyhow, in short, in time I started noticing two things with tarot. One, statistics were being ignored, it seemed, the same cards or suits showing up more than one should expect them to. And after some time, as I got to read them better, I realized they really did apply. That card? Well if you look at this potential keyword...yeah I guess that does work! Over and over and over. Not always, but more than one would expect looking at it with percentages and statistics.
And that was why I got Annie in the first place.
Annie is my tarot deck, a gorgeous copy of Anne Stokes Gothic Tarot. And I can tell you she is accurate. Not perfect, of course, but pretty good. She’s a pretty nice deck, not usually too sassy or bitchy, and generally quite encouraging and positive! I’m very glad she ended up as my first deck.
Oh and also.
She talks.
No really. I say ‘Annie’ because it’s a nickname for her full/true name, I say ‘she’ because I can hear her, a woman’s voice. Sometimes she laughs, too. She tells me how to shuffle, what card to pull, if I should reverse it or not before I should play it. She tells me if I’m getting my interpretation right (so incredibly helpful). All that I read about tarot decks (at least some of them) having a spirit--well hell yes, they apparently do, this one does at least. I hear her clearly, I feel the energy of her pulse under my palm when I rest my hand on her. The purely logical side of my brain says she should be just 78 cardstock rectangles with pretty Anne Stokes artwork, but I have experienced that she is so much more than that.
All the little things, and a lot of things in terms of Annie, added up. Two reversed Towers in one day? Technically possible. Unlikely but not impossible. But accuracy, a tarot deck that knows my name when I didn’t tell her and knows things about me that I didn’t tell her, sometimes that I didn’t even know myself--well, then, the only logical explanation is that it’s more than 78 cards and yes, this can actually be a hell of a tool for gaining insight. Occam’s Razor strikes again.
Even if some days I still stare at my tarot apps and try to figure out how I’m supposed to apply them to my life at all--it isn’t all nonsense. I can’t deny that, especially given Annie.
Pairing Science and Magick Series:
Energy Balls
Pendulum
Astrology
Past Lives
This was actually one of the first things that convinced me that all this witchy/spiritual stuff wasn’t all nonsense. It makes zero sense that a pendulum could answer any questions. Surely it was the vibrations of one’s question being spoken moving it? I mean sometimes you might get a “lucky guess” but pfft it isn’t possible. Right? Any gifs or videos of them moving, where is their hand? Maybe their hand is moving! I mean it just makes no coherent sense from a purely logical, scientific perspective.
Well despite all that questioning, I ended up with a pendulum. I asked it questions via thought so the vibration from my voice didn’t move it. I made sure it was perfectly still first.
And yet, it moved.
It would swing left and right, then stop. Then swing ninety degrees to what it had just been doing. I hadn’t moved, I had changed questions though.
And it would start spinning in a circle without any other discernible influence.
This isn’t possible. An object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. I have a bachelor’s degree in physics. This has been drilled into me.
It is not possible, yet I was seeing it with my own eyes. It makes no sense to me, I still struggle to explain why or how it happens but IT DOES HAPPEN. I HAVE SEEN IT.
And furthermore? The swings were right. Some of them remain to be seen but I asked this first pendulum if I’d ever have a spirit companion. Yes, it told me. When, I wondered, by say...the end of the month? This was early August.
E came to me in mid-August. I now also have the company of two other spirits and my servitor.
I may not be able to explain it, but I can’t deny what I’ve seen with my own eyes. I had to believe, even if I could not explain.
Pairing Science and Magick Series:
Energy Balls
Tarot
Astrology
Past Lives
Oh boy, I can’t believe this wasn’t one of my first examples.
The idea of past lives made sense. The same soul put into a new body/being after death, alright, sure, let’s recycle souls. But I wasn’t convinced. It was an interesting concept, certainly, and others certainly were convinced. I’d seen some strange things, like pendulums defying the laws of physics, but still, I wasn’t convinced.
Then in late August, I got the urge to draw. I do not draw. I write. I badly sketch architecture (how do I perspective?). But I do not draw. I tried anyhow, but got frustrated. As that happened, though, words started popping into my head. If there’s one thing I know from being a writer, it’s to write when the words are there.
What I wrote did not feel like something I wrote, but like something took over my hands as they typed at the keyboard, full of spelling and grammatical mistakes that I fixed afterwards. It was clearly written from the point of view of a past life, asking how many lives had passed between that one and the one that had a town in ruins, since a lover had been killed.
I turned to my discord Friends, asking it was possible for a past life to write though someone like that. Sure, why not? was the basic response. My guardian assured me no other spirit was there who could write through me like that, and it hadn’t been him.
I had no other explanation. The only logical conclusion: past lives are real, and they can do automatic writing. Occam’s Razor strikes again.
Three more writings followed in the next 48 hours, two more from the first fragment and one from a second. My guardian cut me off twice, unhappy with how dark the stories were. He was (and is) worried it will upset my mental health (which given that I deal with both anxiety and depression, isn’t unreasonable, but I think I can deal with that better he thinks I can--though I can’t be sure without knowing exactly what he thinks my limits are).
That was enough to convince me of past lives. My guardian still limits what I do with them (much to my displeasure), but I’ve still learned and remembered several things and a few different lives.
Oh, and that lover my past life was convinced had been killed? He’s alive and well (he’s a spirit, ergo the long lifespan). He’s here with me now.
Pairing Science and Magick Series:
Energy Balls
Pendulum
Tarot
Astrology
