Occult Experiments in the Home: Personal Explorations of Magick and the Paranormal by Barford Duncan

Author:Barford, Duncan [Barford, Duncan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

There is much to be said for ruling out the mundane before resorting to the paranormal, but would things have been different if he had had an experience of the kind that offered no opportunity for physical investigation? Earlier,2 I described how objects rolled around of their own accord after I’d messed with the Ouija board as a teenager. There was no room for degrees of misperception in this experience: either the objects moved or they did not. If they did not, then my sanity is in question; if they did, then reality misbehaved. Either way, the explanation is something more interesting than a draught through a keyhole.

The characteristics of Dawkins’s atheism are not unique but bear comparison with Sigmund Freud, who was one of the most popular and influential critics of religion in the previous century. Although Dawkins offers intriguing suggestions, he shies away from stating specifically what kind of a delusion he considers religion to be, and from where it may have arisen. Freud was more forthright: he regarded religion as a crutch for feelings of existential helplessness: “I cannot think of any need in childhood,” he wrote, “as strong as a father’s protection” (1930: 260). The idea of God, in Freud’s view, arises from projecting a reassuring fantasy of “the father” onto the external world.

Most educated people in the Western democracies would probably position themselves alongside Dawkins or Freud, yet at the time Freud first published his views a friend and correspondent, Romain Rolland3, challenged him that the basis of religion is not a fantasy but stems from a fairly commonplace experience:

[A] feeling which he [Rolland] would like to call a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic”…. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion (Freud, 1930: 251–252).

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