The Reality of Spirits (Paranthropology)

Entity encounters and the therapeutic effect of the psychedelic mystical experience

Anna Lutkajtis

All usual warnings about psychedelic usage apply.

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Sleuthing An Immortal Goddess

Gabriel Roberts

She said to me as she tread across the roof of the dome, “Of course it’s me, dummy!  I’m she who dances to keep the world full of splendor.”  

Her implications meant that without her dancing, all beauty in the universe would disappear and be lost forever.  I was not allowed to see her, but could only see the imprint of her foot as it tread, like the wind leaves its imprint on dunes.  

As she tread across the dome, the roof rained all the fine jewels as they fell toward me like floating feathers, dripping pearls like milk.  The vision waned and I returned to my LSD state, which was beginning to fade and told Albert and Macy about my experience.

She told me that she had called me to the wilderness in order to set my path in motion, that it was what I needed to hear at the time.  She also said that this was just my rite of passage, that the real work was just beginning and I was finally ready to take a much bigger voyage. 

I told David Metcalfe and Dr. Aaron Cheak about my experiences and was shocked to hear that my experience with the divine feminine was a dead ringer for visions of Tara...

Jo Hickey-Hall is joined by author, Patrick Harpur well known to many for his book, 'Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld'.

https://www.harpur.org/x1Daimonic.htm
https://www.harpur.org/patrick.htm

Here we talk about Patrick’s family’s relationship with the Otherworld and whether an openness to the existence of fairies aids the potential for personal encounters. We ponder the eccentricity of our modern western culture in denying the existence of daimons and Patrick offers ideas about which gods may be ruling us at this time.

The Whisky Rant: When We Met The Neighbours

Gordon White

Does it not fascinate you that there was a first sorcerer, a first shaman, a first act of magic?

There is considerable, understandable interest in how our art tumbled down from Egypt and Greece. Both civilisations irrevocably changed the shape of western magic.

But taking a macro view, an overemphasis on these two regions is rather like coming into the cinema for the last five minutes of Return of The King. Shouldn’t we be curious about what happened in the rest of the trilogy?

Homo erectus kicked around for almost two million years, our fully-modern brains are 200,000 years old. 

And yet in the archaeological record there is a time before burial and a time after it.

Somewhere along our journey we acquired a spirit world.

The Whisky Rant: When We Met The Neighbours

Gordon White

A brief quote which points to something I was thinking,

The anthropologist Donald E Brown says “the seeking of altered states of consciousness is a human universal”. In fact, it’s not just a human universal, we share it with vast parts of the animal kingdom.

... which is to say, humans are not necessarily unique in these respects - I briefly had a thought about animal magic as one aspect which might exist, as well as animal mourning. Though I'm on speculative territory with the mention of magic, I'm not sure we can easily draw a line and categorically rule it out.

Join Bernardo Kastrup, leading voice in modern idealism, and Robert Falconer, an IFS expert in "unattached burdens," for a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between idealist philosophy and the phenomenon of spirit possession. Dive into questions about the nature of consciousness, the metaphysical foundations of reality, and how spirit possession might be understood within an idealist framework. This event promises to challenge your assumptions and expand your perspective on mind, spirit, and reality.

Most of the article is about the last book Sahlins worked on, which deals very much with spirits - what he calls "metapersons" believed in by people around the world, but there are some arguably paranormal incidents mentioned as well:

The Enchanted Worlds of Marshall Sahlins

Anna Della Subin

...When the academic reviews of The New Science of the Enchanted Universe began to appear, following its publication a year after Sahlins’s death, I noticed a strange phenomenon: For a genre conventionally prosaic, the scholarly critics kept having encounters with the metaperson of Sahlins himself. When Katherine Pratt Ewing, a professor of Islam at Columbia University, sat down to write her review at her dining table on a Sunday morning, she suddenly found herself slipping into “an almost hypnagogic state in which Marshall was a felt presence,” she recalled in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. “It wasn’t a matter of belief about whether this was possible—it just was.” Ewing later realized that Sahlins had appeared to her on the morning of his memorial service, held at the University of Chicago on April 3, 2022.

“I kept trying to imagine how he would take my comments,” the anthropologist Carlos Fausto wrote in another piece for HAU. “Would he act like a benevolent or a mean-spirited ancestor?” Ancestors, Sahlins had wryly observed, are ambivalent powers, usually the most moralistic of all metahuman types. They are needy, even though “they are not actually in need of anything,” to quote the Swiss ethnographer Henri Junod. At the memorial service, Sahlins’s former doctoral student Sean Dowdy gave a eulogy, and he was certain—for a moment—that he saw Sahlins sitting in the crowd, carrying himself with a shabby dignity. Dowdy spoke of how the late professor had been appearing to him in dreams. In one, Dowdy walked up the stairs to Sahlins’s house on University Avenue. Sahlins opened the door wearing his usual navy-blue sweater vest, greeted Dowdy with a smile, and asked him how the mourning had been going.

It seemed to me that Sahlins, ever since his death, was continuing to develop the arguments of The New Science in a new way. (The book was meant to be a trilogy, if only Sahlins had more time.) The scholar Frederick B. Henry Jr., another former student and longtime friend, worked tirelessly to prepare the manuscript for publication. Henry told me how, as he was driving down a highway in Princeton to an early morning appointment, he suddenly realized that Marshall was sitting in the passenger seat. He stayed there for 10 minutes, as Henry’s hair stood on end and a wave of joy and sadness overcame him. “I found myself belly-laughing at some unidentifiable joke he had manifested beside me to deliver,” Henry recalled. Sahlins was inimitably demonstrating his point, of the immediacy of the spirit world that ever surrounds us. “It is the flip-side, behind the mirror of our limited being,” Henry wrote to me. “None of it need be considered paranormal in the slightest. It is part and parcel of our human condition…. I will eventually become a metaperson, to someone. So will you.”

Think spirit possession is just Hollywood horror? Think again. From ancient theurgy to modern magic, incorporation has been the secret ingredient in effective practice—and you're already doing it without realising it. I reveal how Western magical traditions inherited sophisticated possession techniques from Iamblichus and Ficino, why Christianity's complex relationship with spirits shaped our modern squeamishness, and how understanding the spectrum of incorporation can revolutionise your magical work.

What You'll Discover:

🔥 Why enthusiasm literally meant "possessed by a God" and what that means for your practice
🔥 The Golden Dawn's "assuming God-forms" technique and its theurgic roots
🔥 How everyday experiences like communion are forms of divine incorporation
🔥 The difference between possession and incorporation (and why it matters)
🔥 How we're all living in "haunted houses" of unprocessed trauma and inherited patterns
🔥 Practical applications from shamanic traditions to automatic writing

Whether you're dealing with planetary intelligences, ancestral spirits, or the shadows in your own psyche, this video gives you the framework to work with incorporation consciously and effectively.

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Too many Western magicians treat spirits like they're not real—then wonder why nothing happens. After studying with indigenous teachers and working with students worldwide, I've found the one thing that's blocking your magical results.

The shift is simple but changes everything:

🪬 How materialism broke Western magic in the first place
🪬 Why you need spirits' permission before they'll work with you
🪬 Clinical proof that treating spirits as real gets better results (even for skeptics)

Stop sabotaging yourself with fake beliefs. Start treating spirits like every other culture in history has.

Think spirit possession is just Hollywood horror? Think again. From ancient theurgy to modern magic, incorporation has been the secret ingredient in effective practice—and you're already doing it without realising it. I reveal how Western magical traditions inherited sophisticated possession techniques from Iamblichus and Ficino, why Christianity's complex relationship with spirits shaped our modern squeamishness, and how understanding the spectrum of incorporation can revolutionise your magical work.

What You'll Discover:

🔥 Why enthusiasm literally meant "possessed by a God" and what that means for your practice
🔥 The Golden Dawn's "assuming God-forms" technique and its theurgic roots
🔥 How everyday experiences like communion are forms of divine incorporation
🔥 The difference between possession and incorporation (and why it matters)
🔥 How we're all living in "haunted houses" of unprocessed trauma and inherited patterns
🔥 Practical applications from shamanic traditions to automatic writing

Whether you're dealing with planetary intelligences, ancestral spirits, or the shadows in your own psyche, this video gives you the framework to work with incorporation consciously and effectively.

Funnily enough, Christianity has no problems with spirits ~ IF they are explained within the religious framework of Christianity, with all the appropriate words, metaphors and descriptions. They have be described as "angels" for it to make sense to a Christian, alas, meaning that their true nature is distorted and twisted, whatever that may be.

Not that the angelic guides I work with, as I describe them, have issue with these conceptualizations ~ I would have the guess that this is perhaps where such metaphors originate from. That... otherworldly, ethereal, heavenly, as it were, sense to them that they have.

The spirits I work with seem to have no issue with such labels ~ it's just what it is to them, though I reserve "angel" to describe the more classical attributes given to angels within Christianity, as mentioned above.

Funny that it should mention "planetery intelligences" ~ when I have possibly encountered the... incarnation of Earth, as such? The Sun also apparently is an incarnate being, as shown by the incarnation of the Earth, but I couldn't even begin to comprehend it. It was too different from anything else, even Earth. Maybe stars are so alien to the concept of life as we understand it that we could never comprehend it, possibly. We are incarnate spirits ourselves, with our particular physical nature... where planets and stars seem to fill the whole spectrum of layers ~ they are not just physical, but very astral too, possibly existing on every layer of this... reality, which I am unsure how to properly describe, actually, come to think of it.

I have maybe encountered ancestral spirits... not bloodline-based (as some demand that they can only be), but spirit-based? In the sense that some of the angelic guides seem to have worked with me as a shaman in past lifetimes, and one, my... guardian angel, as it were, seems to be the soul of the shaman who initiated me proper many lifetimes ago. Not that I could ever prove any of this, ha. Personal proof is possibly the only thing that can be had without very thorough investigation of the knowledge of tribe/s I was apparently part of in those lives. And how would I even know where to begin?

Too many Western magicians treat spirits like they're not real—then wonder why nothing happens. After studying with indigenous teachers and working with students worldwide, I've found the one thing that's blocking your magical results.

The shift is simple but changes everything:

🪬 How materialism broke Western magic in the first place
🪬 Why you need spirits' permission before they'll work with you
🪬 Clinical proof that treating spirits as real gets better results (even for skeptics)

Stop sabotaging yourself with fake beliefs. Start treating spirits like every other culture in history has.

Believing that you know that spirits are real seems to be deeply important ~ because otherwise, they can't connect properly through us, or us through them. There has to be resonance and connection properly.

One thing I've been learning is that they cannot act in this world without a focal point ~ individuals who live in both worlds to some degree, or at least, those who have the capabilities to reach into the astral planes, acting as... bridges, doors, I guess. They can grant power ~ their power ~ as well as enhancing our own, but we need the strength ~ spiritual, mental, emotional ~ to actualize that through us. "Power" just meaning their skills and abilities, I guess, and more along those lines. (This is probably where the religious idea of "demons" having domains of influence, and different powers they can grant to the sorcerer comes from ~ spirits all have different abilities and skills depending on their nature, as they are all incarnate astral entities with different natures. The angelic "spirits" are of a whole other nature entirely ~ they seem to have capabilities to do very inexplicable things, but they do seem to need very explicit permission to act against the limits of the world, such as performing miracles that bring people to the surface when they would otherwise drown...)

No wonder Christianity and other such religions demonize what they do not understand ~ they describe "demons" as wanting to control the world through demon-possessed individuals. If we look at the Jewish and Christian holy books, spirits are always misunderstood and painted as "evil", except for those that are described as "angelic" or approved by their deity, where the spirit is demanded to say that they believe in that deity.

To the Christian, shamanic stuff is probably quintessential "demonic" with all of the forms it can take, even though it is very neutral. Though among shamans, there are evil shamans that are denounced and shunned as "sorcerers" and other such terminology that has negative connotations, but they seem to be pretty rare these days.