I’ve been interested in the bizarre since I was a kid, captured in particular by phenomena for which we have evidence but can’t discuss — UFOs, for example, or ESP, or the fact that Covid-19 appears to have come from a Chinese lab. But in the narrow, parapsychological bucket of “damned data,” everything comes down to materialism. Our culture is entirely beholden to the materialist worldview, any evidence to the contrary be damned. And evidence? It looks weird. But weird shit for which we have no explanation tends to be the gateway.

A friend of mine, and an old boss, wrote the book(s) on anti-materialism. In Fire in the Sky, I mentioned my time working in his editorial department. Today, we reconnect and talk about the unrelentingly normal paranormal.

Mitch Horowitz is an historian of alternative spirituality, from the esoteric to the occult, both in history and practice — in other words, where does magic come from and how do we use it? He’s the author of Occult America, a personal favorite of mine, and the forthcoming books Daydream Believer and Uncertain Places.

Below, a transcript of our conversation moderately edited for clarity. And congrats to all the real ones: while I’ll be sharing the transcript more widely over the weekend, this is an audio exclusive for subscribers.

-SOLANA

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MIKE SOLANA: [In Charles Fort’s] The Book of the Damned, the author introduces a concept called “damned data,” which I’ve talked about a lot in Pirate Wires, and in different podcasts.

This is a class of phenomenon for which there is compelling evidence, but people won’t really talk about it, or study it, in serious settings. Charles Fort talked about everything from reigns of snakes and frogs to UFO’s, though he didn’t call them “UFOs” back then, since he was writing… when was he writing, Mitch? The late 1800s, or the early 1900s?

MITCH HOROWITZ: Early 1900s. The Book of the Damned was 1919.

SOLANA: Right, so we had not yet coined the phrase “UFO” in 1919, but Fort’s writing about this stuff. He’s saying there is actually a lot of evidence for very weird shit, and no one is looking at it, and here it is, in an exhaustive, heavy, gigantic book filled with this.

MITCH: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating — 

He became the first naysayer of the age of materialism, while the early 20th Century, the first world war not withstanding, was a period of time where a lot of people felt the modernist mindset was absolutely triumphant. The modernist mindset, which has brought a lot of great things into the world, held there is an unseen physical antecedent to everything we experience. So if you’re a Marxist, that’s economics. If you’re a Freudian, that’s sexual repression. If you are looking for the causes of disease, you’re looking at germs and microbes. If you are looking at the mechanics of the outer world, you’re looking to theories of relativity and time space. [There was the belief] we could chart an orderly family tree of everything that’s experienced in life by just uncovering unseen, physical antecedents.

Fort was the one who said, wait, stop, we have all these exceptions to these known processes. There are instances of spontaneous combustion. There are frogs falling from the sky. There are people bi-locating — appearing and disappearing — there are strange airships in the sky, in an era before we possessed the word flying saucer, and so Fort spoiled the party.

SOLANA: There was a moment… I was at Tarcher (Penguin), in the book room, reading the Book of the Damned, and I got to rains of snakes and frogs and that whole entire phenomenon, and I thought to myself — because he’s referencing news stories — well, it just sounds like people believed weird shit back in the day. It all had to be nonsense. I thought, of course there were false reports about something in some newspaper a hundred years ago, as if the 1920s was like this crazy time.

Then I went back. I googled it, just to learn about the phenomenon. But what came up were recent articles around the world. Every few years there’s some story in Australia, Japan, whatever, about a rain of snakes, a rain of toads, a rain of fish. You wake up, the whole town is covered in, like, lizards. It’s just nuts that exists — or at least that it’s still being reported.

MITCH: A lot of people will point out that the early 20th Century was an age of yellow journalism, where anything that filled column space would get printed, and there’s some truth to that. But part of Fort’s genius was his voluminousness. He would just accumulate these things in massive books, as you referenced in your introduction. The Book of the Damned is no short book. It’s not something you just snuggle up with at night. It’s an almanac of the bizarre.

Fort sought to demonstrate, by sheer volume of evidence, that something had to be going on that was outside the straight story. That was his genius, his capacity to poke holes in the straight story, and that has continued today. When Fort was alive, the term parapsychology certainly existed. But today we have entire academic fields primarily dedicated to the study of ESP that affirm some of what Charles Fort was saying: we simply do not have a handle, even remotely, on the physical processes of the world. There are massive holes and gaps. Materialism, which holds that matter creates itself, is not a triumphant, organizing ideology. It’s simply a theory, and more and more it’s more a theory of sentiment than a theory of facts.

Charles Fort has posthumously prevailed.

SOLANA: In the world of parapsychology, it seems “damned data” centers around the mind-matter connect.

There are all different kinds of damned data. In politics, for example, it’s like the Wuhan lab stuff, right? There’s evidence there we’re not supposed to look at, or we weren’t supposed to look at. For every controversial political conversation this exists, but it exists broadly.

This one — in parapsychology — is one of the most interesting because it’s the one rational people still really hate to talk about. Mitch, you spoke at Hereticon, a conference we threw for Founder’s Fund. The place was filled with rational people who loved disagreeing, and this was the topic that triggered them. There’s data here, but people really don’t want to face it.

MITCH: I often joke — and like every joke, it contains truth — that when I need to chill out from controversy I start writing about Satanism again, because I get less blowback from writing about Satanism than I do from writing about ESP.

And it’s an absolute fact — entire careers and institutions are dedicated to debunking, or attempting to debunk, data that’s come out of academic ESP research over the past 90 years. The fact is we have so many replicable, unimpeachable experiments that have been published for decades in peer-reviewed journals, and that have been re-run, that have been meta-analyzed, that have been juried, that have been picked apart, that continually show some ability to exchange information in an anomalous way in laboratory settings.

Using some sensory faculty that we do not understand people are able to glean coordinates, information, images, pass images back and forth, and the effect that’s detected is replicable, unmistakable, and slender. So it begs more questions than it answers.

It’s not dentistry. It’s not something that can just be automatically or easily or predictably repeated according to certain lines. But after 90 years of data gathering the clinical validity, and the replication of this data, is absolutely unimpeachable.

When I talk about it I try to be as conservative as possible, because, for me, there being just a few statistical points of deviance from guess hits on a deck of cards, or on the ability to precognitively identify images, or to identify data or images that a sender is trying to convey in a matter that would be called a telepathic, that slender, tiny deviation of difference from guess hit rates… it simply reveals the infinite. And that precisely is why it results in such blowback.

I talk about it very conservatively because the simplest facts themselves are the most revolutionary, and put us before a vista of questions.

SOLANA: It seems that you deliver, to the materialists, materialist evidence for anti-materialism, which is extremely frustrating. If it plays out, this undermines the entire worldview.

Mitch: Exactly. It doesn’t mean that Newtonian mechanics are wrong. We still live, most of the time, in a Newtonian world. But it accomplishes what Charles Fort was seeking to do, which is it pokes a hole in Newtonian mechanics. It forces us to come to grips with the fact that there may be this macroverse that doesn’t obey these rules at all. Just as we understand there to be a kind of microverse that doesn’t obey these rules at all in the quantum physics lab. So it’s always controversial when New Agers pick amongst quantum physics data and say, look, perception determines reality. There are many people who take umbrage at that.

Let’s set that question aside for a moment, although it’s a very big and valuable and important question. If we then shift the scene to the ESP world, where we’re dealing with a mechanical macro world that we see, and feel, and touch, and you’re supposed to be able to get a 20% hit rate on something, some target system, and over time you’re evincing, let’s say, a 28% hit rate on that target system, and you’re continually scoring several percentage points above chance, and other people are too, then suddenly we know that we have some sensory capacity that doesn’t obey ordinary mechanical or biological or technological laws.

There’s another set of laws we have to come to terms with.

SOLANA: Or at least certain people.

MITCH: Certain people, right.

SOLANA: Which is maybe the other controversial part of all of this. It seems some people are better at this than others. People don’t like to be told that people are different… specifically, they don’t like to be told that some people are exceptional, let alone exceptional at something that sounds like magic.

MITCH: Right. We don’t like the X-Men. We have never liked the X-Men. My intellectual hero, JB Ryan, a parapsychologist who founded the parapsychology lab at Duke University in the early 1930s, took what might be considered an X-Men approach.

JB reckoned that, out of the subjects he encountered, about one in five seemed to have some ESP ability. One of the young scientists who worked with JB, a man named Charles Anderton, later went on to devise some experiments in the 1970s called the Ganzfeld experiments, which is German for open field. Anderton felt that ESP might be more general among the population, and it might be arousable if you could put people into conditions of very relaxed sensory deprivation. He got a more general spike, but there’s still a debate as to whether ESP is something that possibly can be conditioned, trained for, or whether it’s really limited to a few gifted individuals.

So, the X-Men versus the more democratic approach is a question we haven’t been able to answer.

SOLANA: You anchor a lot of this stuff around a really compelling idea, which is the power of a wish. We’re talking about the power of belief, which we see in everything from prayer to the experiments you’re running in a parapsychology lab. But also in the wish.

Can you tell me a little bit about the premise? What drew you to this idea of the wish?

MITCH: One of the things I’ve been interested in for many years is “New Thought,” or the philosophy that thoughts are causative.

One could come at that from a psychological perspective. One could come at that from a metaphysical perspective. It could be some combination of the two. I personally am interested in that contention from a metaphysical perspective, and I think that the people who created the modern iteration of mind causation in the late 19th Century had a really good instinct for a lot of vistas of the mind that would be affirmed by the hard sciences in the decades ahead. They had an instinct for the placebo response. They had an instinct for neuro-plasticity. They had an instinct for psychical research. They had an instinct for mind-body medicine. They had an instinct for the medical implications of stress. And they had an instinct for some of the things that are now very seriously talked about in terms of models like string theory or different interpretations of quantum physics data.

Since they had such good instincts for things that have been affirmed by many of the hard sciences, or at least some of its theoretical models, why not take seriously their central contention, which is that thoughts are causative.

One doesn’t have to sign onto that with some orthodoxy. I personally believe, and I write in many of my books, including Daydream Believer, that we necessarily experience many different laws and forces. Our lives are conditioned by all kinds of different things, and there are all kinds of intervening factors, but what a shame it would be to not open that box and say, what’s in here? Why not experiment with this? Just as an individual ethical experiment.

Apropos of the power of a wish, I’ve often found myself challenging some of the orthodoxies of the New Thought movement. The primary one is, in order to enact the causative agencies of mind you need to get in touch with the feeling state of the wish fulfilled — that’s the trigger. That’s the turnkey that opens the doors of the psyche. I honor that, but I question its exclusivity as a method.

When the individual is suffering from grief or depression or anxiety, which are experiences that we all have, it’s very difficult by an act of intellectual will or intention to rearrange your emotions and adopt a feeling state that you’re someplace else, or that you’re experiencing someplace else.

I thought to myself, rather than Mother Nature playing this cruel joke on us, where we can only get what we need if we feel like we already have it, what if the wish alone — intensely felt, concentrated upon, and well-focused — could be sufficient to put us on the path of accessing these powers of the psyche.

That’s one of the things I experiment with in Daydream Believer. That’s why ESP research is so important to me. If we’re prepared to accept the prospect of ourselves as beings who lead both material and extra-material lives, if we’re prepared to accept the thesis of extra-physicality, at least as a possibility, which is all ESP research really asks us to do, isn’t it possible that intention in and of itself might be enough to unlock some of these energies that I’m referring to.

I’m making a big theoretical leap here, and I recognize that. But what else is life if not for making theoretical leaps? Let’s find out what’s in that box.

SOLANA: I wonder if what people, when they focus on the feeling component, are really getting at is what you just mentioned, which is intention. Maybe they’re sort of confusing a feeling with an earnest desire for something. Are you saying that it’s just the earnest desire for something that matters?

MITCH: I am. I often speak in terms of the psyche. I think the psyche is a compact of thought and emotion, and it seems to me that if you, the individual, want something, whatever it may be, if you need something to bring fulfillment to your life — and I strongly believe that the mature sensitive individual is capable of deciding what is best for him — then the intensity of the Wish, it seems to me, creates a compact of thought and emotion. That’s the turnkey to enacting the powers of the psyche.

It’s okay to be in a state of want, or in a state of desire. You don’t have to necessarily feel you’re in a state of fulfillment in order to unlock these energies. That’s my contention, and that’s what I’m experimenting with.

SOLANA: What is your sense of what is possible given some future scenario in which people embrace this, and further study it? What are the kinds of things you hope to discover? What are the potentialities you hope to unlock?

MITCH: My wish is, first and foremost, for the individual to realize that he or she is never without resources. Thought in and of itself is more than a tool of analysis, cognition, or motor skill. Thought, based on a whole variety of models that I go through in the book, may very well have causative properties. That perspective may very well concretize experience in some key, vital ways. I don’t think it’s the only game in town in terms of the forces that we experience. We do live in a physicalist realm, and we are going to experience physical demise. We are going to experience mortality. We stubbed our toe, and we experience pain. There’s virtually no exception to that. But the fact is we also have, I believe, causative potentials that emanate from the psyche and that whatever challenge the individual is facing I never want him to neglect that potential tool in his tool belt.

I don’t know that it’s going to fall to our generation to answer any of these questions. The thing to which I’m striving is not to squelch the questions. The problem I have with the professional skeptics is they’re less interested in debating this than in eradicating a debate. They don’t want there to be minuscule sums of money funding parapsychological research on college campuses. Even though the research costs peanuts, they don’t want even those peanuts to be there. They feel like it’s lending intellectual seriousness to fantasy.

Shutting down the debate is what I stand against.

So in terms of my wish, of that which I want to convey to the individual, it’s that you have these resources, and you should experiment with them. In terms of the broader culture, I expect none of this to be answered tomorrow. But I don’t want the debate to be closed down among serious people.

SOLANA: On the topic of wishes, you’re sort of the “expert” —

MITCH: [laughter] I’ll put that on my business cards — “WISH EXPERT.”

SOLANA: For people listening who want to make a wish… how do you do it?

MITCH: Absolute, unembarrassed frankness with yourself first and foremost. We are, I think, unbelievably conditioned to divorce ourselves from our real desires. It sounds strange to say that because we live in a society that, on the surface, can seem so licentious, so driven towards pleasures, so consumer-oriented, and that’s all true. But we are creatures of peer pressure, and we start to internalize that peer pressure at very, very young ages.

I would ask anybody who’s interested in this: as a personal, and very private, and intimate experiment, something they do by themselves and share with no one, not their shrink, not their significant other, not their friends, just privately in the confines of your own psyche, be completely frank with yourself about what you want. And if you are completely unembarrassed, and completely private, you will come to something surprising, I warrant.

We sanitize, perfume, and reprocess our wishes in all kinds of ways so that it sounds spiritual, or it sounds altruistic, or it sounds this way, or it sounds that way. Just forget about all that. Just within the private confines of your own psyche, be completely frank with yourself about what you want.

You may be very surprised, and there’s a lot of energy in that kind of self-admission.