Magic and Science Are Twins

How Science and the Occult Grew Up Together And Remain Friends

In my high school, there were two kids that always hung out that were quite different from each other. One was into football, the other skipped football to take up wrestling. One was more muscular than the other. One cut his hair much shorter than the other. One had a sweet personality while the other tended to be caustic. They were really opposites in many ways but they hung out together all the time. Why did they hang out? Because they were identical twins.

To someone that did not know them as well as I did, they were completely indistinguishable. But to those of us who spent hours of time playing sports with them, going to class with them, and attending school functions together, they were nothing the same. We spotted small differences in size, hair, scars, and personality and focused on them giving us the impression that these identical twins were so different.

In the same way, science and magic are very different things. Often depicted as opposites. Magic is superstition conjuring spirits and ghosts. Science is based on empirical observations and a rigid method of testing. Science has been shown to be true. Magic has been shown to be false. But just like my childhood friends and I, the differences are not as pronounced as we would imagine. We live in world in which we all identify very strongly with science. Scientists are a sort of priesthood. People regularly state, “I believe in science”. And to be a person that, “denies the science” is to be a backward bumpkin. So when when we look at magic, we see all the differences.

Most people (regardless of religion or lack thereof) view magic as ineffective, evil or both. For that reason, this might sound like an offensive comparison. But step back to a time or culture that does not identify so closely with science and the differences largely evaporate. A man born in 1000 BC Mesopotamia seeing computers or rockets or airplanes would likely consider them to be a form of magic. Just as we look at Gandolf in the Lord of the Rings carrying a staff that can shine a light or shoot out lighting, we think, ‘It is magic!’ a man from ancient Mesopotamia might see us participating in a Zoom call on our laptop and think, ‘It is magic!’

Like any set of twins, the differences are only known to those who know them well.

But, the science-is-awesome crowd would say, we DO know the differences so science and magic can be recognized as two separate things. And now that they have been separated from one another they can never to be joined together again. After all, we now know that magic is fake. And in this way we would correct our 1000 BC Mesopotamian friend. No, zoom calls are nothing like magic. They are technology! We used the principles of science to design circuit boards and write software. We then we sent an electronic message through the air via our wireless network that then somehow worked its way through a series of cables and other wireless networks to talk to whoever it is we are talking to. Never mind that few of us know the science behind this. We trust that there is science behind it and that makes it not magic. Not magic at all.

But at a minimum the confusion of our Mesopotamian friend is understandable. Let’s look at some other examples of magic and science.

If we see a group of witches standing around a cauldron in the woods mixing a brew and then declaring certain blessings and curses on friends and enemies in their small village, an observer would say that they are doing magic and they might evaluate the effectiveness of that spell based on how many of the curses and blessings came to pass in the coming days.

Now, let’s move to the R&D lab of your local pharmaceutical company. They mix together some chemicals. They test them on subjects. They get an effect (healing of some malady or a negative side effect). Eventually with some work they manage to achieve their goal of healing a malady. As scientists, they tend to think they know the mechanisms. They know the chemical formulas. They have hypotheses on what the chemical is doing in the human body. They then use a rigorous method of testing to confirm or reject their hypothesis. But this process is hardly done in a straight path. Often a medicine will be formulated to solve one problem, fail to do so, and yet through the testing they learn that it solves another problem (e.g what happened with Viagra). But despite the seeming magic (do these things and watch something mysterious result), they would posit potential (natural and of this world) reasons why the “magic” works. Even if they could not come up with a good explanation, they would argue that a natural explanation would be discovered eventually. And perhaps the answer will be discovered.

But it doesn’t change the likeness. It doesn’t change the fundamental parallel. A modern observer would see this somewhat messy process and pronounce it science (even if the mechanism is not known). Why? In both cases, the witch and the scientist are manipulating the things of this world to get a desired result (and in both cases they may or may not understand the mechanism involved). So what is the difference?

This parallel was described by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. There he writes,

"The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better... They were born of the same impulse... There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages... For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious — such as digging up and mutilating the dead. ...[therefore] it would be true to say that [science], was born in an un- healthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour.

But a modern observer would say there is an obvious difference between magic and science. Although in both cases, the practitioner (be he a magician or a pharmaceutical scientist) follows a series of steps to get a desired result, the magician calls on entities and powers in another mysterious realm or dimension (e.g. spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, and angels) to accomplish the result while the scientist calls on forces, entities, and elements firmly within the natural and visible world to accomplish his goals.

The key difference then would be the magician’s appeal to another dimension. The R&D scientist works with things in this world. The magician with things in the other world. And given that we don’t really know if the other dimension even exists, that makes science much more reliable to say the least. The pharmaceutical scientist is working with real things - who knows what the magician is messing with but it all seems fake.

But the pronouncement that magic is fake depends very heavily on the premise that the other dimension is either fake or inaccessible. Most modern thinkers tacitly assume that either one or the other of these premises are correct.

What If There Is Another Dimension?

But how would our perspective change if we learned the dimension that the magicians are appealing to - the world of spirits, forces, entities, demons and angels, didn’t turn out to be the stuff of fanciful but false tales but instead was a real dimension containing real things? What if we learned that this other dimension could be accessed and that it could interreact with our three spatial dimensions? What if we learned that this realm could be contacted reliably using various methods?

As moderns, we like the idea of placing the spiritual realm in one category (in the probably fake but at least irrelevant bin) and the material realm in another (a bin that we can feel, touch, see, hear, and taste). Doing this is comfortable, safe, and helps us clearly differentiate between magic and science. There is a security to it that keeps things from getting weird.

But where do we get this sort of security? It can’t be achieved by science without creating a circular argument. It is a philosophical claim. And it is a claim that flies in the face of most religious traditions including Christianity. Christian thinker, C.S. Lewis, in his novel, Perelandra, writes of how comforting it is to place angels and demons outside of the material world and into the spiritual realm. He states,

These things [angelic or demonic beings] …had some kind of material vehicle whose presence could (in principle) be scientifically verified…The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realized how great a comfort it had been—how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context.

Lewis’s statements and reflections align with those of the ancient church. As Russian Orthodox monk, Fr. Seraphim Rose says,

“St. John Damascene, in summing up in the 8th century the teaching of the Fathers before him, states: “Compared with us, the angel is said to be incorporeal and immaterial, although in comparison with God, Who alone is incomparable, everything proves to be gross and material — for only the Divinity is truly immaterial and incorporeal.””

So the Christian tradition has never had a clear separation between the spiritual dimension and the material dimension. Christianity never admitted that the three spatial dimensions that we live in are the only dimensions or that the spiritual dimension was somehow inaccessible or unobservable. And if Christianity were proved true, the things that separated science and magic would be at a minimum blurred.

But the science loving crowd is not likely impressed by Christian theistic arguments for another dimension or for mysterious and unexplained powers. So for many years, science worked as though there was no other dimensions or anything that couldn’t be explained with the mechanics of our three dimensional world. But all of that changed with quantum physics.

In The Grand Design, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking speculates that there may be up to ten dimensions based on quantum theory. Other scientists such as astrophysicist Paul Sutter speculate that “dark matter” — a substance thought to account for more than 80% of the universe's mass, yet invisible to us — could potentially be explained by forces and matter being present in other dimensions.

In addition to the idea that there are other dimensions that might contain matter and entities, quantum theory also undermines the mechanistic assumptions of the materialists. Quantum mechanics holds that a subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple locations, as pure possibility, until it is measured and it is only then that it acquires fixed coordinates in time and space. This is a mysterious and seemingly magic quality to matter that sent shock waves throughout the scientific world.

In addition to the work of quantum physics bringing our mechanistic and three dimensional understanding of the world into question, new reflections on consciousness have befuddled naturalistic efforts to explain everything by evolutionary steps. Atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris and his wife, author Annaka Harris, recently discussed what is known as the “hard problem of consciousness” together on a podcast. They talked about the fact that consciousness is ultimately unobservable to science. Further, in Annaka’s book on the subject, she expresses reservations about the idea of consciousness could possibly have come about via evolutionary steps.

In addition to the very existence of consciousness, there are observations of consciousness that have challenged the materialist position. One of those areas is that of the psychedelic experience. In particular, the users of DMT and ayahuasca report experiences that are difficult to understand given the materialist view of the universe. This psychedelic drug, was once used by the Inca, effects remarkable experiences to users. Dr. Rick Strassman, a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, led a study published by the American Medical Association examining the effects of DMT on 60 volunteers.  Strassman large majorities encountered humanoid or animal entities. Almost all experienced heavenly geometry. And these results often appear to be independent of culture and expectations of the participants.

I spent quite a bit of time reading first-person accounts from participants in studies and from those who simply took ayahuasca for personal reasons. Many of the accounts, if true, appear hard to explain by purely naturalistic explanations. For example, one of the more shocking claims made by users of psychedelics is that they enable paranormal phenomena. Consider this quote from Benny Shanon, Professor of Psychology at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem,

“Practically everyone who has had more than a rudimentary exposure to [ayahuasca] reports having had telepathic experiences. Many such reports also appear in the anthropological literature... Similarly, many of my informants said that without overt verbal articulation they could pass messages to other people present in the ayahuasca session…Likewise, many indicated that they received such messages from other persons or beings. Usually, in visions in which drinkers feel that they are receiving messages or instructions from beings and creatures, the communication in question is said to be achieved without words — directly from thought to thought.”

A recent interview study showed that of 40 users of psychedelic drugs, 40 percent reported some sort of telepathic experience. These included the ability to mentally communicate via images and words, the ability to directly exchange feeling-states, and a dissolution of self where one participant would become one in thought and feeling with a partner. The telepathic sensation was so powerful that “some participants complained about the lack of privacy…and were hesitant to repeat the experience.” The feeling is so strong that ayahuasca is alternatively known as “Telepathine”.

Some even report that sober people around them can see or hear phenomena they witness while tripping. One DMT user reported that while on the drug he saw a “harlequin-esque” entity and then the next day his perfectly sober roommate woke him up screaming about seeing a similar entity in her bedroom.

Jean Houston and Robert Masters’ in The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, discuss the strange but very common claims of telepathic experiences among those in undergoing psychedelic trials,

"There is also a fairly common experience where the subject seems to himself to project his consciousness away from his body and then is able to see his body as if he were standing off to one side of it or looking down on it from above. A few subjects feel that they are able to leave the ‘material body’ and move about in something like the ‘astral body’ familiar to occultists…The perception of the aura by psychedelic subjects is very common.”

And while skeptics continue to doubt these claims by people in altered states of consciousness and confidently state that something else must be going on, it’s worth noting that it is often only the people not experiencing the events that are skeptical. Atheists, who you would expect to interpret their experiences as completely “inside the head” tend not to do so. A Johns Hopkins study found that, “Twenty-one percent of the psychedelic users reported being atheists before their experience, while only 8 percent reported being atheists after.” Further, many who come down from DMT experiences state that what the entities that they experienced are real and continue to exist even when not taking the DMT.

In addition to the psychedelic experience, there are other forms of altered consciousness that bring into question materialistic understandings of the world. For example, the so-called out-of-body experience.  People who have died and been brought to life report seeing family members, angels, and even gods. Some report seeing into heaven. A few report seeing hell. Others report being able to see the ER room that contains their dead body. There have been cases where the patient has been able to describe aspects of the room that would have been hidden to the patient even if they somehow were observing thing during their time in cardiac arrest. Science doesn’t know what to do with these stories. Some attribute them to hallucinatory visions taking place in the last moments of a dying brain. But increasingly, those who study the phenomenon are considering the possibility that consciousness continues even after our bodies and brains power down.

A third experience that closely parallels the psychedelic and near death experiences is that found in the practice of the occult. Authors John Weldon and Zola Levitt in Is There Life After Death? cite some striking parallels between some near death experiences and the experiences of occultists. For these reasons, they state that many scientists studying near death experiences naturally begin to study the occult due to the parallels (and even personally contact mediums).

And so there is a strange convergence between the experiences of occultists, those who have had near death experiences, and the clinical trials of certain psychedelics. And this, of course, has echoes to the multiple dimensions of reality that have always been present in mysticism, paganism, and even Christianity. As University of Greenwich’s David Luke says,

“[There] are uncanny commonalities at the core of experiences emanating from old folkloric accounts of fairies; anthropological and indeed firsthand accounts from indigenous cultures; as well as from FDA-approved experimental research; so-called “recreational” and maybe even biblical DMT trip reports; and even alien abduction cases.”

Adam Daniel a writer who discusses the intersection of art, religion and science put it this way, “…is every particle of which we’re made just a shell, within which exists an energetic pearl of pure divinity? Did Einstein confirm Kabbalah?” And professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, Michio Kaku, puts it this way, “I am dazzled by the fact that many of the basic mysteries that we find in string theory and the theory of everything seemed to be mirrored in the Zohar and the Kabbalah.”

So the psychedelic experience, the near death experience, and the experience of the occultists appear to point to some other ‘heavenly’ dimension that contains other entities. And these observations (often made in the context of clinical studies) combined with the findings of quantum physics are often unnerving to the materialists. Of course, none of this is to say that mechanistic, naturalistic, positivist science doesn’t continue to be influential it does. But it is to say that much of the intellectual foundation for such a view of knowledge has been seriously undermined.

So should magic get another look? There has always been this assumption that the magic and the occult were dropped because they do not work. But if it turned out that the occult actually did work in some way, there is nothing that would prevent scientists from studying it or engineers from using its powers.

But here is the weird thing. They have. Despite being taught that magic and science are polar opposites, the history of science shows a strange propensity among scientists to engage in the occult. Let’s look at some examples.

An Enlightenment figure often credited as the founder of modern science is Isaac Newton. But far from being a materialist, Newton wrote more on the metaphysical than he did on the natural sciences. He was deeply interested in ancient knowledge, alchemy, and was completely comfortable with divine intervention. John Maynard Keynes when writing on Newton stated that, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians..." In this, Keynes rightly acknowledged that Newton was not a materialist but Keynes is wrong that he was the last of the magicians. While it is true that there was a shift in Western thought that was taking place during the time of Newton that made the belief in the supernatural unpopular among some Western thinkers and philosophers like Descartes, Hume, and and Ernst Mach (thinkers who popularized empiricism and then positivism), there was always an undercurrent of scientists and academics that didn’t give up on the occult.

The positivism that placed all emphasis on material things and began to look askance at anything that could not be weighed and measured certainly became the mainstream in the decades and centuries after Newton. It is undeniable that a stream of atheism spread throughout the Western world and it infected the scientific community as well as the broader culture (and arguably even the churches). Belief in ghosts, spirits, angels and demons slowly fell out of favor among the scientific class. Even the most spiritual of the scientists would at most express faith in a ‘higher power’. But it was in no way universal.

Throughout the centuries, well known and famous scientists took an interest in the occult. For example, Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace was known as a co-developer of the theory of natural selection, along with Charles Darwin. Wallace regularly attended seances and would bring up spiritualism with anyone would listen.

And Pierre Curie, physicist and husband of Marie Curie, was very interested in mediumship. He followed an Italian mystic who claimed she could levitate tables and communicate with spirits. Her name was Eusapia Palladino. Pierre Curie, along with Marie, attended Palladino's seances. Of Palladino he wrote, "There is here, in my opinion, a whole domain of entirely new facts and physical states in space of which we have no conception." After his death, Palladino was exposed as a fraud but there is no question that Curie believed in both Palladino’s abilities and in the underlying claims of a spiritual realm containing entities.

Another interesting case is that of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920). He was an Indian mathematician who, though he had almost no formal training made substantial contributions in a number of mathematical domains (including number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions). Mathematicians say that Ramanujan’s intuition was without parallel and that with great originality he could connect different mathematical domains. His discoveries continue to yield results generations after his death helping to advance computer security and artificial intelligence. But Ramanujan credited his discoveries to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal who he saw in dreams and visions. He recounted dreaming of blood drops and having visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.

But at least for a time these sorts of views were a tiny minority. Positivism and materialism had become the establishment in the sciences. This positivism perhaps came to a climax in the great Albert Einstein. When Newton discovered gravity he was comfortable with the fact that a mysterious, invisible, and instantaneous force held the universe together because he believed in the miraculous and the magical. If God was holding the universe together magically, Newton was not bothered. But when Einstein helped pioneer quantum theory, his reaction to the mysterious behavior of subatomic particles was quite different than that of Newton. When quantum mechanics showed that matter is not independent of mind, Einstein was immediately skeptical. “God does not play dice,” he famously responded. Einstein then spent the rest of his life attempting to provide a positivist explanation for the other worldly nature of quantum behavior. And he famously failed to do so.

So while Keynes called Newton the last of the magicians. It could be said that Einstein is the last of the materialists. For a time, the occult that had not been practiced because it conflicted with Cartesian requirements of empirical verification, was suddenly was no longer off limits. With quantum mechanics, the question of other dimensions and mystery were opened once again.

One of the pioneers of quantum physics, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli saw the monumental shift that was taking place. And appropriately (like prophet of old) he realized this in a dream. According to physicist F. David Peat,

“Around 1935 Pauli dreamed that Einstein came to him and told him that quantum theory was one-dimensional but reality was two-dimensional. Pauli must accept a new dimension to reality and he believed that the missing dimension was the unconscious and its archetypes.”

This other dimension that Pauli believed to be present not only contained consciousness but entities. And it was possible now with quantum theory to question the assumption that this other dimension could not be observed, measured or weighed. The door to the occult that had been closed with Descartes was now open again.

So slowly at first and with increasing speed, it appears that at least some movements within the scientific community were open to the examination of alternate dimensions. Is it possible that this other realm (once thought to be the stuff of myths and superstition) actually contains matter and entities? Is it possible that quantum mechanics is end of materialism as the dominant view in the sciences? Author Michael Pollan nicely sums up the challenge of quantum physics to materialism,

“Quantum mechanics holds that matter may not be as innocent of mind as the materialist would have us believe. For example, a subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple locations, as pure possibility, until it is measured—that is, perceived by a mind. Only then and not a moment sooner does it drop into reality as we know it: acquire fixed coordinates in time and space. The implication here is that matter might not exist as such in the absence of a perceiving subject. Needless to say, this raises some tricky questions for a materialist understanding of consciousness. The ground underfoot may be much less solid than we think.”

But perhaps this is where atheism and religion just cease to be separate things. Perhaps all this time we have simply been using different terms. Perhaps atheists have used words like aliens and inter-dimensional beings, dark matter, and alternative dimensions, while the religious use words like gods, angels, demons, spirits, and heaven?

And while Einstein-like positivism certainly still remains in many academic circles, it is like leaves on a branch that has been cut off - still alive but without foundation or sustenance to maintain it for long. Over the past 100 years, there has been a growing discomfort among men who truly understand what we know about matter, the universe, consciousness, and quantum mechanics with the idea of positivistic materialism. And according to F. David Peat, Wolfgang Pauli knew that the quantum physics he helped discover would return spiritualism to the world that was once ruled by atheistic and deterministic paradigms.

“But Pauli was now having other dreams in which an ‘exotic woman’ visited him. Pauli believed her to be his soul. He began to see that the most important issue was ‘the lack of soul in the modern scientific conception of the world.’ The ‘spirit of matter,’ he believed, had been denied for 300 years and was now struggling for resurrection. He was driven by a vision of the return of soul to the world. While he spoke to very few about his new work he did once tell his assistant, H.B.G. Casimir, ‘I think I know what is coming. I know it exactly. But I don’t tell it to the others. So, I am rather doing five-dimensional theory of relativity although I don’t really believe in it. But I know what is coming. Perhaps I will tell you some other time.’”

And Pauli’s visions and dreams certainly came true. The resurrection of the ‘spirit of matter’ has been slowly taking place since he dreamed that dream. Scientists, technology leaders, and academics have been increasingly open to looking into this other dimension.

Consider the case of Jack Parsons. Parsons was one of the most influential figures in the history of the American space program. He was an American rocket engineer, and chemist. He was one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He was a scientific pioneer that helped us get to space.

And he also had little tolerance for materialism.

“Between rocket experiments, [Parson and his partners] would wax poetic about their shared socialist values, smoke marijuana, and drink to excess…By 1939 he was enraptured with Aleister Crowley’s revival of what began as a sixteenth-century philosophy. Thelema was by this time a sprawling esoteric movement, incorporating ancient Egyptian deities, sex rituals, and a range of Eastern and Western mysticism. Eventually, Parsons was forced to choose between his new religious craze or pursuing his degree at USC. Ultimately, Parsons dropped out of school and chose to dedicate himself to Thelema, becoming a member of the local California chapter: the Ordo Templis Orientis.”

But although Parsons chose the occult over schooling, his genius for rockets did not fade. Working with a small group, Parson’s used rag-tag methods and minimal funding to test a static motor rocket that could run for over a minute at a time when rocketry was considered something out of fairy tales and was not being seriously studied in the sciences at all. With his successful test, he got the interest of the federal government and was given funding to investigate the possibility of Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO). The Jet Propulsion Lab was born. In the Jet Propulsion Lab, Parsons would invent the first rocket engine to use the castable composite propellant that allowed rockets to harness enough force to finally make it into space.

The scientific man, popularly conceived, realizes that the supernatural is fake and that science and knowledge of the physical world is all that matters. But Parsons did not slow his obsession with the occult. Parsons would donate almost all his money to the Ordo Templis Orientis and worked to recruit his coworkers into the cult. His obsession with the cult undermined his professional career. He abandoned his wife for her 17-year old sister, and did the bidding of his cult.

”At Ordo Templis Orientis’s recommendation, Parsons was engaged in several sexual liaisons and had taken up cocaine, methamphetamine, and opiates. A polyamorous, drug-friendly, college dropout was not super high on the government’s list of potential poster kids for rocket science.”

Many might have said that Parsons was just being inconsistent. Acting scientifically on one hand while acting superstitiously on the other. But was he? That assumes the change that Pauli prophesied had not yet come to pass. It assumes that the “spirit of matter” as Pauli described it was still dead. But it was not.

Another thinker who saw the spirit rising was the great Swiss psychologist and psychotherapist Carl Jung. Jung, who was friends with Pauli, had a life-long fascination with the occult. He believed in spirits and paranormal phenomena, and wrote scientific treatises on the subject. He researched parapsychology, astrology, alchemy, and spirit communication.

And for a final, and perhaps peak, example of the spirit rising among scientists, there is CERN. CERN, the popular acronym for The European Organization for Nuclear Research (In French, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. This international organization was established in 1954 near Geneva and comprises 23 member states. CERN is massive. It has almost 3,000 scientific, technical and administrative staff members. And was granted the status of observer to the United Nations General Assembly. While its main and stated function is to operate the massive particle accelerators and to perform high-energy physics research, CERN also hosts a large computing facility used to store and analyze data from experiments and simulate events. And remarkably, CERN was the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

Given that CERN is perhaps the largest and most powerful scientific institution in the world, it was surprising to many people that when CERN opened the Gotthard base tunnel (the longest and deepest in the world), they conducted a very strange and seemingly pagan opening ceremony. At one point in the ceremony, a topless woman wearing a bird head and wings was flown via cables over the heads of nine people dressed as construction workers. The nine apparently represented the construction workers who had died during the building of the tunnel. Why a woman dressed as an ancient pagan human animal hybrid was then flown over them is unclear.

At another point, a parade of people carried out an effigy of a dead lamb echoing the sacrifices of pagan religions (and perhaps a dark nod inversion of Christianity’s Lamb of God) .

At other times, people dressed as goats simulated sex.

Nudity, simulated sex, simulated pagan activities, and a strange mysticism in the whole event disturbed many who watched. Why would a scientific organization perform such a strange and seemingly pagan ritual?

But that certainly is not the only strange pagan seeming aspect to CERN. In 2016, a video surfaced that showed people dressed in black cloaks in front of a statue of the Hindu deity Shiva that stands in the CERN courtyard (yes, a pagan idol stands in the courtyard) apparently stabbing a woman as part of a human sacrifice. The video ended with the camera person crying and dropping down out of view. CERN did a self investigation and stated that the pagan ceremony was staff members just enjoying a prank. CERN stated that these scientists had simply let their "humor go too far” and assured the public no one was actually hurt.

How is it that all of these great scientists and people that should know better are messing around with the occult, mediumship, and spirits? It makes no sense.

Unless there really is another dimension. Unless entities exist there that can really be communicated with and interact with us in our dimension. If that were found to be the case, their interest would cease being inconsistent. After all, magic was abandoned only because it did not work. But what if it was found to work?

And that is the crazy thing. Some of the most successful people and organizations that there are appear to indicate that they believe that magic works. In fact, it is doubtful that CERN, if they are indeed practicing the occult, would be doing so if they didn’t have evidence of its effectiveness. Other practical agencies that utilized the ideas behind the occult include the CIA and the DIA that both did experiments with remote viewing and psychedelic excursions into the other dimension (the effectiveness of such experiments has been debated) and the tech industry (whose leaders and pioneers dabbled both with esoteric religions and with psychedelic excursions).

In short, the scientific establishment as seen in CERN and notable scientific pioneers and some of the key practitioners and appliers of science (such as the CIA) took the occult and alternate dimensions seriously and sought to use them for advantages in their fields.

So the twins that are science and magic no longer appear as different as they once were. In fact, they are beginning to look as indistinguishable.

What does this mean? In many ways, it means we need to go back to the beginning. We need to ask the sorts of questions that people were asking before we divided knowledge into magic and science in the same way we divide fairy tales and history or fake and real.

The 16th century thinker, Francis Bacon, often credited as the founder of modern science and the scientific method never viewed the supernatural or occult to be immeasurable or unobservable things. He personally attested to observing miracles - having premonition of his father’s death,

“I myself remember, that being in Paris, and my father dying in London, two or three days before my father’s death, I had a dream, which I told to divers English gentlemen; that my father’s house in the country was plastered all over with black mortar.”

He also believed strange things about the dead including that if you brought a murdered man into the presence of his killer the body would reveal his guilt,

“It is an usual observation, that if the body of one murdered be brought before the murderer, the wounds will bleed afresh. Some do affirm, that the dead body, upon the presence of the murderer, haft opened the eyes; and that there have been such like motions, as well where the parties murdered have been strangled or drowned, as where they have been killed by wounds.”

And far from separating these phenomena from the scientific method, Bacon suggested a variety of experiments to examine these other worldly observations. But in the end, Bacon stated that he was restrained by the Anglican Church to not participate in such work. He wrote,

”…yet I hold, that in the end it must be bounded by religion, or else it will be subject to deceit and delusion: for as the substance of the soul in the creation was not extracted out of the mass of heaven and earth, by the benediction of a producat, but was immediately inspired from God; so it is not possible that it should be, otherwise than by accident, subject to the laws of heaven and earth, which are the subject of philosophy; and therefore the true knowledge of the nature and state of the soul, must come by the same inspiration that gave the substance.”

So for this early scientist, the space between proper science and the occult was not one of truth versus untruth, it was one of an ethical pursuit of truth (in line with the principles of his religion) and an unethical pursuit of truth (that could include delving into the magical and occult areas of knowledge). And in light of quantum theory and all the other challenges to materialism we have reviewed, the questions that Francis Bacon asked about scientific examinations of occult phenomena are no longer quaint questions of a medieval thinker on the cusp of a scientific revolution but instead are more relevant than ever. Bacon’s concerns about the church sanctioned limits to science must be considered as we realize that science and magic are no longer separate. The question comes down to not science versus religion. But what sort of science/religion do we choose? And are there limits to this investigation?

And sadly, modern science appears to have no such limits. Experiments on human embryos, cruel treatments of animals, and questionable human trials are standard fair for many in the scientific world. As C.S. Lewis warned, both magic and science “are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious — such as digging up and mutilating the dead.” The darkness we are seeing in science is not arising from the fault of the pursuit of knowledge. It is arising from the pursuit of control. Control unhindered by a God who rules all things. And for this reason, perhaps it is not surprising that the leaders of technology and science are not afraid to engage in the occult.

For Christians magic and the occult are excluded by scripture and church teaching so does this mean (in light of what we have discovered so far) that Christians should also be prohibited from scientific pursuits?

Science can be the simple study of nature - not with an eye toward manipulation, domination, or power. At the time of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, the scientist was depicted as a man holding two books. One book represented God’s revelation in the scriptures and the other represented God’s revelation in nature. If our scientific pursuit is purely to learn of nature, then it is clearly consistent with loving God and creation. But if, like the magician, our science is done with an eye toward power, toward control of creation, and towards domination of the world around us, then it moves to murkier ground.

In today’s world of science and technology, so much is being run by the pharmaceutical industry, profit hungry technology companies, and power hungry military contractors. These industries are focused not on pure learning about creation but the utilization of science to create things that will bring them profit, power, and control. Knowledge by itself is useless to them. The goal is the outcome. Manipulating the things of this world to get what they want. And given that these organizations are rarely if ever guided by religious sentiments, it is no surprise that these pursuits continually push up against legal and ethical boundaries. This by itself should cause us to pause when just taking for granted that science is always a good thing. We are in desperate need of ethical reflections and limits.

And how much more dangerous are the sciences now that the boundary between the dimensions we live in and the previously mysterious dimensions of quantum theory are broken? How much stranger and more dangerous if it is true that there are some sort of other alien entities living in a close but largely invisible dimension? Such questions once seemed insane but with all we have reviewed so far they no longer can be. As Pauli prophesied, the spirit of matter is rising again.

Wolfgang Pauli was deeply into the occult. Albert Einstein, while not an atheist, did believe all things are explained mechanically not supernaturally. When we see Satanic seeming rituals at CERN or psychedelic forums at Davos, we must always remember that many of the most influential leaders in science and technology largely followed Pauli not Einstein. Many believe very much in the other dimension. Many believe very much that there are entities there that can provide information, knowledge and power. Many believe that contacting them - whether through the use of drugs or the use of the occult - is one of the surest ways to get power and influence in this world.

So when we see the outputs of science and technology produced by people without regards to any boundaries and who have been influenced and directed by entities out of this world, what do we do? When we see medical advances using the parts of aborted fetuses. When we see technology developed by people while interacting with spirits from the other dimension. When we see pioneers of industry clearly mixing their efforts with the occult. What do we do with this? Do we use their findings to heal, to entertain, and to do business? What is the role of the applied sciences within the ethical life?

A Deeper Magic?

In the early 20th century, there were a group of writers and intellectuals in England that reflected on positivism, the occult, and the history of their interactions with Christianity. Thinkers like G.K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien lived in the world of academia, debated skeptics, mystics, and heretics, and were not naïve to their arguments. As the discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th century came into the public consciousness (culminating with quantum theory), they wrestled to explain why Christianity was still relevant. And they were not speechless to the argument that science on one hand and the occult on the other might be the best ways to gain information, knowledge, and power.

Their response was fascinating. They could have provided dry rationalist arguments for Christianity as many philosophers have. But instead, they painted the power of God as a deeper magic. In the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis speaks to this point. At the climax of the story, Aslan the Lion (that represents Jesus and the power of God) overthrows the magic of the Witch (that represents earthly ambition and power) unexpectedly. Susan asks what it all means. Aslan responds,

"…that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.”

Here Lewis nicely encapsulates the Christian interaction with pagan magic or its twin brother that is science. The Christian faith is not a denial that the entities of the occult and their effects on the world exist. It is not a claim that scientism and unethical practices might not bring power and positive results (at least for a time). It is instead a claim that there is a deeper “magic” that will overthrow these ambitions and that will in the end win. Christians do not dabble with the occult or practice unethical and unhealthy science because they know a deeper magic.

One thing that the scientific materialism of the past centuries has done is attempted to gut the natural world of its magic and mystery. Children might find the lightning magical. Children might see a seed grow into a sapling and then into a tree and find it mysterious and wonderful. But now we know better. We have figured out that lighting is the result of negative charges in the bottom of clouds that are attracted to the positive charges in the ground. We have figured out that seeds grow into trees through the process of germination given optimum sunlight, temperature, water and air. Silly children thought the world was magic but it is not.

Except it is. That deeper magic that Christianity promises never faded away. No scientific effort to squash it ever was effective. As GK Chesterton wrote,

“All the terms used in the science books, 'law,' 'necessity,' 'order,' 'tendency,' and so on, are really unintellectual...The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.”

Christians argue that this deeper magic that comes from God is a combination of physical laws implemented and maintained by him, miraculous doings and wonders inserted constantly, and a providential guiding that ensures prayers are answered, victories are won, promises are kept, and that the events of history work out for the good of those that follow the God of Israel. In this world view, the effectiveness of magic or science doesn’t need to be entirely denied but it does need to be kept in perspective of the deeper magic.

The word science comes from the Latin for knowledge, scientia. It is a simple idea formulated largely by Christians that as humans we can examine, learn from, and apply what God has done in the world to enrich our lives. But as Francis Bacon noted, it must never become unhinged from the constraints of the deeper magic. Because only when respecting the deeper magic can the lower forms of magic, the occult, and his twin science be properly placed for the betterment of society and the world.