Magical Use of Thought Forms: A Proven System of Mental & Spiritual Empowerment (Paperback)

In The Way of the Shaman, Professor Michael Harner writes: The connectedness between humans and the animal world is very basic in shamanism, with the shaman utilizing his knowledge and methods to participate in the power of that world. Through his guardian spirit or power animal, the shaman connects with the power of the animal world, the mammals, birds, fish, and other beings. The shaman has to have a particular guardian in order to do his work, and his guardian helps him in certain special ways.

The choice of spirit was never arbitrary, for it was believed that a link with a particular animal was already there, forged by the nature of the shaman, even though the shaman might not be aware of it. Thus the spirit would often make itself known, in visions or dreams, before the shaman practiced those techniques that called it to him. This calling had many benefits. Says Harner:

A power animal or guardian spirit, as I first learned among the Jivaro, not only increases one's physical energy and ability to resist contagious disease, but also increases one's mental alertness and self-confidence.2

When the shaman entered nonordinary reality in search of the animal, she would often become temporarily possessed by it. This naturally led to the concept of were animals, the belief-which to many tribes was a matter of simple experience-that certain individuals could literally shapeshift and become the animal concerned.

But were animals are only one example of a whole range of curious phenomena that we all know to be impossible, yet have for centuries been supported by countless legends, myths, and even eyewitness accounts.

When Irish author Bram Stoker crafted his legendary vampire Dracula, the character was based on a fifteenth-century Balkan noble named Vlad the Impaler and named after dracul, the Rumanian word for devil. But Stoker did not create the vampire legend, although he added immeasurably to it. There is a mention of blood-drinking ghosts in Homer's Odyssey. In Hebrew mythology, Adam's first wife Lilith is described as a vampiric character, preying on babies. The same theme is taken up in Arab, Celtic, and Roman mythology, all of which contain references to blood-drinking demons of one sort or another. But the vampire legend familiar today derives directly from an outbreak of vrykolka activity throughout the Balkans and Greece in the seventeenth century. According to popular belief and what purported to be widespread eyewitness reports, vrykolkas were resurrected corpses that fed on the blood of the living. In Hungary, the Magyar term for them was vampir, a word that, with only a slight change, carried the legend into the English-speaking world. By 1746, the first scholarly work on the creatures had appeared, written by Dom Augustine Calmet, a French monk.

Bilocation-the appearance of the same person in two different places at once-is another impossibility, but one apparently achieved by several Christian monks and saints. The list of bilocators includes St. Anthony of Padua, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Severus of Ravenna, and, in modern times, Padre Pio, an Italian monk. Some of the appearances have been well attested. When Pope Clement XIV was on his deathbed, he had a visit from St. Alphonsus Maria de Ligouri, who was seen by several members of the Papal Court at the pope's bedside. But Alphonsus was confined to his cell at the time-a four-days' journey away.

Another ability frequently attributed to saints is levitation. St. Joseph of Cupertino and St. Theresa of Avila were both reputed to do it frequently. One eyewitness swore Theresa remained airborne, eighteen inches off the ground, for about half an hour. The great Tibetan yogi Milarepa went one better: according to contemporary accounts, he was able to walk and even sleep while levitating. In the nineteenth century, the spiritualist medium Daniel Dunglas Home surprised several witnesses by floating out of a third story window and into another. The Italian medium Amedee Zuccarini was photographed levitating with his feet some twenty inches above the nearest support.

In a somewhat similar category is the experience of a British psychologist named Kenneth Bacheldor, who became interested in the widespread reports of table-turning during the Victorian craze for spiritualism. Bacheldor set up groups to investigate, and, after several months of experimentation, developed a system that allowed tables to move by themselves under tightly controlled test conditions. His work culminated with infrared video of a table levitated several inches off the floor with no one touching it.

Levitating tables also featured in an experiment carried out by Dr. George Owens and his wife, Iris, two members of the Canadian Society for Psychical Research, who decided they would try to make an artificial ghost. To this end, they and fellow members of their group created a fictional character named Philip who lived during Cromwellian times (mid-seventeenth century) at a place called Diddington Manor in England. Philip had an affair with a gypsy girl named Magda; his wife found out and denounced Magda as a witch. When she was burned at the stake, Philip committed suicide by throwing himself from the battlements of his ancestral home.

The romantic tale was entirely fictional, except for the detail of Diddington Manor, which actually does exist. The Owens group pinned photos of the manor around the walls of their room and sat regularly in a classical spiritualist sto make contact with the character they had created. After several months, they were rewarded by a paranormal rapping. A code was soon established to allow them to communicate with the entity behind the rapping . . . the entity turned out to be...(Continues)