On the Paranormal
A Critique of Scientism
In the previous essay, I mentioned René Guénon’s notion that our world has been progressively materializing throughout the present cycle, and that this process has led to the creation of a kind of “shell” around the human world, one that disbars mankind from the superior world, as well as shields him from inferior influences.
I also mentioned that it was his conclusion that as our world descends ever further into the chaotic and spiritually impoverished welter of the Kali-Yuga, “cracks” or “fissures” begin to appear in this shell. But these cracks in the “Great Wall,” as Guénon called them, only appear in one direction—admitting influences from Below, but never from Above.
It’s a fascinating theory, and one which carries the full authority and backing of Tradition, which is undoubtedly why it holds such currency. And I can attest that I have confirmed this theory, many times, over the course of a lifetime spent inquiring into the Unknown, and compiling a corpus of what might be called, by some, “forbidden” learning.
But it’s so much more than a merely abstruse and recondite bit of metaphysical arcana; the notion is not one to concern flighty academics and musty antiquarians alone. In fact it concerns all of us, and I suspect it has great bearing on our own time, and even has potent explanatory power in our modern and so very un-superstitious age.
For instance, it is difficult to overlook the prevalence and even the increase of what it pleases some to call “paranormal” phenomena in recent times. I don’t just mean the stories of ghosts and hauntings that appear on mindless and banal television programming—you know the kind, where thoroughly unimpressive “investigators” use infrared imaging and audio recording instruments to discover absolutely nothing.
Which is no surprise at all, given the obviously uninitiated and almost parodically materialistic nature of these “ghost hunters,” and their lack of even the most rudimentary metaphysical knowledge.
No, what I’m talking about is the whisperings of strange things seen and heard, and curious entities felt or perceived, and which even if widely misdoubted and ridiculed, nevertheless persist. The names of these things are legion: Sasquatch, Yeti, Mi-Go, Mothman, the Dover Demon, the Black-Eyed Children, Spring-Heeled Jack, the Wendigo, fairies and hobgoblins and kobolds, Tommyknockers and Dusii and Bruni, and enough goat-men, dog-men, and even lizard-men to fill a thousand Substack essays. Even the ubiquitous “Greys” of UFO folklore may fit into this curious class of beings.
But are these things merely invented or imagined? Or are they objective quanta, real entities that can be measured and known by scientific standards? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between. The scientism and materialism of our age rejects the existence of such things outright; if it cannot be seen and measured, recorded and dissected, and reduced to a set of mathematical coordinates and numbers, then it does not exist.
This is the wisdom of Science, which holds such unimpeachable sway in our age. And how could it be otherwise? If evolutionism—that is to say, materialistic Darwinism—is the explanatory paradigm par excellence of our civilization, then what room is there for what we call the paranormal? If all life on earth is produced through a blind, self-actuating, thoroughly mechanical process of evolution that proceeds from simple chemical aggregates to more complex molecules, and thence to primitive pseudo-cells and rudimentary bacteria, and from there to the eukaryotes and simple animals and fish and reptiles and mammals and man—if, in other words, life is nothing more than a somewhat contingent adaptation of the same laws that operate in the centers of stars and in the spaces between them, then how to explain something like a Sasquatch or a Mothman, which refuses to fit within that neat and orderly multi-billion-year schema?
The answer, of course, is to explain them away as hoaxes, misidentifications, fabrications, or the result of a fevered imagination. And doubtless that is the case in many, if not most, instances of what is classified as paranormal phenomena. But it does not explain all of them, nor does it explain those archetypal germs of folkloric symbology that must have given rise to the “sightings” in the first place.
Then there is the matter of the increasing frequency of such sightings. Is it merely the wider dissemination of information about these beings, giving the hoaxers more fodder for their pranks? Or is something else at work?
The Victorian heyday of materialistic and evolutionistic thinking, during the late nineteenth century, seemed to correspond to a dearth of paranormal phenomena. Certainly, there was widespread interest in such things, with the growth of Spiritualism and Theosophy. The ghost story—to say nothing of the horror tale and the weird tale—became a recognized literary sub-genre. There was a general fascination with all things occult, and the sedulous work of ethnographers to record and categorize the folklore of vanishing cultures the world over is a testament to a pervasive, almost compensatory interest in bodies of knowledge that could not be shoehorned into the scientistic worldview.
But the number and variety of genuine paranormal phenomena during this age was notably limited. If Guénon’s theory is correct, this is proof enough that the nineteenth century represented the absolute nadir of materialism—a time when the “shell” erected by the aberrant and counter-traditional thought of the modern world was at its strongest, shielding Western civilization at least from any higher or lower influences.
That time has now passed, and the cracks in the Great Wall have appeared—hairline fractures at first, but now widening and growing more numerous after the initial breach was made. And what are we to make of the paranormal “entities” that some insist they have seen?
The Theosophists, for one, have their own explanation for these beings, and it is in some ways a remarkably satisfying one. They hold that these things are “elementals,” that is to say, “[l]iving entities or centers of force in the astral and mental planes, also known as nature spirits.”
“They are called elementals because they are supposed to be the life forces behind the four primordial elements, namely, Fire, Earth, Air and Water. The fire elementals are called salamanders; those of the earth, gnomes; of air, sylphs, and of water, undines. In the traditions of various cultures they are known under various names and appearances, such as elves, dwarfs, djins [sic], brownies, goblins, banshees, fairies, trolls, devs, etc.”1
But the Theosophists are, as René Guénon rightly observes, counter-initiatic, and are of evolutionist and thoroughly modern sensibilities. The “elementals,” for instance, are also said to represent a cycle of occult evolution (or, rather, “involution”) through which all living things—including present-day humans—are supposed to have passed. In other words, the paranormal entities of our day represent the most primitive evolutionary stage of a group of beings that in some incognizably remote future will be analogous to mankind.
This would at least serve to explain the changing nature of paranormal entities through time, since the elementals are supposed to be without form, and are thus endued with whatever shape and substance most suits the changing sensibilities of their percipients. Elves and Greys, trolls and Sasquatch, djinn and Mothmen are in this reading not merely similar beings—they are the same creatures, updated and with more fashionable garb to satisfy the more scientistic leanings of the moderns.
It is, as I said, an appealing explanation. But it is also a very clever one, which is reason enough for suspicion; it also requires one to adhere to the syncretic and evolutionistic—not to say baroque—cosmology of the Theosophists, which few thoughtful metaphysicists are prepared to do.
So, as usual, it is to the Traditionalists that we must turn for a much more satisfying explanation. In La Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps, René Guénon discusses the peculiarities of ancient geographies, and the oft-encountered “descriptions of strange beings met with in such accounts,” thereby giving us a clue as to what those mysterious, paranormal entities we hear so much about might really be:
“…one part of these descriptions may really be derived from ‘survivals’ of a symbolism no longer fully understood, whereas another part may be related to the appearances assumed by the manifestation of certain ‘entities’ or ‘influences’ belonging to the subtle domain, and yet another, though doubtless not the most important, may really be a description of beings that had a corporeal existence in more or less remote times, but belonged to species since then extinct or having survived only in exceptional conditions and as great rarities, such as are still sometimes met with today, whatever may be the opinions of people who imagine that there is nothing left in the world that they do not know about.”2
Perhaps those who truly perceive paranormal entities in the modern world retain some relict faculty that permits them to see what so many others cannot; Guénon is characteristically pessimistic on whether the moderns, so far sunk in the degeneracy of materialism and scientism, can reawaken such a faculty:
“…it is moreover true that, communications between the corporeal and subtle domains having been more or less reduced to a minimum, in order to become aware of such things, a greater development than in the past of certain faculties is needed, and these are just the faculties which, so far from being developed, have on the contrary for the most part become continuously weaker and have ended by disappearing from the ‘average’ human individual, so that the difficulty and the rarity of perceptions of that order have been doubly accentuated, and this is what allows the moderns to hold the accounts of the ancients in derision.”3
To conclude my rather scattered musings on this topic, I can do no better than to quote the sage observation of “Arvo,” the pseudonymous contributor of the fascinating and bravura article “Ethnology and the ‘Perils of the Soul’” to the second volume of Introduzione alla Magia, a compendium of treatises compiled by the mysterious and enigmatic Gruppo di UR (“UR Group”) nearly a century ago:
“The common modern concept of reality is a historical formation; outside or prior to today’s civilization and humanity it is meaningless…reality, or ‘nature,’ is not indifferent to man’s attitude and interpretation; both have an effective power over it. The so-called scientific knowledge of nature has been an active process of disensouling and petrifying it. There is an intimate solidarity between the spiritual condition and the way in which nature or reality appears. It is through the materialization of the spirit that a nature has become real in which materialism can be true, and the methods of materialistic and positivist science very largely applicable. But this petrification has not been sufficiently complete to exclude residues or traces of a different condition; hence the zones where paranormal phenomena still occur, which are like spoilsports in the orderly world of materialistic science. Naturally these phenomena have become ever more insignificant and infrequent, the more that the collective milieu is completely dominated by the views of science and technology, while this milieu reacts objectively on reality in a deterministic sense.”4
In other words, it is man himself—specifically the mentality of “modern” man—that has created the world which Science describes, a world in which there is no place for paranormal phenomena. But that is not to say that the “modern world” is the real world. As Arvo concludes in his brilliant essay, modern man is also capable of a kind of magic—“a veritable sorcery by which he has given real existence to a soulless, ‘objective’ nature, following mechanical laws: a nature that was nonexistent in former epochs.”5
The converse must also hold true: that if modern man can create through his “magic” a dead, mechanistic, despiritualized nature, the men of the civilization to come have also the power to resurrect the living, spontaneous, spiritual nature that our forefathers knew.
Perhaps this explains the increase in paranormal phenomena, and of “high strangeness” in general, that we have witnessed in recent years.
“Elemental(s).” Theosophical Encyclopedia (Quezon City, Philippines: Theosophical Publishing House, 2006).
René Guénon, La Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945).[The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pp. 135-36.]
Ibid., pg. 135.
Julius Evola and the UR Group, Introduzione alla Magia, Volume Secondo (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971). [Introduction to Magic, Volume II: The Path of Initiatic Wisdom, trans. Joscelyn Godwin. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2019, pp. 155-56.]
Ibid., pg. 161 (emphasis in original).