When Magic Was Real

Exploring the Implications of Dean Radin's book "Real Magic"

This article is a follow-up to my popular essay When Orcs Were Real. As I did in that essay, I’m going to take a deep dive into a book on the fringes of mainstream science and explore its implications as if it were true. It’s more whimsical than woeful. If you enjoyed thinking about whether orcs were real, you’ll enjoy this one. If you don’t even know what an orc is, skip this one. - The Contemplator on the Tree of Woe

Dean Radin’s book Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science is perhaps the most frank and honest treatise ever written by a parapsychologist. Dispensing with the tiresome disclaimers found in most other works of parapsychology, Radin says:

I’ve been studying magic from a scientific perspective for about forty years. For the first thirty-nine of those years I would have vigorously denied that statement…

After decades of conducting psi experiments, publishing many journal articles describing the results, and reviewing thousands of other experiments in my popular books, I’ve come to accept that psi is a real phenomenon…

And here’s the rub. psi is magic…

Psi is magic. Psi is real. Ergo, magic is real.

Now, if you’re a skeptic, you’ve already rejected this argument, because you reject the notion that psi is a real phenomenon. I won’t try to change your mind. Instead, just for purposes of this essay, I’d like you to suspend your disbelief and accept the following as our working hypotheses:

1. Psi is real. Non-local and non-material causes under the direction of human consciousness can bring about physical effects in the physical world.

2. Psi is weak. The physical effects caused by psi are only apparent after a statistical analysis of large-scale trials. Psi’s effects on the world are something like aspirin’s effect on heart disease.

3. Psi is unreliable. The physical effects caused by psi cannot be reliably replicated on demand. It’s so unreliable that psi experiments are even harder to replicate than mainstream science experiments. (Burrrrn.)

4. Magic is psi; psi is magic.

These hypotheses are, of course, Radin’s, and he describes in detail the various experiments he runs to test them. One experiment in the book was so fascinating that it inspired me to write this essay. It is to that experiment we now turn.

When Chocolate is Blessed…

Does eating blessed chocolate help treat depression? Radin conduct a double-blind experiment to find out.

The study was run with sixty participants. The participants were divided into four groups. The participants were randomly assigned to the four groups, with the assignment balanced by age, gender, chocolate consumption, and neuroticism. (Because chocolate is known to provide short-term elevations in mood, it was important to control for chemical habituation to the creamy textured bittersweet goodness on offer. Because neuroticism is associated with anxiety and depression, it was important to control for neural tendencies to wear black and listen to the Cure.) All of the participants completed a self-assessment of their mood.

Meanwhile, the chocolate was divided into two portions. The first portion was blessed by a cleric. The second portion was ordinary chocolate without any magical blessing. The four groups and two portions of chocolate were then combined as follows:

• Group one was presented with blessed chocolate and correctly informed that it was blessed chocolate. They ate “magic choco” and knew it.

• Group two was presented with blessed chocolate and misinformed that it was ordinary chocolate. They ate “magic choco” but didn’t know it was magic.

• Group three was presented with ordinary chocolate and correctly informed that it was ordinary chocolate. They ate “mundane choco” and knew it.

• Group four was presented with ordinary chocolate and misinformed that it was blessed chocolate. They ate “mundane choco” but thought it was magic.

The experiment was run over the course of one week, with the participants given an ounce of chocolate on days three, four, and five, as follows. Afterwards, all of the participants completed another self-assessment of their mood.

Before I reveal the outcome of the experiment, let’s present three possible outcomes:

• If groups one and two, who got blessed chocolate, have improved moods relative to groups three and four, who didn’t, then “blessing” had a real effect. It didn’t matter if the subject knew about the blessing, it worked all the same.

• If groups one and four, who were told they got blessed chocolate, have improved moods relative to groups two and three, then “blessing” had a placebo effect. It didn’t matter if the chocolate was blessed, it mattered if the subject thought it was blessed.

• If none of the groups have any variance in their mood, then there’s no effect from magic.

What do you think happened? Decide, then read on.

The Blessed Who Know They are Blessed Feel Blessed

Group one, and only group one, had improved mood relative to the other groups. That is, only those subjects who knowingly ate actually blessed chocolate felt better.

Wait, what?

That means it wasn’t a placebo effect. If it had been a placebo effect, then both groups one and four would have felt better, because they both thought they’d eaten blessed chocolate.

But that means it wasn’t a material effect either, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. If the blessing had, for instance, changed the chemical composition of the chocolate to increase its dopamine effect, then it would have effected both groups one and two, because they both actually ate blessed chocolate.

It was a magical effect. It was, perhaps, the most profound outcome ever produced in a parapsychology experiment.

Woah, woe. Before we run rampant with metaphysical speculation let’s pause. As with most experiments, a skeptic can criticize the blessed chocolate trial. Perhaps the subjects were not fully blinded, or perhaps the chocolate wasn’t correctly apportioned. Perhaps by sheer chance, all of the members of group one had good luck that week that brightened their mood. Perhaps Dr. Radin cooked the p value. Who knows? I wasn’t there and neither were you. Given the reproducibility crisis in science, the skepticism is warranted.

But… for purposes of this essay… because we are open-minded people who enjoy playing with possibilities… Let us continue to suspend our disbelief. Let us turn to the implications of this profound experiment.

The Power of Magic is the Product of Belief x Belief

Many mainstream scientists would accept that magic is the product of belief. That’s what a placebo effect is, after all. Everyone knows the placebo effect is real. Placebo effects are everywhere in medicine, and lots of other places, too.

But magic is the product of belief x belief. It’s the product of my belief that I’ve blessed chocolate and your belief that you’ve eaten chocolate I blessed. And these beliefs must both be positive. If I don’t believe, it won’t work, even if you are a true believer. If you don’t believe, it won’t work, even if I’m a true believer. Belief x zero is zero.

Perhaps that’s why skeptics can never replicate psi experiments. They don’t believe, so even when they work with an actual psychic, the product of their belief multiplied by the psychic’s belief is zero. Nada. Nil.

In Dungeons & Dragons terms, skeptics carry an anti-magic shell everywhere they go and so they never experience any magic. And since most people are (relatively) skeptical, most people experience very little that’s magical.

But what if belief changes?

Imagine that Pfizer is working with the FDA on a clinical trial of its new magical ED pill, Viagracadabra. Imagine that the trial consists of 20,000 sad middle-aged men whose wives don’t love them anymore. Half the men are given real Viagracadabra, which is a sugar pill enchanted by Pfizer’s Chief Alchemist. The other half of the men are given fake Viagracadabra, which is just the sugar pill without the enchantment. One half of each group is told they’re taking Viagracadabra and the other half are told they’re taking a placebo. The men who knowingly take real Viagracadabra have miraculous - literally, miraculous - regain of sexual function. The effect isn’t huge (sorry), but it’s real enough to notice (in the statistics, you pig).

Pfizer is cleared to bring Viagracadabra to the other 150 million men in the United States. Pfizer’s Chief Enchanter, who runs marketing, decides to invest $5 billion into a marketing campaign. Rather than promote the efficacy of Viagracadabra, however, he decides to promote the efficacy of magic as a whole.

Grandfatherly men with salt-and-pepper hair wearing white coats with little arcane sigils sewn on the sleeves are brought on camera to say, in Baritone voices with authoritative accents, “Did you know that magic has proven efficacy in over 2000 peer-reviewed studies? Ask your doctor what magic can do for you.” Peppy zoomers with body piercings are hired to run social media accounts promoting the utility of magic for healthcare. A number of extremely attractive celebrities are invited to talk about how magic has made them successful. And so on.

Et voila — Viagracadabra becomes more powerful. Instead of having a small effect, vaguely apparent in controlled trials relative to placebo, its effect becomes very… potent. (I’m so sorry). Why? Because the American people now believe in magic.

This sounds utterly ridiculous. Except… It’s already happened. The placebo effect has gotten stronger in America. The effect is widely documented, with some categories of drugs experiencing a 300% growth in the power of placebo. Why is it happening? Psychology Today explains:

At this point, we can only speculate about the factors contributing to the growing potency of placebos. While research into the mechanisms underlying the effects of placebo treatments is in its infancy, we do know that increasing people’s expectations regarding the occurrence of a non-volitional response increases its likelihood of occurring.

In other words, placebo pills have become more potent because Americans have a stronger belief in the potency of pills. I know, that sounds crazy, but:

The placebo effect has become stronger in the United States, but not in Europe. What might account for this difference? One possible factor is that the United States allows direct advertising to consumers, while European countries do not. Thus, American consumers are more primed to expect positive benefits from pain medications than Europeans.

Now, as mentioned earlier, magic doesn’t work like a placebo effect, because magic requires both the magician and the subject to believe. So perhaps this analogy doesn’t hold.

But perhaps it does. Could anyone dispute that Big Pharma believes in the power of pills? They certainly do. So do doctors and nurses. They all believe. Maybe the reason we can’t find the cause of action for many drugs is that they don’t have any cause of action. Maybe it’s placebo effects all the way down.

Maybe medicine is actually magic.

Maybe it’s all magic.

Maybe reality is just a consensus of minds, and changes in the beliefs of those minds can change reality. Maybe the reason for all the occult symbolism in pop culture is that our society is run by occultists who use magic to manipulate us. Someone should make a role-playing game based on this idea.

When Magic Was Real

I’ll repeat: Skepticism is warranted. I have no idea if Dr. Radin’s report is trustworthy. Given the reproducibility crisis, if you don’t believe it, you’re probably right. And if you don’t believe it, it’s not real. And even if you do believe it’s real, it won’t be real for the other people who don’t.

Given that magic is weak and unreliable, it will be impossible to replicate magic for anyone who doesn’t believe in magic… unless our social consensus about magic shifts so much that the collective unconscious belief in magic overpowers the skeptics’ anti-magic shells.

Now in the past our ancestors did believe in magic. We have abundant literary and archeological evidence of their spellcraft and practice, as well as anthropological evidence derived from the practices of indigenous peoples who still engage in the old ways.

If Dr. Radin’s blessed chocolate experiment means anything, it means that magic used to be a lot more powerful. And that, in turn, explains a lot of other interesting phenomena:

• Every population in every region throughout all of human history practiced magic. If magic never had any effect, then our ancestors were just wrongheaded. But if magic used to have effect because our ancestors believed in it, then the practice makes sense.

• All of the Abrahamic religions assert that the servants of God performed miracles of extraordinary power. Such miracles no longer happen, and atheists use this to justify their skepticism in these claims. But if magic is based on belief, then miracles may not happen today because belief has faltered.

• Many otherwise-hardnosed historical accounts mention magic. For instance, the Secret History of the Mongols records that shamans were used to create rainstorms before certain battles. If magic never had any effect, then this is just foolishness that diminishes the credibility of the ancient historians. But if magic used to be real, then these accounts might be less incredible than we think.

• Some of history’s most respected scholars spent a lot of time writing about magic, and many of them practiced alchemy, astrology, theurgy, and other arts. In the ancient world, the list would include: Iamblichus, Plotinus, Pythagoras, and Ptolemy. In the Middle Ages: St. Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, and Marsilio Ficino. In the Renaissance: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, and Paracelsus. In the Early Modern Era: Isaac Newton. If magic never worked, then all of these men were wasting their time. But if magic used to be real, then there was merit to their efforts.

The possibility that magic might once have been strong and reliable has one other interesting implication. Those of you who’ve read my essay When Orcs Were Real know that Homo Neanderthal species was stronger, tougher, and bigger-brained than Homo Sapiens. They preyed on us under the cover of night, engaging in pillage and rapine in the darkness. How did we win?

Perhaps… we cast magic missiles at the darkness.