The Placebo Effect, is it Actual Magic? (and other ruminations on skepticism and dogma)

This is one of those areas where people pretend to know a lot more than they actually know. I often get asked, how do you know that's not "just a placebo"? and my answer to that is, what is a placebo? Why on earth should believing you are going to get better actually make you better? That sounds like bloody magic to me - just because something has an official name and is a recognised scientific phenomenon doesn't make it any less magic, it just means that, along the magic-science boundary, it's right at the very edge. Magic, as I've said before, is just a word for science we don't understand yet, as it has always been. That can mean technological science, psychological science, even electromagnetic science that we have either forgotten or never understood in the first place. Like most serious practitioners, I do believe there's a science and a set of rules to magic, that can be understood and utilised to create changes that might have formerly been seen as being outside of the usual realms of possibility, or probability.

The placebo effect is one of a set of phenomena that are explained away in science using vague terms that just slap a name on a thing and call it good - a name that is meant to be an answer, something that stops the line of questioning from going any further, and anything that dares to go beyond that is made out to be ridiculous. These phenomena include shared hallucinations, mass hysteria, and, in a way, confirmation bias is also worth mentioning in that group, because, although confirmation bias is surely a thing, it is often used to dismiss instances where outcomes that have been specifically requested by a practitioner during spell or ritual, that manifest against unbelievable odds, but are still considered confirmation bias by dogmatic skeptics - no matter how outlandishly unlikely the manifestation was, the timing of it or the fact that not only did the requested outcome happen but it also came with bells and whistles and cherries on top - which is how you get gifts from the universe when you really deserve them.

Again I'm repeating myself, but we know basically nothing about how the mind works and very little about all of the different frequencies of electromagnetic energy - we have a range that we somewhat do understand, but even gravity's nuances are still to be detangled. It doesn't seem outlandish to me whatsoever that there is a greater matrix of energies surrounding us all and permeating our world that we don't understand in a mainstream or scientific sense, but that shamans, witches, cunning folk and medicine workers have always known - maybe that explains why the only truly global spiritual practices have been the ancient pagan ways, that were stomped out in much of the world by the original power grabs by Abrahamic religions - but never entirely extinguished. Regardless of styles, the same practices came up everywhere - the use of plant and fungus medicines, divination, contacting spirits - which may or may not be extraterrestrial in nature... these are the mysteries of the mystic path, which were taken very very seriously in days gone by (and still are by certain groups), even in the West, especially when the influence of the church started to loosen a bit - but which have, in this technological age, been forgotten again for the most part. 

The placebo effect is no more understood than magic is. There is no as-yet-understood, technical reason why there should be any correlation between the belief of getting better and actual getting better - that one fact really throws a spanner right in the eye of skeptics who still dogmatically refuse to leave the mundane box and consider that they might actually be wrong. A spanner that they're just walking around with it sticking out of their head and acting like everything is fine and makes perfect sense. This leads me into another common argument that I make - everyone senses ethereal energy. Well maybe they don't, I suppose I can only speak for myself, but if you've ever played poker, or been to a sporting event where something happens and the entire atmosphere shifts, a wave of energy overtakes an underdog team and they just begin to trounce their opponents, or someone goes "on tilt" in the poker game and it's tangible, you just know their luck has changed, you can feel it. Is it just me? I've used the example before of sensing an atmosphere in a room, like when someone's been fighting or kissing and are now trying to act like they werent, but you can feel it. 

That's the "energy" that the new agers are always talking about. Now, I have no love lost on new agers, mostly because they're the basic bitches of the occult world, but this is something I refuse to let them co-opt, and will battle them for it's legitimacy because it's just so goddamn important. That energy can be harnessed, focused, cast out to the universe, sent to someone, encrypted with messages, this is a thing that I believe almost everyone can do, but like most other abilities and skills, probably to differing degrees. My brother is autistic, and although he is not as bad as many, it took him a long time to be able to sense the mood in a room, and to act accordingly. He's getting it, with much instruction, but it took a long time for him to develop that cognitive skill - however he's far beyond most other's development in things like minecraft, lego and maths, so in much the same way as people are better at some things than others, people can be more or less attuned to this ethereal sense - which I think is something that often creates these dogmatic skeptics, but just because you can't feel or work with it immediately with no training, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 

One of the main reasons I have a bee in my bonnet about all of this is that it seems so unbelievably obvious and easy to me - in my head I liken it to watching someone who has just started (or is shit at) a video game that you play quite well yourself, and the frustration you feel at all the mistakes, missed opportunities and underutilised advantages. It's glaringly obvious to me that skeptics are wrong, but at the same time, they feel the exact same way about me - I want people to take me on about this, because every time I get to a certain point with these people, they just shut me down with the same tired arguments and when I counter they're like, "well I just don't believe that" - no experimentation, no actual research, even when there is actual research for them to look up, they don't and it's honestly the EXACT same energy as arguing with an SJW, except instead of rage and considering me a bad person, they usually just assume a false attitude of higher intelligence, despite not being able to win the argument on proper intellectual grounds, which is more than infuriating.

Anyway I suppose I've ranted enough, I tried to keep it about placebos where I could but the concept is fairly simple to me - people can heal themselves when they believe they're going to get better - it's magic 101, belief + energy = manifestation. There's even the ritual of taking the placebo. I dunno, it's one of those things where it flabbergasts me that it's not as simple as 1+1. Beyond that, most skeptics would be absolutely astonished by the sheer bulk of academic work with the occult. Most everybody knows of Crowley - and while there's some merit to his work, there's a lot to be said in the negative of his results, character and fate. Hardly anyone has actually read anything proper. I include myself in this, I'm fairly bad at the old reading side of the occult, preferring to learn by doing and intuition, but I did, at a cursory glance on the Google machine, find this epic thread that covers a whole load of ground and that I'm certainly going to be making use of myself, somewhat of a one-stop-shop for the truly curious;

https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/17xsv8/suggestions_for_the_academic_study_of_the_occult/

If you're interested, I do also run a forum/discord combination community called The Court of the Ibis - we're an international esoteric forum dedicated to the research and discussion of various occult practices, we're politically diverse but don't fight, we're friendly and like to play text based DND in the discord, the forum is mostly for posting bigger projects, questions and articles, whereas the discord is where all the whacky stuff and day-to-day chat happens. We're tiny. Absolutely tiny. But we'd love to have you, and the practitioners we do have are quite experienced and knowledgeable, and there's some truly interesting articles over there, so even if you're a skeptic, come and have a look at some of the stuff we have going on, ask some questions, make some arguments and hang out with us if you so desire. 

https://courtoftheibis.com