What is the True Source of Psychic Abilities?

A very common occult practice involves the development of psychic abilities. Yet a great deal of confusion exists as to what psychic abilities are. Are they really latent human powers possessed by everyone? Most people who think so refer to the research of J. B. Rhine and modern parapsychology as having “proven” that psychic powers are natural abilities within all people. But this is not so.

We believe that psychic powers are mediated through demonic ability. We think this because of the testimony of occultists themselves; those who claim psychic powers freely confess that apart from their spirit guides (demons who imitate helping spirits), they have no supernatural abilities. Shamans, Satanists, witches, mediums, channelers, psychic healers, and spiritists of every stripe freely concede that apart from their spirit helpers they are powerless to do the things that they do.

Michael Harner was a visiting professor at Columbia and Yale. He taught anthropology courses on the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York and was chairman of the Anthropology section of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was also a practicing shaman and author of The Way of the Shaman. He observes that the fundamental source of power for all shamans is the spirit world: “Whatever it is called, it is the fundamental source of power for the shaman’s functioning…. Without a guardian spirit, it is virtually impossible to be a shaman, for the shaman must have this strong, basic power source.…”^[1]

Concerning Hindu and Buddhist gurus, which incidentally have many characteristics in common with the shaman,^[2] they too confess that their power comes from the spirit world. No less an authority than Indries Shah observes, “It is true that the Sadhus [gurus] claim that their power comes exclusively from spirits; that they within themselves possess no special abilities except that of concentration.”^[3]

Louis Jacolliot, a former Chief Justice of the French East Indies and Tahiti confesses the same. In Occult Science in India and Among the Ancients, he observes that psychic forces are conceded to be “under the direction of the spirits.”^[4] Thus, the Indian psychics “produce at will the strangest phenomena entirely contrary to what are conventionally called natural laws. With the aid of spirits who are present at all their operations, as claimed by the Brahmans, they have the authority as well as the power, to evoke them.”^[5]

In his Adventures into the Psychic, seasoned psychic researcher Jess Stearn makes this common observation: “Almost without exception, the great mediums… felt they were instruments of a higher power which flowed through them. They did not presume to have the power themselves.”^[6]

In other words, people who have this power characteristically recognize it is not a natural human ability. In Freed from Witchcraft, former Satanist and witch Doreen Irvine confesses, 

“I had known and felt that [occult] power often enough, but I believed it was not a natural, but rather a supernatural, power working through me. I was not born with it. The power was not my own but Satan’s.”^[7]

Significantly, even as a Satanist and witch she did not know that she was possessed by numerous demons: 

“Now, I was no stranger to demons. Had I not often called on them to assist me in rites as witch and Satanist? [But now] for the first time I knew these demons were within me, not outside. It was a startling revelation.”^[8]

Apparently then, even the most demonized individuals such as Irvine, who had 47 demons cast from her,^[9] need not be consciously aware that spirits are indwelling them. If this is so, it may be logical to assume that many others who traffic in less virulent forms of the occult may also be possessed by demons and yet not know it.

Further, if such people are cleverly taught that their supernatural powers are “natural and innate,” they will wrongly assume that their powers originate within them as some “natural” or evolutionary psychic ability. The fact that demons work through them will not only be hidden from them, but there will be a natural aversion to the very concept of demons because the concept of “natural powers” is infinitely preferable to the idea of collusion with evil, supernatural spirits.

Nevertheless, however occultists may choose to interpret their powers, they cannot escape the fact that it is really spirits that work through them. For example, consider the phenomenon of psychic healing, which many people consider a “natural” and/or “divine” ability. In his Supersenses, Charles Panati refers to the research of psychic researcher Lawrence LeShan who has observed Eastern and Western psychic healers firsthand. Panati states, “But if the healers he studied had one thing in common, it was that they all felt that they did not perform the healing themselves; ‘a “spirit” did it working through them.’ They felt they were merely passive agents…. All the healers he studied slipped into altered states of consciousness in order to heal.”^[10]

One of the most comprehensive collections of information on psychic healing is Healers and the Healing Process. This authoritative ten-year investigation observes,

“Any study of healers immediately brings the investigator face to face with the concept that spirit intelligences (variously referred to as guides, controls, or protectors) are working through the minds of healers to supply information of which the healer himself has no conscious knowledge.”^[11]

This study also noted that “the only large concentrations of healers seemed to be in countries where the belief systems involve what is generally known as spiritualism or spiritism.”^[12] For example, “in both Brazil and the Philippines the healers have developed almost entirely in the confines of spiritualistic communities.”^[13]

Similar citations could be multiplied indefinitely for all the different categories of occult practice. Whatever the person with psychic abilities calls them, it is the spirits and not the individual that are the true source of power.

The bottom line is this: Wherever psychic powers are found, the spirit world is also found. Further, apart from these spirit beings, those with psychic abilities claim they are powerless. What this tells us is that the only way psychic powers are generated is through some involvement with the spirit world, and that all men do not have the natural capacity for such abilities. If psychic powers were truly a human capacity, anyone could develop them. But again, the only people who develop such abilities are occultists who, through their occult practices, come into contact with the spirit world. As the vast majority of people have never developed these powers, it is not logical to think such powers constitute a “natural” human potential lying dormant within the race.

In conclusion, we see no evidence for natural or latent psychic powers. These powers are “potential” only to those who are tapping the powers given by spirits, whether or not such beings are perceived and whether or not they are conveniently redefined in terms of natural and neutral categories.

Extracted from John Ankerberg, John Weldon, Facts on the Occult.

1. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman (New York: Bantam, 1986), p. 54. ↑
2. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton, NJ: Bollingen/Princeton University Press, 1974); see the comments by Dr. Robert S. Ellwood, Jr. in Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), “The [recent] cult phenomena could almost be called a modern resurgence of Shamanism,” p. 10; also Tal Brooke, Riders of the Cosmic Circuit: Rajneesh, Sai Baba, Muktananda… Gods of the New Age (Batavia, IL: Lion, 1986); cf. Mircea Eliade, From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Source Book of the History of Religions (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). ↑
3. Sayed Idries Shah, Oriental Magic (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), p. 123. ↑
4. Louis Jacolliot, Occult Science in India and Among the Ancients (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1971), p. 201. ↑
5. Ibid., p. 204. ↑
6. Jess Stearn, Adventures into the Psychic (New York, Signet, 1982), p. 163. ↑
7. Doreen Irvine, Freed from Witchcraft (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1973), p. 96. ↑
8. Ibid., p. 123. ↑
9. Ibid., p. 7. ↑
10. Charles Panati, Supersenses (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976), p. 102. ↑
11. George W. Meek, “The Healers in Brazil, England, U.S.A., and U.S.S.R.,” in George W. Meek, ed., Healers and the Healing Process: A Report on Ten Years of Research by Fourteen World Famous Investigators (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical/Quest, 1977), p. 32. ↑
12. Jeanne Pontius Rindge, “Perspective—A Overview of Paranormal Healing,” in Meek, ed., Healers and the Healing Process, p. 17. ↑
13. Hans Naegeli-Osjord, “Psychiatric and Psychological Considerations,” in Meek, ed., Healers and the Healing Process, p. 80. ↑