Open Veils · Answer
Is there any evidence of real witchcraft?
The empirical record on operative magic is far richer than the trial transcripts suggest. Declassified government programs, parapsychology laboratory data, and cross-cultural ethnographic evidence collectively point toward real anomalous human capacities that traditional magical practice was systematically encoding. The question is not whether 'witches flew to sabbaths' but whether directed intention, plant pharmacology, and non-local perception constitute a functional technology.
Evidence
- The U.S. government's own Stargate Program — operational from 1972 through 1995 under CIA and DIA funding at SRI International — documented statistically anomalous remote viewing results that Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ published in peer-reviewed journals including Nature.
- The pharmacological dimension is addressed by Brian Muraresku in The Immortality Key, tracing ergot-derived psychedelic sacraments through Greek mystery cults and early Christianity.
- Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance framework and his rigorous telephone telepathy experiments — published in peer-reviewed literature despite fierce institutional resistance — provide a theoretical substrate for how sympathetic magic's 'like affects like' principle might operate.
- Ingo Swann's ability to describe physically shielded targets under controlled conditions is precisely what folk magic traditions call 'second sight.'
- Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences has since replicated presentiment, telepathy, and intention-on-random-event-generators across hundreds of trials with effect sizes that dwarf many pharmaceutical benchmarks.