Exploring Enchantment: An Interview with Leo Ruickbie

Leo Ruickbie is a writer, researcher, and prominent figure in the social science of exceptional experience. He has authored numerous books and articles investigating topics like witchcraft, magic, hauntings, and the evidence for life after death. Well-known as the former editor of The Magazine of the Society for Psychical Research, he now works for the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies in Las Vegas. In this interview, Ruickbie discusses his lifelong fascination with the paranormal, his groundbreaking essay in the Bigelow Institute contest, and his current research projects.

How did your interest in parapsychological topics develop?

Parapsychology is a natural home for me. Growing up in Scotland, I lived in an enchanted landscape of ruined castles, wildernesses and roaring seas, where folklore breathed life into everything: here is where the trows were turned into stone (Hjaltadans Stone Circle on Feltar); here is where Jack the Giant Killer died (Tweedsmuir); here is where Merlin was killed (Drumelzier); here is where they burnt the witches (sadly, too many places); and everyone knows what they say about Loch Ness, of course. Hallowe’en was still a living tradition and not commercialized the way it is now. Our lanterns were carved out of turnips, not pumpkins, and our costumes were all self-made as we went out ‘guising’. While I was still at primary school, I remember reading about J.B. Rhine in a magazine that came complete with Zener Cards and had great fun playing around with them with my friends and family. Childhood is a magical time and I was living in a magical place, and that set me on my course, a path of enchantment (what we might also call exceptional experience).

Growing up in Scotland, I lived in an enchanted landscape of ruined castles, wildernesses and roaring seas, where folklore breathed life into everything.

Unknown

Your PhD was about witchcraft. What connections do you see between witchcraft and parapsychology?

It was this quest for enchantment that led me to London, like a Scottish Dick Whittington to make my academic ‘fortune’. I had two offers: one from the London School of Economics; one from King’s College London. I chose King’s, where my supervisor was Prof. Peter Clarke, who had established a Centre for New Religions. Fortuitously, Vivienne Crowley, quite a name to conjure with in the Wiccan world, later joined the King’s staff and became a co-supervisor. I had been working with the ideas of ‘enchantment’ and ‘re-enchantment’ at Lancaster University, exploring philosophers such as Hans Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, and I found myself at an intellectual crossroads between taking a philosophical turn or an empirical one. I chose the latter, deciding to see if there were still people who could be called enchanted or re-enchanted as a test of Max Weber’s famous diagnosis of Western society as ‘disenchanted’, ‘die Entzauberung der Welt’ (Weber, 1919).

I chose the latter, deciding to see if there were still people who could be called enchanted or re-enchanted as a test of Max Weber’s famous diagnosis of Western society as ‘disenchanted’, ‘die Entzauberung der Welt’.

Unknown

The obvious group to study were those people using magic in some way in their lives – people who called themselves witches, pagans, and occultists. The main findings of my PhD were published in my book Witchcraft Out of the Shadows (2004), which has since been cited in the textbook for A-Level sociology (Chapman et al., 2016).

Some of the people I met, through interviews and participant observation – even myself – had had inexplicable, perhaps ‘paranormal’, experiences during ritual. What I have found useful is to consider such events in situ: they happen as part of wider experiences that give them interpretative context and personal meaning, and they happen outside the laboratory, in the wild. Beyond my theoretical hypothesis testing, contemporary witchcraft practices and magic use provided a rich ethnographic setting to explore spontaneous psi experiences. I recently gave talks to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and the Exceptional Experiences and Consciousness Studies Research Group at the University of Northampton about the central role played by the investigation of spontaneous cases in the years leading up to and after the foundation of the SPR. As a member of the SPR’s Spontaneous Cases Committee today, I am involved in continuing that role. Here we find the raw, lived experience of the phenomena that we are trying to understand, and the documented weight of experience overthrows attempts to sideline and subvert it.

What has been your biggest accomplishment?

Being elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2021 and then of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2022 were real high points for me, as you can imagine. In a cultural context where serious inquiry into parapsychological topics is tabooed, censored, and pilloried, it was a real vindication of the value of my work, but it also demonstrates that social science, more broadly, is an appropriate tool for understanding our subject.

I am also proud to be a Professional Member of the Parapsychological Association. As you know the process to become a Professional Member requires the demonstration of a certain level of work in the field and the recommendation of two current directors of the PA, so it’s also a real badge of achievement. At the last count, there were only 124 of us, and I would encourage more people to aim for this distinction.

In the course of my career so far, I have published 6 monographs, 15 chapters in books, and 62 articles, as well as one edited volume and another 3 in progress, not to mention countless online posts and film work. I am proud of every one of these achievements, but there is also the sense that they have been like stepping stones to what has been my biggest accomplishment so far: coming in the top three of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) essay contest in 2021. About 1,300 people from all over the world applied to take part and just 204 passed the strict entry criteria. Originally, there were only three places available, but through Robert Bigelow’s generosity, further awards for 11 runners-up and 15 honorable mentions were also made, and it was great to see so many of my colleagues and friends recognized at all levels. In total, Robert Bigelow distributed an astonishing $1.8 million of his own money on the recommendation of an expert judging panel. Not only that, he has also invested in editing and printing the winning essays in a multi-volume set, which was published in April 2023.

The win has been a real turning-point. Since then, I have accepted a job at BICS to help shape the future of the field. After a strenuous application process for a coveted ‘O-1’ Visa – the so-called ‘genius’ visa – I have now relocated to Las Vegas, officially as ‘an alien of extraordinary ability’. I half expect the ‘men in black’ to come knocking at the door.

What was your winning essay, “The Ghost in the Time Machine”, about?

The terms of the contest were to provide evidence that consciousness can survive the permanent physical death of the body beyond a reasonable doubt; however, my essay “The Ghost in the Time Machine” operated at several levels. I wanted to address why the evidence we have is so often rejected because this subject, more than many others, has to deal with deep-seated psychological factors that prevent the evidence from being properly considered in the first place. I wanted to tackle some of the criticisms of parapsychology generally: that it has no theory to explain the phenomena; and that the phenomena are a priori impossible because they contradict the laws of physics. And I also wanted to go beyond ‘reasonable doubt’, a case-based approach, and use statistics to show the patterns and probabilities at the population level.

My essay “The Ghost in the Time Machine” operated at several levels. I wanted to address why the evidence we have is so often rejected because this subject, more than many others, has to deal with deep-seated psychological factors that prevent the evidence from being properly considered in the first place.

Unknown

Strange as it may seem, it was accidentally picking up a copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that gave me both the key and structure to my argument. There is not space to go into what I called the ‘Scrooge Paradox’ based on the character Scrooge’s denial of his personal experience of the apparition of his deceased partner Marley, but Dickens’s fictional insight allowed me to explore that same denial we see all around us and sometimes face within us. What gave me the structure and, ultimately, the theory was Dickens’s well-known use of the three spirits of Christmas: the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Through these spirits, Scrooge is given access to the three categories of time as if outside of them where they still or already existed, just as if he were in the sort of block universe of four-dimensional space–time in which past present and future exist concurrently that was implied by Albert Einstein and made explicit by Hermann Minkowski (Einstein-Minkowski space–time). I thought to myself, are there examples of such experiences having been reported by real people? And I found that there were. It was my Eureka! moment.

Using the theory that the physical brain receives consciousness, rather than producing it, coupled with research in quantum physics arguing that i) consciousness is a quantum process, and ii) that time is an emergent property of entanglement, I was able to give a theoretical basis to my argument that did not outrage the laws of physics. Instead, I showed that we have experiential evidence to support what modern physics tells us about the world.

...arguing that i) consciousness is a quantum process, and ii) that time is an emergent property of entanglement, I was able to give a theoretical basis to my argument that did not outrage the laws of physics. Instead, I showed that we have experiential evidence to support what modern physics tells us about the world.

Unknown

Hence, the essay’s title encapsulates my whole argument. Most people are already familiar with the phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ and its meaning that ‘the ghost’ or consciousness is separate from but connected to ‘the machine’, the physical body. The immaterial connects with the material to become present in a specific physical space, but my research also showed that this act of connecting created the experience of forward-flowing, irreversible time – what I called ‘timetanglement’ – so the body should be thought of more completely as a space–time machine, although for the sake of simplicity, I left this as ‘time machine’ since ‘machine’ already expressed the spatial aspect.

What impact do you think the essay contest has had?

The contest has had an enormous impact. I interviewed Robert Bigelow for the Magazine of the Society for Psychical Research at the beginning of 2021, and he told me that one of the aims of the contest was to energize research. It certainly did that. It also brought it to much greater attention than had previously been the case. The contest has had global newspaper coverage from The New York Times, The Independent, Newsweek, and The Canberra Times, with The Daily Express recently doing a double-page spread on my essay (Warren, 2022).

The essays are also continuing to have an impact. Available from bigelowinstitute.org, they are continuing to generate discussion and attract attention and plans to publish them as a multi-volume set resulted in a landmark publication in 2023, with ebook and audiobook versions of the top three essays out in early 2024.

What are you working on at present?

Too many things! But that is when we know we are on the right track – when the offers and opportunities come rolling in. At the top of the list are the edited academic collections: The Material Culture of Magic with Dr. Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie; and two volumes of Is There Life After Death? for the Society for Psychical Research. I have started work on turning my BICS contest essay into a book, and have been invited to join Dr. Helané Wahbeh and Dr. Siri Zemel on a mediumship project. I have also been talking to several film directors and at least one well-known celebrity about exciting projects – these could be huge, but we will have to see what comes to fruition. And that is not even to start on the things we are doing here at BICS.

References

Chapman, S., Holborn, M., Moore, S., & Aiken, D. (Eds). (2016). AQA A level sociology, student book 2. HarperCollins Publishers.

Ruickbie, L. (2004). Witchcraft out of the shadows: A history. Robert Hale.

Ruickbie, L. (2023) [2021]. The ghost in the time machine. In Proof of survival of human consciousness beyond permanent bodily death (Vol. 3). Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies.

Warren, J. (2022). It’s the real million-dollar question: Is there life after death? A leading academic sets out the compelling and prize-winning evidence of supernatural encounters which finally shattered his scepticism. Daily Express. https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1584660/Life-After-Death-Captain-Eldred-Bowyer-Bower-Supernatural

Weber, M. (1919). Wissenschaft als beruf. Duncker & Humblot.

Selected Bibliography

Ruickbie, L. (2009). Faustus: The life and times of a renaissance magician. The History Press.

Ruickbie, L. (2012). A brief guide to the supernatural. Robinson.

Ruickbie, L. (2013). A brief guide to ghost hunting. Robinson.

Ruickbie, L. (2013). “So terrible a force”: Spirit communication in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In C. M. Moreman (Ed.), The spiritualist movement: Speaking with the dead in America and around the world (Vol. 3). Praeger/ABC-CLIO.

Ruickbie, L. (2014). The blood of Satan: The exorcism of Michael Taylor. Fortean Times, 313, 36-39.

Ruickbie, L. (2015). The medium: An interview with physical medium Kai Muegge. Paranormal Review, 75, 6-11.

Ruickbie, L. (2015). The séance: Lights, rappings, levitations and apports with Kai Muegge. Paranormal Review, 75, 12-15.

Ruickbie, L. (2016). The impossible zoo: An encyclopedia of fabulous beasts and mythical monsters. Robinson.

Ruickbie, L. (2017). A night with the Black Monk. Paranormal Review, 83, 8-17.

Ruickbie, L. (2018). Angels in the trenches: Spiritualism, superstition and the supernatural during the First World War. Robinson.

Ruickbie, L. (2019). Haunters and hunters: Popular ghost hunting and the pursuit of paranormal experience. In D. Caterine & J. Morehead (Eds.), The paranormal and popular culture. Routledge.

Ruickbie, L. (2022). Lucky charms in the First World War: Industrialized magic. In K. Rein (Ed.), Magic: A companion. Peter Lang.