Baleen Potter and the Psychic Ass Vampires of Sodom.

The power of "magic" people relies on people believing in magic.
I think if you feel that you can suck the energy out of children by torturing them, you will probably have some pretty intense energy around you. The anthropologist Joan Halifax has written about this. In some of the cultures she studied, a shaman was chosen at a young age. That individual was subjected to all manner of torture, including being buried alive. (See Shaman: Wounded Healer)

After the rituals ended, that person went nuts, but it was a controlled form of nuts. When they'd go into states that we would consider multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia, they'd be under a connection to an oracle or spirit. The DSM even makes a distinction between "schizophrenia" and this very kind of experience to avoid diagnosing entire cultures as schizophrenic.

If that individual, the shaman, or whatever you want to call them, believed they possessed some power because of this pain, maybe they would exhibit a fearlessness or an ability to trick people, then the people around them would believe it too. I don't know if you've ever met a genuine psychopath, someone who you know probably does some really scary shit behind closed doors, but they have a power. There's power in not only being afraid of nothing but in believing that your evil deeds make you more powerful.

There's a whole lot of occultism in Rhode Island but since I moved here I've never met a single occultist who has actually used the term "wizard."

"baleen
The power of "magic" people relies on people believing in magic. "

This is a fairly well documented, if still poorly understood, thing. "Voodoo death" is more common than most people think.

For example, here;s an interesting Psychology Today article that touches on the way that medical professionals in technologically advanced societies can exert similar influence:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201209/vo odoo-death-i

I agree with you guys, this documentary is actually pretty accurate in its descriptions of british occult stuff and it totally seems likely that Saville was into that. The power that words and symbols have in terms of altering people's perspective is a very real thing, whether you believe in the magic part of it or not, and I think a lot of people in positions of power use that knowledge to their advantage.

I have a friend who's in to that stuff and a few years ago he explained in detail how he sees it as a form of autosuggestion that basically uses a vocabulary of symbols and ritualistic behaviors to bypass the brain's language processing and analytical functions of the brain and increase the effectiveness of the suggestions (because they can't be rationalized away).

Whether or not you buy that as something that would actually work it's a hell of a lot more interesting and respectable than a literal interpretation of the occult (and from what I've read of Crowley it's a lot more in line with how he seemed to think).

Also, personally, I think that there is almost undoubtedly a neurological basis for the religions, and that while the constructs that emerge from that are culturally specific, the underlying neurological roots are part of how humans work.



Most of the atheists I've met are as religious as anybody, they just end up in materialist religions like free market economics and technological utopianism and design.

Atheist here, and I totally agree that religion seems to be "wired into" the brain or at least that we're genetically predisposed to it. Don't want to get all amateur evo-psych, but it seems intuitive that such instincts would have helped our ancestors back when cooperating in larger groups was a big challenge (same sort of thing that led to words instead of bug-picking as social grooming).

I would add that I think a lot of artistic / celebrity worship comes out of the same complex of incidents. A human being can mourn for Adonis or beg us to leave Britney alone without ever having met them.

I'm basically an Atheist even though I don't identify as one.

Do you remember the author or title of that popular-anthropology book from a few years back that was exploring the functional similarities between religion and professional sports? Colbert interviewed him and it seemed like an interesting book. I'm pretty sure it got a decent amount of press when it came out but my extensive 20 seconds of Google searching reveals nothing.