I Need a New Drug
Some time ago, I took to Craigslist to post the following classified ad:
WANTED: Participants for a clinical thought experiment!!!
Are you currently in between thrilling adventures? Do you yearn to have a thrilling adventure but lack the will to start? Or are you presently content with the level of thrills and adventure in your life? If you’ve answered “yes” to one (and only one) of these three, I invite you to my basement so that I can learn more about your experiences and aspirations. If you are genuinely interested, and not being a dick, please inquire at fake_emailaddress@yaddayaddayadda.biz to fill out a short questionnaire and to reserve a spot. Compensation TBD. Coffee and lemon squares will be available. Spots are limited so enter soon!(!!)
Even if the wording was not sufficient to cover every legal liability, it was the right balance to acquire my desired 10 subjects for each category: risk-takers, open-minded but risk-deficient, and totally risk-averse.
Once they had sated themselves with my complementary Fig Newmans (I’d fumbled the lemon square acquirement at the last minute; though I haven’t determined its influence on my findings), I sat each one down to commence with the experiment.
I offered each participant a single black capsule. I told them that it was a new party drug called “black mold.” Its natural source is a rare Amazonian fungus and is a highly potent hallucinogen even before chemical synthesis. Once ingested, I told them, the effects are gradual but intense, stretching the user’s sensory limitations beyond what more common drugs can reach; “out-of-body experience” or “transcendence” are common descriptors of these effects. Users will feel as if they are being taken far beyond the bounds of earth; they will feel as if they have crossed over into a new plane where conventional notions of physics, morality, life, and death are much the reverse of what they are here, and secrets of the cosmos are being revealed to them.
Naturally the side effects are just as strong. Users will endure long-term disorientation, heightened sensitivity to light and sound, or their hearing will become so acute as to detect sounds inaudible to human ears. They will hear voices, will have blackouts, memory-loss, sleep-loss, and moments of disassociation. They will experience increased strength, agility, and physical competency accompanied by aggressive tendencies toward themselves and others. They will speak incoherently; their voices will change to an unrecognizable pitch. They will have physical symptoms like sores, bleeding, strange scarring, and projectile vomiting of unnaturally colored bodily fluids. “Gritty reboot of puberty” is a common descriptor of these symptoms.
Once that disclaimer was given, I stepped back to give each participant the option to ingest the capsule. I was looking to confirm a hunch that had kind of appeared in my brain while showering. While all of the risk-averse would turn down the pill, I thought, less than half of the inexperienced and more than half of the experienced would accept the pill. An inexperienced user might be moved by sheer curiosity, reasoning, perhaps, that the side effects of the drug could not possibly be as bad as I described or that they are not guaranteed to occur in all cases. An experienced user, on the other hand, may reason that the side effects are no worse than what they have risked in the past and that this is just another, if slightly elevated, high-octane experience. They can tolerate other potent drugs, what is different about this one?
The plain results were that eight of the risk-takers took the capsule without additional prompting or hesitation; half of the open-minded equivocated for several minutes before all but one of the five refused to ingest; two of the risk-averse ingested.
Despite the stubborn insistence of some participants that they were tripping balls, there is no drug called black mold that I’m aware of. It’s just a sugar pill I coated with an impactful color, the fabricated effects of which were a convenient metaphorical stand-in for that which usually accompany necromancy, demonic conjuring and possession, and other interactions with what is generally called the “supernatural.”
The purpose of this thought experiment was to explore the reasoning one may have to engage in the activity of necromancy. I had started with the intention of proving in a clinical setting what has often been depicted in film, fiction, and television: that confirmed thrill-seekers and similarly uninhibited innocents were more likely to risk exposing themselves and others to the influence and effects of the demonic. While that’s still probably correct, that wasn’t the outcome that ultimately interested me.
Season of the Witch
Abstaining from occult activity would seem self-evident to most rational people, whether they believe in the supernatural or not. But such self-evidence applies pretty widely, not just to drug use but to unsafe casual sex, riding a motorcycle or bicycle without a helmet, driving without a seatbelt, smoking, and other things perfectly rational people will sometimes do. It would be helpful to consider occult activity as placeable under the same vicious umbrella. But before we examine reasons for doing them and their shitty outcomes, we must first set aside those known (rather, not very occultic) occult practices, which offer a great deal less than meets the eye. Two types emerge.
I call the first type the circumstantial occultist. There is no shortage of curiosity about the occult in the United States. In fact before any sporting event was introduced, at least by the colonial settlers, it was this country’s original, and maybe even most enduring, pastime. The witch trials at Salem, MA were a heated phenomenon in their day and leave an indelible mark on our culture even now. However, those convicted and executed for witchcraft were later confirmed not to be witches at all; much of the evidence against them was hearsay or totally fabricated. The controversy repeated itself nearly three centuries later when accusations of and trials for crimes related to “devil worship” were rampant in the United States, fueled by public hysteria, political opportunism, a rapacious media, and questionable investigative, therapeutic, and prosecutorial conduct. Those accused were either unremarkable non-practitioners caught up in hysteria (like the McMartin family) or misunderstood teens with morbid fixations who served as sufficient scapegoats (like the West Memphis Three).
Second is the affected occultist, and quite an odd type it is. Wiccans, the most popular of the mainstream, openly practicing occultists, provide a representative assessment. Their spirituality is something of a mishmash of abandoned Pagan figures and rituals; some of their ideas are even lifted from modern-day literature, like Kipling poems. It is pre-Christian nature-and-stars worship filtered through a postmodern bricolage; like a spiritual cut-up method. Other affected occultists are more moral than spiritual. The Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple see Satan as a liberating metaphor against oppressive Christian morality. The former’s heyday was from the 1960s to the 1990s and represents a darker version of the hippie counterculture. The latter is moralistic, a bit pedantic about constitutional manners, and ignorant of theological ones. It is a darker version of the Unitarian Universalist church.
Still, part of what fueled the Salem witch trials was the prevalence of superstitious practice at the time. Indeed, boiling urine or burning animal hair were considered as remedies to malicious witch spells. Which means that while discounting genuine practitioners is ill-advised, finding genuine occult practitioners is near-impossible. And even there, they break down into types with distinct flashpoints.
The Devil’s Son-in-Law
What then do I mean by “occult practitioner”? For my purposes here, my practitioner looks something like a combination of the circumstantial and affected types; that is, not a practitioner at all, but a careless leisure sorcerer. They are intelligent enough to register objections from others, even, perhaps, from themselves, but are also both intelligent and arrogant enough to reason themselves out of them, much as our black mold test subjects might: the risks are minimal, they do not exist, or pale in comparison to the rewards. Those rewards tend to be one or all of the following:
Proof of the supernatural, specifically supernatural evil as described by Christian theology.
Proof of life after death and/or the ability to speak to loved ones who have died.
Obtainment of a desired objective or thing that, for whatever reason, the leisure sorcerer is unable or unwilling to obtain through natural/legal means.
Indeterminate thrills.
Each of these aims are fairly common among people most attracted to leisure sorcery. Yet even while they have overcome their reservations about the risks for their actions, and cannot be dissuaded on those grounds, the reality of their outcomes always seem to be overlooked in the pursuit. I have addressed each in reverse order, mainly for effect.
(4) has the simplest and broadest downside because it is propelled by the most hazardous reasoning. There are endless examples of crimes and extreme acts undertaken simply because someone could and wanted to do it, treating a momentous act as a trivial indulgence, like adding an extra scoop of ice cream onto an already full bowl of it. No lasting pleasure has ever come from this kind of act, let alone any lasting good. In this specific context, the act constitutes self-harm on a massive scale, even if nothing of definitive substances happens. The rituals expected for such things can be elaborate and taxing on the mind and body as a rule. The impetus, however, is a kind of boredom and self-one-upmanship that borders on resignation. The leisure sorcerer has sought and experienced every thrill leading up to this one; not doing it, in the leisure sorcerer’s logic, is worse than doing it.
(3) also needs little explanation as to its deficiencies. It is the most common moral lesson of getting precisely what you paid for, always more than what was initially wagered. It is one thing to dabble in the dark arts for the the lolz but quite another to do so to cut corners for comfort. The danger of the act is neutralized, yet somehow compounded at the same time, by its being treated on par with a multilevel marketing scheme. Indeed, pyramid schemes seem sane and manageable when compared to selling your soul.
(2) begs our greatest sympathy. This reason draws the most desperate, the most despondent, and the most doggedly curious among us. While every other type of leisure sorcerer can make a plausible surface claim to be logical thinking, none in this category can say they do the same. These leisure sorcerers want harder than any other leisure sorcerer wants. They want an answer, they want closure, they want things most people can barely get under less tragic circumstances. They seek a pathway to a realm beyond their mental comprehension and beyond their physical capacity, and hence a heightened knowledge of the universe and of their own well-being. It’s supernatural kamikaze. If someone manages to cross over into the celestial plane and if they have some residual reason in them (and that is a big goddamn IF), the expectation of returning in one piece, if at all, must be reduced by the time it is undertaken.
(1) rests on a perverse understanding of the cosmic order as established and managed by God. The leisure sorcerer who wants—nay, demands—supernatural entities, ones of presumably greater power and reach than the leisure sorcerer, to prove that they exist, that they are material somehow, and act in and toward our own plane. It assumes, moreover, that entities are obligated to appear when the leisure sorcerer calls them. Perhaps a worse outcome of the Enlightenment than the total disenchantment of the supernatural is the relegation of the supernatural to celestial customer service. This is an ideal situation if you were an entity being called, who holds all the cards if it chooses to make itself known.
But the challenges and drawbacks faced in the leisure sorcerer’s choices both overshadow and expose the challenge of the leisure sorcerer as a type.
Satan is Real
An ability to keep in mind that your own intentions are not always clear going into an action and that outcomes are seldom as you envisioned them after the action is done is a fair sign of maturity. To convene with demonic forces, to dip even a toe into the spirit realm, or to otherwise attempt to manipulate the unseen fibers of cosmic order evinces a number of human character traits—just not maturity. Whatever avowed reasons you have for pursuing amateur necromancy, the reckless impulse always takes precedence. Indeed, the central aim of this experiment was practically moot from the start as it becomes clear that leisure sorcerers are very few in number relative to the entire adult population, and not very successful anyway.
This sort of detail is something that probably should have been privy to me while I was scrambling to find an inoffensive substitute for lemon squares. I would not have been very interested in appeasing the risk-takers or enabling the open-minded compared to attempting to convince the risk-averse to take a risk. This is not impossible provided the risk-averse ratio of fearful to prudent leans heavily toward fearful. Fearfulness is more immediately assumed in risk-averse types. They are seen as being crippled psychologically by the fear of having everything to lose or of walking on thin ice, even if in actuality they have very little to lose, much to gain, and are walking on solid earth. With the right pitch, a fearful risk-averse subject may find themselves willing and able to consume a potent hallucinogenic substance.
If, on the other hand, there are more prudent than fearful subjects in the risk-averse section, I couldn’t get very far with my original intent. The risk-takers may talk a good game of their tolerance, stamina, and past adventures that prove their merit, but the only thing that separates them from the prudent risk-averse type is their lack of silence.
I should have been mindful that among the risk-averse there would be subjects who were hardly ignorant of the rigors, demands, and pleasures of actual risk-taking. The likelihood of having obtained and ingested anything even approaching the implied potency of black mold on their own and in their preferred conditions was probably not negligible either. I could only go on visual cues. The two subjects from that group who ingested the capsule neither hesitated beforehand nor reveled afterwords. They picked up the capsule and put it in their mouths with a cold, almost automaton expression. The eight refusals were just as deadpan and free of equivocation or excitement, consulting in silence their own private rationales that the conditions rather than the materials were not ideal. I’m pretty sure that even the most prepared clinician who is not working out of a basement or relying on Craigslist, and who provides the snacks he said he would, could not completely anticipate this type; but that is how the prudent in all their manifestations prefer it.
If the disadvantages and high risks of leisure sorcery are easily exposed and rendered objectionable, the same can’t be said of those surrounding prudent practice. Firstly, it is far more difficult to discover; and secondly, it is a far more formidable and serious undertaking and therefore requires a much different way of thinking about it than many in modern society are accustomed.
Where matters of belief figure at all in the mind of the leisure sorcerer, it is either casual, incidental, or of otherwise reduced importance. With the prudent practitioner, however, belief is one of resolute and unambiguous conviction. The prudent practitioner believes wholeheartedly in demonic forces; they also believe in God and in the truth of the Churches that most ardently profess their faith to Him. They believe in the validity of the rituals of those Churches: the holiness of Scripture, the gravity of sin, the magnitude of the sacraments, the reality of transubstantiation, and the authority of the hierarchies. The prudent practitioner‘s knowledge of the rituals and doctrine of these Churches are staggering to the point that they may know more than professed adherents. The more knowledge the practitioner obtains of Godly faith the better the practitioner is able to subvert it and allow his or her infernal system the freedom to exert its influence. To the prudent practitioner, the Black Mass is not just an adventure or performance art to scare Republican grandparents.
The prudent practitioner carries out his or her designs with discipline and, more importantly, subtlety. Those with interest in being vigilant against this type will do themselves and the universe few favors by relying on antiquated methods of detection and capture, such as pointing at someone with “unusual” or “dark” interests or who is “a bit off” and declaring them guilty. Yet ironically, a society that champions the obvious at the expense of the subtle is an ideal breeding ground for subtly destabilizing machinations. It creates a difficult situation where a prudent temperament is a matter of natural affectation or part of a covert strategy. Much on our part needs to change before many distinctions can be clarified and other actions taken from there.
Sugar, Sugar
This examination leads me ultimately to wonder: who wins in all of this? Certainly not the leisure sorcerers who at best infuse a lethal power into cluelessness. Certainly not the innocent or the unaware who are vulnerable to the incompetence of one type and the insidiousness of the other. Perhaps the prudent gain some advantage, the reasons of which few can afford to ignore but may spend everything before they determine anything. The only victor in this whole dilemma, as far as I can tell, is the Prince of Darkness himself, who carries that enviable legacy as the least obligated entity in the universe. Satan will consume anyone who offers themselves up to him. But while some people are like Fig Newmans and infuse the Dark Lord with necessary nutrients, others are like the absent lemon squares and go right to his gut.