This is an article from Carl's previous blog, Conversations Across the Table, originally posted on Sunday, May 08, 2005
How did I get interested in Witchcraft?
It was rather round-about, as so many things are. Unlike my very early interest in the occult where I had the benefit of my grandfather’s library, and then soon my own, Witchcraft – as we think of it today – was mostly unknown and certainly mis-understood until the sixties.
I must have been about 15 years old (1945) when I ran across a pictorial magazine in a friend’s house. I don’t recall the title, but it was one of the many in the 1940’s and 50’s that imitated the success of the big magazines of the time – Life and Look.
There was an interview of a successful author, William Seabrook, and there was a picture of a lady wearing a skin-tight leather mask or helmet that covered her head completely with only a mouth opening through which she could breathe. They experimented with what later was called “sensory deprivation” – the mask cutting off sight, sound, smell and even facial sensation. Wearing the mask for hours – later it was described as a “meditation mask” – she had various visions that turned out to be extra-sensory or pre-cognitive.
Seabrook had written a number of popular travel books recounting his adventures and magical experiences in Arabia and northern Africa, encounters with Voudoun in Haiti, air travel to remote places, his own experience of self-commitment to what was known in those days as an “asylum,” and in 1940 a book titled “Witchcraft, Its Power in the World Today,” which was the subject of the magazine story.
This was the first book and reference I had encountered that treated Witchcraft as other than historical “devil worship.”
I tracked that book down and found that it described more of their experiments, including the then popular ESP cards. Sometimes she was able to accurately describe each card he picked – seen as a mental image projected in front of her masked eyes. Other times the visions were of the future and were very detailed. None of them were of spectacular events or predictions of stock market activity, but just ordinary and sometimes comical events that happened in exact detail at a later time. One such vision – after spending the entire day in the mask – was of a barrel of fish delivered to her cousin’s apartment. Months later she was with her cousin when express men did deliver this barrel which had been sent as a joke by a vacationing friend.
Sensory deprivation has long been used to bring about altered states of consciousness. Modern experiments have been more complex, but the meditation mask is a simple and convenient method. It does not fully cut out sound, but the effect is to turn your awareness inward and that is probably the most important factor.
I made several custom-fitting leather meditation masks over the next several years for myself and others, and experimented as had Seabrook. We never had such exciting results as clairvoyance or pre-cognition, but the masks did aid meditation and were also good “sleep masks.”
I think their value for meditation lay in the deliberate act (intent) of putting on a mask to isolate the user from external awareness – even if it was impossible to totally mask sound. It was effective in fully masking sight, and it is sight and sound that are the primary sensory inputs. We were not concerned with masking smell, so left holes for the nostrils. The feeling of isolation with the sensation of leather against the facial skin is very effective, and the total result is better than merely closing eyes, having ear plugs, being in a darkened room, etc.
As a sleep mask, it again is more effective than mere eye-shades.
We did experiment with other materials – latex rubber, elastic fabrics, and even cast metal. None of these worked as well as very fine kid glove leather. (I read once, in a book by Lyall Watson, the belief that leather was an effective “psychic insulator.” This, of course, contradicts the idea that psychic perception is like tuning in radio waves. Instead, it directs to the concept of participation in shared consciousness, us Jung and others have proposed.)
Of course, a mask is just an accessory to what can be accomplished through “ritual intent,” but in that sense it is also a tool, and tools are used to enhance what can otherwise be difficult actions. Try pounding in a nail with your bare fist, or even with a natural object such as a rock. A finely made hammer does the job much better.
If interested in the idea, don’t let the fact that today similar type masks are marketed as “bondage masks” deter you. Nearly any tool has multiple uses. In that regard, a lady I was dating at the time, wore the full mask to a dance club and said the experience was very sensual.
And there are other ways to accomplish sensory deprivation. I will write about one such other that Seabrook explored in my next posting.
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