The Unbinding (Pfeiffer 2023) is a new documentary from the same team that brought us Hellier (Pfeiffer 2019). Because it’s so new, I shall avoid any spoilers in what follows.
The Unbinding (2023), directed by Karl Pfeiffer, “an archetypal journey […] to return an object that has much more to it than meets the eye”.
It concerns a weird-looking artefact that winds up in the possession of Greg and Dana Newkirk after its original discoverers undergo disturbing experiences and pass it to the Newkirks in desperation. Strange happenings then commence in the Newkirks’ home, so they begin a thorough magickal investigation. The story unfolds with all the narrative skill and high production values that fans of Hellier will be hoping for. In the film’s surprising conclusion, the nature of the artefact proves to be something that most viewers will never suspect.
From a magickal perspective The Unbinding raises some interesting questions: why would an entity of this nature behave like that; and is it significant that its story is being told at this historical moment? These questions are not explored in the film, and it still feels too soon for me to tackle them here, but what moved me to comment is a particular sequence that presents some difficulties concerning the ethics of occult content creation.
Of course, I create occult content too, and I’m ever conscious of the potential conflict between promotion of magickal or spiritual development and accumulation of an audience or revenue. I aim to produce content that’s clearly in the service of the former, but it’s not always an easy call.
Listeners to WORP FMwill have noticed our spasmodic recording schedule – algorithmic suicide, no doubt. Alan and I agree to make an episode far more often than we actually do. We make firm plans to talk about a topic but usually we decide that it isn’t really worthwhile. We’ll address something only when it seems to make a clear and constructive difference. If that sounds sanctimonious, so be it, but stating our conscious motive helps us try to live up to it, at least.
Magickal investigation in The Unbinding leads the participants to decide they must give up possession of the artefact. The Newkirks own and run a travelling museum of haunted objects; if they surrender the artefact it will no longer feature in the museum. They decide, as an experiment, to make a 3D digital scan of the artefact from which they can print a replica. Their stated aim is to explore whether a 3D print of a haunted object might also produce paranormal effects. Presumably, the replica will also fill the gap in the museum left by the original.
The sequence of the film in question was originally streamed live to internet followers. Whilst the artefact is being digitally scanned, questions are addressed to the spirit associated with it, and answers are obtained via a medium (who is wearing a blindfold and noise-cancelling headphones) using the Estes method.
The two operators begin by explaining their intentions to the spirit, but the medium’s responses immediately convey the spirit’s clear and fearful misgivings:
OPERATOR: A camera is going to send out little beams of light that are going to bounce off the artefact that you inhabit. MEDIUM: Choking. OPERATOR: It’s not going to hurt you. It’s not going to choke you. MEDIUM: It is. OPERATOR: It’s not going to hurt you, I promise […] MEDIUM: Hurt. OPERATOR: I promise, it’s not going to. (Pfeiffer 2023: 41’47”)
The scanning of the artefact begins and the medium reports sharp pains at specific points in her body. In an intercut sequence from a later interview, she states that never before had she experienced physical pain whilst using the Estes method.
The scanning process continues.
MEDIUM: Don’t… make that. OPERATOR: I have to. You don’t want us to print you? MEDIUM: No. No. OPERATOR: It’s almost done, sweetheart. (Pfeiffer 2023: 42’53”)
When a further scan is made the medium again reports physical pain.
The curious thing about this scene is that although the operators are palpably concerned for the spirit when (later) it seems it is being coerced and controlled by another entity, they seem oblivious to the possibility of distress caused by their own actions. Clearly, the spirit does not want the artefact to be scanned, and the reports from the medium suggest this is a cause of pain to the medium and/or the entity.
Rather than what the spirit says to them, the operators seem more impressed by the relevance and timing of the medium’s responses, as if dispelling doubt over the method or the veracity of the entity were a greater concern to them than the very clear request for them to stop. Possible reasons for that request are not explored either.
This scene impressed on me how even those of us who wholly accept the paranormal and magick are still vulnerable to slipping into materialistic thinking. Presumably unconsciously, the desire to obtain a replica of the artefact and to demonstrate the veracity of the method perhaps took precedence over understanding and responding to the communications as interactions with an actual presence.
Artefacts and methods that produce reliable effects are excellent resources for generating interesting content, but if the spirit’s “Don’t… make that” is to be heard and not drowned out, a magical perspective is required.
References
Pfeiffer, Karl, director (2019). Hellier. Planet Weird.
Pfeiffer, Karl, director (2023). The Unbinding. Planet Weird.
Two texts concerning encounters with non-terrestrial entities: the first, Anthony Peake’s The Hidden Universe: an Investigation into Non-Human Intelligences (2019); the second, the film series Hellier (Pfeiffer 2019). Both were created at around the same time, probably unknown to each other, but each confronts a similar mystery of non-human entities which, as Peake puts it:
all have one thing in common: they originally existed in the heavens, came down to earth, were defeated or banished by a controlling power, and ended up underground to occasionally enter this world through portals such as caves and sink-holes (Peake 2019: 44)
Both texts are initiated by personal encounters: in Peake’s case, his mother’s experience of something strange in the sky, followed by a bedroom encounter with an alien grey, even though such things were outside his mother’s cultural frame of reference; in the case of Hellier, unsolicited emails describing incursions of goblin-like greys upon a household in Kentucky.
The White People. Figurines about 1m tall. Discovered at Ayn Ghazal and dated to 6500BCE.
In each instance, the ensuing narrative leads the protagonists and the reader or viewer into “high strangeness”: happenings so bizarre they transcend the usual categories of weirdness, so that phenomena such as ghosts, extraterrestrials, and psi are jumbled together in an inseparable melee of oddness.
What distinguishes these texts, however, is the trajectory the respective investigations take. Peake begins with shamanism, myth and magick, formulating an argument that reaches its conclusions in what is supposedly science. The Hellier team begin with a supposedly scientific, investigative approach, but are drawn ineluctably towards a conclusion in occultism. Along the way, both are confronted with questions about the nature of reality.
The Hellier team commence in that dire confusion typical of paranormal investigation teams. The first season is almost unbearable to watch, because of the faulty reasoning, their inability to distinguish between knowledge and experience. On their first visit to the town of Hellier they find it odd that so many people approach them with stories of strange happenings. When they return, months later, hardly anyone comes forward, yet this is taken as odd too. Is it really so improbable to have different experiences in the same place at different times?
To communicate with non-human entities the team employs “The Estes Method”, which involves relaying output from a ghostbox through powerful noise-cancelling headphones to a blindfolded human operator who then speaks out loud the messages he or she receives. Questions are addressed to the entity by the other participants and whatever is spoken by the human operator is taken as the response. Whereas typical ghostbox communications are vulnerable to different participants hearing different messages, the Estes Method limits the number of interpretations to one and creates a sense of dialoguing with an entity in real time.
Detail from the Junction Shelter “Bridge Scene”. Note the domed skull and pointed chin of the central figure. Upper Paleolithic.
This is taken a step further in a subsequent episode where the same set-up is employed with another member of the team donning a “god helmet” and engaging with the ghostbox operator in dialogue. A god helmet is an apparatus that stimulates the temporal lobes of the wearer with low intensity magnetic fields. In this sequence the helmeted team member, possibly in an altered state, reports multisensory communications from an extraterrestrial entity, which seem to correspond with the verbal utterances being relayed from the ghostbox operator.
But even as the paraphernalia of modern ghostbusting proliferates, the Hellier crew are converging on what amounts to an ancient method of spirit communication: spirit possession. They could have dispensed with all the technology and gained the same experience simply by calling out to the supposed entities, entering a trance state, and allowing whatever happens to happen. Indeed, the climactic scenes of Hellier amount to this: the team decide the phenomenon relates to the god Pan, so they perform a ritual in the caves to open a portal for Pan to re-enter the world. Their transformation from paranormal investigators into magicians seems complete.
The narrative strands of Hellier are manifold, and I will not enter into them here, but at the very end of the second series, after the somewhat anticlimactic results of the Pan ritual, further pointers seem offered by the phenomenon, two of them being: (1) a passage from The Book of the Law obtained by gematria: “the man and the name of thy house 418 the end of the hiding” (Crowley 1976: 38 [II: 78-9]); and (2) Crowley’s Star Sapphire ritual (1992: 36), obtained by gematria and through some striking synchronicities.
418 is the gematric value of Abrahadabra, which for Crowley means “The Great Work accomplished” (Crowley 2020: point iii). The number therefore symbolises enlightenment, awakening – although I suspect the Hellier crew might be thinking it is the street number of the house where Indrid Cold lives. (Long story…) The Star Sapphire ritual, meanwhile, is a sex-magickal invocation of the non-dual consciousness that forms the basis of spiritual awakening.
The Hellier team discuss the idea of performing the ritual, but no comment is made on its sexual aspect. Famously, in the sixteenth century John Dee and Edward Kelley made contact with angels and were instructed by them to arrange sexual intercourse on the same night with each other’s wives. The Hellier team are perhaps confronting discarnate beings with a similar intention of pointing them towards ritual sex as a means of gnosis. Jason Louv (regarding the case of Dee and Kelley) offers a rationale for this:
We know that sex and particularly possessiveness issues around sex are really tightly wound into the human ego and issues of territory and dominance […] The point of all of that is reproduction […] You need functional ego boundaries to take and defend territory in which children can be raised […] When you deal with sexual deconditioning you’re really hitting at the root of the personality […] It makes sense from the angelic perspective: they are trying to crack the centre of the human personality, but what often happens with these things is that what spiritual beings think human beings can handle they often can’t. (Kaminsky 2018: 51’10”)
Engaging in non-habitual sexual activity, then, can be used as a method for challenging ego boundaries and thereby entering non-dual awareness. If there is a third season of Hellier I doubt that these considerations will be pursued, and I am not recommending that they should (for the same reasons that Louv touches upon) but I imagine the trajectory into ritual and magick will continue, as it becomes clearer that (because it is discarnate and therefore without a material basis) the phenomenon cannot be subjected to scientific investigation – not that the Hellier team were ever really doing that anyway.
Peake, however, does not regard the immateriality of the entities as an obstacle to contemporary science. He traces encounters with non-human entities, or “egregorials”, through shamanism, religious myth, legends of faeries and djinn, the magick of Dee and Crowley, psychical experiments, ufology, and entheogens. By this point he has collected a bunch of odd but recurring motifs: beings originally from the heavens that for reasons unknown have retreated to dark, subterranean caves; that appear in forms often similar to or associated with reptiles or snakes; and with whom entheogens or trance states seem to offer a means of communication. Their motivation and ontological status remain uncertain, but they reappear so often and in so many contexts that it is too simple to dismiss them as fiction. Yet if they do not have material existence, then where are they? Referring to quantum mechanics and theories suggesting that material reality is some kind of simulation, Peake concludes:
If the physical world is, in fact, created purely from non-physical digital information then the existence of non-human intelligences existing outside the program is not so far-fetched. Our Egregorials are simply sentient programs in the same way that we are sentient programs. They just exist on a different level. (Peake 2019: 206)
Peake’s trajectory sends him on a reformulation of reality to accommodate discarnate entities. However, does the idea of the physical world as a simulation make sense? If an aspect of reality leads us to conclude reality is not real, what we were expecting to find? Peake seems perturbed by the suggestion “that physical reality is not actually solid in any real sense” (Peake 2019: 191). For him, apparently, if reality has characteristics somewhat like a computer program or a hologram then it becomes suspect. What seems more likely, however, is that his assumptions are unrealistic. A notion of reality as not real is an idea inherently confused and false.
On the one hand we have Peake, trying to find the entities by using science to reformulate reality; and on the other the Hellier crew, attempting communication by using magick to alter their perceptions. What both might be missing is an invitation implicit in the encounter to radically alter their conception of self. In Peake’s case, if reality indeed lacks substance and is like a hologram, then what would be the nature of human existence within that reality? In the case of the Hellier team, if it is not material creatures that their investigations yield, but meaningful synchronicities, are they noticing what effect this is having upon themselves?
Pech Merle, “The Wounded Man”, a human figure with oddly domed head and large eyes. Upper Paleolithic.
The nature and motivation of the entities is implicit in these questions. They are not material creatures but symbols. They come down from the heavens and live in the underworld because that is where we must go to find them. They communicate through dreams, drugs, rituals, and trance because changing our consciousness is what they do. Describing them as “symbols” takes away none of their reality. To approach a symbol is to fall under its meaning and be affected by it.
The association of the entities with reptiles or serpents is related by Peake to an ayahuasca vision of Michael Harner: “The dragon-like entities informed him that they were inside all forms of life, including humans, who are but the receptacles and servants of these creatures” (Peake 2019: 166). This is perhaps taking a living symbol too literally, although it is understandable, given that it was apparently Harner’s first ever ayahuasca ritual, and at the time he was an anthropologist studying the perplexingly alien culture of the Conibo people in Peru.
Compare the conclusions Harner draws from his visionary encounter with reptilian entities to that of Carl Jung in The Red Book:
The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. […I]t is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother. […] The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself, but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. It is always the serpent that causes man to become enslaved now to one, now to the other principle, so that it becomes error. […] The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right […] Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life. (Jung 2009: 180-1)
My suggestion here is that we are not the slaves of the serpent (as Harner supposed), but only potentially so. We become slaves to these entities if we follow them into the earth, taking them literally. Earth is materiality, but it is also the site of germination, potential and growth. The myths inform us that these reptilian entities originally came from the stars, but they have a trickster aspect and can ruin us by leading us into confusion. Whereas Peake aims for the stars and tries to trace them back to their original home, the Hellier crew are led into the caves. However, as Jung suggests, we avoid confusion by recognising them as the living symbols that they are, enacting transformation upon us. Where they lead to wisdom it is because we have recognised that how they appear illuminates the nature of the reality that enables this.
References
Crowley, Aleister (1976). The Book of the Law. York Beach, ME: Weiser.
Crowley, Aleister (1992). The Book of Lies. https://tinyurl.com/y4a7b4qa (sacred-texts.com). Accessed September 2020.
Crowley, Aleister (2020). Liber Samekh. https://tinyurl.com/y5e6lj7w (sacred-texts.com). Accessed September 2020.
Kaminsky, Greg (2018). Occult of personality: episode 191 – Jason Louv and John Dee’s empire of angels. https://tinyurl.com/y6qcamo4 (occultofpersonality.net). Accessed September 2020.
Occult Experiments in the Home 