Monday, August 30, 2010

EMF and Evocation

A while back I wrote about doing some research on magical fields with an EMF detector, a device that measures electromagnetic fields. So far I've gotten a lot less done on that project than I would have liked over the course of the summer, but I did do some testing with it this last weekend and got some pretty interesting results.

Up until then I had done tests on particular tools and objects and walked through a couple of houses without finding anything all that unusual from a scientific perspective. Magical tools do not seem to produce any sort of EMF unless they incorporate something like a magnet that would normally do so, and the sensation I get when picking up a magically charged object does not seem to be electromagnetic in nature. Checking out houses has likewise produced nothing unexpected - there have been a few high readings from doorbell transformers and ceiling fans, but nothing that would qualify as paranormal.

This last weekend I finally got around to testing the detector in conjunction with an evocation. My magical working group has been going through a series of rituals evoking the archangels associated with the signs of the Zodiac, and as this month is Virgo I figured that some scientific analysis would be very appropriate to the nature of the sign. I also had noticed in previous evocations in this series that it felt as if the area over the center of the altar felt colder once the archangel was present, and I wondered if this effect might have anything in common with cold spots supposedly produced during hauntings. Those cold spots often correspond to a high electromagnetic field.

The overall baseline EMF reading for the temple is about .2, which is fairly typical for a normal room inside a house that has electrical service. For the experiment I placed the probe from the detector in the center of the altar on top of the Virgo flashing color tablet that we would be evoking the archangel into. The reading remained steady, around .2, as the ritual commenced, persisting through the opening of the magical field by LBRP, LIRH, and GIRH - Virgo. It remained at .2 through the preliminary conjuration of Raziel. However, as soon as I finished off the specific conjuration for Hamaliel, the archangel of Virgo, the detector shot up to a little over .4 and started beeping. .4 the point at which it goes off in high sensitivity mode.

Now, so far I only have the one test case so the effect will need to be replicated enough times to produce a reasonable confidence interval, but the result proved quite encouraging. It's always possible that it could have been random environmental interference or some sort of household power surge, but the detector was on through the entire opening of the ritual and went off within a couple seconds of finishing the conjuration - that is, at the moment in which the archangel was expected to appear. As usual, I also was able to feel the cold spot forming in its usual location at the same time, which would suggest that there is indeed a connection between the cold, the EMF, and the manifestation of the spirit.

If this effect can be replicated it could give magicians a great new tool for determining the presence of a spirit during an evocation. We would no longer have to rely on subjective feelings of "energy" or whatnot, and we also would not be stuck expending the power of the spirit on stupid tests like poltergeist phenomena, which I'm convinced only detract from the effectiveness of the overall working. If any other magicians out there are interested in this sort of research I highly encourage you to pick up your own EMF detector and try it out. If you do, I would love to hear about your experimental results and I hope that you will feel free to post them here.

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4 comments:

Unknown said...

I'd love to hear about further work along these lines. Perhaps an infrared temperature "gun" to verify hot/cold spots in the room?

Scott Stenwick said...

A thermal imaging camera would probably work best for that. You could shoot infrared video of the entire rite and watch the temperature changes throughout across the entire temple.

I'll have to see about picking one of those up at some point. Sadly, from what I've see they're rather expensive.

List with Laszlo said...

Very interesting, one of our brothers called and told me about this. How much does an EMF run? Did you find it distrafting to the working?

Scott Stenwick said...

Here's the model that I have:

http://www.smarthome.com/7021/CellSensor-EMF-Detection-Meter/p.aspx

It cost around $30 when I bought it and it looks like they're on special at the moment.

What I don't like about it is how it's marketed - the whole "OMG radiation from cell phones!!!" is a bunch of nonsense considering that with things like radio signals we're surrounded by EMF all the time and the tiny amount put out by a cell phone isn't going to make any difference healthwise.

What I do like about it, though, is that it's the only inexpensive model I was able to find with an external probe that connects to the detector on a wire that's almost 3 feet long. That means if you have a place to stash the detector all you have to deal with is a small probe that's maybe an inch long on top of your spell focus.

The probe is in my opinion the main reason that the detector doesn't really detract from ritual work. If you had to put something the size of the whole detector on top of or next to your focus every time I can see how it would become cumbersome pretty quickly.