Shaunell Penrod Indiana Crossroads Encounters Witchcraft and Knowledge Eps.416

222 Paranormal Podcast

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A coven is a group in which witches are said to gather. One of the chief proponents of the theory of a coven was the English Egyptologist Margaret Murray in her work The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921). According to her a coven consists of 12 witches and a devil as leader. The number is generally taken as a parody of Christ and his 12 disciples. (An alternate theory, stressing the Murray view of a pre-Christian tradition of witches, explains 13 as the maximum number of dancers that can be accommodated in a nine-foot circle.)

Each member of a coven is said to specialize in a particular branch of magic, such as bewitching agricultural produce, producing sickness or death in humans, storm raising, or seduction. The actuality of covens was also accepted by Montague Summers, a well-known Roman Catholic writer on witchcraft in the 1920s and 1930s, and more recently by Pennethorne Hughes in his Witchcraft (1952, 1965). Many students of witchcraft, however, dismiss the Murray theory of covens as unfounded and based on insufficient evidence. Nonetheless, 20th-century witchcraft groups continue to use the term coven, and reports of coven activity in the United States and Europe are not uncommon.

What is ESP?

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is an unproven paranormal phenomenon in which people allegedly receive information about, or exert control over, their environment in ways that don't use the five senses. Also known as "the sixth sense" or "psi," ESP refers to a wide range of purported abilities, including telepathy (mind reading), psychokinesis (moving objects without physical contact) and precognition (predicting the future).

ESP violates our understanding of basic scientific principles. Still, estimates suggest that around two-thirds of people in the United States believe in its existence, according to a 2019 study published in Europe's Journal of Psychology. Even in academia, ESP has inspired serious scientific debate. While some psychologists argue that the subject deserves consideration, skeptics point out that the evidence is weak at best, and fraudulent at worst.

History of ESP

Fascination with ESP is rooted in the spiritualist movement of 19th-century Britain and the United States, according to the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Members of the fashionable elite would hold séances, in which mediums would attempt to communicate with spirits. By the end of the 19th century, scientists and other thinkers were joining research societies devoted to studying not only communication with spirits, but a whole host of so-called "psychic" phenomena, including telepathy and hypnosis (which, unlike telepathy and séances, is now backed by science). In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research emerged in London, and in 1885, people founded a corresponding society in the United States. (Both still exist today.)