THE REALITY OF NEGATIVE ENERGY & NEGATIVE ENTITIES * The "New Age" movement has once again made it fashionable to be involved in occult practices. There have been other periods in recent history when this has been the case, most notably *fin de siecle* Europe (IE the 1890's) and more recently the late Sixties "Age of Aquarius" which faded into the "Me" decade and its plethora of self-help, "Human Potential" organizations. This era did not truly die. The "Me" decade became the age of the Yuppie, and the "New Age" emerged from the human potential movement and handed everyone out a crystal. The main problem with the neo-Aquarian movement is that the whole concept of evil is so blithely scoffed at. "There's no such thing as evil," says the New Ager, "there is only imbalance." This is a refrain you hear all the time, not just from the practitioners, but from so-called channeled entities. In this essay, I wish to show you that there is something very dangerous in channeling, something which has been ignored to the peril of not only the channelers, but those who consult them. In the 1890s, when mediumship was quite a fad, somebody estimated that only 25% of the mediums were actually contacting spirits. Fully 75% were charlatans, who used elaborate and not-so-elaborate means to fake contacts with spirits at seances. The famous magician Harry Houdini drew large crowds to seminars he conducted to show people just how the flim-flam artists conducted their phony seances. There is evidence that much of the people who are self-described channels are doing the same thing. "Ramtha", the famous "channeled being of light", was shown to be a fake on national television when 60 Minutes did an expose on the former housewife in Oregon who "channels" him at $300.00 a session. This, however, leaves 25% of authentic channelers, if you use the old figures, which I suspect to be pretty true now as it was in the Turn of the Century. And just as Dion Fortune, one of the foremost occultists to come out of the Order of the Golden Dawn, had warned about the mediums of her day, I must sound anew a very important warning: CHANNELING IS DANGEROUS, not only to the channel, but to those who consult them as well. Most channelled entities come from a facet of reality that is woven, warp and woof, into the reality our physical senses can penetrate. This realm is known to the Native American as well as the Ancient Norse as the Middle World. (Mitgard) These entities from here are people who once had bodies but have died and for some reason have become lost on their way to the "West".(the realm of the dead) They crave the sensations of embodiment, and so they roam, trying to find a living person they can possess for this purpose. Channels "invite" these entities into themselves in their quest for knowledge. And these entities are more than willing to give them whatever "knowledge" they sense within the conscious and subconscious dreams and hopes of their living host, and create whatever personality they sense their host would like, be it the personality of a starship captain from Planet Zed, or an cranky ancient Egyptian priest. These "earthbounds" are only as dangerous as their embodied personalities were. Unfortunately, those humans that wind up "earthbound" were usually mentally disturbed in life, and this mental disharmony can cause mental damage to even the most adjusted person who opens themselves up to them. Even more dangerous is the fact that entities who never HAVE had bodies and can truly be called "evil spirits" also make themselves available to the potential channel. These entities have been known since time immemorial as "demons," "devils," "pretas,"(Sanskrit: Hungry Ones), "kwaidan," (Japanese: Unquiet Spirits) "asuras," (Indo-persian: Not-gods) "djinni" (Arabic: Demon) and "gan'n"(Teneh Athapascan: Evil Spirit(of the mountains). In all cultures that have practiced magic(k), these spirits were actively guarded against. It is a relatively recent occurence that some magicians and Wiccans have abandoned the warding practices that have been used for millenia for protection against them. The magick circle, unlike what Gerald Gardner has claimed, is to keep these negative entities OUT, not to keep the good magick in until it is cast, which although a nice thought, is totally erroneous. My next posts will deal with how to protect yourself, and how a Power Animal or the Inner Teacher or Inner Shaman differs from an outside entity.