Theresa Cheung - The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World - The Ultimate A–Z of Spirits, Mysteries and the Paranormal

A year after his death his apparitionwas allegedly seen looking sadly from the window where he had stood on the eve of his death. The window was walled up but this did not stop the ghost returning. Later sounds of a woman weeping - said to be Susan Decatur - were also heard.

Residents of Washington still report seeing Decatur’s spirit peering out of the second-storey window or slipping out the back door of his house with a black box under his arm, just as he had done on that fateful day of the duel.

Terms used to describe phenomena witnessed in psitesting. The decline effect is a term used to describe the diminishing of psychicability when tested. The incline effect refers to an increase in ability.

Experiments to test psychic ability tend to show that the decline effect occurs more often than the incline effect. Some gifted individuals score highly consistently but many gifted test subjects, who have scored highly in the initial tests, report a loss of spontaneity and enthusiasm during a run of tests. This may be due to the fact that the perception of psi is a very subtle process and without feedback a subject has no way of judging his or her success. Another major factor is boredom as many tests involve repetitive tasks such as guessing numbers or cards.

Psychic images that come from the unconsciousmind’s ability to take in external sensory stimuli. The unconscious mind is a kind of storage facility, absorbing and storing all the stimuli, such as pictures, sounds, noises and so on, we are constantly being bombarded with but can’t process all at once, as this would lead to information overload.

When the conscious mind - the part of the mind that is objective and in charge of reasoning and making decisions - has a question about something that it just cannot answer, the question will go to the unconscious mind, which will mull over the problem and rely on its stored data to come up with a response. In the meantime the conscious mind goes on to another subject and forgets what it was looking for, but the unconscious keeps hard at work until, out of nowhere, an insight appears. This is deductive psychic intuition at work.

See also Random psychic intuition, Goal-focused intuition.

Official court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, admiralty spy - with the code name 007 - and transcriber of the angelic Enochainalphabet of alchemyand magic, John Dee was one of the most learned and remarkable occultists of his day. It is thought that Shakespeareused him for his model of the magician Prospero in The Tempest.

Dee was responsible for setting the date of Elizabeth’s coronation by casting a horoscopeto find the most auspicious day, but he is perhaps best known for his relationship with mediumEdward Kelley Dee was greatly interested in communicating with spiritsand employed Kelley for the sum of £50 a year. The two men believed themselves to be in contact with a number of entities, including an impatient angelcalled Ave. It was Ave who dictated to Kelley, with Dee recording, the text of an entirely new system of magic in a language called Enochain. Dee and Kelley were also associated with the divinatory art of scrying(crystal gazing). Their experiments in crystal gazing, using a shewstone that is now in the British Museum, began in 1582 and continued to 1587.

Kelley may have had some psychicability but he was undoubtedly a scoundrel as well. On one occasion he managed to persuade Dee that the spirits had instructed them to ‘hold their wives in common’, an arrangement that broke down within a matter of weeks when the less gullible wives began to get suspicious.

Kelley also persuaded Dee to leave his position at court and concentrate on producing gold alchemically When this failed the Queen took pity on Dee and reinstated him as a rector of a small college, but he was never to regain his earlier prestige.

An expression of familiarity that is unexpected, déjà vu is the sensation of having been to a place or experienced a situation before. The French term for ‘already seen’ can apply to feelings, thoughts, places, dreams, meetings and living in general -whenever something familiar seemingly happens for the first time. The idea was first introduced to science in 1896 by F L Arnaud.

Studies conducted on déjà vu suggest that it is a common experience, with more than half of those polled reporting instances of déjà vu. It also seems more common in children and women than men. The phenomenon is thought to be a psychological process where the unconsciousmind is stimulated to recall past events of a similar nature that somehow get mixed up with the present event. Some feel that it is evidence for reincarnation, memories of past lives being pushed to the surface of the mind by familiar surroundings or people in the present. Some say it happens when one draws on the collective memories of mankind - see collective unconscious-while others believe it to be the result of out-of-body experiencesduring sleep, or other extra-sensory phenomena.

To the ancient Greeks daemons, from the Greek word daimon meaning ‘divine power’, ‘fate’ or ‘god’, were intermediary spiritsbetween the gods and humankind, rather like guardian spirits. They could be either good or evil. Good daemons were supportive and encouraging but evil daemons could lead people astray with bad counsel.

The Christian Church labelled all such paganspirits as evil, which is why daemons, better known to us today as demons, are traditionally associated with evil. For centuries demons have been blamed for a host of ills and misfortunes including demonic sexual molestation, where a demon masquerades as a man or woman to molest its victim. Many possessioncases in the Middle Ages involved sexual molestation by demons, although this may have been more to do with repressed humans than supernaturalactivity. In many cultures and religions demons have been exorcised. In Catholicism cases of demonic possession - in which demons battle for a person’s soul- are dealt with by formal exorcismrites that date back to 1614.

Also called necyomancy A form of divinationthat calls on demonsto reveal the truth of a matter or of future events. This is done by summoning spiritsvia an oracleor occultmagic. Demons, however, are reputedly perverse, so the accuracy of any predictions made is thought to be unreliable. Moreover, some demons are believed to be hard to control and, if they are able to free themselves from the constraints put on them, they can take over the body and soulof the summoner.

The study of demonsor malevolent spiritsand their powers, attributes and derivations. Demons were thought to be extremely evil and extremely clever, masters in the art of persuasion. Humans had to be constantly on their guard against them. In 1580 philosopher Jean Bodin claimed that: It is certain that the devils have a profound knowledge of all things. No theologian can interpret the Holy Scriptures better than they can; no lawyer has a more detailed knowledge of testaments, contracts and actions; no physician or philosopher can better understand the composition of the human body, and the virtues of the heavens, the stars, birds and fishes, trees and herbs, metals and stones.