One of the things I've been trying to understand for years, which I've posted about many times before, is the extent to with messing around with supernatural stuff is 'healthy'. On the one hand, we all have a part of ourselves that's connected to such things, and it seems unnatural and deforming to just shut it down. On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that our fears aren't unfounded, that this sort of thing really is dangerous.

Beowulf is an archetypical story for the kind of thing I'm talking about. I've never read a book version, but years ago I saw the movie in which Angelina Jolie was the demon. For me, the most memorable part of that was the first bastard demon child, with its tormented rages. Seems familiar somehow. What is the nature of the deal the king made with the demon? I think the story is compelling because its at least partially true, but in real life the devil doesn't show up and offer you a contract. It seems to me that a kind of contract is made when a person's thinking and action puts themselves into relation with something, and I don't think that at its core this involves conjuring something through ceremonial magic or that sort of thing, which I think is at most symbolic. In the Beowulf story, the king gains supernatural power, and a paranormal curse or affliction that comes with it. Is that fundamentally different from the use of any psychic power? Is the exercise of all psychic power a sort of trojan horse for evil?

One of the reasons I care about this, is because several of my early precognitive dreams involved lethal accidents, and they contained symbolism that implied that I was partially responsible. If I was a causal agent, I think I was a minor one, and these things mostly would have happened anyway. But it would be arrogant and kind of stupid to just blow off the possibility completely. And I've continued to have these kinds of experiences, even though almost all of my dreams of this type stopped a few years ago. Of course, everyone dies eventually, for a complexity of reasons, and it would definitely be unhealthy to make too much of that. Everyone is a cause of death in the world, in one way or another, whether they are aware of it or not. And I think that obsessing about negative premonitions or prophecies is most definitely unhealthy. But real people I know have been killed or seriously injured in accidents foreshadowed by some of these dreams, so it unavoidably freaks me out a bit also. Is this another reason for our collective 'dry spell', and why hardly anyone posts here any more? Paranormal dreamers are self-destructing, and the smart ones have learned to leave it alone? Everyone assumes its wrong for me to 'blame myself' for any of this. But I think that's mostly assumption on their part, even though I guess they're probably mostly right. And I see a lot of other people who hold themselves blameless who are not blameless, and I don't want to be one of those people.

As another Beowulf-like example from popular culture, Black Sabbath has a song called Too Late, that's about someone who conjures up a demon he can no longer pretend to control. (That song is with Dio from about 1995, there's an earlier song called Too Late with Ozzy singing that's about something else.) I like that song enough that its almost an obsession. The Sabbath/Dio song 'Falling off the Edge of the World' is similar. There's a song on the second Iron Maiden record along the same lines, maybe called Prodigal Son, about someone who has dabbled too long in ceremonial magic. Some religious people are afraid of oracles, like the Tarot for instance. I've always assumed they're just ignorant, but I'm wondering if there's something to that. Anecdotally, a high percentage of the people I know who have played with such things have mental health problems. Correlation is not necessarily causation of course, but its hard to separate the two, especially since these spirits seem to exist partially outside of time somehow, with causes and effects not always following in chronological order.