Mind over Magick: The Psychology of Ritual Magick

by Richard Kaczynski

Overview

A scientific examination of magical practice

• Draws on peer-reviewed research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, such as real-time brain imaging, to examine the effects of mystical states and magical practice

• Shows how being “in the zone,” as described by athletes and performers, is consistent with the ritualist’s state of mind when working magic

• Suggests rituals and routines to strengthen one’s practice of magic, witchcraft, meditation, and yoga with empirically proven tools

By looking through the lens of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and real-time brain imaging, Mind over Magick shows how and why ritual magical practice can produce profound experiences with tangible benefits.

Richard Kaczynski draws on a wealth of peer-reviewed research to shed new light on magic. He uses psychological studies, including the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in which subjects role-played as prisoners and guards, to reveal the power of magical vestments and personas and the effects they have on ritual practitioners. He shows how being “in the zone,” as described by athletes and performers, is consistent with the ritualist’s state of mind when working magic. He also reveals what neurological processes are involved when one encounters and works with spirits.

Mind over Magick includes empirically proven rituals to strengthen one’s practice of magic, witchcraft, yoga, and meditation. Readers can then apply the scientific method to evaluate their own spiritual praxis and determine what works best for them. For solitary practitioners and group participants alike, the author shares what happens, both on a psychological and neurological level, when they enter sacred spaces and use ritual implements as well as enter deep meditative states. He also details the importance of initiation as a rite of passage and transformative method of instruction.

By approaching the art of practicing magic as a science, readers are encouraged to hone a more effective and empirically grounded practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644119648
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Richard Kaczynski is a lifelong student and writer on Western esotericism. He is an authority on the life and works of Aleister Crowley. The author of Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley and editor of Aleister Crowley’s The Sword of Song, he holds a PhD in psychology with a minor in statistics. His doctoral dissertation examined the structure and correlates of metaphysical beliefs. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Read an Excerpt

1

Something

“YOUR RESUMÉ IS IMPRESSIVE, BUT . . .”

I was sitting across the desk from the Yale University HR officer. It was my fortieth birthday. I had flown seven hundred miles for this job interview, and here it was: the dreaded but. As in, “It never rains but it pours.” “It’s all over but the crying.” “Close but no cigar.” Was there a better candidate? Or a problem with the job posting? I took a deep breath and held it. Finally, she continued:

“. . . what’s up with all this stuff about magick?”

Applying for a statistician position, I didn’t expect questions about my interests in psychology, let alone my extracurricular writing and speaking on Western esotericism. However, the job was in the Department of Psychiatry, so it was a fair question. A question for which I didn’t have a prepared response.

I answered from the heart. “The psychology of everyday life isn’t very interesting. Most of it happens on autopilot. We get up, eat breakfast, brush our teeth, go to work. Like owning a car, you don’t need to know how it works until it breaks down. In the same way, we learn the most about the mind when unusual or unexpected experiences challenge our assumptions. For instance, ecstatic or transformative religious experiences can trigger a sudden change in personality . . . which we assume to be a stable trait. This breaks the rules. How does that happen?”

She paused to consider my answer, then nodded. “That makes sense.”

While my ad-lib answer explained what my interest in magick had to do with psychology, it didn’t explain why I was so interested. One of my colleagues back at Wayne State University used to quip, “People go into clinical psychology to understand their own mental illness. I went into social psychology because I have no social skills.” Well, I pursued a doctorate in psychology because I thought it would explain magick.

How I got there is another story.

Something was in the house.

One night when I was an infant, my half-sister Krys had put me down to sleep in her room. Mom and Dad were at a wedding, and she didn’t want to leave me unattended. As she sat there reading by her small nightstand lamp, she heard the familiar sound of footsteps in the house. The hallway light switched on. “Hi Dad,” Krys said to the silhouette in the doorway. “Your foreman called to say the worksite was ready for plaster in the morning.” He nodded, turned away, and switched off the light.

Not long after, a tapping on the bedroom window alarmed my sister. What was that? She moved closer to me, protective. The knocks came again, more insistent. This time she crept out of bed, cautiously drew the curtain, and peered outside.

It was Dad. “I can’t find my house keys. Can you let me in?”

That wasn’t the last time a mysterious apparition appeared in the house.

On weekends, Dad and his buddies regularly gathered at the house. They drank, smoked, and played pinochle late into the night. Often they would migrate into the basement to Dad’s prized possession: the sacred pool table. As a child, I loved watching them play. The sound of racking the balls, the crack of the cue ball striking that triangle of the other fifteen. The adults making bank shots to avoid the other players’ balls, doing tricks like putting spin on the cue ball, or shooting with the stick behind their backs. Every time they sank a ball, I enjoyed the sound of the ball falling into the metal tracks inside the table, rolling into the ball return, and stopping with a clink against the neat row of previously sunk balls.

One night when I was four or five, the cue ball bounced off the table. This wasn’t unusual, but what happened next certainly was. The ball rolled into the dark half of the basement, coming to rest under the table that served as Dad’s wet bar. “I’ll get it!” I called out as I ran to retrieve the ball. Once I had it in hand, I paused and glanced at the adjacent storage room where the Christmas tree and decorations sat in boxes during the offseason. Beyond the doorway, in the shadowy darkness of the room, I saw a ghostly apparition. Not the archetypal glowing white figure in a sheet, this specter had a human form with distinct features and clothing. The details were partially obscured by a pale gauzy surface that left deep shadows around the eyes, mouth, and other body parts. It hovered slightly off the floor, rippling in the air. I recall the image vividly to this day.

Naturally, I ran back terrified. The adults took the cue ball from my trembling hands, tousled my hair, and laughed.

“It’s just your imagination” was the standard answer whenever I, Krys, or our middle sister, Diahann, reported something inexplicable to Mom. She, like Dad, was a Polish Roman-Catholic immigrant who would brook nothing supernatural beyond the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. Yet these things happened so frequently that we eventually stopped telling Mom, or even each other. Our childhoods were filled with strange sights and sounds. While watching television in the family room, we would hear dishes rattling in the kitchen. When the folks were away at a wedding or other social event, we would hear pool balls knocking together and falling into the gutter; in the morning, we’d go downstairs to find balls on the table (it was strictly forbidden to ever leave balls on the felt after you were done playing). The stories could fill a book . . . but this is not that book.

The incidents begged for an explanation that never came. Was the house haunted? Unlikely, as my father and his construction work buddies built the house. There was no prior owner, so no soul trapped here upon meeting its tragic end. The neighborhood was flat and wooded, so it wasn’t like he’d disturbed some ancient burial mound. So what was behind the ongoing creepiness that our family never discussed?

Many years later, as adults enjoying Thanksgiving dinner together, we broke decades of silence with, “Do you remember all the weird stuff that used to happen in the house when we were kids?” We shared stories for a while, including some we’d never told each other. After finally falling silent, we turned to Mom—ever the denier—as she finally confessed, “All that stuff stopped after Dad died.”

There was something in the neighborhood.

I was walking home one quiet evening from my godmother’s house across the street. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, and her son was a regular playmate for Dungeons and Dragons and similar distractions. As I traversed the driveway toward my door, the sound of a snapping twig startled me. I looked around and spotted a silhouette beside the neighbor’s garage. Why was the neighbor standing there, alone in the dark, at this hour? Something was off, however. The silhouette stood as tall as the roof line. And it was walking in my direction.

I didn’t wait to ask questions but scooted into the house.

First thing the next morning, I went outside for a reality check. I climbed atop the chain-link fence between us and our neighbors, beside their garage. Teetering between the fence and the garage, I extended Dad’s tape measure from the roof to the ground. Eight feet. Hmmm.

I then searched our backyard for any signs of the intruder. At the rear of the yard, in Mom’s pristine vegetable garden, I found footprints. Like the silhouette, they were huge. Having seen the cryptid documentary The Mysterious Monsters (1976) plus countless episodes of In Search Of and Kolchak: The Night Stalker,1 I knew exactly what to do. I grabbed our Instamatic camera, carefully laid Mom’s sewing tape measure along one of the footprints, and photographed its seventeen-inch length. (That would’ve been around a U.S. men’s size 26. My goodness, Grandma, what big feet you have!)

What could it be? I spent the next days tramping around the woods in the undeveloped areas of the neighborhood, seeking clues while narrating my adventures into a small cassette recorder. In my imagination, the snapped tree I came across could only have been Bigfoot. The dead owl I found must have been a snack—or nuisance—to Sasquatch. My overactive imagination notwithstanding, I found no conclusive evidence.

Table of Contents

1 Something

2 Head Like a Whole: The Psychology of
Connecting the Dots and Seeing the Big Picture

3 Rigamarole Models: Daily Magical Practices

4 Think Better: The Magick of Yoga and Meditation

5 Greater (and Lesser) Magical Retirements

6 Hold That Thought: Ritual Implements

7 Sacred Head Space: Temples and What
We Do in Them

8 Significant Others: Encountering the Divine

9 Full Circle: Group Ritual

10 Initiation: Changing Your Mind

11 The Method of Science and You

12 Last Writes

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Finally—the book I’ve been hoping Richard Kaczynski would write for the 20+ years since I first met him. An absolute must-read for anyone interested in the interface of psychology and occultism.

David Shoemaker

Richard Kaczynski is a trained social psychologist and statistician who recognizes the presence of ‘something’ in magick yet also understands the professional practice of science inside and out. Here is a most striking science of magick that is also an implicit theory of popular culture and the ever-present paranormal. We are drawn to things throughout life, it turns out, not because of bad beliefs or misperceptions, but because of who and what we are—magical and material at the same time.

author of How to Think Impossibly Jeffrey J. Kripal

“Mind over Magick presents a compelling exploration of ritual magick through the lens of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, revealing how structured symbolic practices produce significant shifts in the magician’s perceptions, emotions, and behavior. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, Richard Kaczynski offers a clear framework for understanding the psychological foundations of transformative spiritual and magical experience.

Dean Radin

Destiny dwells in these pages. Any magical practitioner, seeker, or student of life who reads Richard Kaczynski’s Mind over Magick will discover new personal paths and insights from one of the most erudite, unpredictable, learned, and profound intellects writing today in the magical space. From Richard’s chilling, unforgettable opening pages to his finely reasoned psycho- metaphysical insights and breakthroughs—and the practices to accompany them—Mind over Magick harbors a fate of its own: an occult classic.

PEN Award–winning historian and author of Th Mitch Horowitz