Psychic vampirism

I think Paranormal State might be one of the silliest shows in the world. And as a Penn Stater, I find it particularly odious that a bunch of Penn State students and graduates are running around pretending to be ghostbusters and demon hunters. I wondered after all of the talk of Belial and other goofy hocus pocus how it could get sillier. Well, the answer is in: Watch Michelle Belanger talk about being a "psychic vampire." It's thoroughly endarkening and silly.

But don't worry. She's a professional. She's in control. From her website:

Michelle's psychic inheritance manifested in a variety of ways, the most remarkable of which was psychic vampirism. Michelle identified and came to terms with this condition while still in her teens. Her pioneering work, The Psychic Vampire Codex (Weiser, 2004), details concepts and techniques that she learned through an intensive study of her vampiric experiences. All of Michelle's other works similarly benefit from her unique combination of personal experience, intellectual insight, and intensive research. A firm believer that psychic perceptions are something that anyone can cultivate, she teaches a variety of techniques based upon a fundamental perception of psychic energy.

Right. Let's see how well she does any of this under remotely controlled conditions. Somehow I doubt it'll happen.

But just to add one more little thing here. What kind of career do you have when your magnum opus is The Psychic Vampire Codex? Call me ungenerous: but that's absurd. And it reads like shoddy adolescent comic book horror poetry steeped in misunderstanding and feelings of isolation, two things I do not doubt that Ms. Belanger has felt acutely and seeks to rectify through living out a fantasy of psychic vampirism that is really very real to her but denied by our current culture. Here is a taste:

Eternal, we wander the aeons, moving to the rhythm of our own inner tides.

Freed from the most fundamental of cycles, we are nevertheless beings bound by cycles. Our heightened awareness of ourselves and the world around us forces us to acknowledge natural rhythms that others simply ignore.

As the day waxes and wanes, we can feel it, and we know that the true realm of magick is the night, for that is when we wax in power. As the moon grows gravid and slim, we feel it, and we know, too, that there are more complex rhythms of power tied to her phases. As the wheel of the year turns round, we feel the wild times, the apogees and nadirs of power.

This reads like a bad Emperor song or something. Queue "Thus Spake the Night Spirit" or "I am the Black Wizards" and take it all very seriously.

Maybe I am taking cheap potshots here at someone who doesn't deserve it. I'm not sure though that there is some genuine justification out there for someone pawning utter fantasies as realities to one another. I can hear me some Emperor and go for the entertainment or play me some games of Dungeons and Dragons and accept the fantasy for what it is. But this kind of absurdity is a kind of pernicious charlatanism that feeds on weak and disaffected people with the promise of some higher truth that doesn't exist.