A former Air Force officer, Kerr Cuhulain (Vancouver) has been a police officer for the past twenty years, and a Wiccan for thirty. He's served on the SWAT team, Gang Crime Unit, and hostage negotiation team. He travels throughout North America as a popular speaker at writers' conferences and Pagan festivals, and he has been the subject of many books, articles, and media interviews. He is the author of The Law Enforcement Guide to Wicca.
All I’m trying to do is
not join my ancestral spirits just yet.
—Joshua Nkomo
A true “psychic attack” occurs when a person deliberately projects a clearly defined malicious intent upon someone else. This attack may affect the victim’s mental state, causing stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness. This in turn affects the victim’s physical body, causing disease and, in extremely rare cases, even death, because the attack is affecting the victim’s nonphysical energy field. Psychic attacks range from short, sharp, highly emotionally charged onslaughts linked with a clear desire for negative consequences to extended, elaborate, rituals of negative magick. Whichever is used by the assailant, the principles of psychic self-defense are the same.
I’ve heard many people advance the argument that “the ancient warriors knew that any purely defensive battle is doomed, if it goes on long enough.” Usually this is a lead-in to an argument that “the best defense is offense.” Psychic self-defense books and articles are full of examples of psychic attack techniques.
During my twenty-nine years as a police officer, I learned how to defend myself and others without becoming aggressive. This was essential, as police officers are criminally liable for any excessive force that they use. The insights that I gained from this experience, combined with my thirty-nine years as a Pagan as well as my martial arts experience helped me to develop strategies that are as effective in psychic self-defense as they are in physical self-defense. You don’t need to attack in order to defend yourself from psychic attacks.
In the physical world the Warrior avoids getting into battles. The Chinese general Sun Tzu taught us that “those who win every battle are not really skillful—those who render others’ armies helpless without fighting are the best of all.” I don’t want you to get into a psychic battle. Nor do I want you to enter into a protracted cycle of attack and counterattack between you and some cretin who doesn’t like you. I want you to win without going to war. Sending your own negative energy at your assailant can certainly affect them. Unfortunately, the effect often includes motivating the assailant to retaliate. The techniques that I will show you in this book are assertive without being aggressive. They will shut down the assailant’s attack and hopefully leave them unwilling and probably unable to attack you again.
Ormungandr, writing from his perspective as an Ásatrúar, put it this way:
Psychic Self-defense is not about being isolationist or being afraid of the world. Nor is it making what we feel or think
As I pointed out in my earlier books, being a Warrior is not about using your hands; it is about using your head. It’s about taking charge of your life. We can find examples of this concept in all places and ages. Let’s look at some examples:
In the fifth century bce, the Greek historian Herodotus said that “where wisdom is called for, force is of little use.”
In the final ritual of the Masai manhood ritual, the senior tribal elders encourage the graduates to “drop your weapons and use your head and wisdom instead.”
In the seventeenth century ce, the Samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi wrote that the “trained martial artist . . . truly acts only in response to aggression. He does not seek it out. When made, his responses are nonresistant and nonviolent. He is a man of peace.”
Christopher Penczak advocates “compassionate defense” in his book The Witch’s Shield:
When y...
