Paranormal beliefs everywhere draw upon and are linked to foundational religious or supernatural premises characteristic of the particular culture in which they occur. My research on shamanism in Nepal revealed that a broad set of Buddhist, Hindu, Bon (pre-Buddhist Tibetan), and various indigenous religious premises form the foundations of shamanic paranormal beliefs. This is also the case in many other cultural settings, including paranormal beliefs in Western society. Here the source that is drawn upon is the miracles described in the Bible, especially the wonders wrought by Jesus as described in the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John (Humphrey 1999: 93). Miracles are central to Christianity and the divine status of Jesus. As the Italian biblical scholar Marcello Craveri (1967: 117) pointed out, the centrality of Christianity is Jesus's miracles because without these he would appear as an ordinary human.

Jesus's Miracles as the Prototypical Examples of Paranormal Beliefs in the West

In his book The Supernatural, the Occult, and the Bible (1990), the biblical historian and archaeologist Gerald Larue discusses the powerful impact of the pervasive supernaturalism of the Bible on contemporary magical and paranormal thinking. The Bible is the book of miracles, the text of uncanny happenings, or the definitive handbook of the paranormal in Western culture. It has for millennia provided the central themes of paranormal beliefs and research.