People with supernatural powers may mean several different things, depending on whether you mean religious traditions, paranormal claims, or scientifically established abilities.
1. People traditionally believed to have supernatural powers
Across cultures, certain individuals have been described as having abilities beyond ordinary human capacities:
- Prophets: receiving divine revelations or foreknowledge.
- Mystics: reporting direct experiences of God, spirits, or transcendent realities.
- Shamans: traditionally believed to communicate with spirits and enter altered states of consciousness.
- Psychics / clairvoyants: claimed ability to perceive information unavailable through the ordinary senses.
- Mediums: claimed communication with deceased persons or spirits.
- Healers: believed to heal through spiritual, energetic, or other non-ordinary means.
- Witches / sorcerers: traditionally associated with spells, curses, divination, and other forms of magic.
- Seers: people reputed to perceive future events or hidden information.
- Yogis and advanced meditators: some Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Zen and Buddhist traditions describe siddhis, unusual abilities acquired through spiritual practice.
- Saints: some religious traditions attribute miracles, bilocation, prophecy, levitation, or healing to particular saints.
2. Paranormal researchers describe other claimed abilities
In parapsychology, the terminology may somewhat different. Researchers could have investigated alleged phenomena such as:
| Claimed ability | Description |
|---|---|
| Telepathy | Information transfer between minds |
| Clairvoyance | Perception of distant or hidden information |
| Precognition | Apparent knowledge of future events |
| Psychokinesis (PK) | Mind influencing physical systems |
| Remote viewing | Attempting to describe a distant target without ordinary sensory access |
| Mediumship | Apparent communication with the deceased |
| Healing psi | Claimed anomalous influence on health or biological systems |
| Apparitions | Experiences of apparently seeing deceased or non-ordinary beings |
These are claims or areas of investigation, may or may not be abilities established as ordinary scientific facts.
3. An important distinction
There could be major difference between saying:
“This person reports having an extraordinary experience.”
and
“This person objectively possesses a supernatural power.”
The first may be documented phenomenologically. The second requires evidence demonstrating that the ability may not be explained by ordinary psychological, neurological, environmental, or statistical mechanisms.
Interestingly, some people who appear to have “supernatural” abilities may instead have exceptional natural abilities, for example, extraordinary memory, pattern recognition, intuition, perceptual sensitivity, hypnotic responsiveness, or an unusual capacity to read subtle social cues.
4. From a parapsychological perspective
A more neutral question may not necessarily “Who has supernatural powers?” but:
“Are there people who demonstrate anomalous information processing or mind matter effects that may not yet be adequately explained by conventional models?”
That is essentially where parapsychology enters the discussion. It leaves open the possibility of phenomena such as ESP or PK while requiring systematic investigation rather than simply accepting supernatural explanations.
And this distinction is particularly important with prophets, psychics, mediums, remote viewers, and people reporting encounters with non-human intelligences: the experience may be genuine as an experience without the proposed explanation necessarily being established.
Shervan K Shahhian
