Every post has to have a picture, so here’s a nice one of my pets.
I don’t have time to write this morning because, by the grace of God, I am getting to go In Person (!!!) to my local social security office to replace all the important things I lost by being completely foolish and absent-minded. I was able to go with one child on Monday–up three levels in the elevator, into a dark hallway to peer at a door with a lot of handwritten signs on it, one of which said, “knock if you have an appointment,” into a big empty room with one security guard and one person behind thick plexiglass. Every few minutes the lights, which required movement to stay on, would go off, and the security guard would have to stand up and wave a paper underneath the sensor. Both people were very friendly and efficient, but it did feel like the strangest sort of way of doing business with the government that I could have ever imagined. Anyway, today I go back for the remaining five. I couldn’t be more thrilled. I will soon be able to have three whole extra drivers in my family because of my constant efforts to remedy my own stupidity.
All that to say that I don’t have time to think of anything myself, but after working back and forth over my piece on Manifesting, trying to cut it down to size, I came across Mike Duran writing about Pandemic Paganism:
Shortly after the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, some noticed that interest in occultism had begun to boom. Social media platforms were seeing a noticeable increase in mentions of “astrology” and esoteric terminology. CNN reported that “psychics and astrologers have seen their customer bases increased exponentially during the pandemic.” In fact, many psychics described 2020 as “a year like no other” saying that “everybody wants to know what’s coming.” Which is one reason why Kemi Marie who runs a spiritual wisdom account on Twitter and increased her following from 50,000 to 300,000 over the course of the pandemic. Along with this emerged an exponential growth in witchcraft and Wicca. For example, this writer admits that “The Pandemic Turned Me Into a Witch.” Apparently, she found renewed solace in doing “spellwork” for sick friends and for the speedy development of a vaccine. In fact, during quarantine, many “virtual covens” formed. Like the one developed by Sére Skuld who “proposed to make a hyper-sigil – the union of several magic symbols” to provide her circle of practitioners protection against coronavirus.
Everywhere I went on the internet I did find extraordinary numbers of people trying out manifesting and witchcraft and getting on to instruct others in their new found knowledge. The platform of youtube, and insta, as a means for these kinds of practices to be communicated to others, seems particularly comfortable. Mike goes on:
While the embrace of witchcraft and New Age thinking among the Nones is indeed troubling, the fact that “few among this demographic identify as atheists or agnostics,” is significant. Or as Burton puts it, “A full 72 percent of ‘nones’ say they believe in God, or at least some kind of nebulously defined Higher Power; 17 percent say they believe in the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.” The pandemic may not have initiated a global revival of historic Christianity, but it did reveal that we are an incurably spiritual people. [emphasis his]
Anyway, after following a lot of Mike’s excellent links, I came across this, which I had seen before, but forgotten about:
When I saw it before, I hadn’t been thinking anything about manifesting, and was trying to understand Hollis’ “theology” given that she is, so so bizarrely, marketed in the Christian section of Barnes and Noble. Seriously, she is not a Christian, and really, she doesn’t seem particularly religious. Or at least, that’s what I would have said before reading Mike. Clearly, she is, as indeed we all are.
So anyway, I’ve gotta run! Pray to the real God for me that I get all my papers in order. Have a nice day!
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