All of the stores are beginning to release their Halloween lines (my favorite time of year for home decor shopping), so I thought it was about time I got around to finishing up this blog post.

This is something I’ve been contemplating for quite a while. And I hope you’ll bear with me here, as this is a very complicated topic that I have a lot of thoughts about. So I’m going to try to sum up complex and heated social topics in order to make a larger point that I believe vehemently to be true of our modern society.

You’ll also have to excuse a certain amount of oversimplification of the term “new-age spiritualism” as I’ll be using it in the same catch-all way that I was raised hearing it used. It refers colloquially to any and every magical practice and belief outside of the accepted (White, Christian, Americentric, capitalist) norm. This is the same way that terms like “witch” and “magic” have been applied throughout my life. I use them in this way here today because I think there is a not-insignificant lesson that can be taken from all of this.

Obviously there are a lot of layers to this particular social phenomenon, and they really do run the gamut. You can’t talk about new-age spiritualism without discussing the appropriation of Eastern and indigenous religions by (usually white) Westerners, especially Americans. And you can’t talk about it without talking about racism (in Western culture but especially in America) and the role it has played in “othering” Eastern and indigenous religions, practices, and belief systems. You also have to talk about the attempted eradication of Eastern and indigenous religions, practices, and belief systems and how people today trying to recapture their lost ancestry often get lumped in with “new-age spiritualists” simply for deviating from the norm even though their practices are not new nor are they connected to the “new-age spiritualism” movement.

Some of this, I think, has to do with how the term itself is applied. Because I don’t actually know anyone who calls themselves a new-age spiritualist. I don’t know anyone who practices “new-age spirituality”. It is instead a term that is applied to you by others (usually with a tone of disapproval at best) or as a handy marketing term for a particularly profitable sector of religious capitalism.

But go into any of these so-called new-age shops and you’ll find that they don’t know better than the rest of us what the term means. In these shops, you’ll find herbs sacred to certain Native American tribes mass-produced, bundled, and sold as smudge sticks (although cultures from around the world have practices of smoke being used as a spiritual cleanse, the popularity of white sage smudge sticks is undeniably taken from Native American practice), Hindu god and goddesss charms mixed in with crystal healing (taken again from Native American tribes), and Tibetan prayer beads hanging next to Vodou sachets. And with all of this, you’ll have any manner of coffee table books meant to tell you the “correct” way of being a neo-pagan witch.

It’s the fetishization of exoticism at its very worst. And there’s certainly someone somewhere making a very pretty penny off all of the books, talismans, candles, rocks, and everything else that’s been commodified for the sake of capitalism. But what I’ve learned the more I delve into this world and the more research I do on “magical thinking” — the academic study of the human preponderance to attribute meaning to occurrences that they don’t understand — the more I find that the people buying (or buying into) these things are usually quite earnest in their beliefs.

And while the “witchy woman” trope is hardly new, being present in writings from across human history, it cannot be denied that all of these witchy, magical things are having something of a moment right now.

So yeah. That’s a lot to unpack. And while I’m not trying to imply that I am an authority on these subjects. It is something that I have devoted a lot of time, research, and thought to. And it seems to me that there is a common thread running through all of them. Because it all seems to have a lot to do with the way the world changed during the modern age.

I have already pointed out the large movement in the modern day for people from minority cultures to seek out their ancestral heritage. But I think that in our focus on splitting groups between “Old World” and “New World” we miss a broader truth.

I have a bachelors and a masters in English, so I’ve probably spent more time than most reading about and discussing colonialism. But it was only after I started listening to The Blindboy Podcast, an Irish podcast that often discusses the cultural and philosophical effects of modernity, that I realized I’ve only ever considered colonialism as something that happened in the New World and the global south. It was only when Blindboy began talking about the colonization of Ireland by the British that my thinking adjusted and I realized every single European country lost chunks of their heritage to “colonization” too. We just don’t call it that.

Now I’m sure for any European reading this, this is a “Well, duh,” moment. But when you study colonization the Europeans are always the colonizers and never the colonized. I think it also has to do with what group is doing the colonizing. Because Europe wasn’t colonized by capitalism, and that’s traditionally the motivator we attribute to colonization. Instead Europe was colonized by religion, and then capitalism developed out of that.

Specifically, I believe that Christianity developed capitalism. But we don’t call the Christianisation of Europe colonization. And why? It certainly shares a lot of the same effects. Christians came into areas that had their own religions, their own practices, and their own heritage, and it whitewashed it. Pagan practices were either converted into a Christian practice or they were demonized as something evil and dangerous. Either way, thousands of years of cultural heritage and tradition were lost, replaced by largely meaningless practices made up by missionaries to ease the transition.

There is a separate essay to be found here, discussing why I think capitalism is the direct product of Christianity and why the stripping of people’s cultures laid the foundation for capitalism to run as rampant as it has. But this post is likely already longer than anyone is willing to read. So I’ll save that for another day.

So what does all of this have to do with the new-age paganism movement happening today?

I think we are at a particular point in society right now where people are largely disillusioned with both capitalism and Western Christian practices, and they’re feeling the absence of their culture.

I’m not a particularly spiritually inclined person. But I do think that the loss of culture– the loss of history that I’ve described above– is something that we carry with us. Like a void in our souls. And whether you explain this through a severed connection with your ancestors or through theories of genetic memory (what is one but a scientific explanation for the other, really?), the result is the same. We can feel that something is missing. That there is a part of us that has been stolen, and we’re looking to reclaim it.

And regardless of what culture you come from, there’s a very good chance that almost all of what your ancestors believed and practiced has been lost to the ravages of time. I think we’re all just scrounging to fill this void with anything that feels like it might fit.

And when you start to compare the practices of native tribes today with what we know of the lost practices of the pagan tribes across Europe, you can start to see why new-age spiritualism is so appealing. Because it looks pretty similar if you squint. And when that’s all you have — that squint — you’ll take what you can get.

What is the “New Age Spirituality” movement if not the attempted reclaiming of cultures worldwide? Sure, it’s not perfect, and it’s often cringe-worthy. Appropriating other people’s cultural customs and using them for commercial benefit is never okay. But underneath everything else, when we strip away the capitalism and the social media cries for attention, I think what is invariably left over is a person seeking a deeper connection to the earth (and, by extension, our collective history). Because capitalism can’t and never could fill that void where our cultural heritage used to be.

You’ll notice there that I correlate cultural heritage to a connection with the earth. This is not a coincidence. For thousands of years, humans lived in harmony with nature, because we had to. Our cultures developed with our connection to the world around us, and we learned that to survive, we needed to respect nature. That changed with the advent of Christianity. In demonizing so many pagan practices, Christianity severed this connection we had with the land, which ultimately, I think, is what cleared the way for capitalism and the exploitation of our natural resources. It’s why I see the two as inextricably linked.

To borrow from The Blindboy Podcast again, mythology exists largely to pass on information in oral cultures. And one of the most important things it passes on is information about how to avoid dangerous situations. Broadly, we can look at folktales like little red riding hood that teach children to fear the wolf in the woods (and the one parading as a trusted family member). Mythology also teaches what is most important to a culture. Blindboy talks about this in terms of sacred objects and protecting the ecosystem. Often animals or plants that are a keystone species to a particular ecosystem are also held sacred in the cultures of that area. In Irish mythology you have the oak tree, in Native American plains mythology you have the buffalo.

In destroying the pagan heritage of so many cultures, Christianity also destroyed the built-in protections for these species. People forgot why it was nature was so important and capitalism was able to come in and commodify our natural resources.

So that explains why people would be turning to neo-pagan practices in general. But why now? And why women?

Our lives today are about as far away from “natural” living as you can get, after all. Most of us live in cities. We work on computers. We shop online. We consume recorded entertainment, played back to us on screens. For every one of us that is able and makes an effort to get out into nature, how many of us don’t even have the option?

Like I said, humans developed over thousands of years alongside nature, and now our lives are almost completely devoid of it. And even more than that, our current lives and the way we interact with technology deprives us of some of our basic needs to feel fulfilled. Studies are beginning to show that our computer-based jobs and lifestyles do not leave us feeling accomplished the way that working with our hands does. We no longer create real things. We write emails, we create spreadsheets, we make profit. But none of these things are actually real the way a good meal is, the way a garden is, or the way even a chair is. Even in “helping” professions, most of us don’t get to help people on a day-to-day basis the way our ancestors would have. Sure, a doctor talks to patients, maybe even examines them. But then they turn around and type everything into a computer, check a bunch of boxes, and tell a pharmacy to give the patient some specific drugs. The actual healing is done elsewhere, outside of their purview.

I really think the New Age movement shows that humans are fundamentally missing something. And many of us are turning to neo-paganism in search of whatever that something is. I don’t think that most people understand why they feel this way or even what it is that their lives are missing. But I do think that we all feel it. Just look at the rising numbers for things like diagnosed depression or suicide rates.

It even makes sense to me that women would be the ones to seek out this connection first and foremost. In a patriarchal society, women (especial POC women) are the ones at the furthest disadvantage. We live the most outside of what feels natural to us, so it follows that we would be the ones seeking a solution in droves.

And what is the furthest away from patriarchy you can get and also, conveniently, promotes a closer relationship with nature and the outdoors?

What claims to have the “ancient, mystical magic” that we need to feel whole? What looks sort like our own cultural heritage if we squint?

What doesn’t care if you don’t fit a particular mold, wants you to think for yourself, and embraces all things weird, twisted, and lost?

What spits in the face of capitalism, patriarchy, and everything else that tries to tell us the way we are is wrong?

Witchy shit.