My new favorite hobby is pouring myself a nice glass of wine and browsing popular Amazon reviews for tarot decks.
In all seriousness, as a theologist I find this sort of thing utterly fascinating. There is a complete disconnect of the self in the kind of person that the first reviewer must be, an utterly uncritical cosmology of what external pressures likely brought them into the occult community.
Humanity has repeatedly sought to create religion in times of upheaval, both on a societal and a personal scale. There’s a reason why New Age spirituality and interest in the occult have so rapidly exploded within the past decade or so of the Information Age. People are distancing themselves en masse from organized religion–and ESPECIALLY Christianity, and its politicized trappings within the United States government–but feel the need to keep the religion aspect. In difficult times, belief in something beyond the self and the material is a thing of fundamental comfort. It makes the random suffering and confusion of the world more bearable, grants a sense of satisfaction and control in your life otherwise lacking.
But the occult, specifically, is antithetical to the Information Age in many ways, and utterly anathema to capitalism, and this intersects in a very key way for a person like Jen B. The occult is the infallibly unknowable. It is finding things you can never understand and the joy of trying to grasp the impossible however you can. The world is filled with unexplainable and the strange, and there is a deep and potent joy I feel in studying it, both on a practical level and in an academic level. I love examining why we as a species keep reinventing wizards and powerful spirits who exert influence over our lives in ways we cannot comprehend.
But that is not the occult that Jen B wants. Jen B wants a very, very, very, very, VERY new understanding of the Occult. She wants the occult to be a place of peace and tranquility and sterilized, sanitized self help. She wants clean pale blues and neutral earth tones with lots of natural lighting in a yoga group. She wants to buy crystals that will alleviate her anxiety and realign her chakras, and she does not want to examine why she thinks buying crystals will alleviate her anxiety, and she does not want to research what chakras actually are beyond Pinterest infographics of see-through people in a lotus pose. She, as a Lightworker VERY specifically, wants to feel important, and like it is her duty to heal a broken and toxic world, but she has no idea why she wants to do it or how she could actually do that, and she won’t examine that because the answer isn’t easy and comforting.
The world is a chaotic and cruel place filled with random suffering and deeply ingrained toxic power structures which seek to literally profit off of sucking the life out of billions of people in a slow and miasmic way. But Jen B cannot approach this from a radical mindset, cannot bear the mundane and banal reality of “These problems are caused by political and corporate structures to enforce government control and subservience”. Jen B seeks the occult because she wants to discover that the reason she hates her job and feels no satisfaction from it is actually psychic emotional vampires draining her life force chi, and she can prevent them from feeding off her by thinking really hard about how they can’t actually do that.
For the marketing directors of Target’s next New Age self help book, for the contracted freelancers who are hired to write a cutesy pastel purple “101 Spells For The Working Witch” to be sold for $10.99 at Barnes and Noble, for the white reiki masters and yoga instructors who like houseplants, the occult is not a place of wonder and mystery and the unknown and the unknowable. The occult is not the occult for them, because they want to learn that spiritual enlightenment can be found on Amazon.com for 24.99 plus shipping and handling, because the world is scary and complicated and doesn’t make sense, and crystals are pretty little rocks you can arrange into shapes, and this makes them feel like they can survive another day of being forced into doing absolutely nothing of worth, meaning, or time, so that they can use an imaginary high score in their bank account to buy water and a studio apartment.
If you’ve been personally victimised by “The Wild Unknown” Tarot Deck by Kim Krans, you MAY be entitled to compensation
