| I don’t think it’s new, just more visible than it used to be. When I was a teenager, I took the New Age/occult section of the bookstore seriously[0]. It feels silly in retrospect, but it’s not really any weirder than the religious beliefs I was brought up with, nor the presence of horoscopes in all the newspapers and advertised elsewhere without getting banned under the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951, nor the then-new National Lottery being shown with a regular segment by a fortune teller called Mystic Meg, nor the endless TV shows about ancient aliens and ghosts and telepathy, and you might be surprised how long people continued to say crop circles “had to be supernatural” after their secret was revealed to be two blokes and a stick. Edit: Oh, and my mum insisted on handing out homeopathic sand and white paint pigment[2]. And the Bach flower remedies “for memory” (she got Alzheimer’s 20 years younger than her mum). Plus all the stuff about crystal powers, dowsing rods, the whole caboodle. [0] So, naturally I tried the shape-shifting turn-yourself-into-a-werewolf spell I found online[1], and now I’m a furry. [1] The original website is long gone, but this looks like the same text I saw 25 years ago: http://www.paganlibrary.com/rituals_spells/russian_shifting_... [2] No, seriously: https://homeopathicremediesonline.com/product/titanium-oxyda... |