At some point in history, someone looked at a calendar, panicked, and decided numbers weren’t just useful for counting goats and debts — they were mystical. In that instant, numerology was born. Numerology: the belief that your destiny can be uncovered by assigning magical significance to basic arithmetic. The premise is laughably simple: take your … Read more
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones — but people who find themselves facing a cosmic dilemma might want to try it. Are you torn between two lovers? Trying to decide which job offer to take? Do you wish the ancient gods would whisper words of wisdom in your ear? The answer is … Read more
Automatic writing is the noble tradition of zoning out, letting your hand twitch around on a piece of paper, and then insisting that the resulting illegible mess is a profound message from the spirit world. The idea is simple. Too simple. You grab a pen, empty your mind — which for some practitioners is less … Read more
There’s something particularly grating about watching a suburban yoga instructor in $200 leggings stand in a circle of tourists, waving a smoldering bundle of sage like they’re warding off invisible mosquitos, and announcing that they’re “clearing negative energy.” Welcome to the world of modern smudging — where ancient spiritual practices are Xeroxed, mispronounced, stripped of … Read more
There was a time when looking at the Great Pyramid of Giza could fill a person with proper awe — the kind of admiration you should feel when you realize that, five thousand years ago, without cranes, GPS, or a single MBA consultant, human beings dragged two-ton stones across a desert, stacked them with supernatural … Read more
You can measure the collective desperation of a town by the quality of its wishing well. In the case of Whispering Falls, that quality falls somewhere between “don’t drink the water” and “please update your tetanus booster.” The Legendary Wishing Well of Whispering Falls is tucked between a vape shop and a taxidermy studio. A … Read more
There’s a special kind of theatrical stupidity involved in crystal ball gazing, and humanity has embraced it for centuries like a drunk clinging to a lamppost — not for illumination, but for support. The basic idea is simple: take a highly polished ball of quartz, or glass, or whatever’s cheapest at the local renaissance festival, … Read more
If you ever feel underachieving, remember: two thousand years ago, a group of ancient Peruvians spent decades carving enormous pictures into the desert floor — and modern humans immediately assumed it must have been aliens. The Nazca Lines — sprawling geoglyphs etched across the Nazca Desert — depict hummingbirds, monkeys, spiders, and a few abstract … Read more
The world, in its infinite descent into half-baked wishful thinking, has embraced energy healing like a drunk clings to the last stool at a bar at closing time. Somewhere along the line, we collectively decided that physics, biology, and chemistry—disciplines built painstakingly on centuries of blood, sweat, and Nobel prizes—were simply too stressful, and it … Read more
There is, in this endlessly gullible world of ours, no shortage of ways to make yourself look like a prize fool, but none—none—compares to the unique spectacle of a grown adult stumbling around a field, clutching two bent pieces of wire like they’re about to divine the very secrets of the universe. Dowsing, for the … Read more