Speak of the Devil: Spiritual Psychosis in the Internet Age
I remember stumbling into the online work of Witch Tok a few years ago - the side of TikTok occupied by Neo-pagans practicing pre-Christian religions or New-Age spiritualities of various stripes. Many of these people are young adults or older teens who have found a new world of spirituality and non-dogmatic religion to fill the now-empty part of their life that used to be occupied by organized religions such as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism.
By and large, I have no problem with the “New Agers” - people whose spirituality is heavily defined by things like astrology, crystals, tarot cards, and any number of additional esoterica. I personally, don’t believe in efficacy of almost anything within the New Age umbrella, but I will admit to really enjoying tarot cards as a self-reflection device, as well as being a real sucker for pretty rocks (who isn’t?). My issue is not with these aspects of this New Age and Neo-pagan world. My issue is with the prevalence of what I will be terming “spiritual psychosis”.
This is an actual term. According to A Mission for Michael, a mental health provider with locations in several states, Spiritual Psychosis “typically involves delusions, strongly held false beliefs, and hallucinations, which are sensory experiences without external stimuli.” They further give the example of someone who “might believe they are a prophet or hear divine voices giving them instructions.”
What I found time and time again amongst Witch Tok and similar online new-age spaces, were young people confidently discussing their in-depth conversations with divine beings, whether they were old gods such as those of the Norse or Greco-Roman pantheons, or newer deities such as Jesus Christ. And what I found most fascinating about these situations was how often the divine entity seemed to speak with the exact same cadence, slang, and regional dialect as the person in the video. There was a Jesus Christ who sounded like a California skate border, a Dionysus who spoke like wine-drunk soccer mom, and a Zeus who seemed to have all the charisma (or lack thereof) of a mid-2010s Tumblr post. And, surprisingly enough, these divine voices always agreed with the people who were channeling them - always took their side in whatever discussion was being expounded upon.
While this situation may seem harmless enough, and often times was, I do believe there is an inherent danger to teaching the idea that some people really can just channel the voices of divine entities. Sure, there’s a problem if someone feels God is directly talking to them through the Bible or the Rig Veda or the Quran, but at least other people have access to those same texts and can refute these beliefs using scripture of their own (or at least attempt to). But when we empower people to believe that voices they hear in their head, regardless of whether they align with widely-recognized scriptures or teaching, are synonymous with divinities, then we have a much bigger issue on our hands.
Yes, skateboard-bro Jesus is unlikely to cause issues. But what if this same person begins that have darker or more upsetting thoughts and their benign Christ-voice starts to tell them more concerning things? What if this person never transitions to troubling divine commands only they can hear, but they end up empowering another young person to take the voices in their head too seriously? And what happens when the Thors within two people’s heads start giving wildly different commands?
In the end, I think it’s important to remember that no matter what we call God, and no matter what symbols we use to refer to the divine and to help make it make sense to ourselves and within our cultural environments, we are always talking about something incomprehensible. Every word said about the divine is a metaphor at best and an outright lie at worst. And I believe that we can rest assured that God is not speaking to any of us in something as clear as words or hidden symbols.
God is the force which underlies us and through which we have our being, not a person. God doesn’t speak. We speak. And we often speak to ourselves without realizing it. And yes, sometimes these words to ourselves take on the form of the Gods we worship, but only because our minds and our beings have been shaped by those stories and those ideas, not because we are actually hearing them. Shiva, Tao, Jesus, Zeus - these are tools which point us to the divine and which hone our senses to understanding the incomprehensible.
As the Buddha once taught, he is a finger pointing towards the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.
