I mean anything like cursed or lucky objects, ghosts, etc?
Figured it's the spooky season and I don't know too many people irl to talk to about the supernatural without discovering q-level brainworms.
I'll comment in the thread with my answer.
First mistake, not posting this in !creepy@hexbear.net
Second mistake, not asking me personally if I believe in cryptids which I very much like and think Bigfoot is one.
How do I cross post and/or should I make a second post there?
Do you think there's just one or several? What's your Bigfoot theory?
edit your thread and it has a box to crosspost, I think, iirc.
My rational side wants to say there's several, all across the world, given there's been sightings from everywhere. I don't buy into the woo that's it's a supernatural creature, I like to think it's some sort of missing link
There are almost certainly some creatures, objects, and phenomena out there we have not yet discovered or explained. People sometimes come across these and lack the scientific education to try to adequately understand these things so they try to explain it in the only way they know how: the supernatural. Also, there are a lot of hucksters pretending that these things exist to take money from believers.
In my experience, belief in the supernatural is always tied to chud brainworms, unexamined or otherwise.
I think it is very strange how much of a connection exists between esotericism and extreme reactionary ideology. What is up with all that stuff about hyperborea, runes, whatever Varg believes, among others? Why are they so weird with it?
Yeah I know about the witches. But they seem more connected to reality than the people I'm talking about. The ones I'm talking about believe some wild stuff, read this and the section below it. Or just look up Julius Evola.
So a lot of modern occult/esoteric/new age thought in the US descends from the I AM Activity, a Christian/American Jingoist/Theosophical (read westerners appropriating bits and pieces of Hinduism and Buddhism and calling it magic) syncretic cult.
They had 1 million members at one point in the early 1900s and popularized a lot of ideas that eventually found their way into mainstream new age thought.
These people were absolutely demonic reactionary freaks. They were rabidly anticommunist and antianarchist, and so they reviled the colors black and red and wouldn't ever where them (except in American flags, though even then they believed that when Jesus or the Count of St. Germain or whoever came back as the messiah he'd make the red stripes purple (their favorite)). They were also vegetarian, but not due to caring about animal welfare or whatever, it was because they thought animals were demons in physical form and eating them could get you haunted or possessed. In addition to diet their detestation for animals led to new members of the cult generally killing any pets they'd previously kept.
Well eventually they absorbed a ton of members of the Silver Shirts/Silver Legion which was a group of American fascists modeled after the black/brown shirts of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, like top officers too not just rank and file.
The group mostly falls apart after the male half of the founding couple who declared himself immortal via fascist hippie magic, died, but the top brass still had a lot of money and relocated to Mt. Shasta where they remain to this day, putting on Nazi Christian Theosophical pageants to this day.
Uh anyways, these fuckin weirdos, and their offshoots, as I say we're pretty influential in bringing Theosophy to popularity in the US.
My reply here is very rambling but QAA has an episode on them, and the Nonsense Bazaar did a two letter on them (NB is a non-nazi esoteric/woo woo podcast, the hosts are true believers but seem well meaning). These are much better sources than me and most of what I know comes from them.
If this is weird, please let me know, but -
I started thinking about the belief of the God Zeus in ancient times.
He was the explanation of lightning strikes, like a lot of other gods.
Trying to disprove Zeus became a deadly crime. You could be ostracized or killed for not participating in the belief, forget about trying to prove that lightning is just a normal thing that could be manipulated by a lightning rod?
People could then tie other beliefs around something as hard to understand as lightning for the ancient people. Zeus is considered The Father God. A patriarchal deity who subjugates others including his own wife, Hera, the closest to his equal.
Men who benefit from that status quo have an incentive to perpetuate the belief in Zeus. Working with this logic, it's easy to see where esotericism would find its niche in reactionary circles.
You get to be part of the fan club and have the real truth. If you're doing better than your peers, you are considered better. If people fail, they're doing it wrong and they work harder, hiding their failures and lack of belief.
Look at the traits of fascism and then read some mythology around Zeus or other similar father gods.
Look at the ritual sacrifices and the implication of being able to have a bigger or better sacrifice means more favor to you.
The farmer can burn a fraction of his harvest and other believers would see that as justification for having his farm.
It reverses the nature of cause and effect and discourages challenges to the contrary.
That farmer has an incentive in people believing that system works.
So yeah, if you tell a white dude he's descended from Vikings and that he's special for it, boom! You've got a version of Norse Paganism (I don't know much about any other versions of Norse Paganism) practiced by neonazis.
The use of ancient cultural symbols and scripts by fascists is disturbing. Didn't think I'd be spending these years learning of the different symbols for fascism for my personal safety.
I think the distinction comes in the form of how one defends their supernatural belief.
I believe on some tiny level that magic is real, but I would never attribute something as magic in serious conversation. I'll immediately do my best to find a rational explanation, and even if I have no better explanation, I would never suggest it was supernatural.
I'll call it creepy or weird. I'll say I don't know what happened. Like I won't talk about my beliefs on the afterlife because I don't want to convince anybody.
I think supernatural as a term flattens our understanding of the abstract, surreal, or hypothetical. It becomes a tool to stop questioning.
No, one hundred percent think the universe is just material objects. Sometimes this causes me existential dread, strongly wish I believed in souls and spirits and the like because oblivion is terrifying, but I just don't.
I do get jumpy and paranoid about ghosts and demons that I fully believe are imaginary for a few days after watching a horror movie about them though, so there's that. Maybe due to religious trauma, who knows?
We all live different realities.
That's true. I don't know how to delicately talk about mental health and the relationship with belief in the supernatural, but I'm open to trying to get better at it.
Personally, I think belief in the supernatural can come from coping for some people, myself included. Sometimes as I'm dealing with bouts of depression or anxiety, I'll look for patterns in things. Instead of thinking on things never getting better with depression, I look for patterns of things getting better. When I have anxiety about something terrible happening in the future, I look to patterns to reassure myself that things may get bad, but likely won't be statistically worse than an event in the past.
I've noticed when I'm depressed, I'll look for signs of hope. That could be affirming words or phrases I see in passing during the day. It could be having something unpleasant happening and not having it as distressing the second time around. Or I'll try something difficult and then repeat it to see if the luck will hold out.
With my anxiety, I'll look for consistency. I'll do things in the same way I've done it safely in the past. It didn't go badly the previous time and I find myself a working strategy. So I'll be very rigid if I find something that works, even if it's less efficient or against how it's traditionally done. I calm myself by running the numbers.
That said, when things stay the same, my depression gets worse and when things change, my anxiety gets worse.
LMAO on a reread, I think I described my obsessive compulsive disorder.
No, except for when I think it would be funny to claim that I do.
Lol im gonna get roasted for this… but yes. Most of humanity has believed in the supernatural for most of human history, and I’m reticent to label them all as superstitious cranks.
We have our gods too. What is “the market” if not a supernatural being? Nobody controls it, it wields extraordinary power over everyone’s lives, we make blood sacrifices to it, it has its priests and it’s diviners, etc.
One of my favorite theories I’ve read is that AI is basically a demon that’s using nerds to summon itself into existence in spite of the obvious risks. All these people working on it know it is going to be bad, it’s going to be evil, and yet they continue to work on it as quickly as possible. What’s that if not supernatural?
Someone might look at this and say I’m nuts, that’s just capitalism, well ok but what is capitalism if not a demonic entity? It is literally destroying the planet! That’s not exactly a secret. And yet we keep working towards its goals, actively. I do, everyone else reading this does.
That doesn’t mean it’s invincible. We know how to fight it too, love, solidarity etc. An alternate belief system. In other words a supernatural toolkit.
Our ancestors said gods, we say economic systems, just sounds like semantics to me.
It’s old, historic, and has bad luck. Nothing explicit like noises and apparitions etc, but I feel like I would get a vibe if I worked overnight
Chaos magic, which works by the same principle as the placebo effect, is pretty cool.
No, but my whole family does. I have to play along, and some general superstition has rubbed off on me.
Aliens, though,
No but GOD I HOPE IM WRONG. I fucking love magic and supernatural shit. I want that to be real so goddamn bad holy shit.
I'm agnostic and skew almost Wiccan in my beliefs. I know Gardner or whatever his name is is racist bullshit, but the idea of other forces and some dichotomy having sway over our minds and lives doesn't seem unreasonable. I've also seen and experienced things that make it hard to totally discount the existence of ghosts and other phenomena. I can't rule out some low-level insanity, but I can't shake the feeling that there are some forces and beings we can't understand.
