Science and spirituality — are they opposing concepts? This episode dives into the use of the term woo-woo, conspirituality and the rise of the Qanon goddess, the energetics of intention and the science of intuition, and what happens when science can't prove your spiritual beliefs.
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Science and spirituality — are they opposing concepts? This episode dives into the use of the term woo-woo, conspirituality and the rise of the Qanon goddess, the energetics of intention and the science of intuition, and what happens when science can't prove your spiritual beliefs.
Referenced in this episode:
Keep in touch!
Website
Instagram
Thanks for listening!
Hi everyone and welcome to the Lunar Body, I'm your host, Kristen Ciccolini, period priestess, nutritionist, and the founder of Good Witch Kitchen.
This is episode 17, I’m actually surprised at how quickly the weeks have gone by I can’t believe I made 17 episodes. I know compared to other shows that’s nothing but it feels like a lot. I watched this Reel the other day of Jackie Johnson, she’s the host of the beauty podcast Natch Beaut, she made a funny video about meeting the Natch Beaut team and it was just her dressed up in different outfits as different characters as the editor, producer, writer, social media person, and that’s what this operation is all about. And because this is a one-woman show and it’s a lot of work, I do need a break, so consider this episode a wrap on season one of the Lunar Body.
It will be back later this year, at some point. I knew I always wanted to do seasons but I never had a plan for how long I wanted them to be or at what intervals but the best part is, I’m the only one here, so I can do whatever I want. Next season might be 10 episodes it might be 27 episodes, this season, we’re finishing up with 17 and today we’re talking about science and spirituality. Which is basically how this podcast can be summed up.
Some would say that these are opposing concepts. But they aren’t mutually exclusive, although a lot of people with superiority complexes like to say that. Practicing witchcraft or embracing a spiritual life is not in direct conflict with science, and if you’ve made it this many episode in I’m guessing you agree. They can exist alongside each other and they often complement one another. We can believe in both magic and in medicine, as one of my favorite witches Pam Grossman has said.
So this episode isn’t science versus spirituality, it’s an embrace of both. Because it’s often framed in this binary way where you can’t possibly believe two things at once. But 90% of people pray to something, so there are millions, billions of people out there who believe in both some higher power and science. Isaac Newton was an occultist. Albert Einstein was quoted as saying religious experience is the strongest driving force behind scientific research. For many people, science affirms their spirituality, it’s not in direct conflict.
And you might notice that the more that certain rhetoric leans towards the science-only side, believing in only the things that can be studied, then everything else in that context tends to be trivialized and referred to as woo-woo.
Let’s talk about the term woo-woo. I have taken this out of my vocabulary, for the most part, because sometimes it’s easier to describe things as woo-woo to people who aren’t in-the-know in this way, but I’ll tell you why I’ve decided to stop saying it and why I've been trying to consciously remove it from my usage.
Think about when you’re describing something that way, what do you actually mean by it? For me, I would use it when I was worried someone would judge me for my spiritual practice. If I referred to something as woo-woo, it would kind of acknowledge that I was aware of how it sounded and that whoever I was talking to might think I’m a little bananas.
But I don’t actually feel that way about my beliefs. Sure, I'm self-aware and I know how it might sound to other people who don't have the same belief system, but why does that mean I have to diminish my spirituality for the comfort of others?
I'm sure plenty of you can relate for a variety of reasons. I think my reasoning for doing that is my need to be liked and accepted and whatever I learned in childhood that made me believe I had to be palatable. And it's harder as a solo practitioner like myself, when you don't have a community of people around for that affirmation, you just do things privately and keep it to yourself and downplay it when people ask why you have tarot cards in your purse or why you you can't hang out on a full moon when you had a whole ritual planned.
This is different depending on where you grew up and how you grew up, some people are lucky to have grown up in diverse places with open-minded adults nurturing their sense of exploration. Some people grew up Catholic. In that case you often come to your beliefs privately, behind closed doors, researching online. My best friend was really the only person in real life I ever talked about witchcraft and spirituality with, that is until a few years ago when I found this amazing feminist collective called The Cauldron a couple years ago run by my friends Kate and Carlie, and it wasn’t until then that I found that there were more people like me in Boston — you'd think in a city there would be more of this going on especially so close to Salem but no, Boston is still very puritanical in some respects, we have almost no occult shops, there's like one place to buy crystals, I can think of two places in all of Boston and Cambridge to buy herbs, and maybe a meditation class at a yoga studio is like the closest thing you'll get to any kind of publicly available ritual around here, I'm getting off track, but anyway, it wasn't until I found The Cauldron and Kate and Carlie that I could find a community here, I found my people. Unfortunately because it was all event-based it kinda fizzled with the pandemic and I’m really hoping for events to return again. But this wasn’t until the last couple years, so up until then I have felt like I had to guard my practice in a way that was ultimately dismissing it by calling it woo-woo because it's like, other people just don't understand, you know? Unless I actually take the train to Salem or drive the 40 minutes, like I want that community in my own home, in my own area. But that’s what I don’t like about the word, its dismissiveness. Woo-woo is ultimately belittling and I don't want to do that to something that has brought me so much joy and that is part of my identity.
Also when we think about not just why we use the term, but the types of things that we use it for, you might notice that it’s all focused on things that can’t be empirically proven, or it can't be tested in a lab. Western culture is heavily focused on evidence, repeatable systems and tangible results, it's focused on having physical proof for everything or else it’s garbage. It dismisses the more abstract ideas and things that we simply just cannot prove in that way, although it has just as much value.
The term woo-woo perpetuates the idea that it’s all crazy, that it’s pseudoscience, that it isn’t worthy. But again, what are those things that we're talking about? They’re practices that are embracing of the divine feminine, they’re maybe things that are traditionally practiced by women, they’re indigenous or ancient eastern practices. Smudging would be considered woo-woo, but it's a very serious ceremonial Native practice, a lot of Chinese medicine is considered woo-woo. A lot of the work I do, the lunar aspect to my work, also would fall under that category. And to dismiss these things becomes a dismissal of religion and culture and really sacred rituals and these parts of ourselves that we hold in reverence. We’re disrespecting ourselves this way.
Woo-woo is defined as unscientific. And I find there’s a lot of stereotyping in there. Just because we believe in the aligning our ritual practices with the moon phases, doesn’t mean we don’t believe in science. Two things can be true. We can honor the mystical and unexplainable while also believing in research. And three things can be true — we can have our spiritual beliefs, respect science, and also recognize that a lot of science is skewed by patriarchal beliefs in science and education. So that dismissal of these more intuitive, communally focused, holistic practices, it's a symptom of our culture.
Because what’s deemed worthy of empirical study, what we place such strong importance on in the west, is determined by what white men in charge think is worthy. So many Eastern traditional medical modalities, for instance, are seen as woo-woo or pseudoscience. And this impacts your health, your cycle, and if you’re dealing with period issues and as a result are feeling out of alignment with your body and your intuition, that’s one of the effects here, because you aren’t taught about how your body works in this system.
If you haven’t listened to it yet there’s a Bonus episode where I shared the audio of the workshop I did on The Patriarchy vs Your Body that talks more about this if you’re interested. I do a lot of research in the health space obviously and one of the consistent themes is that menstruators’ hormonal fluctuations make it difficult for us to be studied, so we are often not included in research. Or if we are, cyclical changes aren’t accounted for, or they study postmenopausal participants, and results aren’t always detailed by biological sex. I have literally read a report saying that the complexities of the menstrual cycle are considered major barriers to the inclusion of menstruators in clinical trials. That’s from the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
So that’s a problem. But ultimately what’s considered worthy of study begins with the patriarchy in charge of scientific research, white men in charge. That research informs current professionals and educational institutions. It trickles down to a lot of people convinced that the only available avenue is the one that can be physically observed and studied.
But when it comes to healing, physical observations are not always part of it, there is so much that we still don't know. Just because we can't pinpoint the mechanism of action of a change, doesn't mean it didn't happen. Just because we don't know an answer right now, doesn't mean we'll never know. It might, but science is ever-evolving. We don't have all the answers to life's complex questions.
You and I know that real magic, real witchcraft, real energy behind spiritual practices regardless of your religion or your what you call your work — we know that it’s powerful. So to use the term woo-woo dismisses our personal knowledge and experience and reverence in order to make other people comfortable.
One thing I’m not talking about here, however, is conspirituality. The rise of the QAnon goddess. The people who funnel through the wellness to Qanon pipeline. This gives the rest of us a bad name, this is the science denier, the spiritual bypasser, the spiritual narcisissist. This is woo-woo, disguising itself as spiritual enlightenment.
Conspirituality is such a great term — spiritual, New-Age people who spread conspiracy theories, namely QAnon theories. I'm going to read a summary of an article on this that was published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion because it's really a great distillation of what this is all about:
"The female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics) may seem antithetical. There is a synthesis of the two, however, that we call 'conspirituality'. Conspirituality is a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative world views. It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift' in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian new world order' is to act in accordance with an awakened new paradigm' worldview."
This is a huge, huge topic and there have been many podcasts and articles done on this with much better information than I have the capacity to offer this week, but what it comes down to is that both of these groups align on three beliefs, that nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. This is how people in wellness and spirituality kind of make their way into this science-denying pipeline.
This has become more popular over the last year as there’s been a huge rise in people in the spiritual community sharing QAnon conspiracies and anti-vax propaganda, the people who say love can cure COVID and fear is why you caught it in the first place.
If you aren't familiar with Q by now basically it's a conspiracy theory that says democrats and many celebrities are satan-worshipping cannibalist pedophiles running a sex-trafficking ring and that Trump was going to expose them. It's a lot. And I think a lot of people are really drawn to the save-the-children aspect of it all, and that's their entry point and it just devolves wildly from there, you know? First you find a Facebook group that you vibe with that touches on these concerns, and since it's like a closed area with no rules there's a lot of misinformation shared and suddenly you're radicalized.
I've seen it in Facebook groups that I'm in. I actually don't participate in this any longer because it has moved far beyond what it initially started out as but there's a local spiritual women Facebook group that I now just lurk in, and over the last year there has been so much skepticism about the vaccine, people sharing Qanon theories or vaguely referencing them like an MLM being like "private message me for more information."
There's a lot of distrust in authority, which on its own I think is fine. We have every right to question authority because there is a lot of corruption around us, there is a lot of bias in research, but the misinformation is where it devolves, there is such a lack of trust for science that goes from healthy skepticism where you're looking for possible conflicts of interest and dissecting how the research was done, to downright harm that makes a mockery of the hard and incredible work that researchers have done and that hospital workers have endured over the last year. And they say do your research. What does that mean? Truly are you in a lab? Are you creating primary sources?
Our culture is one of instant gratification and no one is interested in reading beyond headlines, and "do your research" typically just means "I saw a viral Facebook post and read what some anonymous person posted on thevaccineisamicrochip.com."
So in these Facebook groups aside from the anti-vax rhetoric I've also seen a heavy focus on positive vibes only, love and light only. This was major last June after George Floyd died and more and more people in the wellness community were speaking out and also getting pushback, that we're being divisive, our nation doesn't need that right now, I've gotten emails from people saying the same thing when I mention anti-vaxxers or when I get political on social media. I'm being divisive when we really need to come together.
This is spiritual bypassing. Spiritual bypassers tend to be the science deniers.
Spiritual bypassers often promote the love-and-light only way of life, yet loudly and proudly vote for Donald Trump and have flagrant disregard for public health in the name of personal sovereignty, because wearing a mask and caring for the collective isn’t their truth, whatever that means. My body, my choice, they say, co-opting language from the pro-choice movement as they vote for an anti-abortion sexual predator.
That phrase, personal sovereignty, is so interesting to me. It means supreme power or authority over one’s self. Which is a right we all have, but I wonder where these people draw the line between personal sovereignty and just reckless behavior that impacts everyone around them. Making ourselves a priority is important to a point, and then beyond that point it turns into willful ignorance and disregard for the people in your life or your community. It’s individualism. It's ignoring science because it's inconvenient for you.
And these conspirituality people, they like to say look at the research. Again, usually that means they saw something shared on Facebook and that’s their source, but they say do your research, you decide what’s best for yourself. But this is where it gets confusing. Because I believe in spirituality, I do believe in authority over my own body, and I believe in science, but I also believe in not making things up about the science.
When it comes to public health, a matter of their actions deeply impacting others, it’s not really a matter of “you do you.” It’s not a personal decision because they say it’s a personal decision, it’s actually very public when the people around them might suffer the consequences of their actions.
The topic of conspirituality is so interesting, these people who claim to believe in science but also share sources that are the complete opposite of that, kinda gives the rest of us a bad name. It’s really spiritual bypassing, which is using your beliefs as a way to absolve you from any personal responsibility.
There is an actual study on spiritual bypassing that ended up recommending psychologists and therapists look out for that behavior when counseling patients. They define it as “the unhealthy misuse of the spiritual life to avoid dealing with psychological difficulties.” Or when people “seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological ‘unfinished business.’”
It’s an avoidance function. And I wonder what it is that's being avoided when it comes to facing science. I'm sure it's different for everyone. But it can get so bad that it becomes a form of spiritual narcissism, which is a term I read about in Scientific American, I'll share the article in the show notes.
It’s when we’re so focused on personal development and doing our spiritual work but like not actually examining our shadow side and doing the hard work of integrating that, it’s the love-and-light shit that refuses to acknowledge any of that. That article stated it perfectly, “Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool some of us into thinking we’re evolving and growing when all we’re growing is our ego.”
You know by now I hate this love and light talk. Love and light is murder, I really believe that, especially when it's used to avoid talking about issues of race, when we're called divisive for acknowledging the wellness is political, when we're talking about the covid vaccine and how it's not about the energetics of fear making you susceptible it's about a fatal fucking virus that our immune systems have never been in contact with before. Love and light refuses to acknowledge deeply important conversations and problems and it's unhealthy. It's mentally unhealthy.
And as I was putting this episode together someone asked about how to deal with science deniers in the spiritual community. I don't have a great answer for this because these people tend to be rock solid in their convictions, and that can kind of make it worse because put yourself in their shoes. It's natural for humans to cling stubbornly to something in the face of contrary information, maybe that's the avoidance factor, the fear of being wrong. But it's cognitive dissonance that's hard to deal with and it can be isolating as you lose family and friends over these things, which makes you want to stick to it even more because what was it all for if you give up now right? It's natural to double down when you're wrong.
So keep that in mind. But maybe check in on them, how are they doing mentally, physically, emotionally? Since this is can be an avoidant behavior, getting hyperfocused on anti-vax propaganda or hyperfocused on the universe protecting your immune system things like that is bypassing something. So that would be my advice, to see what's going on otherwise. I mean this behavior is serving them in some way, or else they wouldn't do it, so checking in on them, try to get a sense of the why behind it all might be helpful.
You can help them figure out if they're reasoning with information, meaning they're thinking critically about it and deciding what it means for them, or if they're rationalizing it, bending it to fit their predetermined beliefs. If they're open to it of course.
We can also help debunk some information but that's less likely to work, again if they're deep down the anti-science rabbit hole there's only so much that we can do there, so I'd focus more on what else is going on in their life that they feel compelled towards... alternative facts. Maybe invite them to hang out or do something that takes them out of their echo chamber. And also don't be afraid to set boundaries if you need to, whether you clearly let them know what you'll talk about and not talk about with them, or if you need to cut them off.
I think one big point to consider with any of this is that there is a systemic problem, a lot of science is hard to understand for the average person. Academic writing sucks. It's dry, they use big words for no reason, it's inaccessible, it's elitist. Not everyone knows how to read a paper, though I will link to a free course on Coursera about understanding medical research if you're interested in that. But sometimes reading it is like when you were in high school and you wanted to sound smart so you used the thesaurus for every single word looking for longer ones. So I don't blame people for not fully diving in. News outlets don't really help because they often sensationalize research and cherry-pick data for a good headline.
So talking more about these things, being willing to help people learn if they're open to it, being willing to listen to their reasoning without judgment, being willing to set boundaries if it's not going the way you planned, checking in on how things are going for them otherwise, those are my recommendations for dealing with science deniers.
Ok, major tangent. That was a long way to say that this is not what I’m talking about when I am indeed talking about it, but I'm saying that there are people who believe and science and acknowledge that they don't know everything and there is always more to discover, and then there are people who straight up deny what science shows.
But the main point of this episode is that science and spirituality can co-exist, in ways that complement each other, affirm each other, and they're not things we need to be divisive about. We can have both. A lot of the science and research we have today came about because of the questions that were asked in spiritual or religious contexts.
And science can actually measure a lot of our energetic efforts! It may not be able to confirm for you exactly that the prosperity bath you took is what made you rich or if your house-hunting spell is what truly led you to your dream home, but the energetics of intention can be measured.
It's very easy to write things off as placebo effects. This happens a lot on the holistic health space and going back to what I mentioned about Eastern healing modalities, in the West a lot of it is written off as placebo. I think there's still a lot of value in placebo effects so I don't get the hate, but also why is it considered a placebo effect? Because there's no research, and why is there no research? Because it's not considered worthy of study. So just because we don't have something published in the Journal of the American Medical Association doesn't necessarily mean it's trash.
Again, I love some healthy skepticism, some thoughtful inquiry, it's cynicism I don't like, where it's like, this can't possibly be true. Lack of evidence to disprove something doesn't necessarily mean it's untrue, this is in opposition to what we just talked about with science deniers where there is plenty of evidence to disprove certain things.
So i want to talk about the energetics of intention. You have heard me say, or you may have heard others say as well, that with rituals, with spells, all you need is your own energy. Crystals are sparkly and pretty and candles are fun and you can have all the bells and whistles to help you out, but at the basis of it all is energy.
How do we infuse our energy into our rituals? It's thought-based, it's emotion-based, it's really feeling your feelings and believing in your intentions. And emotions can be studied. Emotions are energy. Gratitude is actually one of the strongest positive emotions that influence our physiology. There's a study from the Heart Math institute showing this relationship between the heart and brain waves that focused on people who were actively appreciating one another, their heart rate variability essentially synced up. Stress of course is a negative emotion that greatly influences our physiology and can have really detrimental effects, and you'll see really erratic heart rate variability in this state.
So our emotions, our energy, can influence us at a cellular level. Now does this explain how love spells work? Not really, but maybe. A Heart Math Institute study claimed that physical aspects of DNA strands could be influenced by human intention. What they did was have participants hold test tubes that contained DNA and they were instructed to generate feelings of love and appreciation with the intention of causing the DNA to wind or unwind. What they found was the positive emotions influenced the DNA by up to 25%, and that intention was an important factor in the changes.
And so how does this apply to spirituality. We pray, we venerate, we perform spells and rituals, all of that requires intentionality. Again, it's all energy. But, this isn't to say that energy alone is enough to move the needle with your intention.
Is it all you need with your rituals? For the most part, yes.
But is it all you need to ensure the outcome? Not exactly. You need more than energy and intention for your magic. You also need action, otherwise it's just the law of attraction. Think hard enough and you'll attract what you wish for, which is its own version of spiritual bypassing, not taking any responsibility for what happens or leaving it up to the universe. It takes away your own agency really.
But the energetics of intention, the research here proves that there's something to this, you're changing something inside of you that can also propel you forward, that can also motivate you to take action towards your goals. The ritual is a symbol of your desire, it's not fully complete without the things that you do after the ritual, after you speak your intention, that help make what you want to happen, happen.
I don't think we need science here to tell us that, and it was a small study, but this is a case where science affirms spirituality.
Now what happens when science can't do that for you?
This is a question I got from someone last week and I asked for a little more context because there's a lot that could apply to, and they said "I personally have been shifting from being an atheist to more spiritual/witchcraft identifications. So an example would be with crystals, there’s no science that proves there’s energies that help us but I still feel like they do."
And I love this, because it gets into the bells and whistles. Like who says mint is good for prosperity and rosemary is good for protection. Of course there's no science for that, and it very well may be a placebo, but you know what? Who cares. This is folk magic and folk magic goes so far back in history, there's a reason that it has stood the test of time. Whether it's just tradition or if there are energetics behind it yet that we simply haven't discovered yet, that's to be determined.
I do feel though, that we all have relationships with minerals and with plants and with earthly objects like this. Some people are more attuned to them than others, some people are attuned to the spirit of plants and communicate with them intuitively. And in herbalism, a monograph from one herbalist might say completely different things than another's. And both can be true, both of them can have had completely different experiences with a plant and both can be correct.
For the things we can't measure, that we can't study, I don't think we have to discount our own personal experiences. If a crystal helps you, it helps you. And also, let's talk about watches. Some watches use quartz to regulate timekeeping. How does that work? It's piezoelectric, meaning when you apply pressure, it generates electric voltage, and if you apply voltage, it vibrates at a certain frequency, which is how it's used in watches to keep the clock ticking.
Not all crystals are piezoelectric but all matter has frequency. I wouldn't say it's impossible that that it influences us on a certain level, but there are currently no studies to support crystal healing. Anything written about it talks all about the placebo effect, and again, I wonder why that's such a bad thing if that is the only explanation. Placebo effects can provide real biological results. But it's always just dismissed as the power of suggestion. And that may be, and it may not.
This reminds me of when I was listening to a scientist on a podcast talking about how it’s hard for her to accept that tarot is not just her mind spinning the card meanings to force something to be true. And again, healthy skepticism, all good, it's a valid perspective and a good question. But tarot is a conversation with yourself, does the idea that you might be spinning it invalidate the reading? You're working with your own thoughts and experiences and interpreting the cards through that, it's not like the clouds are going to part and god is going to be like "you know what, the two of swords actually means this." You're going to look at that and think of an important choice you need to make, it's what's true for you. And I don't see anything wrong with that.
But with crystals, with metaphysical applications for herbs, with astrology and other things that science can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, I don't think it means you throw it all out. Especially if it's harmless stuff. Having a crystal collection isn't the same as managing a Qanon Facebook group. Though you also do want to be checking if your crystals are ethically sourced. I always recommend the Village Silversmith which is a local shop in New England but they sell Etsy too and they're AGTA-certified which means they have to follow a certain code of ethics. So always check on that.
But I don't think it means you throw it all out, I think it means you follow your intuition with it.
In the science community the belief is that our intuition is located in the right side of our brain. The tissue that connects the right and left side of the brain is actually thicker in women's brains, and I think I've talked before about how in your menstrual phase, there's more activity between the left and right brain at that time and so you may notice that your intuition is stronger. The right brain is associated with gut feelings, which makes sense because the gut and brain are connected, the gut is actually referred to as our second brain, while the left is more logic-focused and that's a recipe for making quick decisions.
Intuition is just unconscious information, it's faster than rational thought which is why it seemingly comes out of nowhere. But since it's based on information and our experiences and our interpretations of those things, it can also be wrong sometimes.
So it's good that you're asking this question and not blindly following your intuition, it's good that you're examining it, because blindly following it is what can lead you from harmless things like carrying an amethyst in your bra to taking that amethyst and throwing it through Nancy Pelosi's window.
And let's think about meditation. There are tons of studies on the mental and physical benefits of meditation, but the spiritual benefits? Ones that we know, ones that you've likely experienced yourself? How can you measure that? Can you go to an Ashram in India and tell its guru that their stress levels might be pretty low but that doesn't mean they're talking to God?
And keep in mind science is still young. We like to think we know everything, but we don't. We've only been doing this for a couple hundred years. I believe there are many things bigger than the human experience, bigger than we can even fathom that we don't have the capacity to study, or that simply isn't meant to be studied.
Science and spirituality both come down to the same thing, seeking answers. Just think about the Big Bang Theory. Are you satisfied with that explanation? That all of life was created by accident? It is just a theory after all, we don't really know. We're all just searching for answers.
Science wants to find the why behind spirit and spirit wants to find the why behind science. One way I've read it is that "physical scientists are trying to prove God to themselves through the outer eyes and ears, while the spiritual scientists are trying to prove God to themselves through their inner eyes and ears." We're looking for the same things in different ways. Neither way is better than the other, it's when they can come together that they can be most powerful.