Is woo on the rise or just where I live?

[HangingOver]

I permanently relocated to the South West a few years ago after being a long term weekend visitor for about 5 years....and I've noticed the rise in the amount of woo practitioners in the area has totally exploded!

They range from harmless stuff like dancing naked around the forest with no clothes on (but always mysteriously with a photographer on hand for Instagram!) to more questionable stuff like "yoni steaming" and putting their periods on their faces, to the downright alarming stuff like Kambo (if you don't know what that is it's where a lunatic with no medical training burns you then applies this stuff to the burn that comes out of a poisonous frog in the Amazon, and you really violently vomit and have the shots and sometimes your face and skin swells up). There's also a woman nearby who seems to be a sort of doula (sp?) who specialises in helping you to give birth avoiding medical intervention of any kind at all costs....which seems a bit questionable!

I thought I was quite a fuzzy live and let live type but it's starting to annoy me. My lovely housemate who had a traumatic past is into it and it makes me sad that she goes to the legnths of poisoning herself to try to vomit up "bad energy" She's not bad, she's lovely.

Is this just a local thing or are other seeing a rise in "magical" and "goddesses" near them?

I don't see religion as different than woo and have no issue with the base concept of either

i didn't know the word "woo" till I joined MN.

this episide reminds me of the first scene (I think) in the first episode of "Grace", with the policeman pointing out he is criticised for consulting with a woo person, but is asked to swear on the Bible in court.

that said, I thought there was a non religious option for oaths in court now?

Also mainstream religions don't tend to encourage pseudo-scientific medical practices which can be dangerous for women or delay them from getting medical treatment for actual medical problems.

Fair point

I find the similarities and differences interesting between woo and religion, but certainly don't want to derail the thread.

I thought there had been cases of people using prayers and leaving it to long before getting scientific medical help ?

Okay to avoid derailment I'm calling a demarcation between organised religion, traditional woo and Instawoo. This thread is about Instawoo.

How are you defining traditional woo and instawoo? Curious which category I fall into (I won’t be offended😂)

If its instawoo, there was a marked increase in the number of men calling themselves gurus and lightworkers, just before I left 2 years ago. The algorithms seemed to push their accounts at me no matter how much I ignored them.

I know nothing about instawoo.

do most posters view that differently to traditional woo?

Those are individuals though, not the teachings of the religion. It's like someone praying to get a good mark for an exam instead of studying hard. It says more about the person itself. I can't think of a single mainstream religion who would say to not accept conventional medical treatment if you have cancer... But there are 'gurus' out there who say you can cure cancer by eating veggies.. during the pandemic, imams priests and rabbis alike were all encouraging their congregants to get the vaccine asap

Fair point.

Is it woo, to believe humans can walk on water, part a sea, then turn water into wine ? Rise from the grave ? Etc

To be fair, the majority of pagans I know, myself included, dont encourage people to shun conventional medical treatments and those that do are looked at pretty poorly in most pagan communities. Idk if that’s the distinction between “traditional woo” and “instawoo” though.

That's not my religion. My religion believes the Torah was written by human beings and is hence fallible and a lot of it is myth/metaphor. The more 'orthodox' religions like orthodox Judaism or Catholicism do take a more literal interpretation of what is written in scripture but a lot of the justification for that is also academic/tradition/political. It is complex.

This is what distinguishes religion from woo. Religion is established,it is a whole institution. There are reasons why certain religions have retained their more orthodox beliefs including the more mystical effects. There is generally a 'tradional' camp and a 'reformist' camp and the traditional camp wants everything to stay the same including what was the consensus several centuries ago pre-science. The common argument which I do find across religions is religious leaders fear that they will 'dilute' the religion if they take a progressive stand.

And yet the traditional forms of mainstream religions are still the religions people tend to stick with if they choose to be religious; I guess it is probably to do with familiarity?

But this is all very different from wellness culture woo. These are not institutions. They are actually consumer products for the anti-consumer. If consumerism and the welfare state replaced the role of religion in people's lives, then woo has replaced the dying welfare state in the last stage of capitalism. Consumerism is not as meaningful in an age of high inequality/lower social mobility.

I have a dear dear friend who trained as a homeopath. She had to undergo life saving surgery. It was only life saving because she’d wasted so much time trying to heal herself ’homeopathically’ before admitting she needed help.

Ive never had to sit on my hands and bite my tongue as hard as I did during that period.

So it’s not just religions that lead people to think they can delay getting appropriate help.

But that's their choice, assuming they are adults.

On the other post, I find the idea of "woo as substitute for welfare state" bizarre.

There is a lot of this stuff in the West country IME. But Mumsnet may not be the place for criticizing woo - I read a thread about distance reiki the other day and people were jumping on to defend it 😅 Like, how can a grown adult be THAT naive? It is worrying 😳

@EmmaH2022 well I don't find it difficult to understand. I find it impossible to get a GP appointment without going privately. Fortunately I have private healthcare due to my employer so I get my prescription antibiotics really easily within a few hours of requesting an appointment. Someone without private healthcare has to either wait for weeks...or convince herself that the little bottle of sugar tablets from the homeopathy website online is just as good as antibiotics.

I don't know anything about Instawoo (sounds fascinating, in a faintly horrified way) but I would differentiate between some well established woo, like Wicca, witchcraft and druidry and the New Age stuff, concentrating on chocolate, crystals and whatever next.
Having said that, woo practitioners of any kind are not always what they say they are, and I wouldn’t go near any of them without someone in my magical community vouching for them.

Oh I see! Thanks for clarifying. I didn't think of homeopathy as Instawoo.

i was thinking that paying £300 to attend a goddess conference isn't something you do if you aren't wealthy.

@EmmaH2022 I am in north London. I know plenty of non wealthy people who do similar not goddess conferences but wellness conferences etc. I mean, it's an interest like any other and it costs less than a holiday.

With all due respect why do we need to follow books that state x events when people usually either follow certain sections or selectively interpret certain parts, or based on the current political climate, change parts to fit with the politics of the day ?

@Hawkins001 the Torah/Bible does have historical basis. Everything we do is based on historical precedent. For example, the platinum jubilee we are celebrating this week is also based on religious precedent, the queen is 'appointed by god' to lead apparently and she is also the head of the church of England. Most of us are not adherants of the church of England but if the polls would have us believe, the vast majority of us still support the monarchy and hence we are by default accepting her 'divine authority '.

I am not a royalist but many people are and the reason she is queen is rooted in religion. This is why she is coronated by the archbishop of Canterbury and anointed with holy oil.

We don't? We live in a pluralistic society. No one is making you

No. We have freedom of religion, you can choose which, if any, religion you want to follow. If you don’t want to follow a religion no one is going to make you.