Leda Beluche, “energy theologist,” offers customers a selection of crystals, books, and other spiritual paraphernalia at her Haus of Healing in Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City. She is one of several modern-day practitioners of witchcraft and astrology who rack up hundreds of thousands of views and likes on social media each day. (Photo by Emma Ayers / The Washington Times)
How many folks out there living where there are;
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
~Words to America The Beautiful
Avoid Wicked Customs
“When you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire [sacrificing children], or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you. You shall be blameless before the Lord your God. For these nations which you will dispossess listened to soothsayers and diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not appointed such for you.”
Deuteronomy 18:9-14
“They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They practiced divination and sought omens and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the LORD, arousing his anger.”
2 Kings 17:17
I imagine there are some, perhaps many, professing to be Christian that have read the above Bible verses not realizing those words from God to His people were in the Holy Bible. Yes, words directed to the people of Israel — GOD’S PEOPLE — of which, whether Jew or Gentile, he or she who believes are one and the same to God, and are counted as “His people” who are to avoid all evil such as divination, sorcerers, omens, astrology forecasts, Ojuija boards, conjurer of spells, witchcraft and to be able to discern well and wisely.
The whole New Age Movement that germinated right after World War II and grew in the 1960s is nothing more than a rebranded paganism. And it has been the fastest-growing religion in America for years.
Much of it has infected and adversely impacted the American Church. Pagan rituals, worship of creation rather than the Creator take place in churches in America every year.
One example of the many to be found as all manner of pagan rituals and practices have entered the Church, and not just the Church of Rome;
Diocesan ‘Earth Day Mass’ gives ‘thanks to the trees’ in a pagan-inspired ceremony – LifeSite
There is no new thing under the sun, exactly as one of the wisest men to ever live saw, knew, and declared.
Rather than turn to the light, rather than turn to God, turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, turn to the Holy Spirit, turn to the Holy Bible the world loves the darkness and the sin, loves the abominations and evil.
“…that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”
John answered and said, “A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ,’ but, ‘I have been sent before Him.’ He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease. He who comes from above is above all; he who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of the earth. He who comes from heaven is above all. And what He has seen and heard, that He testifies; and no one receives His testimony. He who has received His testimony has certified that God is true. For He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God does not give the Spirit by measure. The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into His hand. He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”
John 3:15-21, 27-36
Evil is emboldened. Satan is intensifying and far too many in the world, are consumed in darkness, loving the darkness because that is where their deeds, their hearts are just as Jesus says.
If you think it’s bad now? Just wait. It’s going to get worse. A whole lot worse.
Again, it has been the idle Church, the pastors, and their congregations in America addicted to a feel good message not paying attention to the culture, and the whirlwind spiritual warfare taking place all around them and within them.
Allowing the sacrificing of children [to Molech and Baal for there is no new thing under the sun] allowing the sexual depravity and immorality even inviting practicing homosexuals to take senior pastorships within certain denominations or churches. Allowing the boldness and arrogance of communism and paganism to no longer hide in the shadows but to become mainstream.
Allowing the Constitution to be attacked. Allowing the great sin that America has and does commit daily, nightly.
It all begins in the Church. In America. And with the void, the great vacuum created by such apathy, laziness, being lost and filled by evil is it any wonder that witchcraft is the fastest-growing religion in America?
Why America was founded;
In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.:
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith, and the honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another; covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.
Mayflower Compact
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Satanism Making Comeback Through Witchcraft and Atheism: Rabbi
Read on…
Ken Pullen, Tuesday, October 29th, 2024
Young women gravitate toward modern witchcraft as psychology fails, practitioners and scholars say
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
By
Reprinted from The Washington Times
NEW YORK — Forget what you think you know about witches: despised crones bent over bubbling cauldrons, casting spells with a pinch of wolfsbane and eye of newt in a deep, dark forest.
Witches today are young influencers with popular social media accounts, where they host podcasts and post astrological divinations from their downtown dwellings.
Picture this: Two young women in floor-length dresses and pointed hats light nearly 50 candles that form a circle on a floor, brightening the dark space. Elaborate, converged spheres are painted on the surface in the middle, adorned with a large multi-pointed crystal.
This is the TikTok account of “Stella, Witch of the Moon.” She’s an artist whose Instagram bio describes her online space as “The Witch’s Cottage for like-minded witches, creatives, artisans, healers & magick weavers.”
She’s merely one of the #witchesoftiktok, who rack up hundreds of thousands of views and likes each day.
The demand for witchcraft content is certainly there — in real life and online — as modern women grow more disinterested in formalized, religious spirituality and seek looser, similarly historical forms. Leda Beluche, a self-described “energy theologist,” says it’s not a sinister inclination. It’s simply borne out of feminine interest in self-knowledge.
“Women have been in pain since the beginning of time, even if you go back to Salem and how the witches were, you know, prosecuted, and all this stuff,” Ms. Beluche said. “Women … have always [been] just so powerful, and they want to understand that.”
One way to understand the self is through astrological charts, she says. Indeed, “What’s your star sign?” has become a common query among friends, family, and total strangers alike. Ms. Beluche routinely asks it of her clients when they come into her small Upper East Side shop in New York, called Haus of Healing.
“If we go back 30 years, people would be like, ‘Oh, that’s garbage. That’s the placebo effect.’ Nobody cared. But now, especially with TikTok world, people are addicted to astrology, and it’s mostly because the human mind now knows that a chart can literally define who they are when they were born,” she told The Washington Times.
“We saw this pick up in practice during the pandemic,” professor Helen A. Berger, a scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, said in an interview with Brandeis Stories. “For centuries, women have been told to focus on families. Focusing on the self is a radical act. It’s empowering.”
Indeed, astrology’s influence is growing, especially among younger Americans. According to YouGov’s 2022 poll, more than 1 in 4 Americans says the stars influence their lives, including 37% of adults under 30. The astrology market, in particular, has seen significant growth, increasing from a $2.2 billion value in 2018 to $12.8 billion in 2021. By 2031, it’s expected to reach $22.8 billion, according to Allied Market Research.
Women, too, are more likely to buy in, with 30% of women and 25% of men citing their earnest belief, reports YouGov. According to those who work within the spirituality space, however, women are much more likely to use it openly — and as a means of connecting with others, often using astrological charts as a rubric for predicting social behavior.
And a recent survey from Pew Research Center explores the details of this growing interest in “spirituality.” According to the 2023 survey, 42% of adults think the dead can communicate after they’ve passed. Nearly half believe the dead can lend the living a helping hand. What’s more, 45% of respondents say they have experienced a profound sense of wonder about the universe and a deep “spiritual peace.”
That peace, according to Kelsey Zazanis, is what women are after. The 27-year-old self-described astrologer in San Luis Obispo, California, said women are suffering from a too-sterile form of medical diagnosis in response to their emotional pains. She believes women are especially eager to be treated as though their depression and malaise aren’t simply conditions in need of medical treatment, but instead real hurts.
If mental anguish can’t be seen sympathetically by society, she says, then it will be by the heavens.
“I just see a lot of women who have gone through some sort of intense life experience, and the aftermath of that gets labeled as some sort of like mental illness and so … people can call you crazy for … talking about other realms of perception that are not accepted by the Western rationalist viewpoint,” she told The Times.
Ms. Beluche confirmed that her customers are often seeking some form of spiritual guidance or relief in their lives. That’s why she offers clients the opportunity to go deeper in their practice: with spiritual healings, energy clearings with sage, hypnosis techniques, and past life regressions that encourage people to access their former selves.
With a broad smile and a serious tone, Ms. Beluche says she was a witch in Salem, Massachusetts in a previous life. “I healed the Earth, the plants, herbs, people and animals, you know — I had a devotion,” she said.
And Ms. Beluche insists her methods aren’t just magical: They’re scientific. She describes herself as a “researcher,” adding that she’s debated many an academic and scientist over the realities of magic. She said they seek her out for conversation.
But Ms. Beluche told The Times that the difference between her identity as a healer “of light” and those witches commonly understood as part of the occult is her religious faith and desire for goodness.
“We don’t cast hexes or dabble in dark magic. We just don’t mess with that,” she said, adding that she believes in God.
That doesn’t mean all modern witches are shying away from the dark arts. On Reddit groups like “WitchesvsPatriarchy,” they even share politically charged hexes. One user recently described a “freezer spell” aimed at Donald Trump and Project 2025, with plans to symbolically “freeze” their influence by sealing names in bottles under the waning moon.
With nearly 1,500 upvotes and comments brimming with support — like one user’s daily “Blue Wave Spell” ritual — these digital covens continue to attempt to stir cosmic political energy. “WitchesvsPatriarchy” boasts more than 750 thousand active members.
But for other “light” witches, hexing and other dark practices just aren’t in the cards. After all, they don’t want to displease God.
And their belief in a higher power has no bearing on their spiritual practices. In fact, they say they believe spiritualism and religion are part and parcel of the same thing.
Denise Passarelli, who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, is a practicing Christian who says she attends church every Sunday — but she still clears evil energy out of her kids’ rooms with sage.
“I don’t really see them as different. I just see it as a continuation of something, even though it’s probably not like ‘in the Bible’ what I’m doing, but I feel like it’s the same thing. We’re either cleansing ourselves, or we take communion, but, I don’t know, it isn’t different to me,” Ms. Passarelli said.
For Ayda, a 21-year-old Muslim in Paris, the whole of spiritual witchcraft doesn’t have to be in her practice to believe in its power — whether as a magical practice or a communal ethos. But Ayda says she limits her spiritual practice to meditation, in keeping with her religious beliefs, though she agrees that faith and “spirituality” are part of the same worldview. For her, though, God is the first step.
“You know, we don’t have that in Islam, because it’s supposed to be that God has, like, all the power. So if you … need help with something, or whatever, you should ask him first,” she said, noting the tight restrictions Islam places on practicing witchcraft. Ayda mostly enjoys the female community surrounding spirituality. “[They’re] all the same thing, though.”
The concept of “God,” to some of these women, takes a different form than the Abrahamic understanding that animates Christianity, Judaism and Islam. For many spiritualists, “God” has a far more universal meaning. Ms. Beluche added that, to her and several of her clients, the understanding of the phrase “God is love” is literal — and magical.
“We are God … when I say that, [I mean] we’re carrying his light within us. But to me, at the end of the day, God has a final decision, right? And that’s why I believe in faith,” she said.
The ’precarity of American culture’
Of course, that’s not the definition of “God” to religious people who fear the occult and believe in its darker power. Erika Ahern, a Catholic woman who writes at The Loop by Catholic Vote, told The Times she believes the rise is directly related to the number of women with cultural trauma — namely abortion and sexual abuse.
“They say those who embrace it do so … to fill some kind of void in their life, or there’s a wound there. People of faith will talk to you about a spiritual woundedness through which the evil spirits, Satan, whatever you want to term it, you know bad, bad angels — they capitalize on that,” Ms. Ahern said.
She added that many priests she’s spoken with on her podcast “The LOOPCast” point to the rise of abortion regret as the reason women are becoming more interested in occult practices.
“[One of the priests] spoke of abortion — actually abortion and sexual abuse — he said, as an exorcist, he believes the occult is kind of gripping women in particular for [those reasons],” Ms. Ahern said. “As abortion has become more and more — I think it’s one in four women in my demographic at this point have had an abortion — I see that the rise of that instance has correlated with the rise of the occult.”
But Jessica Calarco, sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” says the reasoning behind the interest in these practices is far more face value. A lack of security in America, she argues, is the reason women in particular feel pulled toward transcendent belief.
“All of [spirituality] is essentially designed to help people avoid things, whether it’s physical harm or precarity or kind of economic harm, but that’s often what those kinds of investments are designed to do in the U.S.,” Ms. Calarco told The Times.
Ms. Calarco argues the “precarity of American culture” drives people — especially women — to look for ways to have a sense of control, to feel they can manage the risks they face in their lives.
“We’re supposed to take responsibility for caring for ourselves, for caring for our loved ones in ways that folks elsewhere have more support with. Whether it’s, you know, helping to care for elderly loved ones who are in a time where they need high levels of physical care, for example, or sick loved ones, or young children,” she said.
But to Ms. Zazanis, the California astrologist, control is the opposite of the point.
“My worldview is completely centered around it, but almost as a passive observer,” she said. Divination, and particularly astrology, is not a magic to be forced but something far more academic — it’s a study of time, she said.
Ms. Zazanis isn’t interested in changing her life with divination, but, rather, it provides a lens through which to study life. It’s a psychology of sorts — or a method of avoiding dealing with issues in a more harmful way.
“To me, it’s often traumatic things that kind of crack you open to a deeper realm of perception,” she said. “And sometimes, if you don’t have the ability to really carry that and integrate that … then Western culture automatically would kind of funnel that into the psychiatric realm or, like, pathologize it.”
Even so, Ms. Zazanis isn’t relegating her beliefs to a form of coping with her emotional pain. “There are simply a lot of experiences I’ve had in life that cannot be explained through any sort of scientific paradigm,” she said.
She’s not alone. In 2020, Amy Tripp, an astrology influencer with nearly 150,000 followers on X, predicted Ms. Harris would run for president in 2024, citing her upcoming Saturn return. And on July 11, 2024, she pinpointed July 21 as the date Mr. Biden would step aside. When her old tweets resurfaced, fans rejoiced. One proudly declared on X: “Astrology girls remain undefeated.”
It’s these sorts of events and predictions that keep fans of spirituality invested, Ms. Zazanis said. But for her, the real investment belongs to what she sees reflected in the beliefs she espouses. And the proximity to the “dark arts” doesn’t scare her, either.
“Misfortune can lead people to be an atheist. But then, for me, I was like, ‘Oh, I need to know the answers behind this terrible s—-,” she said.” I originally came to it from like, a place of needing answers. And I didn’t think anything could scare me more than the stuff I was, like, seeking answers for.
But as long as Ms. Zazanis’s birth chart astrology outlines her fate — and the rich symbolism she sees within her charts makes sense to her — she says she’ll persist in her belief.
“There are some scary things there,” she said. “But ultimately, the way I see it is this: It’s reflecting life itself.”
• Emma Ayers can be reached at eayers@washingtontimes.com.
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