Tag: occult

Business is booming for NYC psychics amid COVID-19 pandemic

While storefronts are going bust across the Big Apple due to the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s psychics and fortune-tellers say they are seeing more clients — and making more money — than ever before.

Unlike most businesses, they thrive in times of uncertainty and despair.

“When there’s a big change in the world, or more uncertainty in the world, that is when people look for more certainty,” psychic Betsy LeFae told The Post. “Everyone now wants more certainty, and yes – that is when people tend to turn to psychics.

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Why the Soviets Sponsored a Doomed Expedition to a Hollow Earth Kingdom

IN DECEMBER OF 1923, TWO unlikely travelers arrived in Darjeeling, India intent on finding what could not possibly exist: Shambhala, a kingdom located inside a hollow earth. Along them trailed Soviet spies, Western occultists and Mongolian rebels, all serving their own agendas. Even with so many eyes on them, their expedition still managed to disappear from the face of the earth for months; when they finally emerged, they had a fascinating story to tell and even more secrets to hide.

The travelers were Nicholas and Helena Roerich, two Russian expatriates traveling under a U.S, flag, which they had hoisted upon a Mongolian spear. As they informed the local authorities in Darjeeling, they were leading a scientific-archaeological expedition aimed at cataloguing the art and culture of Central Asia for the first time. Their eccentric behavior quickly raised some eyebrows: Nicholas Roerich, a famed painter and archaeologist, walked around Darjeeling in the robes of a Dalai Lama, held conspiratorial meetings with Tibetan lamas and introduced himself as an American, even though his accent betrayed his Russian heritage.

Still, the couple’s reputation as paragons of the Western art world as well as their American sponsors persuaded the authorities to let them pass through the city, and into the forbidden Tibetan plateau. However, nobody was aware of the couple’s true destination: the city of Shambhala, a place not to be found in any map.

Shambhala is a fabled city-kingdom of the Himalayas, believed by Buddhists, Hindus and local shamans to exist simultaneously on the physical and the spiritual plane. For millennia, the legend of the underground kingdom played an important role in every Tibetan tradition and eventually, rumors of its existence reached the West.

It so happened that Helena Roerich, a writer and philosopher, had translated in Russian The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky’s influential esoteric work which first presented Shambhala as a shortcut to enlightenment. The Roerichs came to believe deeply in the Shambhala myth and at some point, while living in New York, Helena received telepathic instructions from “Master Morya”, an otherworldly entity, encouraging the couple to leave the U.S. and seek the city for themselves.

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The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism

In the 1430s, a small group of writers in Central Europe – church inquisitors, theologians, lay magistrates and even one historian – began to describe horrific assemblies where witches gathered and worshiped demons, had orgies, ate murdered babies and performed other abominable acts. Whether any of these authors ever met each other is unclear, but they all described groups of witches supposedly active in a zone around the western Alps.

The reason for this development may have been purely practical. Church inquisitors, active against religious heretics since the 13th century, and some secular courts were looking to expand their jurisdictions. Having a new and particularly horrible crime to prosecute might have struck them as useful.

I just translated a number of these early texts for a forthcoming book and was struck by how worried the authors were about readers not believing them. One fretted that his accounts would be “disparaged” by those who “think themselves learned.” Another feared that “simple folk” would refuse to believe the “fragile sex” would engage in such terrible practices.

Trial records show it was a hard sell. Most people remained concerned with harmful magic – witches causing illness or withering crops. They didn’t much care about secret satanic gatherings.

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