I converted to Catholicism at age 16 on a moody fall night, the Oregon air crisp and threatening to drizzle. The ceremony was held in the dimly-lit chapel of the Jesuits who lived on the campus of my high school. My parents, who were not God-fearing people but who worked hard to afford my Catholic school tuition, looked on proudly, even if they didn’t understand my choice completely. My older brother did little to mask his confusion.
In one way, this gesture of faith made sense for me. I had always been a chaser, a seeker: desperate to believe, to tether myself to something, to belong. I experienced the affliction that is American teenage girlhood in the 1990s, in the mossy Northwest where, at the time, a unique wave of third-wave feminism was emerging from the region’s vibrant underground music scene. These were years of my life when I felt pulled by polar opposites: the Catholic Church and my daily life in school yanked at one arm, while feminism and punk pulled on the other.
I was too young to personally know something important was happening around me, but I proudly wore my brother’s hand-me-down band shirts and became an avid listener of local college radio, absorbing everything. At the time, a particularly female movement called “riot grrrl” was emerging from the region, which demanded space for women in the punk scene and other traditionally male spaces. Riot grrrl was “a new form of expression for young women,” Fabiola Reyna, the founder of She Shreds magazine, described in a podcast.
At shows, girls would link arms and stand close to the stage, claiming the space where the mosh pit would normally be. Those linked arms were symbolic: a refusal to carry the shame of patriarchy one generation further. “Riot grrrl empowered women to stand up and literally scream about things that they had been taught to keep silent about for generations,” Reyna said.
To my young brain, it felt like to be a girl and to be angry just made sense. On MTV, I heard Tori Amos sing about her rape and Gwen Stefani croon about the familiar feeling of being less-than in every space. Courtney Love, the famed wife of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, a stripper turned punk rock guitarist in the band Hole, screamed like she’d never been afraid of anything in her entire life. I was a burgeoning writer, and as the riot grrrls emphasized the importance of speaking up, I yelled in my own way on the page.
But despite all of this feminism in the air around me, at my high school, I learned that to be even a little bit religious was to have a certain kind of social cachet at my school. I did not enter high school a Catholic, nor was it a requirement of attendance. And as my family was not religious, I grew up as aware of Jesus as I was of Han Solo—to me, both were characters in elaborate stories.
Most of my peers had been in Catholic school all their lives, and automatically mumbled all the complicated prayers and mantras at school masses, held each Friday in the cafeteria. My friends asked why I never attended; I said I wasn’t Catholic. They urged me to go anyway.
After a while, I started to look forward to the old ritualism—the mantra prayers, the incense, and the drama of it all. I fumbled through the motions until mass became a familiar dance. I found solace, but also an acceptance from my peers that can be hard to have affirmed as a teenager. At mass, social lines blurred; they were back by lunch.
In decades prior, young Catholics were encouraged to choose a confirmation name from the story of a saint that particularly resonated with them. Though this had fallen out of fashion, when I decided to convert to Catholicism at age 16, I chose one anyway: Agnes, the patron saint of purity.
Catholicism had won the tug of war over me, but Agnes is my proof the riot grrrl remained at a low simmer. Agnes was born in 291 AD. As a teenager, she was so devoted to her own purity, she rejected the romantic advances of high-class suitors. Jesus was her only spouse. One nobleman felt so spurned by this, he ordered Agnes to be tortured, dragged through the streets, raped, then burned at the stake.
The story goes that every man who tried to force himself onto her was struck blind. Her hair suddenly grew long, swaddling her small body like a protective cage. When men tried to burn her, the flames parted around her. And so, finally, her story concluded as so many women’s have: They chopped her head off.
Purity wasn’t what drew me to Agnes; her story felt like a nod toward some truism that spanned the ages: that men would get whatever they wanted, one way or another. We had to never cave, never compromise, especially when it came to our spirituality. Her story felt inherently punk rock.
When I envisioned the life of Agnes playing out on a screen in my mind, I pictured her laughing, smiling a wide-toothed grin of bloody-teeth, her body hairy and calm: a hideous beauty, terrifying in all the power she contained in the face of violence. She was a force, a season. And I wanted to be like that.
Of course, I was only 16 when I chose this name. In time, the irony of Agnes as a Catholic saint would settle in: a hyper-patriarchal church where women can never lead. Eventually, the church’s hypocrisy, treatment of women, and systemic abuse of vulnerable people would lead to my departure from the institution. My faith crumbled, but my feminism remained. It would be a long time before I would feel anything spiritual again.
By 2017, I was in a sort of spiritual crisis. I was now a professional journalist and had poured myself into my work, but felt I was never getting ahead. I had immersed myself in understanding political extremism, but being so steeped in other people’s hate was taking a personal toll on me. I needed something to hold onto, and I knew I wouldn’t find it in a church.
For a time, I found something spiritual—or spiritual-seeming—in tarot cards, a tool long deployed by thinkers in New Age circles. I bought a classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck from a New Age bookstore, eschewing superstitions that a tarot deck must be given to you. I didn’t have anyone in my life who would do that sort of thing, so I got my own.
For a few years, I casually played with the cards, but it wasn’t until 2020, when the world locked down during the pandemic, that I sank deeper into their history and meanings, and they began to answer questions for me. I signed up for Zoom classes on tarot history and practice, and took copious notes.
By 2020, during extended periods of COVID lockdown, this kind of spiritual seeking seemed to be flourishing. It was particularly visible on social media, where people sold tarot cards and crystals. Self-help gurus offered coaching and meditation workshops. It seemed like a fresh surge of the New Age—an umbrella term for alternative spiritual ideas and practices popularized in the 1970s and 1980s that focused on self-improvement and healing but were not derived from any single religious tradition.
But this time, the New Age was online. It was young, but also old. A New New Age trying to make all our helplessness tolerable. “New Age gives you this sense of ‘I can do something about this,’ either by narrowing your view to literally just yourself and your emotional responses, or by giving you this cosmic sense of you’ve got this higher purpose,” said Susannah Crockford, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Exeter. “People got stuck inside for a really long time.”
Whereas in more traditional religious paths, like Catholicism or Islam, believers take direction from ordained leaders, New Age (often used interchangeably with “metaphysical”) adherents put stock in their own kinds of leaders: psychics, seers, mediums, spiritual coaches. Beliefs in reincarnation and paranormal phenomena are common, but not required. Nothing is required. Wisdom can be found in dreams, in stars, in astrological signs, in charts mapping where the sun and moon and stars were at the time of one’s birth. Or, in my case, tarot cards. Power is held by those who claim it.
One of the movement’s most undeniable facets is that New Age ideas have had a longstanding appeal to women. Dreams and emotions are not discarded, but studied. It is a world where women are not followers but leaders, acting as gurus, mystics, living goddesses. “They’re offering a concept of ultimate reality—or God—that is not male,” Catherine Wessinger, a professor of history of religions at Loyola University New Orleans, said. “It’s not an issue of talking about a he or a she. It’s just a higher state of awareness, of unity.” And this remains starkly at odds with many traditional religions, where women cannot be ordained, and their bodies and sexualities are legislated by men of faith.
On Saturday nights, I’d fire up Zoom again and have hours-long calls with a friend who was also in my classes, where we would talk about life and about our worries about the world, and then we’d lay out tarot cards, scouring them for some kind of message or meaning. We talked about how this felt vaguely spiritual. It felt good to admit to another person that I needed some kind of spiritual dimension to my life. And yet, when I scrolled through Instagram, this world I was dabbling in began to worry me.
As COVID blanketed the world in fear, conspirituality—a term coined by academics to categorize the fusing of conspiracy theory with spiritual ideas—started to play out online. While some practitioners of New Age ideas were infusing fearful people with a surge of love and light, others exploited that fear to sell goods and sow mistrust.
It reinforced my worries that the New Age—despite all the benefits I was finding from it—could be yet another mechanism of exerting spiritual control over other people. Online, I saw women promoting themselves as prophets, while selling snake oil: a woman in Colorado called herself “Mother God” and peddled colloidal silver as a miracle COVID cure. Another woman—not far from where Bikini Kill talked about personal power in Washington state—was telling people the vaccine was poison, that the end was nigh. She’d been at it for decades.
I dug into history, and before I knew it, I was reporting. I found that generations of female leaders had staked a claim in the New Age, summoning power for themselves by professing spiritual wisdom and recruiting massive followings. I had stumbled upon the New Age seeking something spiritual at my own vulnerable time, but instead of priests, I encountered a new world of prophetesses offering empty answers in exchange for people’s money and blind trust. That didn't feel different at all from the church I pushed away from.
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In the years since COVID rushed into our midst, instead of only making journalism about extremism, I began to write, too, about people’s quest for love and clarity, and the ways fear makes us malleable in the hands of grifters. In writing, and asking questions, I found the personal power I had been looking for all along.
Sometimes at the end of a long day of reporting, I might flip a card or a few for clarity. A Two of Coins. A Ten of Swords. A Hermit. A Fool. They aren’t telling my fortune. I know now that I don’t have to be a believer to be spiritual, and I don’t have to give myself away to any object or predetermined system—whether that’s Catholic or New Age or anything else. But I do like the things tarot makes me think about, how I find myself considering all possibilities. By opening myself to all spiritual options, I’m linking arms with generations of seeking women who simply want answers in a fearsome world.
