Negli Stati Uniti durante la crisi pandemica si sarebbe registrata una crescita del numero di persone che cercano consolazione nello spiritismo. Su The End of the World, Colin Dickey indaga le ragioni di questo fenomeno passando in rassegna alcuni eventi storici che avrebbero favorito tendenze simili.

This is the year of magical thinking. The complete breakdown in a coordinated federal response to the pandemic has left our country adrift, and individuals scrambling for basic necessities. Rather than face this catastrophe head on, everyone from school administrators to politicians has expressed an absurd kind of wishful thinking that COVID-19 will eventually, somehow, just go away.

As a means of abdicating responsibility, magical thinking is an egregious dereliction of duty, but it can also be a vital means of responding to the devastation that follows. As our public health and economic infrastructures have broken down, so too have our cultural and religious infrastructures. As the death toll from this new virus began to reach terrifying new levels, the usual means we have always relied on to endure death became strangely unavailable. Families have been prohibited from being with their loved ones at their bedsides, and funerals—like all large gatherings—have been banned or severely restricted. Just as deaths were spiking in rapid, tragic ways, our rituals to cope with these deaths were interrupted.

Deprived of these means of making sense to death, more and more people have turned to psychic mediums as a means of making sense of their loss.

Immagine da Pikist.