Wellness and its demons
According to wellness-Insta, invisible enemies are trying to invade you + your kids
Have you noticed that sound recently - a strange quietness? Yes, Jordan Peterson has been off social media. The culture war has temporarily lost its biggest megaphone. What has silenced the grumpy prophet? Well, almost since the day he became the most famous intellectual and spiritual authority in western culture, Peterson has been beset by strange ailments: depression, chronic pain, akathisia, myopathia. In the last few years, those ailments have become incapacitating and neither he nor his family is quite sure what to do about it. His daughter, nutrition influencer Mikhaila Peterson, suggested last year that her father might be under ‘spiritual attack’. Yes, the most famous psychologist in the world is beset by demons. But now, a new enemy has been identified: mold.
Peterson, according to the latest diagnosis, is suffering from Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), a controversial diagnosis according to which exposure to mold leads to a host of mental and physical health problems. It’s the dark side of the shroom boom: evil fungi.
I feel sympathy for Peterson and cannot imagine how terrifying and demoralizing it must be to have one’s ability to function robbed by incapacitating symptoms which doctors struggle to diagnose and treat. It’s frightening because it could happen to anyone. But I was also struck by the parallels between the invisible enemies of Christianity - demons - and the invisible enemies of wellness.
Every couple of years, wellness culture becomes obsessed with a new invisible enemy that is the root of all evil, or rather, the root of all inflammation: mold, electro-magnetic fields / 5G, heavy metals (in your food, water, vaccines, chemtrails), food additives / seed oils / gluten, blue light, parasites / ticks, glyphosates, microplastics, and so on and on and on. Once you’re in the wellness Instagram slipstream, you won’t just be warned about one issue, but a whole pandaemonium of invisible agents trying to invade your body and the body of your children.
Some of these invisible enemies are infections of modernity - EMF / 5G / blue light / vaccines / pesticides / food additives. And some are ancient enemies of the natural world, as old as Satan - parasites, mold.
The body in the wellness universe is like the body of a medieval saint - it finds itself in hostile territory, filled with invisible enemies trying to penetrate it, and it must try to protect its sovereignty. Except in wellness, it’s not a monk, it’s a MAHA mom trying to protect her kids from the demons of civilization.
Maeve Eberhardt is a linguistics professor at the University of Vermont. She analysed the language of the website of Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s famous wellness brand.
What emerges from the keyword analysis are three major discursive themes threaded throughout the corpus: (i) harmful substances are everywhere, (ii) the larger environment is beyond individuals’ control, and (iii) good citizens must exert control over body, food, and home.
The way wellness culture talks about invisible enemies is strongly reminiscent of medieval demon language. This from the Goop website:
While all toxic heavy metals wreak havoc on the body, MERCURY is an especially insidious beast, responsible for untold suffering throughout human history… MERCURY toxicity can be responsible for countless disorders and symptoms, including anxiety, ADHD, OCD, autism, bipolar disorder, neurological disorders, epilepsy, tingling, numbness, tics, twitches, spasms, hot flashes, heart palpitations, hair loss, brittle nails, weakness, memory loss, confusion, insomnia, loss of libido, fatigue, migraines, endocrine disorders, and depression. In fact, mercury poisoning is at the core of depression for a large percentage of people who suffer from it.
The wellness consumer occasionally reminds me of Nicole Kidman in The Others - a worried mother close to nervous collapse, desperately trying to protect herself and her children from hostile supernatural entities surrounding them.
How can you protect your sovereign bodies from the invisible enemies all around us? Detox, deep cleanse, purge, fast, switch your diet, buy supplements, buy amulets and crystals and strange devices, raise your frequency, move house, buy tests that identify the enemies within, and if possible, remove yourself entirely from Babylonian modernity, ‘exit the matrix’, and retreat to some corner of nature, far from the nearest 5G spire, where you homeschool your kids and eat only homegrown fruit or, perhaps, give up food altogether and become a Breatharian.
There is, of course, a vast priesthood of wellness experts ready and waiting to protect you and your kids from the invisible threats, with their products, services and MLM schemes. And, remarkably, they have expertise in not just one of the invisible threats, but all of them!
When wellness becomes demonology
You can see how easily this quest for purification and self-defense could blur into old-school demonology, and it’s no surprise that the range of alternative therapies offered in Goop’s Netflix series included actual exorcisms. I heard an interview recently with integrative medicine influencer Dr Simon Yu, who warned listeners of the usual litany of invisible enemies - mold, heavy metals, EMF, parasites - and at one point Dr Yu leaned into the demonic:
What if I propose that parasites are akin to demons? Parasites are deceptive, malevolent, elusive entities. They drain your energy, hijack your mind, and overpower your will. If we replace the term parasites with demons, we can then view the history of mankind and medicine from a unique perspective.
The blurred line between the invisible enemies of wellness and literal demons is most obvious in the work of Anthony William, the ‘Medical Medium’, who is a leading wellness influencer and Goop columnist, with tens of millions of followers on Facebook and Instagram. He gained prominence by claiming the Epstein-Barr virus causes many ailments including cancer, he popularised the celery juice diet, and he often shows up on my Instagram feed warning of heavy metals. William claims he gets his health advice from angelic beings. The advice is reminiscent of medieval Catholicism - he speaks of the ‘Holy Four’ of fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, which protect us against the ‘Unforgiving Four’ of radiation, heavy metals, DDT and ‘the viral explosion’. His most recent book tells his followers how to protect themselves from demons and spiritual warfare.
We should not be surprised at this porous boundary between secular wellness and demon-obsessed Christianity. As I and others have written, the religion of wellness emerged out of 19th-century Protestant Christianity and especially from new movements like Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventism and Mormonism, in which the healthy soul and the healthy body become more and more intertwined, as do moral and physical purity and the concepts of sin and disease. The path to heaven becomes the road to wellness, and the pilgrim’s progress becomes one long diet / cleanse / purge / detox / colonic irrigation. Wellness shares with Protestant Christianity a tendency to apocalypticism - one friend is convinced everyone vaccinated will drop dead in 2027 (he also thinks a meteor will strike the same year).
The family resemblances between wellness and evangelical Christianity helps us understand how and why so many wellness influencers went MAHA / MAGA in the last few years. They share with evangelicals a tendency to a paranoid world-view: we are under attack, there are invisible enemies all around us, and THEY (Big Pharma / Big Agro / the Deep State / demonic elite) are trying to control us through infernal technologies. We need the charismatic outsider - Trump, RFK - to protect us and our children from their evil plans.
‘Yes’, you may say, ‘I see the parallels between Christian demons and the invisible enemies of wellness…but that doesn’t mean wellness is totally wrong in its obsessions. Mold toxicity is a real thing, vaccine adverse events are not entirely made up, all those microplastics and pesticides and food additives in our diet probably are messing us up!’ I agree...
