kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with wendigo

I have often said we live in a Dark Age of the spirit. Seldom has it been more difficult to take up genuine spiritual work. All the religions are corrupt, all of the prophets are false, and for most of us, there is no source of guidance save a small, flickering, constantly endangered candle deep within the cloudy windows of the soul. Demons, those shifty beings who feed off human sorrow and pain and wait for opportunities to parasitize the weak and greedy, are having a field day. Any kind of spiritual work such as basic prayer or the creation of genuine community is almost impossible in these heavy times.

There are always disparate paths one can travel no matter how bleak and unilateral the road may appear. If you’ve ever watched a particularly bleak art film such as Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl or The Devil’s Bath, you are familiar with nihilism as a genre. The character, usually a depressed woman, winds her way towards inevitable suicide because circumstances and patriarchy can only lead to one kind of grisly, self-harming outcome. Yet there is always a choice, even for those afflicted with the worst cases of Sartrean bad faith.

One of these choices is to go full Rambo on a bad guy/gal like Luigi Mangione did on Brian Thompson and Shane Tamura did on Wesley LePatner. Vigilante justice works quite well, no matter what its detractors like to claim. A dead CEO stops a great deal of cash from hemorrhaging out of middle and lower middle class pockets, and better yet, the rest of the CEOs start living in fear. When CEOs actually fear for their lives as a consequence of being horrible people who actively make grandiosely evil choices, this is an undeniable net positive. A dead criminal has a zero percent recidivism rate. When Muslim migrant rape gangs have to worry about being stalked, tortured, and systematically murdered by larger gangs of disenfranchised, ski-masked white boys, every young English girl and boy who has to walk to school alone breathes a little easier. You won’t sell me on the notion of the baddie rapist exterminators going to Christian Hell or atheist oblivion. I believe Valhalla awaits them, because just as the old gods are stirring, all signs point to them having readied their old realms for exclusive reentry to heroes.

The heroic Saint of Killers schtick is not for everyone. It is certainly not for me in this incarnation where I am so short that I cannot refill my bird feeder without a stepladder. Though I pity the fool who drives me to invoke my old, latent, inner serial killer, at this time she is not in the building. Most people choose the Path of the Normie, and though this path can go six ways to Sunday, more often than not it leads to a great deal of reincarnation and short stints in both Heaven and Purgatory between lives. The Path of the Normie is especially problematic in our day an age as souls are sifted to determine how attached to the material they have become. It is my impression we should separate ourselves out from Normies as they are easily moved by astral tides and can easily become zombified monsters.

As often happens with me these days, I was doing my normal routine when a disembodied being essentially sat me down and instructed me to take notes on concepts it wanted me to explain to my small yet highly intelligent audience. As per usual, this entity was far smarter than me (not that hard of a state to accomplish, I’m afraid) and I suspect it could have been from the Divine realms of consciousness. It said that I needed to do my best (in my own retarded way) to outline three main strategies for approaching spiritual work. It said that the three basics I should cover — these things often come in threes — were the virtues of Differentiation, Diligence, and Humility. As always, I acknowledged I could be wrong about everything, including the nature of the entity I believe was speaking to me. I promised it I would do my level best to meditate and explain the concepts to my small cadre of Meatworld friends. You are among those friends, Dear Reader, so here we go.

Differentiation

The first part of true spiritual work is differentiation from what I have called Normie consciousness. In my essay about the Normie path, I liken Normie consciousness to a shallow ocean of muddled clouds that is currently being driven off the edge of a great cliff. There is that old saying “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” This is usually said by adults to kids who are intent on following a stupid trend, implying that they are moving towards self-destruction because the herd is moving the same way. True confession: the vision of the shallow ocean of clouds came to me in one of my nightly dreams and I unpacked it in discursive meditation, during which I believe I had help understanding it via one of my many, smarter-than-me, possibly Divine spirit guides. The trouble with following trends is that you become what you follow. If you fail to draw boundaries around what you will and will not do, the borders of your soul disappear and you become subject to massive forces that would seek to drive you towards a particular outcome or karma. This is why I likened the Normie response to MRNA vaccination pressures to a mass choice to fall into Hel, because this is the outcome I believe that has been created for many souls due to the pressure of many erasing their soul borders to join the great blob of vaccinated materialism. Of course vaccination is not the only determinant whether a human soul is one with the blob or apart from it. There are a zillion factors that make a soul, most of which are far too complex to derive any blanket judgements. Also, I could be wrong.

In an age of extreme materialism, the work of differentiation means shedding materialism and practicing what you preach. The original Jesus and Buddha are two good examples of what this looked like: both became wandering mendicants who eschewed luxury in favor of mystical enlightenment. Most Normies go the opposite way of Jesus and Buddha, seeking the various initiation rites of the Bathroom Class. Nowhere is this more true than of televangelist preachers who live in McMansions and fly around in private jets. The Bathroom Class and its aspirants are deeply attached to the material to the point where they frequently become Earthbound after physical death. When physical life revolves around comfort, convenience, and the inflation of the ego, you vibrate more strongly in death to what you did in life. Those who treated everything and everyone as an object to be used and thrown away will end up tied to their own rotting garbage after death. They will remain tethered in Meatworld as hungry ghosts, their astral revenants animated by the ever-starving Wendigos of material lust. This is a terrifying age of unique horrors, especially as a psychic sensitive. Those who chose to incarnate in this era — this includes you — have balls made of brass.

I hope it goes without saying that differentiation means learning to stand on your own, alone if necessary, against tyranny, greed, and lowest common denominator peer pressure. Fear is the mind killer, said the Dune sci-fi novel series, and it is a good take away even if you have no interest in those books. When everyone around you, including the poor people, entertains themselves with lurid fantasies of living in luxurious mansions, be the rebel who sweeps his own floor in the morning and cleans his own toilet every night with no plans on ever changing those habits if your bank accounts swell. When every unemployed, former IT manager is scouring Indeed and milking every connection to compete for the golden ring of another $100K+ cushy corporate position, be the guy who walks away from the rat race entirely and starts a bike repair business or who restores old furniture to its former glory out of a two room apartment. When every person in your peer group subsists off a steady dopamine drip of video games, social media, and porn before going off to college and accumulating permanently life-ruining debt, be the girl who turns off the machines and goes outside and talks to the trees. Be the weirdo who takes jobs merely in order to understand regular, working people while she is still young. In my own case, my successful management of my own fears about lucrative employment ushered me into a lifelong career of music teaching. Thirty years later, I love my job and I am amazing at it. If I had been more afraid of the bohemian life of a music teacher, I would have made different, more materialistic choices and I would likely be unhappy about them.

Letting go of Perfect

Ironically, the drive towards perfectionism makes us into Normies and dissolves our soul borders as effectively as consciously slipping into the stream of the herd. If you are anything like me, you want everything in Meatworld “just so” and you have had trouble accepting things the way they are since before the day you were born. As a child, I already had a rampant desire to look perfect, act wisely, and to be among those whom I thought of as perfect.

Perfect, of course, is not possible in Meatworld. It is often the most perfect looking people who are the foulest and vilest. Perfect, at least in Meatworld, is an illusion and a trap.

Perfectionism often comes with the toxic trait of snap judgement of the perceived imperfect, especially where appearances are concerned. If you are a perfectionist, the next time you see a person or people who do not present an immediate, bodily threat, catch yourself before you condemn them for their appearances or judge yourself against their appearance. When your brain goes to judge with “She looks tired” or “I look tired compared to her”, “He’s fatter than I am” or “I am skinnier than him”; “Her hair looks like s**t”; “He is a slob”, stop and acknowledge that they are probably doing their best to get by in the world, just like you. Like you, they crap and have stinky butts. Get over it and move on to thoughts that are more constructive for you, you, and you.

As I aged, I noticed that my perfectionism and competitiveness also affected the spaces I occupied. I was always running algorithms in my head to determine which spaces were “good enough” for the likes of me, not even knowing I was doing it. The entire time I was doing this, I remained deaf, dumb, and blind to the spirits of place and all they wished to tell me. Gratitude (in place of worry) is the primary method of connecting to the spirits of place that I espouse in my upcoming Aeon book, Sacred Homemaking, due out in Summer 2026. Compulsively and constantly appreciate helpful spaces and items just as you would helpful people. For instance, I am writing this sitting in a sixty year old chair while looking at my spectacular front yard garden in a lower middle class block on a rare, cool summer day. I could focus on the list of projects I need to do to make this little house perfect — repotting plants, vacuuming, repainting, growing hedges, remodeling, or I could focus on how grateful I am for this time to write, the lovely porch that my husband fixed up and painted, this brief spot of respite from summer heat, the wonderful books in the bookshelves, the adorable cats, the door that keeps the outside out an the inside in, the windows that easily open and close, the colorful rugs, the fine air, being well-fed. There is much to love here — more, actually — than what needs improvement or maintenance. Every second of every day offers an opportunity to focus on what is already good, and the very definition of true progress is to stop, smell, and thank the roses.

Diligence

My late father was a diligent man. He measured twice and cut once. He maintained a beautiful house and yard for nearly sixty years of his life, along with marriage to my Mom, who was able to stop working shortly before I was adopted in 1973. My father was mentally alert literally until the second he died, which I personally witnessed. The day before he died, he was perfectly lucid and conversing with relatives. Despite having advanced bladder and liver cancer, he still worked in the yard two weeks before his death in October of 2023. He kept his salesman/estimator job until the day he died as well. He was 85. My German immigrant grandmother was the same way. Her mind was not as sharp as my father’s in late age, but she was as neat as a pin until the day she died, always kind, loving, and sweet to everyone.

As a kid, I remember both my parents and grandparents making their beds every morning. My parents’ house was always clean and tidy. My father loved his lawn and never allowed it to become anything less than a well-manicured park. They were always early picking us up from various events or school. They were dependable. Most kids do not have the blessing of dependable, organized parents. The foundation of security a dependable parent builds underneath a child is a deeply spiritual well regardless of religion or belief. I would not be in the position of spiritual strength in which I find myself had I been without my dependable, stable, organized, diligent parents.

Once we have differentiated and shown ourselves to be fearless (mainly to ourselves), the routines of diligence take over. Making the bold statement is not enough. You must live it every day, through thick and through thin. You must continue to kick ass until the day you die… and beyond. In my own case, my own unwavering, daily dedication to revival Druid practices of discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection, and Ogham divination for myself and others has resulted in tangible results. These results would not have been as remarkable if I had skipped my practices when I was feeling ill, low, or not in the mood. The gods and helper spirits want to help us to help ourselves, but they cannot assist us if we are not in it to win it. The long haul is… long. We set ourselves on a trajectory and we must remain brave and true to it despite terrible weather and great temptations off the path.

Musical practice helped prepare me for spiritual work. I was born to be lazy as many musicians are: there is this idea that we can hack our way to musical expertise without practice. There is also the issue of there never being time enough in any given day to practice properly. As a music teacher, I have learned that five minutes of practice in a day or a week is better than no minutes. Perfect is not possible, so whip out a tune and stop caring if it is going to get you to Carnegie Hall. Perseverance is what matters. All rivers start as a trickle.

Humility

Imbalance of humility is a major player in the spiritual leprosy of our era, especially when it comes to perceiving the Divine. I find it very frustrating when evangelist Christians claim their God is everywhere. Really? Is He in the underground tunnels where children are flayed alive and eaten after being violently raped by cackling political dignitaries? Is He in the throat of the sea bream who suffocates to death in the Pacific garbage patch? Is He squatting in the reeking contents of my cat’s litter box? The Christian God and his monotheist counterparts (Buddha, Mohammed) are not very relatable. Their stories no longer slap. The metaphors are still relevant but the stories themselves, especially the ones that take place in an ancient Semitic river land when pyramids were still being built, are elderly and fall short. What people invariable end up doing is looking for more updated, modern applications of the metaphors — hence Savior and Changer archetypes being pinned on the Great White Disappointment — instead of more renewed faith that Jesus is actually coming back. Monotheists especially suffer from perfectionist, all-or-nothing syndrome, which is a way of categorizing all phenomena into spiritual binaries: good/evil, heaven/hell, winner/also ran, God/Satan. The problem here is that the spiritual is the subtle. It requires detail and nuance. There is no nuance in a binary, no working ecosystem, only the bludgeon of the Rightly Right and the Wrongly Wrong. See yourself as the Rightly Right and you will unleash all manner of horrors upon your fellow humans: Mao, Stalin, and the Inquisitors come to mind. On the other side, knowing yourself to be Wrongly Wrong (and seemingly helpless to improve) hands you over to the perversity and depravity of that worldview. Those who see and know themselves to be Wrongly Wrong become monsters of a different sort, offered up to similar Wendigos: Jeffrey Dahmer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sean Combs, and the Marquis de Sade for whom sadism was named are infamous for the harm they have done.

Better to exist within the realm of accountability and diligent discrimination to always discern right from wrong. This discernment is far from easy and must begin with the self. Discernment involves deciding which parts of our world belong to Satan, which belong to God/gods, and an entire, bursting spectrum of in-betweens.

You have both less power and more power than you think. You can control the minds of others if you like — just look at the monsters mentioned in the paragraphs above who started life as regular people — do you really want to be like them? You will not easily levitate spoons or fly a Quidditch broom without material innovation. Maybe take that into consideration if that is your idea of magic.

To be humble is to understand you are special but not exempt. You don’t get to skate, whether you are embedded in the crowd or surfing above it. You must devote yourself to unrelenting, daily work, and sometimes that work is down in the muck with those who will never understand you, nor you them. To be humble is to fully acknowledge you could be wrong and not to be butthurt because you are not yet a god or anything close to it. Humility, like the third element of most ternaries, is what seals the deal and opens the Universe of new possibilities. Stay humble, my friend.

For those who actually have vibrant, full lives: Katy Perry is a pop singer. She sang at the Superbowl halftime show a few years ago.

Katy Perry’s most recent publicity stunt was to take a rocket ship to the edge of space with a crew of five other women. The mission, if you can even call it that, was named Blue Origin, a generic, corporate shill moniker that would be entirely plausible as an overpriced cosmetics line or a stupidly expensive sushi restaurant. The all-female excursion that did not even break orbit cost a cool billion dollars and pumped out more carbon emissions in one shot than a billion people create in a lifetime. Jeff Bezo’s latest wife, a heavily plastic-surgeried pilot turned glamour puss, was in the group. The trip in its entirety was done to show the triumph of feminism — over what we will never know — and only took eleven minutes start to finish. Jeff Bezos, who financed it, is using it to launch his latest scheme of Space Rides for Rich People. Anyone can go on an incredibly wasteful tour of near space if he or she can cough up 150 grand in cash. The internet had a field day with the mission, with the funniest of memes invoking the rocket ship scene from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999). Blue Origin was by CIA spooks, for CIA spooks, and that is why the flight list included Katy Perry and Gayle King, Oprah’s best friend. Facing relentless mockery, Gayle King attempted to defend the jaunt after the fact, and was downright pissy about it. Ms. King defended the extravagance with her very own “Let ‘em eat cake” phrase: “Have y’all been to space?” and of course the internet, led by TikTok, said “No, Gayle, you probably need to be able to afford health insurance to do that.”

To state the extremely obvious, Katy Perry is not the brightest crayon in the box. I would guesstimate her IQ to be in the high 80s at best. That is why we have to take her lifestyle choices with a few grains of salt — she’s nearly in the Special category, if you get my drift, and we cannot expect a person who nearly rode the short bus to make consistently excellent decisions. Regardless of derp, when a person becomes extraordinarily wealthy and famous, it can go several ways. In Katy’s case, it has gone the way of the Wendigo. The Wendigo as most of you know is a Native American creature of legend. It is a formidable blend of cannibal and zombie that was once human. A Wendigo is created when a person tastes human flesh and develops an insatiable appetite for human meat. Yet the more the Wendigo eats, the thinner and hungrier it becomes.

Katy Perry has one or more Wendigo spirits attached to her — one craves influence, hence her absurd, vain album releases under the guise of empowering women and constant cringe faux-enlightened posturing. Another one of Katy’s Wendigos is real estate. She has destroyed more than one elderly person’s life by forcing the purchase of their homes she fancied those residences. She once roped an actual nun into circumstances that most likely caused the elderly nun’s death on the courtroom floor because she wanted to buy the abbey. Katy constantly dives into drama over houses she covets for herself, despite owning multiple large homes, which tells me she longs for a true home of the sort that money cannot buy. I’ll be talking about that true sense of home in my upcoming 2026 book, Sacred Homemaking, which is an occult take on the tidying genre.

George Michael at the height of Wham!'s fame

The day to Katy Perry’s night is George Michael, a world famous singer who died in 2016. George Michael, who was half of the group called Wham!, was one of the 1980s biggest stars and most likely went through the whole disgusting Hollywood groomer mill with the best of them. Unlike in Katy Perry’s case, whatever happened did not turn George Michael into a monster. He turned into an angel. George Michael donated huge amounts of money in secret. He secretly volunteered to help causes he believed in despite being a literal rock star. Revelations of just how charitable and utterly selfless he was were only forthcoming after his death at age 53 because he deliberately tried to keep it all on the down low. When he saw a woman on the TV show Deal or No Deal say that she could not afford IVF treatment, he secretly called the next day and gave her 15,000 pounds. She ended up naming the son she conceived via the treatment after him. He regularly left 5000 pound tips with waitresses and waiters. Entire charities said that his millions kept them afloat for years, and these are only the ones we were able to find out about. Had George Michael met a bunch of nuns who were going to lose their sanctuary instead of Katy Perry, there is no doubt in my mind he would have bought the property for them at a much inflated cost just so they could stay there as long as they wanted.

Like many greedy people, Katy Perry will remain in a state of Wendigo-driven stasis until she lets go of her fear. The gods are patient and are willing to let this process take many excruciating lifetimes. I personally would not trade places with Katy Perry for all the world, because much of her wealth is unearned. Like many who amass unearned wealth, she has failed to understand she can and will be earning it back in future lifetimes. Or maybe she does understand it deep down and it causes even more dissonance in her fractured brain. Generosity sublimates to the power of seven, and that’s why George Michael’s soul was likely able to have a great deal more autonomy after he died. Katy Perry won’t be so lucky. This is why it is so important to cultivate generosity and gratitude in equal measure. It’s not just that Katy Perry is going to get the short end of the stick later on in her future incarnations, it’s that she is horrible now. She does not act like a happy person. She acts like a person with a Wendigo. She is the author of her own destruction because she lacks humility, grace, and inner beauty. Nevertheless, it’s never too early or late to stop lying to yourself. As George Michael proved, compulsive generosity is the fastest shortcut to heal the heart, but it isn’t the only path. Though I doubt she will do anything differently, I will always maintain that no person is beyond redemption, even if that person is a space cadet bimbo.

I have always wondered just how much of this French stereotype is true!

Making the words and lives of other people into objects of obsession conveniently places self-realization upon a high, impossible shelf. The life of the revered person or people becomes a Wendigo — a monster that cannot be satisfied and that always cannibalizes its own tribe and eventually itself. Westerners have had a long time fad of fetishizing Eastern religions and (bastardized) Eastern meditation. Eastern religions often act as a Wendigo to someone born and raised in the West. Their practices, divorced from the land, become poisonous. Much of this is because of the conflict with the spirit of the land in which they are adopted.

Exotic fetishism is a syndrome that results from feeling embarrassed about one’s humble origins, feeling unmoored or uninspired by one’s traditions, and longing for someone else’s birthright. Exotic fetishism is a way of displacing the appreciation of the here and now for the cherished other, who always lives in another land, another time, another social class. For instance, a Westerner who throws himself into Buddhist transcendental meditation while holding down a salary class job and while living in the West is likely to piss off the land spirits without knowing it depending on how grateful or ungrateful he acts in his daily life. If he’s lucky, the beings of the unseen ecosystem around him will be forgiving or at least ambivalent. If he’s not so lucky, he will be beset with personal tragedies, unhappiness, and misfortune. Buddhism is a religion of ancestor worship and if he leaves that part out, he’s missing too huge of a chunk of that religion to be doing it right. If he’s a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), he isn’t likely to understand ancestor worship on a fundamental level because he will not have been raised that way. There are hard limits to where and how he was born and he did not accept them or work with them; instead he pretended they weren’t there and supplanted his potential with a mantle of faith that wasn’t appropriate to him or the land from whence he came. He rejected the spirits of the land as they were, refused to work with them, and never thought they could do the same to him.

A Little Thing Called Self-Worth

There's a woman I know who has always been tortured by exotic fetishism. Like many exotic fetishists, she has traveled the world. Though she has an interesting ethnic background and is not entirely white, she is ashamed. She is embarrassed by her family's wealth but also embarrassed that they are not filthy, Hollywood mogul rich. She loses all self-worth when she is around celebrities and is the sort who would camp out in dreadfully uncomfortable and potentially degrading circumstances for days if it meant she could spend five minutes chatting with a rock star or top-tier politician. She name-drops insufferably, always presuming that other people are just as impressed by famous people as she is. She has spent her life wondering why she is so miserable, yet it has been under her nose this entire time.

The Land Can Reject Us Too

The land reaches out to us all the time, but if we make fetishes of other times, lands, and cultures, the land spirits around us have no choice but to show us the same rejection we show them. By fetishizing the foreign, we become foreigners on our own soil: anchorless, nomadic, here today, gone tomorrow. We become unworthy of investment. When we refuse to communicate with the spirit of place where we are, the spirits don’t give us much in return: they ignore us and we ignore them.

Obsession with technology is its own sort of exotic fetish. When I walk in the forest preserve, I often see joggers and bikers dressed to the nines in the latest style of designer spandex suits. Their bikes likely cost more than my 16 year old car is worth. They wear sunglasses, noise-cancelling headphones, Apple watches, helmets, and special designer shoes as if they were going to be photographed by paparazzi during or after their bouts of exercise. They don't go through the forest preserve slowly enough to connect with the spirits of the land. They huff and puff too much to notice details like hummingbird moths or wild roses and blackberries. Their headphones cancel the calls of rare sandhill cranes and the distinct song of red winged blackbirds. They wouldn't know a red sumac from a poison sumac until it was far too late and it doesn't occur to them to learn. At least they manage to get to the forest preserve though, because for every one of them there are five of their peers glued to a screen who rarely go outdoors at all.

The Ungratefulness of Exotic Fetishism

There's another irony in that we can make fetishes of our own culture and background and alienate the spirits around us that way. For instance, if I decide my German grandparents, now deceased, are the pinnacle of human transcendence, and I make a fetish out of their lives and become a snob about how great they were, once again I fail to listen to the spirit voices around me and the land that gently guides me every day. I ignore the love of my family who are alive now. I become uncaring about the Earth that generously offers me spaghetti to eat and black tea to drink because it does not exactly match the spaetzle and beer of the past that I imagine my grandparents had. I fail to love the Eastern red cedars and the maples because my grandparents had hawthorns and black pines. I spend my life studying German when I could easily learn Spanish, which is what half my neighborhood speaks.

If I put my head in the clouds of an imaginary land, I am also prone to make stupid mistakes. I could make a small mistake, such as wearing clothing that does not suit me, but I wear it because it is from a culture I admire. I could easily spend too much money, buying trinkets and doodads from the exotic land I am obsessed with, or I could spend thousands traveling. The worst outcome is if I make a major life choice based on my exotic fetishism: marrying someone not because they are right for me, but because they suit the fetish, or wallowing in the fetish as if it is an all-consuming addiction and becoming useless and dependent.

Like it or not, we are spirits in the material world tasked with learning the onerous burden of being human so we may one day free ourselves once again to rest in the arms of God. I can deny my burden and rail against it all I want, but my refusal to learn my lessons will not enable me to pass the class without the usual groundwork.

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Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel, and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich bring a concrete image to my mind. In this vision, I see an aging con artist, their good looks long in the past, their waistlines expanding as old-people waistlines tend to expand. They sit in mammoth living rooms that would have made a medieval king’s castle look like a shack in comparison, watching television with a blank stare while absentmindedly planning their next stab at relevancy: a comeback, a new marriage, a new surgery to puff up what sags, a new car to pinch a last bit of dopamine from their jaded neurons.

People Who Consume Too Much

We modernites are a well-fed people. We all have at least one drawer of stuff we will never use. Some of us have entire basements, garages, and storage units full. We all need to downsize, present company included, yet the people with the most stuff are almost invariably the ones who clamor for MORE, MORE, MORE. For this reason, we have multilevel marketing companies and other sucker pyramid schemes to exploit the middle class. One of the most grotesque examples of multilevel marketier shamelessness I have seen are the companies that have sought to capitalize on the COVID scamdemic overreaction: now that every middle and lower class person is out of work and/or looking for work, the pyramidmeisters are out in full force, recruiting the credulous for their uplines.

Lack of money is cited as the number one cause of depression as well as the number one reason couples get divorced. “If only I had the money, I could do whatever I want,” is the common refrain. Money is the perceived panacea of our time. It is the balm that heals all wounds.

Napoleon Hill will be remembered primarily as a huckster who went bankrupt multiple times with multiple marriages, but his philosophies are essentially sound. Unfortunately, in Hill's case, one has to weed out the good advice from a sea of rapacious greed to get at it. In some ways, he was Donald Trump before it was cool. Osteen never once opened the doors of his megachurches or McMansions to the homeless or the needy. When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, Texas in 2017, Osteen closed the doors of his megachurch and tweeted that he was praying for everyone’s safety. In other words, he answered the question What Would Satan Do: Deluxe Mammon Edition. As far as Byrne, she has written multiple sequels to her original tome and has never been photographed without her signature, only slightly desperate poop-eating grin.

Paris or Bust

I once knew a young man who had a bad case of lack-of-money-itis. He was reasonably bright and articulate. When he was happy, he was delightful and witty. His more regular state was black-pill depression. “If only I were rich” he said over many bitter cups of all night diner coffee. Being rich was his ticket out of depression. If he were rich, he would move to New Zealand; Italy. If he were rich, he would have a much better house. If he were rich, he could afford a nicer piece of insert popular electronic doodad here.

Therein lies the rub: he was rich. His grandmother left him a three bedroom house with a very nice yard in the suburbs. His mother bought and prepared all his food despite the fact he was in his early thirties. His stepfather bailed out his struggling business ventures and paid for his continuing college education. He was one of those people I call a “Paris or Bust”, meaning that he is one of the many who will never be happy unless they have the work-free lifestyle of hotel money heiress Paris Hilton. Paris or Busts marry for money and regret it. They also easily end up homeless because money burns a hole in their pocket, whether it is real money or credit debt money.

I find it interesting when Paris or Busts say they would be more altruistic if only they had more wealth. This is simply not the case. Altruism is now, not later. Joel Osteen didn’t open the doors of his church or his homes to hurricane victims in 2017 because his ministry was never focused on altruism in the first place. Joel Osteen has always been more about making an empire for himself than helping his congregation be like Jesus. Joel Osteen is not like Jesus; he’s more like the opposite of Jesus. The proof is in the pudding. By their fruits ye shall know them.

A young Paris or Bust man who says “If I were rich, I would host Christmas for the orphans and give them tons of presents and a wonderful party every year” is lying. He who does not donate $10 to the local food pantry while he is middle class can become richer than Roosevelt — the embedded habits won’t change. The appetite for material wealth is like a drug addiction. If you grew up rich, you might remember being miserable and ashamed because of it, but there will always be that craving left behind of when things were easier. This is the way it was for me for a long time, and it is only my religious practices that got the monkey off my back once and for all.

A Minute on the Lips...

Material wealth is a Wendigo. Once a taste is had, the yearning to consume isn’t likely to stop without a fight. That’s why for every fantasy I have of earning a billion dollars, I counter with a fantasy of becoming penniless and homeless. I argue that people who addicted to wealth actually worry about becoming homeless all the time, but since they do not admit it in any honest way, it becomes a much greater fear for then than for a lower middle class person, who must always confront the specter of homelessness whenever a bill arrives or the car breaks down. The only people who don’t live in perpetual fear of being poor are poor people.

For many in this age, the concept that infinite independent wealth might never arrive like a rescuing knight on a shining steed is downright intolerable. Our lives of luxury have only served to whet our appetites for more. This is how you get a young man who lives on his parents dime and inherited a suburban house to think of himself as “middle class” or (if he is in a foul mood) “poor”. I’ve known a person who complained that her parents could not afford to finance her film career — her artsy, honors student upbringing gave her an inferiority/superiority complex and a hopeless, debased obsession with the type of celebrities who frequent the pages of W Magazine.

For such a person, there is no world outside the Bubble, where the prosperous must always compete for jobs, grants, mates, attention, photo opportunities, and apparent virtuousness. The longer one lives in the Bubble, the more blind one becomes to its soapy walls closing in. The Bubble in the US is often lily-white, so its residents become self-conscious when confronted by a black person. They immediately become the picture of fawning obsequiousness, their pandering training from news channels, popular movies, and sitcoms kicking in. They doth protest too much. Confronted by a white poor person, the hatred of the poor black person that has been viciously repressed rears its ugly head as bigotry towards the white poor person. Hillary Clinton’s moment of christening the poor as Deplorables did more to unite the poor and working classes of all races than Che Guevara could have ever dreamed: the class war was revealed in its naked, ugly, warty glory. Jesus said the poor are blessed and it is true in at least one sense. Though it will never be easy to be poor, it at least forces you over the hurdle of fear of being poor.

The Indian Chief known as Jack Fiddler lived in a time of scarcity. He was the leader of a tribe called the Sucker in what is now northwestern Ontario, Canada. Near the dawn of the 20th century, the fur trade had decimated the animal population of northwestern Ontario. Hunters and trappers exhausted the forests of their fauna. Trade fell off and people went hungry.

Wendigo became a regular infestation in the area -- that is to say people from Jack Fiddler's tribe and the surrounding tribes regularly went rogue and became insane cannibals living on the fringes. Fiddler, as the resident spiritual healer, reported that he had "defeated" fourteen Wendigos. When his own brother turned Wendigo after a trading expedition ended in starvation, Fiddler had no choice but to euthanize his own sibling. Canadian legislators pegged Fiddler as a mass murderer and put him on trial. Jack Fiddler briefly escaped captivity and hung himself on September 30, 1907.

In the old tales, the Wendigo could not be cured and transformed back into a human. In order to stop a Wendigo, a shaman like Jack Fiddler had to kill it. The Wendigo was like the zombie of modern myth: it was a parasite that could only be killed by eliminating the host. The Wendigo (nowadays labeled as a sufferer of the phenomenon known as Wendigo psychosis) was a material plane menace brought on by starvation's effects upon the brain.

Canadian prosecutors were quick to shunt off Jack Fiddler as the "real" enemy. The Wendigo went unchallenged. Consequently, Fiddler's Wendigos still continue to exist in the most literal sense: my little area of the Midwest spawned Henry Holmes, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer, just to name a few.

Another, less obvious form of Wendigo rides the back of entire populations. The Wendigo is more active than ever before, igniting the ill-conceived fury of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, chewing on the fragile psyches of the deranged men and boys who call themselves incels. Not every person the Wendigo infects is prone to monstrous behavior: there are compulsive shopping Wendigos and anime/manga Wendigos, home decorating Wendigos, political correctness Wendigos, and cleanliness Wendigos. The common element of all Wendigos is that they isolate and destroy their hosts.

Excalibur

The sword that kills the Wendigo is gratitude. The concept is simple, but that does not mean that it is easy. When all traces of ingratitude are rooted out, the Wendigo dies.

Of all of the ancient skills that modern people of the West have lost, the first and foremost is gratitude. Nobody knew in 1780 just how rich the common man would become because of petroleum wealth. There was no such thing as a poor and simultaneous overweight person when the USA was young. Such a concept wasn't conceivable.

If we were to hand out Ingrate Awards, the spoiled dauphins and princesses of Antifa and BLM would be first in line. The God complexes of BLM members know no bounds: not only do they seek to redistribute wealth (i.e. hand out the money stolen from people they don't like to people they do like), they hope to erase the complexity of history so that it cannot dare to reflect badly upon them. Antifa is a nearly identical group of spoiled, mostly college-educated crybabies who prefer to dress their brand of violence and looting in ninja thug costumes. Scratch the surface of a BLM/Antifa member and you have a colossal ingrate who dwells in a living hell of I WANT. Each one of them is a screaming, thinly-disguised inner child who sincerely believes the next tantrum will be strong enough to bring the longed-for Apocalypse.

We cannot force demon-obsessed, overgrown children to be grateful, and even if we could, the methods we would be obliged to use would make us just as awful as they have become. The only place we can start is ourselves.

Gratitude is a form of mental alchemy that sublimates and frees virtue while trapping and banishing vice.

Gratitude starts with small stuff. The process is slow but powerful, much like drops of water that eventually carve a river through a mountain range. There is always something to be grateful for, even in times of hardship (and right now, we are experiencing "interesting times" in the most Chinese curse form of the term) and famine. Back in my college days, I became intensely irritated at a professor of mine who happened to be a devout Christian. He wanted us to understand the story of Job. At the time, I thought of Job as a Stockholm Syndrome masochist who, like a battered woman, kept returning to his abuser. The Bible does a fine job of presenting God as a sadistic creep, and the whole "everybody came back to life and was happy in the end" conclusion of the story does little to ameliorate the depravity of its moral. The flaws in the story of Job obfuscated the idea of being stripped (and beaten) down to only one's purest love of the Creator.

Just as Job always found something to be grateful for, and in the end the only thing he had left to be grateful for was his love of his god, we mere mortals can find much to be grateful for, thus partaking in the sublimation that is gratitude. I have memories of a past life where I starved to death as a child. I don't think this is out of the ordinary in the slightest: we all have past lives and due to the nature of the world, we have all starved at least once. Gratitude is the graceful acceptance of limits. Sometimes the limits are an early death. The material plane is a brutal testing ground. You can choose the Luciferian bull in a china shop route and become a one man army against the predicament of it. Hulk smash! Conversely, you can try the other, subtler route and seek to understand why the material plane is the way it is.

When I first accepted that I have lived many lives, I had to come up against the notion that the poor, the deformed, and the unfortunate "deserve" their outcomes. The issue I take with religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism which would assign people their lots in life based on the castes into which they are reincarnated is that old chestnut of mine: I COULD BE WRONG. Just as it offends the crap out of me that some Christians assume theirs is the one and only true God and that everyone else is going to hell, the ignorance of some Hindus and Buddhists who shun slaughterhouse and funeral workers as Untouchable strikes me as equally abhorrent. I still believe I've lived a ton of lives -- I have memories of being a cat several times and a goose before making the human jump -- but I could be wrong, so it makes more sense to do as Martin Luther King Jr. advised and to judge my fellow man upon the content of his character.

Understanding the material plane is full of obstacles means the one way we can help ourselves is to do unto others. There is no better example of what not to do than BLM/Antifa. In this way, ingrates are helpful because they demonstrate what we should be doing by never doing it.

To cultivate gratitude, I have a few suggestions:

Say thank you, not f**k you.
Forgo a perk and give it to or share it with someone else.
Clean or restore something, such as an item or a space, then thank the item or space for its gifts. If you want to get fancy, light a candle or burn incense in thanks, but it's the thought that counts.
Let go of a spite. Look at an event in your past where you felt wronged, think of the person or circumstances that you felt caused it, and say "I forgive them and I let it go."

Solve et Coagula

Now let's look at the process of being grateful. It is possible to be grateful for being detained at a long stoplight. Let's say you are driving to work in your car and you end up at a lengthy stoplight. By invoking the spirit of gratitude instead of reacting like the typical commuter by getting pissy, you unleash two different virtues. One of these is patience. The other is the appreciation of one's situation: a working car, a job to which to commute, and functioning infrastructure are not things that a child soldier in Sierra Leone can boast of enjoying. This does not mean that your situation cannot be improved. Nevertheless, there is always room for gratitude and by invoking it, you attract more reasons to be grateful to yourself as gratitude begets gratitude.

At the same time, there are two negative emotions you can harness at the stoplight. The reason you won't act out in frustration by swearing or otherwise getting angry is because of certain negative traits in your personality. One is egotistical laziness: you don't care if you're late and nothing can make you care -- you are too important to fret about such trivia. Another is that you hate those fidgety, hair-trigger, power weekend types who tailgate other drivers because they are anxious to get to their next exercise in empty-headedness. The two negatives of your laziness and hatred bind together and become lessened as a result.

Generosity is sublimation. That's the secret of it. The more you give, the more you will get, and what you get back will always be in a far larger proportion to what you gave, though not necessarily in the same form. The most generous character of all, Jesus Christ, sublimated himself right into heaven. On the smaller scale, the most generous people are always the happiest because generosity has a way of taking over the soul.

The Wendigo cannot survive this form of onslaught. To defeat the Wendigo in others, we must become the anti-Wendigo. The Wendigo is always hungry. We take only what we need and are then happy, grateful, and full. The Wendigo wants to take what others have. We are content to make do with what we are given, even if that's next to nothing. The Wendigo is blind with desire and hate. We make every effort to unveil our desires and examine the roots of our hatreds.

The Wendigo is infectious but the remedy is lies within.

The frozen, pristine fastnesses of the North American Arctic are no place for the coddled and the comfortable. If it isn’t the howling, icy winter wind or the fifty below temperatures that drive soft city dwellers back to their climate controlled paradises, it is the demoralizing 23 hour winter nights. Now imagine such a land before the advent of electricity. Imagine trying to survive solely off of seal blood and whale meat while depending on your own skills and wits to build a snow shelter adequate enough to keep you and your family alive in a hut made of snow… yeah, me neither.

The Wendigo comes to us from North American Indian/Native American legend. Some say it is from Algonquian legend, but the Wendigo shows up in Inuu (Inuits call it the Angiak), Ojibwe, Cree, and Naskapi folklore as well. It’s not difficult to put together why the people who lived in and around the Arctic came up with the idea of a terrifying monster who stalks fragile winter settlements in the dead of winter, looking to pick off humans for their meat. The Wendigo is a hard American winter personified. It is psychopathic, sociopathic, and ruthless. It is no stranger to famine and it will do whatever it takes to assuage its own ravenous appetite. The creature comes into being when a greedy, selfish individual splits off from his or her community and goes on a cannibalistic bender. After eating anyone unfortunate enough to accompany her on the journey into isolation, the newly-formed Wendigo develops an insatiable craving for more human flesh. The more it eats, the thinner it becomes. The Wendigo can only be defeated when a shaman kills it. Anyone else who gets too close will be turned into the same sort of zombie-like automaton.

I don’t need to remind readers of how ubiquitous zombies have become in entertainment. Zombies abound in film, television, and literature. Resident Evil had five sequels. There are more than 20 Resident Evil games. Zombies are so popular, they show up in franchises that aren’t supposed to have anything to do with zombies, such as Game of Thrones. You’d almost suppose we had ravenous, cannibalistic shadows we were trying to project as a culture…

We live in Addiction Culture. Everybody is addicted to something. I am one of those rare birds who does not get addicted easily. That said, in college I smoked anywhere from one to ten cigarettes a day and had a weird thing for Nutella for a few months. The cigarette and Nutella addictions did not last but I still drink two large mugs of strong black tea every morning with no plans to quit.

Every female friend I have ever had was either addicted to starving, purging, stuffing, or all three. As a teen, I watched my friend starve herself to the tune of 700 calories per day, a behavior that was smiled upon by the teacher of our sadistic Aerobics Slimnastics class. Women my age have warped relationships with food. Men, on the other hand, routinely suffer from etheric starvation — this is where the desperation of incels comes from. I put out a great deal of excess etheric energy and always have, whether I’ve liked it or not, and that is why I have often been stalked by creepy, incel types despite the clear message that I am happily married. Addiction is par for the course in Addiction Culture. To be a non-addictive personality is to be an oddball. To say: “I have never been addicted to alcohol or any form of non-prescription or prescription drugs” is the mark of the unicorn. I am not eaten alive by any self-destructive urge. I have never had a desire to ruin myself in the pursuit of a mind-altering substance. I am a modern freak.

Our culture is so full of Wendigos, we would hardly recognize one if it saddled up next to us on the street.

On a large scale, one of our collective Wendigos is our civilization’s doomed addiction to cheaply available petroleum. We have had every opportunity and incentive to back away from petroleum addiction, and as a race, we have chosen to build Costcos and spaceships to Mars instead. The more oil we consume, the hungrier we get, and meanwhile, we create the barren wastes depicted in Wall-E. Our entire food system is essentially a clever way of consuming petroleum-fertilized corn. Our diets became meat heavy over the last hundred years for a reason — how better to consume massive amounts of corn than to feed it to cows and chickens, concentrating it in their flesh? The inevitable result was a Wendigo and the irony of fat people technically starving to death because of the junky and devitalized nature of their GMO corny diets.

The Left has created a Wendigo in its addiction to controlling people. Donald Trump or his random populist leader counterpart can be thrust forward as a boogeyman, but the background of insatiable craving for power lurks obviously in the background. The Left, now suffering the final, acute stages of demonic possession, has taken to looting, burning, vandalizing, and murdering both its opposition and its own. A marauding set of zombies could not do a better job.

In middle and upper middle class neighborhoods, the Wendigo pops up in shows of ostentation. Think of the senseless waste of resources it takes to maintain a lush, green lawn in a summer drought. Where is the sanity in maintaining a lawn? Sure, it’s better than this, but it’s still not sane. In the neighborhood behind the building where I work, there is a newly constructed McMansion style house with a three car garage. It's a place and a neighborhood built for a class in complete denial that Progress is dead. It is one of many. The conformists who live lives of quiet desperation in these tacky structures (hilariously roasted by McMansion Hell) haven’t the faintest clue they’re being ridden.

In the city of Seattle, a slightly different Wendigo rides the backs of BLM would be Marxists — the kind perpetuated by a shrinking pool of resources. In Seattle, only those making seven figure incomes can afford a three bedroom house. Hatred and entitlement has become BLM’s Wendigo as they march through a seven figure income neighborhood, boldly declaring it as their land unfairly taken away by gentrification. Never mind that Japanese Americans crowded the Central District before World War II came and they were sent to internment camps. Never mind the time before that, when Jewish people proliferated in that Seattle neighborhood. Black Lives are the only lives that Matter, and anyone who doesn’t wish to kiss the feet of a group of people solely based on their arbitrarily chosen ethnicity be damned. To their credit, the BLMers have a legitimate point: it isn’t fair that a handful of rich, out of touch white and Asian people cower and shudder in their 1.5 million dollar condominiums while everyone else who doesn’t have an Amazon/Google job worries how many paychecks they are from living out of their car. The prosperity hoarders with their slick careers and their posh condos are also eaten by Wendigo; BLM isn’t technically wrong to criticize their cushy lifestyles. Nevertheless, marching through the streets while demanding 800K in reparations per black person along with a free 1.5 million formerly white/Asian owned condo is an entitlement Wendigo. It’s the voice that wheedles, “If only I won the Lotto…” meaning “If only I could force the Universe to give me money I did not earn, I’d finally be happy”. Though some well-adjusted people win the Lotto and stay that way, the other type is far more common, and the reason is that it is a Wendigo. You don’t make it go away by feeding it.

Celebrities and other people with lots of money are classic Wendigo victims. How many times have we heard of the disgraced celeb: wealthy, good looking, smart, married to someone fabulous, blessed with adorable children, yet there they were on a plane to Pedophile Orgy Island with Jeffrey Epstein? All the King’s perks and all the King’s privileges could not keep them from flocking to a stable of captured children. Instead of doing the right thing and either NOT GOING or implicating the pedophiles, they gleefully participated in the abuse, never thinking they might face consequences for their behavior. Celebrities are the hungriest of all.

Once a celebrity gets old, they chase the one thing they cannot buy on a silver platter: youth. Money, comfort, adoration, awards, and admiration is not enough. Celebrities would be forever young. Plastic surgery almost makes eternal youth seem possible until you look closely at the overinflated cheeks and the too-tight-to-close eyelids. There is also the problem of looking wet behind the ears when you haven't menstruated for fifteen years. At some point, a 62 year old who sorta kinda looks 27 is a curiosity to be pitied. The drive to look that way is a Wendigo of diminishing returns.

Anorexia, as I mentioned earlier, is a classic form of Wendigo. In her memoir of anorexia and recovery, Appetites, Caroline Knapp put it this way:

Food, over time, became a terrible, powerful symbol — of how much I wanted on the one hand and how certain I was that I’d never get enough on the other — and my denial of food thus became the most masterful solution. I’m so hungry, I’ll never get fed.

The Wendigo isn’t starvation so much as it is the fear of starvation. The Wendigo is a catabolic collapse into fear of deprivation. Over time, fear putrefies into self-destructive insanity and devolution.

Pornography addiction is a classic Wendigo. The porn addict starts off innocently enough and is soon roped into a dark hell populated by both corporeal and non-corporeal demons. Like any good Wendigo, the porn addict becomes increasingly isolated and every relationship he touches turns to excrement because of porn.

I realize how hopeless this all sounds. In my next article, I’m going to talk about the process of defeating the Wendigo. Please stay tuned — the Wendigo is a terrifying and voracious beast, but you don’t need to be a Algonquian shaman to get the better of him!