New Age

Three young practitioners on the resurgence of mysticism in the digital era

- Belle O. Mapa

The occult, witchcraft, mysticism, pagkukulam. Oftentimes I wonder why there are so many ways to refer to magic. Maybe we need to keep finding similar words with less negative connotations. Maybe we just need the right moniker.

We keep exploring new mediums, too. Magic is no longer a simple party trick.

Astrology is memeified: crystal shops are popping up everywhere, tarot card decks are available at bookstores. Just get on social media and you’ll find many young “magicians” dabbling in various crafts, even offering services.

Case in point: Monch the Mystic. By day, she’s a psychology major at Ateneo. By night—or in between breaks at school—she’s an astrologer. You can find her column in Rappler. Then you have Apple Nocom, a certified tarot reader and mental health advocate. She learned from the esoteric community Mysterium Philippines. And then there’s me, a self-professed witchcraft rookie with a growing collection of healing crystals. I source from Instagram shops and a mystic shop on some Australian mountain range.

And if there’s one thing that ties our practices together, it’s our contemporary approach to magic.

Is magic the new religion?

We’ve been taught at an early age to fear magic—but not in the way that we fear god. We were taught that spells and fortune tellers were sinful. But we grew up. We learned to think for ourselves, to see that maybe it’s not so much sinning as it is deviating from the norm. And that’s not a bad thing.

“Learning tarot was on my bucket list as a child,” Apple Nocom says. “But since it was frowned upon in my very Catholic community, I never really thought about putting it into action.”