How good must it feel to gather up physical manifestations of your anxieties, shove them in a giant papier-mache demon and set fire to them? Wonderful, surely. The citizens of Santa Fe, New Mexico, think so: it was recently described in the New York Times as their “secret to happiness”. Every year, they stuff the Zozobra with “glooms” – representations of their fears – before burning them. These days, anything clogging your psyche can go in there: “wedding albums; medical bills; report cards; loved ones’ ashes; parking tickets”.
My fascination with folklore was nourished by a decade in Belgium, where I was initially baffled by, then sought out, the country’s best bits. I watched my sons’ primary school headteacher gleefully set fire to a Zozobra-adjacent humanoid – bonhomme hiver – to banish winter; dodged carnival figures in straw-stuffed tunics, blank white masks and vast ostrich-plume headdresses hurling oranges into crowds; and heard children cry in real terror at the prospect of being stuffed in a sack and dragged to Spain by Saint Nick’s nasty sidekick.
I still dabble. I recently enjoyed Venice’s Festa di San Martino, a Halloween equivalent during which an emaciated wooden saint on a boggle-eyed horse was carried from shop to shop followed by small cloaked children banging saucepans and demanding sweets (there was also a giant wine barrel on wheels – probably necessary for adults to cope with sweet-maddened children banging pans). Knowing my predilections, a Latvian friend sent over a picture of a similar celebration in Riga, featuring cloaked, hooded, masked animals; a faceless giant with an outsized scythe; and an ineffably creepy red-trousered bandit.
All of which qualifies me to say we’re entering the best time of year for this stuff: the dark months bring forth cloven-hoofed Krampuses, hooded chastisers and belly-slitting witches. But it also means I’ve been wondering if this might be a good time for folklore, superstition and magic more generally.
The signs have been there for a while: census data suggests paganism is flourishing, and the pagans I spoke to last year made their practices sound like the sanest response to an uncertain, unequal world alienated from nature. A witch told me the Russian invasion triggered a resurgence in Ukrainian witchcraft – fighting fire with fire, since Putin reportedly consulted shamans before invading and bathes in severed antler blood.
Most recently, Teen Vogue offered witchcraft strategies to help your vote count and WitchTok has been soul-searching about its failure to hex Trump. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed he was attacked by a demon (the Vatican is apparently facing rising demand for exorcisms), and Russell Brand is countering sexual abuse allegations by flogging magical amulets. Coincidentally, as I was thinking about this stuff, an email from World of Interiors arrived, rhapsodising about the desirable, ghost-infested home of the director of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. The new superstition is everywhere.
Because, well, we aren’t living in very rational times, are we? The US just took a look at an incoherent convicted felon whose campaign strategy peaked with 40 minutes of interpretative dance and thought: “Yep, that’s our guy.” Conspiracy theories, each more improbable and impervious to logic than the last, flourish and we’re supposed to put our faith and funds in magic beans called “crypto”. At the most basic, urgent level, we know rationally (because science tells us daily, hoarse and despairing) that we can’t keep living as we are, that our world is collapsing – but we choose, irrationally, to do exactly that.
Traditionally, folklore was rooted in a world where disease, violence and terrifying natural phenomena felt beyond human control; it offered ritualised responses to incomprehension and impotence. Now we understand how a pandemic spreads, the forces that fuel state and individual violence and how anthropogenic climate breakdown drives extreme weather, catastrophic floods and wildfires. I prefer to believe the answers will be human, rational and scientific, too. But when that feels hopeless, why on earth wouldn’t you fall back on magic and manifesting, on superstition and delulu, on howling at the moon? At the very least, I can absolutely see the attraction in taking all your fears for the world, stuffing them in a giant demon and watching them burn.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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