Ruby Warrington - Material Girl, Mystical World - The Now-Age Guide for Chic Seekers and Modern Mystics

My instinct is to play it superwitchy and dress head to toe in black, even though I know it’s considered more high vibe among spiritual circles to wear white. Apparently it raises your “auric radiance.” In the end I settle on a long black Agnes B skirt I picked up at a consignment store in the East Village (just witchy enough), and I pair it with a sleeveless white silk blouse. A mouth of MAC’s bright red Lady Danger lipstick completes the look. It’s what I always wear when I want to feel properly pulled together. It’s the same shade Alexa Chung wears (she told me when I interviewed her once), and I think it makes me look like a lady. A dangerously smart, sexy, and pulled-together lady.

In the street outside I can already hear the sounds of the impending zombie apocalypse as my fellow New Yorkers congregate outside the bars to smoke and flirt. Getting wasted and fornicating in the face of death is the other big theme of the evening, after all. Meanwhile, I think about all the spirits I won’t be drinking but will instead be inviting to deliver their spine-tingling messages tonight, and I pick up the tray of tamari-roasted vegetables I’m taking as my dish for the potluck supper we’ll be eating in silence after the séance. The idea is we’ll be dining with any deceased ancestors who’ve decided to join us.

All of which, if I’m honest, has become a pretty standard Friday night for me.

Seriously, you should hear some of the conversations I have with my girlfriends these days. Women like Madeline, who used to work at Nylon magazine but left to go to psychic school in L.A. and is convinced she’s a reincarnated mermaid. Raquel, a former fashion stylist who’s devised a spiritual detox program to open your third eye and cleanse your chakras along with your colon. Or Marika, a financier turned modern shamanic practitioner who mainly wears Isabel Marant and introduced me to my spirit animal last summer.

And no, I didn’t meet these women on some mind-bending plant medicine retreat in Peru. Although that’s probably on their vacation wish list, along with swimming with dolphins, a trip to Burning Man, and a ten-day silent meditation Vipassana. Nor do my friends and I waft around in purple caftans (unless they’re by Mara Hoffman), grow out our armpit hair, and imbibe only homegrown kombucha. Rather, the women I have been known to refer to as my coven are the hip, switched-on denizens of New York, L.A., and London, cities fast embracing the dawning of what I like to call the Now Age. As in New Age … but given a totally modern upgrade for NOW. And I connected with many of them after I launched my website, The Numinous, an online magazine where Material Girl meets Mystical World .

The by-way-of-intro e-mail often goes something like: “OMG at last. A platform that speaks to my twin passions—fashion and astrology!” And then we get into how a fascination with all things esoteric has opened up whole new worlds of inquiry about what it means to be thriving as a twenty-first-century woman.

Because from Ayurveda to the tarot and Tantric healing, on any given evening in Brooklyn, Venice Beach, Shoreditch, Sydney, or Berlin, Now Age curious seekers are flocking to workshops to waken our Divine Feminine, sitting in ceremony to welcome the New Moon, experimenting with shamanism, and getting seriously high on the vibes, man. The night I attended a pranayama breathwork session in a tepee in a park in Williamsburg last summer, I didn’t come down for days.

Which sounds pretty woo-woo, I guess. But if embracing the New Age in the 1960s meant changing your name to Echo, rejecting your traditional upbringing, and running away to live on an ashram, in the Now Age, choosing to check out a more spiritual worldview is no longer seen as incompatible with an appreciation for fashion. If anything, the fact that we’ve evolved into such an exaggeratedly material, hypervisual, and device-dependent world has given these ancient human technologies a newfound allure. If social media, for example, has created what some people are calling a “disconnection epidemic,” then esoteric practices like astrology and meditation become a (necessary) way to reconnect—sure, to each other, but not least to our selves .

And on the flip side, spending half our lives in the alternate reality we casually refer to as the Internet (I mean, let’s take a step back for a minute; everything being “online” now, and existing somewhere in the Cloud, is actually seriously sci-fi) means we also get to investigate these Now Age practices from the comfort of our own living rooms. Not to mention the freedom it’s given us to totally blur the lines when it comes to what a person who identifies as “spiritual” should look like. Um, have you checked out Miley Cyrus’s IG feed lately? #GODDESS. The week I’m writing this, even Khloé Kardashian had penned an essay on her spiritual leanings for Lena Dunham’s “Lenny” newsletter.

Enter mass meditations that devolve into networking events, spiritual speed-dating, and my friends and I discovering the joys of the “healing hang date.” Also celebrities like Russell Brand (God bless that man) discovering yoga and going from Hollywood wannabe and recovering addict to total Now Age pinup. Oh, and his ex, Katy Perry, telling a reporter for GQ magazine, “I see everything through a spiritual lens. I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens. I look up into the stars and I imagine: How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form?”

Well, I could not agree with you more, Katy, and astrology was my gateway drug into the Mystical World, too. I must have been about three years old when I discovered I’d been born in the Chinese year of the Dragon. Result! Most people got normal animals, like pigs or dogs, but lucky me had obviously been singled out for some pretty special cosmic treatment (not that astrology is for narcissists or anything. No, really, it isn’t—as I’ll explain in detail later on!).

Anyway, there followed a period of about six months where I’d scrunch my features into a “scary” dragon face and do this heavy breathing thing through my bared teeth, to show everybody how the mythical beast lived in me . And then my brother was born (year of the Sheep, yawn), and people stopped paying attention.

I also grew up knowing that my mum had my full astrology chart done by a family friend when I was born. I was an Aries, which meant I was “confident and extroverted, and sometimes quite bossy.” Beyond the home environment I was definitely more on the shy side, though, and I was desperate to know what else the astrologer had said. But Mum was always frustratingly vague about it. “Ummm, you have a lot of planets in Cancer …” she’d murmur, balancing my baby brother on one hip while stirring a pot of buckwheat noodles.

If you haven’t already guessed, she was kind of hippieish, and we ate mainly macrobiotic when I was a kid. I think mostly because John and Yoko did. The other families in the rural country village where I grew up were the same, a tight little clique of “alternatives” who embraced natural remedies, grew most of their own vegetables, and wore a lot of cheesecloth.

It wasn’t until I started at the tiny village school that I realized there was anything strange about my mum taking my brother to see the fierce Dr. Singha, an Ayurvedic practitioner who cured his recurring ear infections by banning him from eating dairy, or us spending weekends at music festivals where I got pink henna streaks in my hair. But my flask of homemade adzuki bean stew felt decidedly unsexy next to my friends’ pizza and fries at lunch, and even aged five I was acutely aware that my home-stitched smock dresses were no match for Claire Maplethorpe’s shop-bought tutus. To my five-year-old eyes, not only did pizza and tutus look waaaay cool—it was also evident that without them in my world, I would always be on the outside looking in.