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

Up until that point I’d been completely satisfied with my social life too, which consisted mainly of hanging out with the fairies at the end of our garden, making mud pies, and tumbling down the rabbit holes in my imagination to explore magical, underground kingdoms. But now I wanted a Barbie. My fairies were mysterious and mischievous and very stylish in their own ephemeral way, but Barbie had long blond hair, an extremely covetable wardrobe, and a boyfriend called Ken, just like an actual princess. And I’d consumed enough fairy tales by this stage to know that princesses, even more so than little girls born in the year of the Dragon, got all the luck.

So what’s this got to do with my adult interest in all things Now Age? Allow me to explain. If you think back, you’ll remember there was a lot of talk about how 2012 was going to mean “The End of the World” as we knew it, due to it being the final year to be represented in the ancient Mayan calendar. And this was certainly the case for me. I want you to keep this deadline in mind as we fast-forward to a few months before D-day, when I was working as features editor at the UK’s Sunday Times Style magazine.

I’d obviously decided at some point that the most direct route to getting my hands on a wardrobe like Barbie’s and achieving as close to princess status as an outsider like me could really hope for was to pursue a career in fashion. I fell in love with magazines in my teens, which—by now the only “poor kid” (relatively speaking) in a progressive North London private school—found me grappling with the mother of all identity crises. And in shuffles a lineup of the usual teen rebellion suspects—early experimentation with drugs and alcohol, an eating disorder, and a six-year relationship with a much older, sexually domineering man (whom I’ll be referring to as the Capricorn), who also managed to completely rob me of my sense of identity.

Magazines, and the glossily perfect world they represented to me, became an escape. And by the time I’d mustered the courage to leave the Capricorn and rebuild my life in the image of my own choosing, I became hellbent on pursuing a career as a fashion and lifestyle journalist. But after twelve years in the industry, I was dismayed to find that I was bored out of my mind.

Perhaps it was because landing a job on Style magazine pretty much represented the apex of my ambitions at the time. After all, a lot of the anger and frustration that lay in wait just beyond my tedium on the job was directed at myself for not being utterly satisfied with a position I’d worked so hard the past decade to achieve.

A lot of my friends were experiencing the sense of fulfillment I realized I was craving by having kids, but I’d decided long ago that I didn’t want to be a mother (more, oh-so-much more, on this subject later). Whereas I had become increasingly aware that I was essentially trying to fill the creative Source energy , second-chakra-shaped void (the seat of our creative energy) that had appeared in my life with copious amounts of cocktails, designer clothes, and … cocaine. Yes, over the past decade I’d also morphed into the quintessential work-hard-play-hard party girl. In the beginning, it was a world that fueled my post-Capricorn desire to fill myself up with all the FUN I felt I’d been denied in my teens and early twenties—but lately, it felt less hedonistic, more like a way to numb my existential angst.

Sure, my “on paper” life was pretty fabulous—great job, great relationship (I’d since married the love of my life), great, generally heavily discounted, wardrobe. Loads of holidays, loads of freebies, and a home of my own on one of the most desirable streets in one of the most desirable parts of London. #Blessed. So why was it all tinged with the underlying sense of unease that something MAJOR was missing? Like, something fundamental to the purpose of me taking up space on the planet. Was writing about what T-shirt some celebrity was wearing or getting them to “open up” about the state of their relationship in an interview really all I had to contribute to the world?

I don’t blame the drinking or the drugs, although they had become part of the problem. The morning after a binge, the anxiety and the despair, the anger and the frustration came on ten times worse. But essentially the nonstop party was just a way of distracting myself from the little voice that kept insisting, It’s not enough. It’s NOT ENOUGH . Because how dare I? This was what “having it all” looked like, wasn’t it? How much more, exactly, did I want? No, the real problem was that as the months went by, and my anxiety reached a level that I actually sought professional help with a therapist, I continued to ignore the Voice. And well, 2012 was the year kismet decided to intervene.

I’ve since, thanks to my adventures in the Now Age, been able to understand exactly how dis(self)respectful it is to blatantly blow off the Voice (a.k.a. your intuition, your soul, your higher Self, the Universe, um … God ), and I’m actually beginning to believe (more on this later too) that if each and every individual was in a position to truly honor this Voice, we might have the blueprint for world peace, right there.

Luckily for me, my soul wasn’t going to give up that easily—instead, it led me back to astrology. Like: Okay, why not learn astrology. Like properly, so you can read people’s charts and stuff , it said, while I was lying on Salinas beach in Ibiza, mojito in hand, pretty pissed off that I’d spent so much money on a new Missoni bikini that had begun to dissolve the first time I wore it in the sea. You’ve always been into astrology, and it sounds like what you need is a passion project. Because if my life was lacking anything, it was passion.

My childhood interest in astrology had bloomed over the years, and even my colleagues referred to me as Mystic Ruby, since I was the girl who always knew when Mercury was going retrograde (and all our writers were going to miss their deadlines and our photo shoots would fall through). Maybe our in-house astrologer, the eminent Shelley von Strunckel, would deign to teach me a thing or two?

Turns out she would, and soon I was being invited for dinners at her loft in Kings Cross where this grande dame of mystical glamour began filling my mind with stories of ancient spiritual folklore over bottles of biodynamic red wine. All the stuff that had been swirling in the background in my childhood, but which I’d locked away in a box marked “crazy, crunchy, and NOT VERY COOL”—along with the adzuki bean stew. Now Shelley was taking me back.

I was instantly in awe of her being so worldly and so well read—and not just in astrology but all things mystical! Shelley had traveled the world and experienced the magic of the Universe firsthand, and my heart thrilled at her vision. It was as if her stories were the missing link, as if she’d opened the door to a whole new world, which, conversely, I realized I’d been seeking all along—a Narnia she described as “the numinous.”

“It means ‘that which is unknown or unknowable,’” she explained … and I felt my soul swoon. Not even the hypnotic allure of a new pair of Miu Miu shoes could have inspired such tingles in me as the web of intrigue the word numinous wove in my mind. Having been raised atheist (I once had to walk out of a midnight mass in case I started yelling “cult!” at the top of my voice), it was kind of like getting the whole concept of, um, God, for the first time. (In fact, sometimes when people ask me what the word means, I have been known to reply: “basically ‘awesome’—but in a biblical sense.”)

Was this the moment I “woke up,” as people in Now Age circles often refer to the day they finally decide to walk out on their corporate career and go train to be a yoga instructor in Bali? Well, in a similar vein, I basically decided there and then that beyond the study of astrology, my new side project was going to be investigating all things numinous for myself. And while we were at it … wasn’t that a great name for a magazine?