The term “woo-woo” and I share a birth year, according to Merriam-Webster. It has only been used in the contemporary sense—as a dismissive, even pejorative shorthand for spiritual or supernatural beliefs—since 1992. The same dictionary entry etymologically attributes woo-woo to the (wordless) sound of ghostly moaning.

I also found a Reddit thread that raises two other particularly interesting possibilities: user @Western_Mountain3540 speculates about a possible connection to the Chinese character wú (悟), meaning awareness or spiritual enlightenment, and user @jonwilliamsl contributes examples from the 1940s in which woo-woo is connected to the ineffable allure of a woman.

No matter which of these possible origins may be true, or whether all of them are, they resonate with symbolic associations that shape how the term is used and understood. My aim in the following paragraphs is to examine some of the assumptions that follow from these associations, and to begin to unpack how the concept of woo-woo rhetorically functions. I do not claim that every mystical belief is automatically true, but I am interested in what gets dismissed, by whom, and why. If the term feels obviously justified, I aim to unsettle that certainty—with a particular invitation, especially to those most confident in distinguishing the rational from the irrational, to sit with the disruption.

The rational is political.

If woo-woo marks what is irrational or outside the bounds of legitimate knowledge, it is understood in binary opposition (in the Derridean sense) to what is rational or objective. Within modernity, the rational and objective are associated with the secular—the sphere containing what is understood as separate from religion, especially in relation to public life and institutions. 

Although the secular is often assumed to be neutral, or even a universal endpoint of progress, anthropologist Talal Asad has offered some fascinating scholarship that traces the historical and political conditions underlying these assumptions. Asad argues that the secular is actually a modern formation with a specific European history that is tied to and contingent on Christianity. This echoes modernity itself, which functions as a historical framework that often presents itself as universal even as it carries markers of its own cultural and religious inheritance.

The claim that secularism brings rationality or neutrality carries an implicit authority grounded in political and cultural dominance. This authority can feel invisible precisely because it is framed as common sense, as the baseline against which other forms of belief are measured. As Asad argues, secularism is a historically specific formation that defines religion through its own assumptions, then embeds those definitions within broader structures of power. Within that framework, the boundary between the rational and the irrational is produced and maintained.

The claim that secularism brings rationality or neutrality carries an implicit authority grounded in political and cultural dominance.

A clear historical example of this dynamic is the way colonial administrations classified and governed religion. In British India, for instance, colonial officials treated religion as a bounded, systematized set of beliefs and practices that could be categorized and managed through law. Traditions that did not fit neatly into that model were reorganized to align with it.

What came to be called “Hinduism” was, in part, shaped through this process: a wide range of local practices and cosmologies were gathered under a single label, then interpreted in comparison to Christianity. This imposed a structure that made Hindu practices legible to a secular legal framework, and also played a part in transforming how people understood their own traditions.

In that context, far from standing outside of religion as a neutral observer, the secular sphere actively defined what counted as religion in the first place. Various local practices and incommensurable beliefs were pushed out of the category of religion altogether. This classification was then used to justify forms of governance and education that reinforced the authority of the colonial state.

Womanhood is woo-woo.

If the boundary between the rational and the irrational is historically and politically produced, it follows naturally to question whose knowledge falls on either side of that line, and why. The same processes that defined religion in relation to a secular norm also shaped which forms of knowing could be taken seriously at all. Within a Modernist/secular framework, forms of embodied, communal, cyclical, or alternatively spiritual knowledge threaten dominant arrangements of authority.

Womanhood is deeply entangled in this dynamic. Woo-woo often names forms of knowing that have been disqualified by colonial and masculinist standards, and many of those forms are associated with women, as well as with otherness more broadly. 

Woo-woo often names forms of knowing that have been disqualified by colonial and masculinist standards...

For example, in Scotland alone, nearly 4,000 people were accused of witchcraft between the late 1500s and early 1700s, and a significant subset were folk healers and midwives. A recent historical analysis identified 142 accused people who were specifically connected to healing or midwifery practices. About 85% were women, and around 90% of those convicted were executed.

Many of these women were using herbal remedies and rituals that today would be recognized as forms of community medicine. Some even used substances and techniques that modern medicine recognizes as effective. The ambiguity between healing knowledge and perceived supernatural power was ultimately treated as dangerous.

There is also a clear institutional dimension. After the Protestant Reformation, these practices were increasingly labeled unorthodox and were marginalized, especially when they were associated with women or with older religious traditions. At the same time, emerging medical institutions were consolidating authority in more formal, male-dominated structures. 

Witch hunts intersected with broader efforts to police these forms of knowledge, where control over healing and reproduction carried both practical and symbolic power. Witchcraft was, in many cases, used as a label to describe knowledge that could not be easily absorbed into emerging medical and scientific institutions.

Witchcraft was, in many cases, used as a label to describe knowledge that could not be easily absorbed into emerging medical and scientific institutions.

At the level of representation, there has long been a close association between women and irrationality or madness. Women are often imagined as powerful in ways that are difficult to contain, and this power has been both aestheticized and constrained. Bethany Ladimer comments on this phenomenon in her article “Madness and the Irrational in the Work of Andre Breton”, in which she explains that the surrealists shared a goal of social revolution through the liberation of the individual psyche, and that for them this goal was symbolized by Woman’s values because they were seen as contrary to dominant social values. 

Surrealist artists commonly appropriated the feminine, but Ladimer points to a fundamental contradiction, using Breton’s second book—titled Nadja—as a case study. Breton believed in sanctification through the mystical or divine quality of the monogamous love of a woman (according to the Platonic concept of “finding your other half”), but Ladimer explains that this is antithetical to the notion of Woman as a means of cultural change or liberation because it strengthens patriarchal structures.

Ladimer also discusses male representations of madness in women, and the surrealist understanding of madness (threatening) as opposed to irrationality (fascinating / enlightening / safe). As long as women function like a mirror, referring back to men, we are seen as irrational, and therefore neutralized and safe to dismiss; but when we fail to conform, we become “mad” and therefore dangerous. 

In both cases, the issue turns on comprehensibility, on whether something can be translated into the terms that dominant systems recognize, with the end goal of destroying or neutralizing the threat. Feminine ways of being that are cyclical, ebbing and flowing, magnetic, and beyond language sit uneasily within frameworks that prioritize linearity, hierarchy, categorization, and control. In that sense, what gets called woo-woo is a way of marking and managing ways of thinking and being that exceed the boundaries of what dominant systems are prepared to understand or validate.

… the issue turns on comprehensibility, on whether something can be translated into the terms that dominant systems recognize, with the end goal of destroying or neutralizing the threat.

From the vantage point of my own academic specialization, this connection between woo-woo and womanhood/otherness is further supported by semiotics and psychoanalytic theory. In particular, Jacques Lacan’s account of the Symbolic Order describes the (paternalistic) system of language and law that structures subjectivity. 

To become a speaking subject is to enter this system, which organizes the world through categories and rules that make communication possible. For Lacan, though, entry into the Symbolic Order requires separation from an earlier, pre-linguistic, relation to the maternal. Infants begin in a state of fusion with their mothers and at first do not recognize themselves as separate individuals—but through the process of gaining language, the child must break from that unity. Language depends on difference. Subjectivity therefore forms through a kind of loss.

Julia Kristeva extends this framework by naming what is left behind. She coins the term “chora” to describe a pre-linguistic, bodily dimension of experience that underlies and continually disrupts the Symbolic Order. The chora is not totally outside of language, since it persists within it through variables like tone and affect, but it encapsulates what language cannot describe, what exists in between and beyond and through language. 

The chora is closely tied to the maternal body, to the earliest forms of relation and sensation that precede clear distinctions between the self and the other. In that sense, the chora resonates with woo-woo, as both resist being fully captured within the structures of language that define what counts as rational.

Hope, faith, and magic are strategically powerful, actually.

So far, my argument has been largely diagnostic. It explains how political structures work to mischaracterize and dismiss the irrational, and problematizes assumptions around what is being excluded. What it has not yet done is account for what that excluded material does. This final section shifts from diagnosis to function by arguing that what has been excluded is indeed useful, even powerful, that it does something important that dominant frameworks cannot do on their own.

Enter hope.

The practice of hope is not abstract for me. I know what it costs to hope, and what it costs not to. After deconstructing Christianity in my early 20’s, I fell into nihilism and depression. At some point I encountered the philosophical idea (associated with Nietzsche and later with Foucault) that we can fashion our lives into works of art, and, like a distant star in an endless void, it gave me some tiny glimmer to orient toward.

At the time I had nothing like the spiritual understanding of the world that I have since developed. I deeply felt and grieved the death of God, like Nietzsche described in his Parable of the Madman:

Are we not continually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still an above and a below? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?

But, I clung onto the idea that maybe I could make something meaningful out of my experience of life. I didn’t have any clue what form that would take, but it kept me going from one day to the next. I didn't kill myself. I put one foot in front of the other. I started to at least try to act as if there was something on the other side, something I was moving toward.

More than a decade later, I am in a deeply spiritual and loving relationship with my world and with my ancestors., I’ve done so much work toward processing and healing the rawest and darkest parts of myself, and I’ve started learning to trust my own intuition and tap into my own magic. None of this was mapped out in advance, and much of it has surpassed my wildest dreams. Hope was not a feeling I had. It was a direction I chose before I had any reason to believe it would work.

Hope was not a feeling I had. It was a direction I chose before I had any reason to believe it would work.

I first encountered the political strategy of hope as a formalized concept in a book called Popular Music and the Politics of Hope. In the introduction, its editors, Susan Fast and Craig Jennex, write:

In this moment, it is neither difficult nor impressive to point out the obstacles we face and to leave it at that. In fact, Solnit argues that despair in dark moments is often “more predictable” than hopefulness and “in a sad way safer” (2016, 20). Hope is often a far more difficult path—it requires coming face-to-face with profound difficulties but knowing they are surmountable.

Within this framework, far from being a soft or escapist posture, hope is a powerful condition for action. It is a world-making force. It allows people and communities to orient themselves toward futures that do not yet exist and cannot be guaranteed in advance. This is precisely what makes it politically potent.

A demand for certainty forecloses the possibility of change before it begins. If transformation must be fully mapped out in advance in order to be taken seriously, then nothing genuinely new can emerge. Hope makes room for movement without requiring total knowledge of the destination. It helps us to shape what can be imagined, and therefore what can be pursued.

This account of hope also correlates in relevant ways with the concept of faith, for example in that both hope and faith orient people toward futures that cannot be secured by evidence alone. Within Modernist secular discourse, faith is perhaps more readily dismissed because of its association with religion, but hope is also often treated with suspicion and discounted through similar (I might even suggest causally related) underlying moves.

It is not a huge leap to further extend this line of thinking to magic, and from there to woo-woo, as expressions of this same orientation toward possibility. Hope is a world-making force, and faith sustains orientation toward that world. Magic can be understood as a set of practices that formalize and intensify such an orientation. 

Hope is a world-making force, and faith sustains orientation toward that world.

Rituals, manifestation, spellwork, energy work, and other magical practices operate by aligning attention and intention, through action, toward desired transformations. They do not conform to Modernist standards of evidence, but they function in ways that are continuous with recognized political and cultural strategies. They cultivate belief and meaning, and coordinate collective energy. Particularly within traditions that have been historically oppressed, these practices have also served as tools for survival and resistance, especially where other forms of power were inaccessible.

A historical example of this dynamic appears in the Bois Caïman ceremony, often cited as a catalytic moment in the early stages of the Haitian Revolution. At this gathering, enslaved people participated in a Vodou ritual and collectively committed to revolting against their enslavers. Within its own framework, this was an act of spiritual transformation. At the level of social reality, it also helped align participants around a shared vision of uprising.

The Bois Caïman ceremony has continued to function as a symbol of resistance against oppression in Haitian art and cultural memory. At the same time, it has been repeatedly reinterpreted through dominant religious (read: Christian) frameworks that recast it as a demonic pact, a move that reframes the resistance itself as a moral danger. This move cannot undo the role the ceremony played in organizing revolt, but it demonstrates the ongoing impulse to contain practices that mobilize collective power by translating them into terms that render them suspect or illegitimate.

I am an outsider to Vodou, and while this historical moment carries very real political implications, there is also something worth naming in the pull I feel to frame any spiritual tradition or experience in terms an outsider audience would find legible. That impulse is not neutral. It participates in exactly the same dynamic this essay has been critiquing—the one that requires marginalized knowledge to translate itself into dominant terms before it is permitted to count. 

… the pull I feel to frame any spiritual tradition or experience in terms an outsider audience would find legible. That impulse is not neutral.

I am not positioned to speak to what the Bois Caïman ceremony meant from the inside. The meaning and the magic of that event belong to the people who lived it and their descendants. It is not mine to validate or explain.

Which raises a question I have been circling around: why do I feel the need to justify magic in secular or logical terms at all? That reflex is worth interrogating. I stand by the points I’ve made, but it is not my responsibility, or anyone’s, to translate their inner life into a language that skeptics find acceptable before it is allowed to count as real. If anything, the people least positioned to judge experiential knowledge are the ones who haven't experienced it.

As below, so above.

Woo-woo has been used rhetorically to dismiss othered (gendered, racialized, Orientalized, working-class, etc.) forms of knowledge. When practices coded as woo-woo are treated as inherently unserious and perpetually in need of justification or translation in order to earn their legitimacy, the effect is to foreclose ways of knowing and acting that have long been central to marginalized communities. But, given the political potency of hope, faith and magic can similarly be reframed as technologies for remaking reality.

Alice Sparkly Kat offers a particularly resonant articulation of this dynamic in the introduction to Postcolonial Astrology:

[Astrology] follows not only the old adage of ‘as above, so below,’ but also ‘as below, so above.’ The latter adage means that not only do the wider cultural contexts that we project onto virtual images, such as the stars, dictate what meanings we are able to construct from the world, but also that by changing our collective behavior, we are able to change what we see in the stars by changing ourselves.

To change ourselves is also to change what becomes visible as possible. The patterns we read in the stars, and more broadly, what we label as woo-woo, are shaped by cultural frameworks—but those frameworks are themselves shaped by human imagination and collective orientation. 

To change ourselves is also to change what becomes visible as possible.

This matters because it problematizes the assumption that woo-woo is simply a false attempt to decode a fixed external reality. Instead, woo-woo can be a participatory practice that links perception and meaning to action, that influences the feedback loop between inner orientation and outer reality. Changing ourselves, our beliefs, our language, our behavior, also changes what becomes legible and meaningful in the world. 

In that sense, the dismissal of woo-woo is a refusal of the imaginative and transformative capacities it can sustain. Reclaiming those capacities is a serious epistemic and political move toward surviving and remaking reality.