What’s woo-woo? 

Boiled down to its sticky residue, it’s extreme silliness masquerading as spirituality. Zack Polanski – The Tit Whisperer – claiming that he could enlarge the size of women’s breasts by hypnotising them was peak woo-woo. (A more lecherous take on ‘wizards’ who do ‘reverse ageing’.) Woo-woo is especially attractive to disappointed women of a certain age: see crystals, goddess workshops and having a shaman on Skype speed-dial. Gong baths, forest baths, any bath that doesn’t feature water; meditation, mindfulness, manifestation, the word ‘creatrix’. Don’t forget ‘cacao ceremonies’ on Brighton beach where menopausal women pay other menopausal women to make them a hot chocolate in a flask while they watch the sun rise. Then there’s signing up to a women’s weekend retreat to ‘honour the feminine divine’ in lieu of having hot sex or a good box-set to watch.

Then there’s woo-woo which both sexes can make equal fools of themselves over: ‘Freedom from Ego’ workshops (which generally mean acquiring heaps more to show off about), taking ayuhuasca in Hackney, biodynamic farming, mistaking the Druids for hippies rather than warriors and, of course, past-life regression. A couple I used to know told everyone they met that in a past life; the woman was apparently the husband’s mother in ancient Rome. They said their ageing whippet was also with them in Rome, which explained why, at 8,000 years old, he sometimes struggled on his daily walk.

Until she saw sense and started showing off what her mama gave her again on The Celebrity Traitors, the most flagrantly silly face of homeland woo-woo was probably Charlotte Church, who turned her very big house in the country into a ‘wellness retreat’ complete with a shower which the singer described as akin to a ‘very large and unusual-shaped vagina’ (did Zack Polanski design it?) and a ‘womb room’. According to planning documents, Church aimed to create ‘a system of non-hierarchical participatory democracy’ inside the property. ‘The Dreaming’ was due to open in 2022 – but was postponed due to a problem with too much sewage, which unkind souls might say is the overriding impression that one got from the whole daft enterprise.

Lots of woo-woo is easy to laugh off – but some of it can be positively harmful, both to individuals (particularly immature ones) and society. I’m thinking in particular of the Church of Trans-substantiation (pronouns are the new star signs) in which a male merely uttering the words ‘Man – I feel like a woman!’ may gain him access to the most intimate of female spaces. The growing indulgence of ‘witchcraft’ as a lovely cosy nature-worshipping hobby, and indeed as a legitimate religion, might ring a few alarm bells if we weren’t all so busy being suicidally inclusive. Some years ago I remember being rather shocked to read that a practising Satanist was serving on a submarine; a Ministry of Defence spokesman at the time stated that the Navy was an equal opportunities employer and did not discriminate against specific religious beliefs: ‘He went to his commanding officer with a request to practise his beliefs on board his ship and it was granted.’ Which is all very well, but in a crisis at sea I wouldn’t want my life to depend on someone who worshipped Lucifer. Surely he’d be hoping for mayhem, disaster and death rather than all hands on deck?

Basically woo-woo proves the old G.K. Chesterton quote: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’