Why TikTok thinks you're a space angel
On the occult, racism, and aliens
Hello my fellow internet wanderers and welcome back to Snake Oil, the only newsletter on the web written by three kawaii ghouls stacked in a trench coat.
We are gathered here today because we need to talk about aliens.
And by that I mean “Starseeds,” a genre of woo-woo content that, in recent years, has spread across TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and involves convincing people that they’re holy intergalactic beings. Not that anyone needs much convincing, apparently!
Starseed believers will tell you that among us Earthlings there are extraterrestrials called “lightworkers.” They may look like your average homo sapiens sapiens, but don’t be fooled. Starseeds, we are told, are actually cosmic beings and ancient souls reincarnated from other star systems (e.g., Orion, Arcturus) and dimensions (3D+), and sent to our humble realm for a Higher Purpose. What that entails is left somewhat vague but usually has to do with raising the spiritual consciousness or collective vibrational energy of humankind, whatever that means.
Anyway, the kicker is: you could be one of them.
Starseeds content is as plentiful as it is popular. Go to Etsy.com and you will find thousands of hits for products including “Starseed DNA Activation Software” for $85, or a “Galactic Origins Reading” selling for an auspicious $77.77.
On YouTube you’ll find videos that will help you figure out which star system you’re from and explain why being sensitive, empathetic, and feeling like a misfit probably indicates you’re an alien from the Pleiades. Or you might encounter the Galactic Federation of Light Apparel, which posts videos about meditating Andromedon-style to receive Akashic transmissions, and also sells $120 Starseed crewnecks.
Then of course there’s “light language,” aka the Simlish of Starseeds followers. It has yet to make a Duolingo debut, but some people are channeling it on Instagram reels and TikTok. It supposedly has healing qualities for listeners but it may also just be people speaking in tongues.
So where on Earth (or outer space) did these ideas come from?
As it turns out, the concept of “light workers” has been effectively peddled long before the digital age.
Don your tin foil hat: To find out why aliens have become yet another tonic for audiences alienated under capitalism, we will be taking a trip back to 19th century Europe—and the emergence of occultism.1
Blavatsky enters the building
Starseeds draws upon two prominent ideas in occultism: first, that a select, secret society of ascended beings is guiding humanity, and second, that humanity is on a spiritual (and racial) evolutionary path.
One of the earliest to marry those ideas was Madame Blavatsky, the contemporary founder of an occult movement called Theosophy. She was born in 1831 as Helena Petrovna von Hahn into a Russian-German aristocratic family in Yekaterinoslav, at the time a part of the Russian empire (now modern-day Ukraine). Blavatsky is regarded as one of the founders of the New Age movement and is perhaps best known for establishing the Theosophical Society in Adyar, Chennai, India.
Her goal with Theosophy was to create a kind of Theory of Everything, combining philosophy, religion, and science. But what she came up with is basically a quacky racism manual with Orientalist Characteristics™.Theosophy is a mishmash of Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Gnosticism, and Luciferianism from which Blavatsky brewed up a spiritually adorned racial theory. This is all laid out in The Secret Doctrine (1888), a mammoth occultist treatise written in what might be called mystical mumblecore.
Blavatsky wrote in part I, titled “Cosmogenesis: Seven Cosmic Elements—Seven Races of Mankind” about the “root races” in humanity: Astral/Etheric; Hyperborean; Lemurian; Atlantean; and Aryan (yup, stay tuned); with the sixth and seventh races having yet to appear. She borrowed the concept of “yugas” —or epochs— from Hinduism, but refashioned them as karmic cycles attributed to different races, or cycles of racial birth and death.
In this vision of the world, humanity is undergoing a racial evolution, both spiritually, physically, and cosmologically.2
Blavatsky lays out some races as superior to others. She attributes “unaccountable degrees of intellectuality among the various races of men” to their lack of the “divine spark,” or what Theosophists call “monad.” For example, Blavatsky described the “savage Bushman” as having “reasoning powers...very little above the level of the animals,” and the “savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian” as being “narrow brained.”
Blavatsky’s anti-Semitism also runs rampant in the text—she refers to Jewish “idiosyncratic defects” including “gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality,” and describes the religion as amounting to not more than “phallic worship.”
In Blavatsky’s developmental racial hierarchy, the temporal and geographical origins of each race naturally assign some as inferior, and others superior—it’s a history, and a future of “naturally” justified eugenics.
Racial pruning is stated to be a natural consequence of racial evolution, as Blavatsky intones: “less favored groups–the failures of nature–will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind.”
Adepts of the occult
Two other Theosophists, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, built upon Blavatsky’s racial theory in jointly and separately published works. Besant, a favorite pupil of Blavatsky, was a British socialist and staunch advocate for Indian home rule, even becoming the leader—as a white, British woman—of the Indian National Congress in 1917.3 Leadbeater, an American, was a reverend of the Liberal Catholic Church, a claimed psychic, and an accused pederast.
In one of their works, “Man: Whence, How, and Whither, a Record of Clairvoyant Investigation” (1913), Besant and Leadbeater wrote that the “sixth root-race,” which would replace the Aryans, would emerge as a colony in Baja, California in the 28th century. They infused their writings with an apocalyptic expectation of the coming of the so-called “World Teacher,” a Christ-like figure leading the evolutionary progress of humanity, and believed in “Masters of the Ancient Wisdom,” or “ascended Masters,” what Blavatsky also called “Mahatmas,”4 referring to spiritually enlightened beings working as humanity’s shepherds.
Christian influence in the Theosophical texts was nothing new.5 The writings of German mystic Karl von Eckartshausen (1752-1803) show the early knitting together of Christianity and occultism. He described in “The Cloud upon the Sanctuary” (published in 1802 in German as Der Wolke vor dem Heiligthume) a secret society of mystical persons, “The Elect,” guiding the development of humanity—an idea derived from the Christian concept of the “communion of saints” (communio sanctorum).
Eckhartshausen wrote: “From all time...there has been a hidden assembly, a society of the Elect, of those who sought for and had capacity for light, and this interior society was called the interior Sanctuary or Church.” He continued: “This society is in the communion of those who have most capacity for light, i.e., the Elect. The Elect are united in truth, and their Chief is the Light of the World himself, Jesus Christ […].”
Blavatsky and her occult adepts took this concept of elite divinity and recast it as the “Great White Brotherhood” (sometimes also called the “Great White Lodge”) a kind of Marvel crossover cast of spiritually enlightened figures from various religions—Jesus and Buddha included—that were supposedly involved in our earthly development. It was an idea that stuck around, long past Blavatsky’s death in 1891.
Blavatsky left behind a mixed, if influential legacy. In her lifetime, she had gained a reputation as a prominent medium and psychic in Europe and the US, regaling many a spiritualist gathering with tales of her encounters with “Mahatmas” in the East. But not everyone bought into Theosophy, or her fantastical tales. Just six years before her death, Richard Hodgson, a member of the Society for Psychical Research based in Cambridge, UK, and a paranormal investigator, declared her to be: “One of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”
Even so, Blavatsky’s ideas about racial evolution, enlightened guides, and the spiritual ascendance of humanity would go on to influence the development of Nazi mythology, science fiction, New Age religions, conspiracy theories, educational philosophies (looking at you Rudolf Steiner), and even some TV shows (like Twin Peaks) in the 20th century—long before it worked its way onto TikTok in the form of space angel content.
So stay tuned: More on how Blavatsky’s mystical racism set the stage for the Starseeds content mill in the next installment of Snake Oil.
And one more thing!
Many thanks to Susan Howson for helping edit this edition of Snake Oil. Make sure to check out and subscribe to her Substack, EELS, for book reviews and recommendations delivered with humor and panache.
Also, I know this Snake Oil post has been a long time coming—it has actually sat in my drafts folder for over two years amid life changes and upheavals and bouts of procrastination and self-doubt. So thanks for sticking around, there is more to come :)
The inspiration for this deep dive comes from a Tumblr post from the now-deactivated blog, knowsys. What a legendary essay. Thanks for tugging me down the rabbit hole.
The races were also said to have come from ancient, long-lost continents, e.g., Hyperboreans from “Hyperborea” in northern Russia and Canada, Lemurians from “Lemuria” in the Indian Ocean, and Atlantians from “Atlantis,” which Blavatsky surmised could have been an archipelago of islands in the North Atlantic.
Seven years before Mohandas Gandhi! But that’s a story for another time.
From the Sanskrit word “mahātmā,” meaning “great-souled,” which was already used at the time in India as an honorific.
Theosophists positioned themselves in opposition to the Christian dogma of the day, but some scholars have argued it was actually a revival of occult Christian traditions in the West.