I was briefly interested in woo as a teenager — Wicca, telekinesis, shapeshifting, that sort of thing.

One of the fascinating oddities I learned from that period is that several different founding mothers of Wicca — Valiente and Farrar come to mind — met people who thought the rituals they has created around and soon after WW2 were actually thousands of years old.

I can’t put the connection into words, but it feels like this is related to “Joy in the Merely Real”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/joy-in-the...

Plus a dash of the way a beginner can totally misunderstand words of art and invent their own totally inaccurate understanding of what’s going on.