Spirituality is culturally ascendent. You almost certainly have a colleague who is interested in some combination of tarot, astrology, and breathwork. The chronically online don’t simply have empathy; they’re mock-psychic “empaths.” Reddit is flooded with reports of near-death experiences, psychedelic visions, and children who describe past lives.

This is beginning to make the intelligentsia uncomfortable. In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum argues that we’ve entered a period of “New Obscurantism,” a time of cultural upheaval when people grasp at the false comforts of superstitions, not unlike when occultism took hold of an expiring Russian empire through Rasputin. As Applebaum sees it, the irrationality of spirituality goes hand in hand with the desire for a strongman’s magical solutions and the post-COVID assault on science. Drawing the Enlightenment contrast between “superstition” and “reason and logic,” she sides, naturally, with Benjamin Franklin.

There’s some truth to this: as the right redefines itself in the U.S., it has tried to lay claim not only to traditional religion but also non-religious “spirituality.” The COVID-19 pandemic saw many spiritual teachers ally themselves with pseudoscientific wellness influencers and conspiracy theorists. The “Director of Messaging” for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s  presidential campaign was a New Age teacher. Yogis and theists are increasingly popping up on the Joe Rogan Experience.

But, in the face of the right’s increasing appropriation of spirituality, we shouldn’t long for some neo-Enlightenment utopia of well-tuned mechanical clocks. Spirituality isn’t going anywhere, and, unfortunately, reason and logic seem to have approached their social limits. In the face of death and all that conjures it—plague, social chaos, floods and fires—logic is inadequate, because our mortal terror cannot be reasoned away.

Only 30% of Americans attend weekly religious services, according to Gallup, but 81% of Americans believe in God, and 86% consider themselves “spiritual.” As our political system convulses, the planet warms, and technological change threatens humanity’s confidence in its future, people will turn more and more to the solace of spirituality. They’ll look for a ballast, for communion amidst chaos, for enduring consolations against death and loss. Dismissing spirituality as frivolous and benighted will push it out of what remains of the public square and, in doing so, discourage good actors. Of course, we need “reason and logic” to navigate the period ahead. But we also need better spiritualities.

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Amulet is a literary magazine of spirituality, religion, and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike. Rather than pushing an agenda, Amulet will be a venue where diverging voices can pursue new ways of speaking to our longing for transcendence.

Increasingly, there’s widespread recognition of what’s been lost with the decline of religion in the West: the vanished structures of ritual and community, the lost stability afforded by a tradition’s shared beliefs and practices. Some micro-communities are regressing into fundamentalism’s reactionary politics, suffocating dogma, and fear-based rule-enforcement. At Amulet, we respect the wisdom accumulated over millennia in religious traditions—the lessons in ritual and contemplative practice, the soaring testimonies of many saint-like figures and heroes of religious history—but we think that fundamentalism is a mistake. It would be foolish to prophesy what might emerge from this moment—what combination of old and new visions—but we believe there’s no going backwards.

Grounded in the present and oriented toward the future, the founders of Amulet are launching a literary magazine, rather than a news magazine or a research journal, because our spiritual imaginations have been shaped primarily by literature and scripture; because we believe in language’s ecstatic possibilities; and because this religious and spiritual moment demands the depth of thought and imaginative daring that, at their best, literary magazines can foster.

Moverover, we believe that literature is itself a kind of spiritual project, a search for meaning and beauty that at once draws on a long tradition and stretches into a future of expanding possibility. Readers and writers alike engage in an endless search, where meaning twists chimerically and can only be approached asymptotically. We believe it is a good thing for everyone—especially readers and writers—to consider themselves a part of something larger, more unknowable, than any one individual consciousness or agenda.

Starting online with five issues this year, Amulet won’t be the place for incendiary op-eds, half-baked broadsides, or the day’s headlines. Instead, we’ll publish new myths, like K-Ming Chang’s “Four Horse Girls of the Apocalypse,” and essays charting unexpected sources of ecstasy, like Brittany Newell’s exploration of the texture of the divine, its erotic surfaces. We’ll feature incantatory poems, fervent tracts, and unsettling stories written by emerging and established voices from around the world.

In our debut issue, we present writing that leads us to the light. Sheila Heti asks—and may God forgive us for this—how should a (mystical) magazine be? There’s a brand new story of grief and ghosts from Argentine master César Aira, while Noor Qasim offers an elegant choreography of love, marriage, and disappointment. Simon Critchley demonstrates just a few ways mysticism can improve your life, alongside a lament from Fady Joudah, an exploration of the “vanity” of “existential panic” by Sandra Lim, and much more.

In mystical schools of various religious traditions, the divine is understood either to be present in an inspired text, or awakened in readers who use the text as a mirror for perceiving the divine’s inner presence. At its best, reading even a nonreligious story or poem is an encounter with something transcending words on the page—the music inhabiting those words, a spirit expressed in style, a worldview that endows each line with a sense of the whole.

In this way, Amulet aspires not to be a literary magazine about spirituality, but an engine of the spiritual experiences literature makes possible: those spellbound moments, after finishing a singular poem, essay, or story, when the world irradiates with portent and meaning, at once achingly familiar and strange. Our hope is to cultivate a community of readers and writers possessed by voices, consumed with longing for something larger than ourselves.

Welcome to Amulet.

Samuel Rutter, Editor in Chief
Alec Gewirtz, Editor & Publisher