Ever since I began diving into the world of The Weird, I’ve encountered odd little synchronicities everywhere. Today’s synchronicity is brought to you by Meditations on the Tarot and my mood disorder.

I have been struggling with my mental health lately. For unknown reasons, my mood, motivation, and ability to engage with the world have entered a record slump. Everything is dull, boring. Everything is a chore. Work is sucking the life out of me. Home is an endless cycle of upkeep and decay. It’s 80+ degrees in January. I feel alienated from the community I live in. Despite medication, therapy, and an ongoing effort to improve my mental health, it would seem that the Albatross of Depression has returned to hang once more around my neck.

I’ve learned that when my dysthymia kicks up, one of the best things I can do is to stay offline. Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram are actively detrimental to my mental wellness on a good day, and wildly destructive on a bad one. The algorithm knows how to stoke an unwell mind to keep you on the scroll forever. Your misery is profitable for the techno-oligarchs. Even outside of that context, many things in the world have been genuinely upsetting lately. The news is a bleak cycle of chaos and despair designed to break the public will and drive endless consumption.

To avoid getting online, I picked up Meditations on the Tarot from the pile of books on my desk. Written by a Catholic monk in France, it is a thick tome that has been lovingly translated from French into English. It explores the symbols of the Tarot in a deeply thoughtful way that is informed by both mainline Catholicism and the esoteric, wizardly Catholicism that lurks in the shadows of the Church.

I randomly opened the book and landed on page 422, in the middle of the chapter on The Devil. My eye was drawn to the bottom paragraph of the page:

And here is further advice, as simple and effective as the preceding: if one senses depression or any other sign of approach of a demon or demons, one spits three times to the left and crosses oneself.

What a curious piece of text to randomly land on while in the midst of a dysthymic episode. I read the preceding paragraph next, for context:

…Nevertheless, one needs rest – time during which one is left in peace by demons, i.e., time during which they are absent. In order to assure this, one has to resort to sacred magic. Tradition, centuries of experience, teaches us what is necessary in order to protect oneself from the approach of demons – or, if one senses them approaching, what to do in order to drive them away – and gives the following practical advice: make the sign of the Cross towards the north, south, east, and west, each time saying the first two verses of Psalm 68 (from David):

Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered;

let those who hate him flee before him.

As smoke is driven away, so drive them away;

as wax melts before fire, let the wicked perish before God.

This is a curious piece of text to land on when randomly opening a book of 665 pages, most of which conspicuously does not talk about depression. It is also curious that the remedy to depression is twofold. First, take rest and be left in peace (get offline, away from the demons). Second, do some folk magic with signs, cardinal directions, and religious texts. This is like catnip to me.

I am not Catholic. Although I am descended from a deeply Catholic family, I never went to church as a child and never received confirmation or any other Catholic rites or blessings. That said, for the last year or so I have felt something pulling me into the orbit of the faith. It began when I read my great-aunts memoir about my great-grandmother, who was very Catholic (she raised two nuns and a priest and eight other kids). Despite the obvious differences in our lives, I found her story and the anecdotes of her life to be quite relatable, and it was fascinating to read about the details of people in my family who I barely knew but could put a face to.

2025 was also randomly full of trips to Catholic landmarks. In February of 2025, my wife and I visited Montreal and randomly stopped in to visit Le Basilique de Notre Dame de Montreal. The experience was beautiful and inspiring, and I felt a connection to the place that I do not generally feel when we visit other places – perhaps an echo from my French-Canadian ancestors, ringing through the ether.

Later in 2025, we took a family trip to France. As part of our itinerary, we visited a number of cathedrals and basilicas in Paris, Dijon, Lyon, and Avignon. Just like in Montreal, these visitations stirred something deep within me. In Lyon, I surprised myself by making an offering to the church and burning a votive in honor of my grandmother, who had died a year before my visit and who I think would have appreciated the gesture. This series of events culminated in a religious experience that came to me in a dream.

In a nutshell, I may not be Catholic, but there is something about Catholicism in my blood that is sending and receiving pings through the ether.

Back to the topic at hand. Meditations on the Tarot, written by a literal monk and examining the symbols of the Tarot through a very Catholic lens, has been a source of great insight and interest to me. It was an odd synchronicity to randomly open this book to a tiny passage about depression while in the full thickness of my mood.

Make of it what you will. Old me, materialist and scientific me, would have blown it off as a meaningless coincidence. Now, older and maybe wiser, further removed from the ongoing infliction of psychic damage caused by my first career and early life, I can find meaning in the coincidence. And maybe that’s just what I needed: a tiny glimmer of meaning, a little tickle of hope. A beacon of the Weird in a broken world.

Who would I be to ignore such a tantalizing invitation? Let’s turn, cross, spit, and pray. The meds aren’t working anyway. What have I got to lose?