Rituals cast a spell on gen-Zers
Burning ceremonies and grape theory videos are flooding TikToks, as people search for meaning and connections
At midnight on New Year’s Eve, Kimberly* was under a table, clutching a bowl of grapes — 12, to be precise. As the clock struck 12, she downed the fruits one by one while thinking intently of the relationship she hoped to find in 2024, following the instructions set out by the viral Grape Theory.
Kimberly, an engineer by trade, was not the only person to see in the New Year by pinning her romantic hopes on her ability to avoid choking on cylindrical objects swallowed in quick succession. In fact, the grape theory was such a sensation that supermarkets were selling out of grapes on Dec. 31 — particularly annoying for those practising the separate Spanish tradition of eating 12 grapes at midnight for good luck.
“It looked like a fun, cute thing to do to manifest love. Something that didn’t involve too much, but still sparked a little bit of hope and anticipation,” said Kimberly, who has also dabbled in astrology and tarot. “I was shocked at how it was actually kind of difficult, eating 12 grapes while trying to focus on manifesting the future love of my life.”
The Grape Theory gained traction after a 20-something TikTokker posted a video saying she’d done the ritual on the previous New Year’s Eve and miraculously found love four months later. That particular post has over six million views, but it’s just a tiny part of a wave of ritual-based content sweeping social media right now.
If you’re tapped into a certain algorithm geared mostly to gen Z and Millennial women, you’ve likely been served up any number of vaguely witchy ways to change your life, alongside the salmon bowl recipes, Taylor Swift Easter egg theories and that epic 50-part pathological-liar-romance drama titled “Who TF Did I Marry?”
Perhaps on New Year’s Eve you opted for the “12 Wishes” ritual, which involved writing down a dozen hopes for the year, putting the notes in a jar and burning one on each of the following 11 days, trusting the Universe would bring them to fruition. (The 12th wish was your own responsibility, a drag if you landed yourself with, say, “Become a millionaire.”)
Or maybe you were inspired to organize your month around the various moon-related ceremonies available. You might set a glass of water outside on a full moon with an intention for the month written underneath it. Or you could wait for a new moon and light a white candle sprinkled with cinnamon and cloves (for abundance and success), using the flame to burn some bay leaves upon which you’d written your manifestations.
Burning ceremonies abound on social media
You’ve almost certainly seen a burning ceremony, possibly hosted by Lori Dyan, a Canadian tarot reader and author of a book called “Burn Your s--t,” out in May, about “the life-changing magic of rituals.”
“You feel unburdened after it, you feel lighter, you feel a collective exhale,” said Dyan of the ceremony, in which she burns pieces of paper people have sent to her, written with things they want to release from their lives. “What’s wild to me is that I’m doing this live on Instagram, with people from all over the world, and they’re having a similar response. Energy is not confined by geography.”
People in this “beautiful collective coven” often tell Dyan that this makes them feel less alone. “They’ll hear me speaking aloud something someone from Denmark sent to me, watching it on their phone in their backyard and thinking, ‘I feel like I wrote that.’ ”
She said the same themes emerge from Australia, Panama, Kuwait: Letting go of toxic relationships, impostor syndrome, health struggles. One woman awaiting test results to see if her cancer had reoccurred asked to have that possibility symbolically “released” in a burning ceremony. “I asked everyone to hold space for this woman or anyone with a health diagnosis, and I felt like I was going to levitate off the damn chair,” said Dyan. “The flames went up emerald green when I burned it, which is associated with the archangel Raphael.” (If you don’t know your angels, he’s got the healing portfolio.) Immediately after, she said, she got a message from the woman saying she’d “felt the love,” and then a few weeks later, a followup to say her scans had been clear.
Dyan isn’t claiming that burning ceremonies cure cancer. “Rituals don’t provide outcomes, but they support outcomes,” she said. She sees them as tools for “self-care” and connection.
Rituals exist in most of the world’s traditions
While he’s not on social media much himself, these sorts of rituals are immediately familiar to cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, author of “Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth It.”
“There are cross-cultural patterns. Fire you’ll find in pretty much all of the world’s traditions, also making a wish,” said Xygalatas. “These are the things that click for our evolved psychology.” The same goes for repetition, like speaking an affirmation three times over a special tonic before you drink it.
“Our brain tries to make sense of the world, and to do that we engage in stereotyping, seeing patterns,” he said. It’s “very stressful” for this predictive mechanism to encounter the unexpected or unusual. “This is why you find ritualization in contexts that have a lot of anxiety, like gambling, sports, illness or warfare. You can’t control most things, but that’s one thing you can do. If ritual is anything, it is structured.” In one experiment in Mauritius, Xygalatas asked people to wear monitoring devices while they were worshipping in a Hindu temple. “We saw that after performing repetitive prayers, their anxiety levels go down, their cortisol levels decrease.”
Such rituals play an important role in social cohesion. “Rituals invite people to move in synchrony,” he said, referring to simultaneous action like dancing with a group or gathering around a fire and singing on Imbolc, a Gaelic festival that marks the beginning of spring. “When people engage in synchronous movement, they trust each other more and their endorphin levels increase.”
Many rituals incite emotion and invite people to feel those feelings together — an increasingly rare experience in a society where many of us live far from the places and people we grew up with, or feel little or no connection to our cultural background’s traditions. “Organized religion
‘‘ For a long time, I saw these practices as irrational, but I gradually realized that if you’re going to reject those, you should reject things like art, sports and music. They’re equally useless but also equally meaningful to humans.
DIMITRIS XYGALATAS COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGIST
in the West has plummeted, but as it does people seek meaning and connection and ways of coping with the world in new forms,” Xygalatas said. Social media, which enables us to tap into traditions from every corner of the globe, simply accelerates this.
Everyday rituals bring connection and meaning
By the way: If you haven’t written down your deepest fears and offered them up to the Universe, that doesn’t mean you aren’t engaging in rituals regularly. “Do you raise your glass to make a toast? Do you attend birthday parties, weddings, funerals?” asks Xygalatas. “Those are rituals.” Ditto shaking hands, putting up decorations at holidays, knocking on wood. These are all ways of “deriving meaning from things that are essentially meaningless,” something that seems to be uniquely built into our DNA as a species.
“For a long time, I saw these practices as irrational but I gradually realized that if you’re going to reject those, you should reject things like art, sports and music,” Xygalatas said. “They’re equally useless but also equally meaningful to humans. And if you strip all of that away, we’re just apes living in buildings.”
Perhaps you were wondering how the Grape Theory is panning out for Kimberly so far? “It has not worked … yet!” she said. “I feel OK about that. It’s still early in the year. If anything, it reminds me to be more open to love.”