Dolphins and Money New Age |
Cosmic concepts |
Spiritual selections |
“”Doreen Virtue, the woman who runs seminars on how to talk to angels. And yes, there are apparently adults who are not in mental institutions (yet) who believe in this.
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—Skeptico Critical thinking for an irrational world[1] |
Doreen Virtue (1958–) was an Angel Therapy charlatan (yes you read that correctly: Angel Therapy).[2] In 2017, Virtue converted to Christianity and renounced her previous New Age activities. She has had her name removed from various New Age products and publications, including apps and tarot decks.[3] She is one of only a few special select people who can "see" and "communicate" with angels including the guardian angels that watch out over all of us. If you're a lady between about 35 and 65, at home and without too much education and access to pricy-hourly-rate-kind-of-cash, Virtue may have just what you're looking for.[note 1] Indeed, Virtue has an impressive, unverified story about how angels saved her life when armed robbers tried to steal her car, the angels told her to scream and she screamed.[4][1] She earned an M.A. in Counseling Psychology from Chapman University, a fully accredited university.[5] She earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in Psychology from California Coast University, which is accredited by the Distance Education Accreditation Commission.[5]
For a price, Virtue will show you how angels can help you the way they help her, which seems even more questionable now that she has renounced her work.[6] She is something of a prolific woo-factory turning out several books a year on angel related cruft. Earlier in her career she focused mainly on folk-psychology writing mainly on relationship therapy. She has written as many books on the topic as men she has married and divorced. Angels seem to be brilliant with numbers but lousy marriage counselors.
Virtue is a longtime student of number-woo, and invented a past life story where she studied under Pythagoras himself. According to Virtue, we're all alchemists somehow or other—it's not clear what that means, but it appears to impress her followers. Anyway, numbers have special significance or vibrations or whatever, and numbers you see on clocks, license plates and the like provide messages from angels—thus, we should ask our angels to explain the significance of these numbers. Angels arrange for specific number sequences to appear to us or subtly "whisper in" our "ear" so that we focus on particular numbers on every day banal objects. If we keep noticing the same number sequences (specifically in repeating sequences or patterns such as 777 or 1212), the angels are giving us a message through those numbers. She also claims to know how Angels are able to interfere with license plate registration numbers, phone number customers are assigned and the exact temperature on thermometers (°F for Americans and °C for the rest of the world) so that one day, they all converge as the same number (up to how many decimal points they can do this...not even Doreen one knows). She could write down how Angels pull this all off in a book and sell it to you, but doing it through a 1-900 phone number is more sensible. To feel angel numbers in depth you can contact Doreen and trade her number-knowledge with your credit card number.
Virtue has a special "Angel Number Calculator" for identifying your personal angel number, or that of other people.[1][7] Virtue's most notable numbers are located on the price tags of the books she sells.
If you can't afford a personal therapy session with Virtue, there are other "certified spiritual councilors" (CSC) and "angel therapy practitioners" (ATP) that have been certified by the American Board of Hypnotherapy,[note 2] which is (surprise!) headed by Virtue.[8] Yes, you too can take a series of courses (if you can afford it, that is), obtain the much-coveted ATP title and help others find interpersonal communicative bliss with their guardian angel.[9]
Virtue is excited about indigo children and crystal children and has now come up with something even more remarkable and special called "rainbow children". Since humans evolved from what Virtue calls "ape-like postures", crystal children prove humanity can evolve further. Still, Virtue doesn't mean evolution by natural selection, because she also writes that God is sending these various children as a gift to us. The crystals and the rainbows are both highly sensitive and psychic, they may appear uncommunicative and autistic but really they communicate telepathically instead. Virtue writes that the spirit world told her remarkable things about all these wonderful children while she was asleep. Furthermore, Virtue published a lucrative spiritually-informed book about the crystal children. We wait with bated breath for her follow-up book on rainbow children.
Virtue also offers instruction on the very similar-sounding Earth angels.[10][11]
Besides angels and indigos, Virtue has written on a number of other woo topics, including chakras,[12][13] fairies,[14][15] ascended masters,[16] crystal healing[17] and oracle cards (which are divinatory decks like tarot, but they lack the major and minor arcana structure).
Virtue said she had an experience of Jesus in an Episcopal church in early 2017 and says she has given up the angels, the tarot and the rest of it.[18] She is no longer selling her own books via her website, but instead refers to an Amazon site with a list of Evangelical Protestant titles. Hay House continues to sell 25 oracle decks authored by Virtue.