The question behind every With What site, asked about the one thing you cannot inventory
What do you want to do with the one life you have?
A plain-English map of what humans believe, why they believe it, and what it is like to try it. No dogma. No product. No promises.
How this site works
It describes, it does not preach
Every claim on this site belongs to a tradition, a text or a person. Never to us. You will not be told what is true.
Every article answers the same four questions
What it is. Where it came from. How it is practised. And honestly, what we can and cannot say about it.
It maps the harm too
Coercive groups, medical harm, exploitation and appropriation get their own section, with real articles.
Fourteen territories
Each one is its own small library. Start anywhere.
Thinking About It
What metaphysics actually means, and how people have argued about whether any of this is real.
22 articles △Discernment & Harm
How to tell a teacher from a predator, and where the spiritual world does real damage.
19 articles ☉Sky & Cosmos
Astrology in its Western, Vedic, Chinese and Mesoamerican forms, and the sky it all reads from.
22 articles ✥Divination & Oracle
Tarot, the I Ching, runes, scrying and every other way humans have asked a question of chance.
19 articles ✲Number, Letter & Name
Numerology, gematria, sacred geometry, and the belief that the alphabet is load-bearing.
13 articles ◇Body & Energy
Chakras, qi, prana, meridians, auras and the many maps drawn over the same body.
18 articles ●Contemplative Practice
Meditation, prayer, fasting, silence and pilgrimage across every tradition that uses them.
19 articles ✡Western Esotericism
Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, the Golden Dawn and the long European underground.
20 articles ☸World Religions & Their Mystical Cores
The major faiths, and the contemplative traditions burning quietly at the centre of each.
25 articles ✧Indigenous & Folk Traditions
Shamanism, Aboriginal belief, African diasporic religion, heathenry and village practice.
18 articles ☘Earth, Plant & Stone
Land, plants and stones as objects of belief — ley lines, sacred sites, animism and crystals — plus a lithotheque of 150 stones and metals.
16 articles ⚗Herb & Remedy
What plants have been used for across four traditions, what the evidence and the toxicology say, and a herbarium of 150 species.
23 articles ◎Consciousness & the Edge
Near-death experience, lucid dreaming, entheogens, parapsychology and the research into them.
18 articles ✦The Modern Landscape
New Age, manifestation, wellness culture and what spirituality became after the internet.
18 articlesIn memory of Skye Jane Turner