Introduction to the special issue : (Con)spirituality, science and COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed not only a life-threatening virus globally but also the spread of conspiracy theories about its origins and impacts. This dis/misinformation circulated within many societies and subcultures, and, notably, among wellness influencers and holistic spiritual communities. Jules Evans was the first to highlight this rise of 'conspirituality' in the online magazine Medium in April 2020, followed by the popular and ongoing podcast conspirituality.net, hosted by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker. The term, however, was first used almost a decade earlier in a scholarly article by Charlotte Ward and David Voas (2011) on 'The Emergence of Conspirituality' in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, to describe the nexus of right-wing conspiracy theory and New Age spirituality at the turn of the twentyfirst century. Egil Asprem and Asbjørn Dyrendal (2015) then disputed this claim in their article 'Conspirituality Reconsidered: How Surprising and How New Is the Confluence of Spirituality and Conspiracy Theory?' in the same journal. There is now widespread agreement that New Age conspirituality shared similarities with Western esotericism, the 'cultic milieu' (Campbell 1972) and 'occulture' (Partridge 2004), as Asprem and Dyrendal had argued.