Meanwhile, on the other end of internet culture’s ideological spectrum, you have the witches of Tumblr. Witchblr (a real thing) isn't so much a community of Wiccans as much as it is a millennial-pink confection, studded with crystals and presented by tea-drinking women in flower crowns twirling through meadows—served alongside recipes for patriarchy-strangling tincture and a few choice emoji hexes guaranteed to ruin President Trump’s day. It was also Tumblr's 11th-largest community last year, at least ranked by the number of hashtagged posts it spawned. (Tenth-largest? Retiblr.)

The Witchblr is in many ways the Cult of Kek's opposite—it’s predominantly female, it’s not overtly racist, it prizes self-care over "triggering normies"—but both manage, despite their cheek-rooted tongues, to take on a spiritual affect.

The internet giving birth to new religions, or new versions of existing religions, is just another sign of it becoming a real place. But what ties Witchblr and the Cult of Kek together, despite their diametrically opposed viewpoints, is that each is dissatisfied with the real world and their inability to change those circumstances, and thus each has created its own sheltering cosmology. Followers of both send violent or violence-connoting images to their enemies (who are, at least in part, each other). And because each seems to comprise a mix of ironic and genuine believers—and because the internet is overrun with that nihilistic, post-truth “lol nothing matters” point of view right now—each has the potential to be a little dangerous. And that makes them hard to know what do with.

Kek Starter

If your brain is still trying to process the fact that millennials think they’re witches and worship the Egyptian deification of primordial darkness, let’s back up. Belief is fundamental to human culture. If you’re being purely objective, there’s very little difference between spreading the word of Kek and proselytizing for a more socially acceptable prophet. “The consensus is that the internet speeds up the same processes that always made up folklore,” says Jeffrey Tolbert, a folklorist at Bucknell University. “Think of it as the telephone game. All of that happens a lot faster on the internet, and it’s a lot more visible.”

Which makes sense, as long as you don’t think of technology as the opposite of spirituality, as many people tend to do. But actually, the supernatural and (to the non-technical) the mysterious black box of technology mesh together quite well. Tech can either lend a kind of scientific authority, or provide a blank digital canvas welcoming of screwy new ideas. “As soon as there’s tech, people will incorporate it. Look at ghost hunters,” says Lynne McNeill, a folklorist at Utah State University.

But, McNeill says, there's a more interesting comparison to make: “The best example of the ability to embody a fictionalized world on the internet is probably fan fiction. Suddenly fiction is no longer something you can only access from the outside. We can redraw the boundaries of reality.” That's the kind of flexibility the supernatural needs to flourish.

Even the communication medium of the internet is ripe for the occult. According to McNeill, the internet’s focus on the visual—think: emojis, memes and gifs in place of text alone—has brought back symbolic communication, something most religions are steeped in.

Kek worship and Tumblr's version of witchcraft aren’t the first religions to burst forth from the internet's skull, and all of them are similarly shining examples of Poe’s Law. The realest of them is probably Pastafarianism—the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which started as a satirical protest against teaching intelligent design in schools, then became a meme and acquired thousands of followers. (You may have even seen a car bedecked with its Fry Guy-meets-Sebastian emblem.)