Sad News

Eclipse hysteria has fatal consequences for a Los Angeles family

Honestly, the stories about people overreacting to the April 8 Solar Eclipse are getting too sad to save for the Weekend Entertainment Guide.

A recent thread on r/conspiracy asked, “Now what?” u/ElizabethDane had the best answer:

It is 'soon' until the end of time. A good mate of mine has been obsessed with the most outlandish theories out there for the last 25 years. Everything is a false flag operation, everything is some kind of con, any significant news story about anything anywhere is absolutely not true. The evil empire in charge of everything will reveal itself 'very soon' and he will be proven to be right. He's been saying 'very soon' since the mid 90s. Yesterday morning it was all going to be revealed by lunch time but now of course, it's gone back to 'very soon'. We will all be enslaved by the Clintons / China unless of course Trump - who is God by the way - can stop them first. There's no hope for some folks.

On r/atheism, a series of posts by u/writtenonapaige22 track the story of a woman who went to a taco restaurant in Florida and gave the servers enormous tips on the grounds that she expected to be raptured on April 8. When she wasn’t raptured, she returned to the restaurant and tried to get her money back.

So, last weekend at the restaurant I work at, a woman tipped me $300, convinced that the rapture was imminent on April 8th. Here's where it gets even more bizarre. A few days later, she returns and tips my coworker a whopping $777.

Fast forward to today, and she's back again, adamant that her tips were somehow fraudulent and that we tampered with them. Her claims of fraud are literally impossible, we bring the card reader to the table, and it's the guest who decides the tip amount by either pressing a preset option or entering a custom one before hitting pay. That's exactly what she did. So, it's physically impossible for us to manipulate the tip amounts.

Both my coworker and I have already received our tips with our paychecks, and we obviously have to pay income tax on them. Returning the money to her at this point is literally impossible since we don't actually have all the money.

The saddest eclipse freakout story yet, though, is the murder-suicide committed by Danielle Cherakiyah Johnson, known professionally as Danielle Ayoka. ABC7 in Los Angeles reported that she stabbed her boyfriend to death at home Monday morning. She then pushed her two children out of her moving SUV on the freeway, killing one of them, and drove into a tree, killing herself.

On her X account, Ayoka identified herself as an astrologer and said on April 4, “This eclipse is the epitome of spiritual warfare.”  

I had never heard of Danielle Ayoka prior to

Abigail Joy

sending me the Los Angeles Times news article. Unfortunately, some people coming across the story of Danielle Ayoka in the media will probably get the wrong idea that she represents all astrologers. Just like any other community of human beings, the astrology community apparently has a few idiots who ruin it for everyone.

Some of Ayoka’s writings are relatable. Her origin story, as told to The Fader in 2016, is unremarkable. I’m about three years older than she is, and she sounds just like many other millennial women who came into adulthood at a moment when traditional religions were losing their influence and the online spirituality scene was exploding. She’s not especially profound, but neither are most people when they begin their careers.

How old were you when it all came together for you?

I'd say it was definitely after I went through a time where I was super religious and I moved from religion to energy. All that stuff started culminating around 20.

By 2018, however, a forum thread on Lipstick Alley began to speculate that her monthly subscription aura cleanses might be a scam.

I don’t know Ayoka and don’t know what sent her over the edge. I do know that the hype surrounding the April 8 Solar Eclipse got way out of hand. I am not in favor of Big Government or Big Tech censorship, but I am in favor of private citizens getting better at using their own brains.

The Solar Eclipse was followed by a Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces on April 10, earlier today. Some of the qualities associated with the sign of Pisces include imagination and fantasy. In the right context, these are not bad qualities to have. With aggressive Mars powering through Pisces, however, the dreaming went too far — and Saturn, the planet of limits, has shown us the consequences.

New York Post reported that, in the aftermath of Ayoka’s rampage, “Investigators found a trail of bloody footprints leading through the open door of the apartment, which was also littered with black feathers and tarot cards, sources said.”

Most people who use Tarot cards don’t do stuff like this. It is possible to have a functional and grounded life in the alternative spirituality scene, but it does require some thought. In my book Impossible Dreams: Hopes, Fears, and Expectations for Saturn in Pisces, I comment on my own experiences:

The absence of hierarchical authority took some getting used to when I discovered astrology half a Saturn cycle ago. As I began to diverge from my Lutheran heritage, I realized there was no pastor or bishop to tell me what to do in the Wild West of the alternative spirituality scene. Therefore, I would need to use my own common sense and discernment to keep myself safe.

Fortunately, I’d already had some experience traveling alone in unfamiliar cities as a woman. There, as in the spiritual world, the answer isn’t to avoid travel entirely. It’s to stay mindful of your surroundings and take basic precautions like crossing the street if someone looks at you funny.

Another basic precaution you can take: if you’re on the internet, and whatever you’re reading or watching sounds unhinged, just close the browser tab.