“There exists a certain strength in elk, and a deer is a pure animal.” This indisputably true statement, given in a set of instructions for repelling demonic apparitions by means of an elk hide belt fastened with steel pins, comes from Causae et Curae, Hildegard of Bingen’s treatise on natural philosophy and various medicines animal, vegetable, and mineral. If you squinted, and gave yourself up to a certain mischievous perversity, you could call it a wellness manual.

Hildegard, abbess and polymath, wrote her manual in the middle of the twelfth century. Since then, the publishing niche occupied by such manuals has grown radically. My father, I suspect, would disapprove of this. Wellness, he said when canvassed for his opinion, is “not something normal people talk about.” This is a common position. Wellness has been much and eloquently abused – wellness is late capitalism, wellness is Gnosticism, wellness is for those with more money than sense, wellness is the special purview of the most insufferable women on God’s green earth – and it is hard not to see that the abusers have a point.

Take Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, for instance. Everyone is right about Goop. Goop is not good, even according to the forgiving standards of those who appreciate wellness precisely for its caprices and excesses. The unsubstantiated health benefit claim lawsuit settled with Orange County District Attorney’s office upon payment of $145,000 in 2018 was in fact the high point of Goop. The low point is Goop’s daily offerings: boring sweaters and six-hundred-dollar viscose above-ankle culottes and a thousand variations on the perpetually dieting woman’s salmon-and-salad dinner. Bizarre gems hawked with conviction in a Montecito monotone are rare.

Wellness is by turns: a species of oppositional defiant disorder, an industry that is avaricious and mendacious, a mindset that is narcissistic and neurotic. Is it anything else?

Hildegard tells us that “all living creatures are, so to speak, sparks from the radiance of God’s brilliance, and these sparks emerge from God like rays from the sun.” The fact that life is an emanation of God’s radiance means that radiance is a quality proper to the living, and in fact to creation itself: “For there is no creature without some kind of radiance – whether it be greenness, seeds, buds, or another kind of beauty. Otherwise, it would not be a creature at all.”

Wellness, as a state of being to which we all legitimately aspire, is the enjoyed presence of this creaturely radiance; wellness as a practice is (or should be) its cultivation.

Of course, we all have our different methods of cultivating radiance – some better, some worse, some simply incomprehensible to the other half of the population. You might be tempted, upon contemplating Gwyneth and her empire, to posit that wellness is uniquely and exclusively feminine. But post–Bryan Johnson, those claims are not really tenable. Bryan Johnson is part of the seemingly endless ex-Mormon-to-tech-wealth-to-transhumanist pipeline, distinguished mostly by his commitment to testing, on himself, every hypothetically possible life-extending practice on or off label and on or off the books. You know, of course, that he received blood transfusions from his own son. But what in Bryan Johnson is grotesque is dwarfed by what is annoying. More important in understanding Bryan Johnson as a type is the fussy paraphernalia of micro-hacks: the supplements and hyperbaric chambers and sleep schedules, the targeting and isolation of biomarkers and the Prussian discipline ordered to ruthlessly working over the margins. Vampirism notwithstanding, no one could ever accuse Bryan Johnson of having any fun. This is male-pattern wellness. In a late-breaking addition to my reporting here, Johnson has apparently just fallen in passionate love with an employee, and has also taken DMT, which are two of the things possibly able to bring men back from the depths of male-pattern metrics-focused wellness.

Male-pattern wellness is monastic, characterized by abstention and austerity. It is driven by a desire to specify and optimize the relevant mechanism, and a disinterest in all else. Male-pattern wellness may discover the ancestral wisdom of organ meats, but God forbid the bodybuilder-influencer discover the ancestral wisdom of eating on a plate. When I see their cutting boards on Instagram, their ersatz compositions of plain ground beef, a smattering of blueberries, an entire avocado, and a hunk of butter – a hunk, not a proportional grace note, to be gnawed whole, not spread on anything – I am filled with the primal and inarticulate female grievance, such as Eve doubtless felt when she first awoke and saw Adam’s untrimmed hedges and the mattress on Eden’s floor. How can you people live like this?

Worse, male-pattern wellness makes recruits. When things are divided into masculine and feminine groupings, a channel of exchange and influence is natural. Still, it grieves me to see women on Instagram flaunting their primal bods and their cutting board slop. My sisters, my sisters, what has happened to you? You can still eat raw meat and enjoy primal gains. Just mince it finely, add capers, cornichons, herbs, mustard, salt, serve it in a little mound with a raw egg yolk atop good china, with sourdough toast points and a salade de carottes râpées (for hormone balancing, per Ray Peat) and a glass of burgundy (for having a nice lunch, per me). There is a way to do things. Read Nourishing Traditions before it is too late. It’s not about the food; it’s about the meal.

The meal, not the food, is the key to female-pattern wellness, which is much more interested in the holistic nourishment of the organism than the isolation of the mechanism. The Weston A. Price Foundation’s material is a classic canon of female-pattern wellness. For the devotees of Weston A. Price (1870–1948), a dentist who traveled the world seeking the causes of dental health and dental degeneration, there are very few bad foods. There are only foods that have lost their proper context. Sometimes, this is due to overprocessing – milk should be left raw – and sometimes to underprocessing – grains should be soaked, sprouted, soured. Sometimes the chains of context disruption are more serious. Ruminants are denied grass. Animals are raised without sunlight. But for everything there is a proper method, a context, a place in the harmony. Hildegard would agree.

“If someone has an empty brain,” she advises,

and because of this is vexed by insanity, and is delerious – take the whole grains of wheat and cook them in water. Remove these cooked grains from the water, and place them around his whole head, tying a cloth over them. His brain will be reinvigorated by their vital fluid, and he may recover his health and strength. Do this until he returns to his right mind.

Even more tantalizing, the maintenance of these harmonies is in practical terms not a matter of science, but of tradition. You must nourish not just your body, nor just your body and soul, but also your ancestors and descendants. Bake sourdough. Make kefir. Recover what your grandmother knew. Given that my grandmother had nine children, a dazzling social life running Catholic Philadelphia, and a flourishing real estate career, what she knew was mostly the value of boxed mashed potato flakes. But I appreciate the sentiment. The idea of a female lore passed down from mothers to daughters, upon which some of the elemental harmonies of life rest, is a powerful and attractive one. If male-pattern wellness is monastic, female-pattern wellness is witchy.

It is also lush, extravagant, sensual. I don’t mean to go too far here and deny that it has a scientific side. I thrill to think of the laboratoires of La Mer, where haughty and severe acolytes in white lab coats devise ever more efficient ways to get kelp bioferment molecules into my pores. Do I buy La Mer (the baroque opulence of female-pattern wellness is always vulnerable to charges of conspicuous and inordinate consumption)? No. But I think of them in their beautiful laboratoires every March, as I cut bladderwrack from the rocks and shallows of the New Jersey coast, ferment it into evil-smelling goo, and apply it to my face throughout the year. I am not sure why I do this, except that I cannot afford La Mer, and trust in the wellness enhancing properties of things that come from the sea.

The sea, I am convinced, is the primal source of wellness. Optimizing oblates fill their TikTok penitentials with odes to the salutary qualities of morning cold plunges. Niacinamide natural philosophers understand that these are all pale imitations of and unnecessary elaborations on a November swim in the salty bay. To be on the sea, looking out at it, and above all, submerged in it, is practically synonymous with wellness as a state of being. The most important thing you can possibly do for your wellness is to buy beachfront property.

Possibly this has something to do with the sea’s ancient relation to the moon (Hildegard informs us, “It is the moon that is especially important for the health of human beings.”) Or perhaps it is due to the oyster beds. Eating oysters is very important to wellness: Ray Peat gives them top billing in Nutrition for Women. Empresses throughout history have also known the importance of oysters, according to the marketing copy [sic, throughout] on pearl-powder.net:

Empress Dowager Cixi, who effectively controlled the Chinese government in the late Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) for 47 years, was an avid fan of Pearl Powder. She not only used Pearl powder on her face, but ingested it daily. It was a beauty treasure that women used throughout the Orient for lustrous, soft, silky skin, and gave them a radiant, youthful appearance…. Pearl Powder was Iconic Cleopatra, queen of Egypt’s beauty secret. She was renowned for using pearl in her beauty regimen to maintain her youthful, beautiful skin. She was also famous for bathing in pearl powder, milk and honey to keep her skin looking ravishing and radiant.

Since the beginning of time Pearls were treasures of the earth, valuable and sought after…. Superpower Pearl Powder is a fascinating substance for making your hair fuller, your skin younger and more beautiful, your nails stronger, your body healthier, your life longer. It is serious skin and health care at its Finest. Pearl Powder will endow your entire body with radiance and vitality, while promoting clear, moist, glowing, supple skin.

Upon reading, I instantly purchased some.

Not only pearls, but all precious stones have an enduring fascination for seekers of wellness. “Lady with crystals all over her house” is the most persistent cultural shorthand for someone over her head in the woo-woo morass, even as the particular content of said morass changes with fads year by year and decade by decade. Hildegard was a great believer in this aspect of female-pattern wellness. On the uses of jacinth, she writes:

For anyone who is “bezaubert” [bewitched] by fantasms or magic words and has gone out of their mind: take a warm loaf of fine wheat and cut the shape of a cross through its top crust, but without breaking the loaf into pieces; draw the stone through the line of the cut on top and say: “May God, who deprived the devil of every precious stone after he had broken his commandment, drive out from you, N., all fantasms and all magic spells, and may he release you from all the pain of this madness.”

It is unclear whether this works on chatbot psychosis, but doubtless someone will make the experiment soon.

Crucially, for Hildegard, it is not an exogenous spiritual power that elevates crystals from mere rock to stones of power. It is what they are as created things – their origins, their visible representation of spiritual analogues, and above all their shining creaturely radiance – that makes them powerful in spiritual warfare. “They terrify the devil,” she says,

who hates and despises them because he remembered that their beauty appeared in him before he fell from the glory which God had given him, and also because some precious stones are created from the fire and energy in which he himself has his punishments. It was in fact by fire that the devil was defeated, through God’s will, and he fell into fire, just as he is also defeated by the fire of the Holy Spirit whenever people are rescued from the devil’s jaws through the inspiring breath of the Holy Spirit.

In fact, what is manifest with particular brilliance in gemstones inheres in all creation: “God has directed for humanity’s benefit,” says Hildegard,

all of creation, which God has formed both on the heights and in the depths. If we abuse our position to commit evil deeds, God’s judgment will permit other creatures to punish us. And just as creatures have to serve our bodily needs, it is also easily understood that they are intended for the welfare of our souls.

The idea of true wellness encompassing care for the soul, not just the body, has come down through the ages – albeit with a large, red, neon, blinking mutatis mutandis – all the way to its modern propagator. Gwyneth Paltrow’s spiritual advisor is a third-generation shaman (shamanism is apparently like plumbing – the best time to enter the field is two generations ago).

All of this is backed up by what I am pleased to call my lived experience. It is truly incredible how much more spiritual I become when I am installed in beachfront property. My cares and worries disappear; I become like a little child. Petty spites and angers melt into the air. I am filled with sweetness and light and the raw milk of human kindness. The Almighty would not believe how quickly I would mount the heights of sanctity if he would simply move my interior castle permanently to a beachfront lot.

But as his inscrutable providence has not yet seen fit to answer this prayer, I pursue ocean-based wellness instead.

However pure in theory its aims, in practice, wellness, male-pattern and female-pattern alike, is almost always in large part some kind of substitute activity. I cannot afford a little crab shack of my own, but I can afford La Mer (well, I can’t, but someone could. I can afford bladderwrack. You get the idea.)

Even more commonly than it is a substitute for oceanfront property, wellness is a substitute for worrying about death. I do not want to die. I love breathing (it is the premier wellness activity.) This is a pilgrimage, only a pilgrimage, but I love being here on the journey along with my fellow pilgrims. I love the cruel outline of the Bitterroot Mountains against the sky, the blue-green shell of the she-crab barely discernible in her sideways crawl through the shallows. One thousand years would not be too long to spend watching crabs, let alone dipping them in (raw, organic, grass-fed) butter. I love being part of it all.

We are all going to die someday (except for my mother), and there is nothing any of us can do about it. But there are things that happen along the way, things related to this central fact, that we can do something about. Joint pain here, a little loss of energy there, a dulling of the glow: these are both portents of something inevitable and to some degree locally solvable problems. A twenty-three-year-old woman obsessing over the ingredients in her exfoliant is certifiably insane and probably destroying her skin barrier, but also instinctually following the advice of many good therapists: focus your energy on problems you can solve. In fact, she has given herself a great gift: a decade hence she will be in a position to take on the project of rebuilding her skin barrier, a project that carries with it a whole raft of other ingredients to think about. Hildegard, once again, has a recommendation:

One whose face has hard and rough skin, made harsh from the wind, should cook barley in water and, having strained that water through a cloth, should bathe his face gently with the moderately warm water. The skin will become soft and smooth, and will have a beautiful color.

Of course, you can’t finally stop aging any more than you can stop death, but not only are the component problems more solvable, the reality of inevitable failure is much easier to live with. The skincare industry is a testament to the fact that in the final analysis, most of us would rather be old than dead.

Doctors, of course, are actually sworn to help keep us alive, not just to help ease our long goodbye to the earth and the world. But wellness, as many others have pointed out, has very little to do with medicine as practiced by doctors. You would never see doctors discussing which forms of alcohol are more and less healing. A doctor would never prescribe exactly one tequila sunrise (organic tequila blanco, fresh squeezed orange juice, pomegranate molasses), taken out of doors at close of day, to cure an incipient malaise. In an illustration of why nutritional studies are so riddled with confounders, it should be noted that this was during a week where due to a provisioning error I ate nothing but raw milk, pork jelly, steamed razor clams, and the aforementioned tequila sunrises. I emerged malaise free and ready to fight a shark.

Alcohol could never be medicine, but alcohol is perhaps the ultimate terrain of wellness, because the project of wellness is a kind of discernment and refinement of spirits. This, not that; by this method, not that one; in this way, not that way; to this degree, and no further. The more potent and dangerous the substance, the more scope for the practitioner of wellness to make a judgment, discern the proper underlying harmony. I never feel more like Gwyneth Paltrow than when I am pressing metheglin on some poor victim and making him listen to my latest theories produced out of thin air: that fruit distillates produce more salubrious animal spirits than grain liquors because they come without the protest of a tillage-ravaged earth. The fruits, they drop into our hands on their own, practically. The orchards, they have always been there.

Natural wine is a wellness elixir, so long as it comes from the Old World and is not hawked under the auspices of some loathsome Brooklynesque logo like “F**k Monster,” where you are meant to understand that the redacted letters in F**k ostensibly stand for Funk, because natural wine is funky, get it, and because we are all old enough to swear without getting sent to time-out.

Mezcal is a wellness elixir. Pulque is a wellness elixir. Mead is a wellness elixir. Home-brewed apple cider and the products derived therefrom have such an important place in the wellness canon that they deserve their own article. It is debatable whether beer is a wellness elixir. With all possible fondness, I must admit that Yuengling is not. The beers in Sacred and Healing Herbal Beers, bittered with yarrow, nettle, wormwood, and birch twigs, are probably wellness elixirs. Hildegard enjoins us to drink beer for health. Time spent among the physiognomies of your local craft brewery poses an empirical challenge to this advice, but is the empirical even admissible in the domain of wellness, which is in part a reclamation of the placebo effect as human prerogative, as participation in the work of creation through naming things as good and very good, filled with life and wholesome to it?

Wellness, at its best, at its least sane, at its alchemical heart, is a posture of dazzled curiosity toward the wonderful objects and substances in the world and the qualities they latently possess; a desire to find and pluck the invisible strings connecting them all.

There are silver-skinned salmon and trout of knowledge swimming in Idaho’s rivers, there are mazes of comb hiding bee-treasure, there is light and memory in the movement of water. The trees are hanging with yielding persimmons and arils like rubies hidden in red globes. There is milk and honey, colostrum and shilajit. Women want to know all the world; and many of them understand, like toddlers, that the best way to learn about something is to pop it in your mouth. I am not saying this impulse won’t get you into trouble. An expulsion from paradise here, a nicotine habit there, an overdraft charge for a labradorite drinking glass that you decided would “heal your life.” The stupid things I have done, the stupid money I have spent, for wellness! I know I will have to account for it when I leave this earth to face the terrible judge:

I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. With every breeze, as with invisible life that contains everything, I awaken everything to life. (Hildegard)