The Spiritual Boys' Club

The Brotopia of Enlightenment

The Spiritual Boys’ Club

I did some research. Anthropological fieldwork, you might call it. I looked at those internet lists: “Top 100 Spiritual Teachers,” “Most Influential Spiritual Leaders,” “Wisdom Keepers Changing the World.”

And what did I find?

An endless parade of men’s names, men’s faces, men’s voices declaring themselves the arbiters of enlightenment.

The “best” list I found had 25 women among 100 teachers. Twenty-five percent. As if the divine feminine operates at a quarter capacity. As if wisdom arrives primarily through testosterone. As if the people who literally birth humanity into existence are somehow less qualified to guide its spiritual evolution.

Most lists had far fewer than 25 percent.

And nonbinary people? Zero mentioned. Apparently, transcending gender binaries in your lived experience doesn’t count as spiritual insight worth recognizing. Apparently, you need to fit neatly into the colonial categories of “man” or “woman” to be considered influential.

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What This Actually Means

This isn’t just annoying. This isn’t just “well, maybe women and nonbinary people need to market themselves better” (though let’s unpack THAT victim-blaming in a moment). This is symptomatic of a spiritual establishment that has confused patriarchal dominance with divine authority.

Think about what these lists are really saying:

They’re implying that the people who wrote the Vedas matter more than the people who kept oral traditions alive for millennia through song and story.

They’re suggesting that the monks who wrote theology in monasteries matter more than the mystics who couldn’t access those monasteries because they had vaginas or didn’t perform gender “correctly.”

They’re insinuating that the spiritual teachers with book deals and TED talks and massive platforms matter more than the curanderas, the rootworkers, the medicine women, the herbalists, the midwives, the dreamers, and the channels who’ve been doing this work in their communities for generations without needing a publicity team.

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The Burning Times Never Really Ended?

Here’s a radical theory: The systematic erasure of feminine spiritual authority didn’t completely end when they stopped burning witches at the stake. It just got more sophisticated.

Now instead of fire, we use:

• Academic gatekeeping. You need credentials from institutions that historically excluded women and still exclude most marginalized people.

• Publishing industry bias. Male authors get bigger advances, more marketing, better placement.

• Speaking circuit economics. Conferences book “names” that became names because previous conferences booked them.

• Media amplification. Who gets the profiles, the podcasts, the platforms?

• The Wikipedia problem. Women’s pages get deleted for “insufficient notability” while men with equivalent credentials stay up.

The Inquisition was just more honest about what it was doing.

Thomas Berry—whose work I deeply respect—wrote about Christianity’s “barbaric attack on the spiritual qualities of Indigenous peoples.” I would add a tragic corollary about Christianity’s barbaric attack on feminine spiritual authority, on queer and trans mystics, on anyone whose body or being has threatened patriarchal religious control.

And that attack continues in these lists. It continues every time “influential teacher” gets unconsciously coded as “man with large platform who wrote books and speaks at conferences.”

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Let’s Get Specific About Who’s Missing

You know who’s mostly not on these lists?

• The grandmother who tends the family altar and keeps the ancestors close.

• The disabled mystic whose hard-earned wisdom comes through chronic pain and medical trauma.

• The sex worker who understands embodiment and sacred transgression better than any celibate monk.

• The prisoner doing Buddhist practice in solitary confinement.

• The undocumented immigrant maintaining spiritual traditions in diaspora.

• The trans shaman doing ceremony for their chosen community.

• The Indigenous land defender whose spirituality is inseparable from protecting water and earth.

• The depressed person whose dark night of the soul taught them things sunshine spirituality never could.

• The big-bodied person who had to develop radical self-love against a culture of body hatred.

• The domestic violence survivor who rebuilt her concept of the divine after religious abuse.

These people are doing profound spiritual work. They’re influencing their communities, their families, their networks. But they’ll never make a Top 100 list because the metrics of “influence” are designed to measure audience size, not depth. Platforms, not transformation. Visibility, not wisdom.

The “But What About Marketing?” Deflection

Inevitably, someone says: “Well, maybe women and marginalized teachers just need to be better at self-promotion!”

My response: NO.

First, this assumes everyone has equal access to the machinery of self-promotion—book deals, agents, publicists, social media teams, conference circuits, wealthy benefactors. They don’t.

Second, it assumes that spiritual authority SHOULD operate according to capitalist marketplace logic. It implies that whoever markets themselves most aggressively deserves the biggest platform. Since when is shameless self-promotion a spiritual virtue?

Third, it ignores that women and marginalized people who DO self-promote effectively often get labeled as “inauthentic,” “aggressive,” “attention-seeking,” or “too much.”

The same confidence that makes a man seem authoritative makes a woman seem arrogant. The same self-assurance that makes a cis person seem spiritual makes a trans person seem “agenda-driven.”

The game is rigged, and then we blame the players for losing.

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The Real Question: Influential TO WHOM?

Here’s what these lists never ask: Influential to whom? And for what purpose?

Are we measuring who has the most followers, or who creates the deepest transformation?

Are we measuring who gets the most speaking gigs, or who shows up for their community consistently?

Are we measuring who writes the most books, or who passes wisdom through oral tradition, through ceremony, through embodied practice?

Are we measuring who gets featured in mainstream media, or who holds space for the grief, rage, and healing that mainstream culture refuses to acknowledge?

Because if we changed the metrics, the lists would look radically different.

Let’s say we measured spiritual influence by who shows up for the dying, who tends the land, who maintains ancestral practices, who creates sanctuary for the marginalized, who speaks truth to power at personal cost, and who does the unsexy work of actual liberation.

Then we would have to acknowledge that spiritual authority looks different from what these lists suggest.

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A Modest Proposal

We propose additional, alternative categories for “spiritual influence”:

• Most Likely to Make Patriarchy Uncomfortable

• Best at Tending What Capitalism Tries to Kill

• Most Committed to Collective Liberation Over Personal Brand

• Deepest Understanding of Intersectional Spirituality

• Best at Holding Paradox Without Collapsing Into Easy Answers

• Most Willing to Acknowledge They Don’t Have All the Answers

• Best at Listening to Nonhuman Intelligence

• Most Committed to Decolonizing Spiritual Practice

• Best at Integrating Shadow Instead of Performing Light

• Most Likely to Tell You Uncomfortable Truths You Need to Hear

Try making those lists and see who rises to the top.

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What Actually Needs to Happen

I’m not naive. I know these lists aren’t going away. But here’s what needs to change:

1. Acknowledge the structural bias. Stop pretending these lists reflect objective spiritual merit. They reflect who has access to platforms, who gets amplified by existing power structures, who fits the dominant culture’s image of what authority looks like.

2. Actively seek voices from the margins. Don’t just add a few women and call it done. Center Indigenous teachers, BIPOC teachers, queer and trans teachers, disabled teachers, poor teachers, teachers from the Global South. And not as tokens but as authorities.

3. Value different forms of influence. Not everyone writes books or gives TED talks. Some people’s influence happens in small circles, in embodied practice, in sustained community care. That’s not less important. It may sometimes be more important.

4. Question the metrics. Are we measuring wisdom or wealth? Depth or reach? Transformation or entertainment? Liberation or comfort?

5. Spiritual authority doesn’t require institutional validation. The mystics, shamans, healers, and visionaries doing the deepest work often operate outside mainstream recognition. Maybe that’s exactly where they need to be.

The Bottom Line

These lists claiming to identify the “top spiritual teachers” are like maps of the ocean that only show where ships have traveled, ignoring 95% of the ocean’s depths because submarines haven’t visited them yet.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Just because patriarchal structures haven’t amplified it doesn’t mean it isn’t influential.

The spiritual teachings that are actually transforming the world are happening in circles we may rarely hear about. They’re transmitted by teachers whose names we may never know and carried forward by students who don’t need their wisdom validated by lists.

They are the ones teaching people how to grieve, how to rage, how to heal ancestral trauma, how to decolonize consciousness, how to love across difference, how to survive the current apocalypse with grace and fury.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

The most powerful magic has often been underground. The most dangerous truth-tellers have frequently been the ones the establishment refuses to recognize. The real revolution may be underway, led by people that the patriarchy tries to silence.

So to the list-makers: Keep your lists. We’ll keep our liberation.

I measure influence differently: by depth, not reach. By transformation, not followers. By how well someone walks their talk in the unglamorous daily practice of actually living their values.

And by that metric, some of the most spiritually influential people in the world are names that don’t appear on Top 100 lists. They are teaching in prisons and protests, in ceremony and community gardens, in hospice rooms and homeless shelters, in their own living rooms and around kitchen tables and at bedsides and gravesides.

Blessed be the teachers who never make the list. Blessed be the wisdom that refuses institutional validation. Blessed be the feminine, the queer, the trans, the nonbinary, the animal, the mythic, the feral: all the authorities patriarchy try to erase.

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For a preliminary list (by no mean exhaustive!) of WOMEN and NONBINARY SPIRITUAL LEADERS, go here:

tinyurl.com/WomenSpiritualLeaders

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The spiritual art in this newsletter, in order of appearance:

Georgia O’Keeffe: Red Canna II

Hilma af Klint: Group X, Nos. 1-3, Altarpiece

Leonora Carrington: The Magical World of the Mayans

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Links to all my other stuff: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of November 6

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Martin Luther King Jr. said that harnessing our pain and transforming it into wise love can change the world for the better. More than any other sign, Scorpio, you understand this mystery: how descent can lead to renewal, how darkness can awaken brilliance. It’s one of your birthrights to embody King’s militant tenderness: to take what has wounded you, alchemize it, and make it into a force that heals others as well as yourself. You have the natural power to demonstrate that vulnerability and ferocity can coexist, that forgiveness can live alongside uncompromising truth. When you transmute your shadows into offerings of power, you confirm King’s conviction that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in seemingly random data. On the downside, it may cause a belief in delusional conspiracy theories. But it can also be a generator of life’s poetry, leading us to see faces in clouds, hear fateful messages in static, and find key revelations in a horoscope. Psychologist C.G. Jung articulated another positive variation of the phenomenon. His concept of synchronicity refers to the occurrence of meaningful coincidences between internal psychological states and external events that feel deeply significant and even astounding to the person experiencing them. Synchronicities suggest there’s a mysterious underlying order in the universe, linking mind and matter in nonrational ways. In the coming weeks, Sagittarius, I suspect you will experience a slew of synchronicities and the good kind of apophenia.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Philosopher Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase “the map is not the territory.” In other words, your concepts about reality are not reality itself. Your idea of love is not love. Your theory about who you are is not who you are. It’s true that many maps are useful fictions. But when you forget they’re fiction, you’re lost even when you think you know where you are. Here’s the good news, Capricorn: In the weeks ahead, you are poised to see and understand the world exactly as it is—maybe more than ever before. Lean into this awesome opportunity.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Babies are born with about 300 bones, but adults have 206. Many of our first bones fuse with others. From one perspective, then, we begin our lives abundant with possibility and rich with redundancy. Then we solidify, becoming structurally sound but less flexible. Aging is a process of strategic sacrifice, necessary but not without loss. Please meditate on these facts as a metaphor for the decisions you face. The question isn’t whether to ripen and mature—that’s a given—but which growth will serve you and which will diminish you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Beneath every thriving forest lies a lacework of mycelium. Through it, tree roots trade nourishment, warn each other of drought or illness, and make sure that young shoots benefit from elders’ reserves. Scientists call it the “wood-wide web.” Indigenous traditions have long understood the principle: Life flourishes when a vast communication network operates below the surface to foster care and collaboration. Take your cues from these themes, Pisces. Tend creatively to the web of connections that joins you to friends, collaborators, and kindred spirits. Proceed with the faith that generosity multiplies pathways and invites good fortune to circulate freely. Offer what you can, knowing that the cycle of giving will find its way back to you.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In 1995, wolves were reintroduced to the American wildlife area known as Yellowstone Park after a 70-year absence. They hunted elk, which changed elk behavior, which changed vegetation patterns, which stabilized riverbanks, which altered the course of the Lamar River and its tributaries. The wolves changed the rivers! This phenomenon is called a trophic cascade: one species reorganizing an entire ecosystem through a web of indirect effects. For the foreseeable future, Aries, you will be a trophic cascade, too. Your choices will create many ripples beyond your personal sphere. I hope you wield your influence with maximum integrity.

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I authorize you to explore the mysteries of sacred laziness. It’s your right and duty to engage in intense relaxing, unwinding, and detoxifying. Proceed on the theory that rest is not the absence of productivity but a different kind of production—the cultivation of dreams, the composting of experience, and the slow fermentation of insight. What if your worth isn’t always measured by your output? What if being less active for a while is essential to your beautiful success in the future?

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You are not yet who you will become. Your current struggle has not yet generated its full wisdom. Your confusion hasn’t fully clarified into purpose. The mess hasn’t composted into soil. The ending that looms hasn’t revealed the beginning it portends. In sum, Gemini, you are far from done. The story isn’t over. The verdict isn’t in. You haven’t met everyone who will love you and help you. You haven’t become delightfully impossible in all the ways you will eventually become delightfully impossible.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): By the time he became an elder, Cancerian artist David Hockney had enjoyed a long and brilliant career as a painter, primarily applying paint to canvases. Then, at age 72, he made a radical departure, generating artworks using iPhones and iPads. He loved how these digital media allowed him to instantly capture fleeting moments of beauty. His success with this alternate form of expression has been as great as his previous work. I encourage you to be as daring and innovative as Hockney. Your imaginative energy and creative powers are peaking. Take full advantage!

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Black activist Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” He was proclaiming a universal truth: Real courage is never just about personal glory. It’s about using your fire to help and illuminate others. You Leos are made to do this: to be bold not just for your own sake, but as a source of strength for your community. Your charisma and creativity can be precious resources for all those whose lives you touch. In the coming weeks, how will you wield them for mutual uplift?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Who would have predicted that the first woman to climb Mount Everest would have three planets in Virgo? Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei did it in 1975. To what did she attribute her success? She described herself not as fearless, but as “a person who never gives up.” I will note another key character trait: rebellious willfulness. In her time, women were discouraged from the sport. They were regarded as too fragile and impractical for rugged ascents. She defied all that. Let’s make her your inspirational role model, Virgo. Be persistent, resolute, indefatigable, and, if necessary, renegade.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Among the Mbuti people of the Congo, there’s no word for “thank you.” Gratitude is so foundational to their culture that it requires no special acknowledgment. It’s not singled out in moments of politeness; it’s a sweet ambent presence in the daily flux. I invite you to live like that for now, Libra. Practice feeling reverence and respect for every little thing that makes your life such an amazing gift. Feel your appreciation humming through ordinary moments like background music. I guarantee you that this experiment will boost the flow of gratitude-worthy experiences in your direction.

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