"we're swapping one kind of authority dependency for another"

You're not wrong, but I think you're missing the structural shift that makes this fundamentally different from what Campbell meant by the hero returning with the boon. In the monomyth, the hero brings wisdom back to the community — it's inherently social. What DTC spirituality actually resembles, at least from my sci-fi-brained perspective, is more like replicator technology — spiritual practices become downloadable modules with no origin story and no communal context. The danger isn't just parasocial authority migration; it's that when you can grab any technique instantly without the journey that traditionally grounded it, you lose the liminal space where actual transformation happens. I've noticed this in my own practice — the Saturn-hour sigil work I did felt meaningful because I'd spent months studying correspondences, not because I found a cheat sheet on someone's Patreon.

"When everyone's a solo brand, you end up with a thousand isolated micro-cults and no real accountability."

Okay but I want to push back on this assumption that the alternative to DTC spirituality is actually shared meaning. Like, was it really shared? Or was it shared for a very specific type of person and everyone else just... performed along?

Here's the angle I don't think you're considering: what if DTC spirituality is actually making room for devotional practices that institutional spaces actively crushed? I'm thinking specifically about animism, local land cults, animal veneration — stuff that doesn't scale because it's inherently place-based. The wolf symbolism I work with isn't something I picked up from a Substack. It came from repeated encounters that felt like they had weight to them, the kind of density that doesn't budge when you push against it. You can't institutionalize that. The moment you try, it becomes something else.

And I think there's something interesting happening with lunar cycle work in this new ecosystem. I've been tracking rituals by moon phases for about two years now, and what I've noticed is that the people doing this seriously aren't actually isolated — they're forming synced practices without needing a central authority. Like, I know there are people doing the same full moon work I am on the same night, and we're not in a Discord together. We're just... tuned to the same cycle. That's not a micro-cult. That's something older.

I think the real danger you're spotting isn't the decentralization itself — it's that monetization pretends to be place-based when it's actually placeless. A creator selling you "your local spirit guide reading" over Zoom is still operating in the same extraction logic as the church. But that doesn't mean the underlying shift toward personal, localized practice is the problem. It might actually be the correction.