'Lightworker' Who Said COVID Vaccines Harm the Spirit Hospitalized With COVID

Magenta Pixie, a beloved and widely followed New Age figure in the United Kingdom who says that she channels a “divine intelligence” known as  “the White Winged Collective Consciousness of Nine,” has been hospitalized with COVID-19, according to Telegram updates from her husband and daughter. In recent months, Pixie has often discussed her opposition to COVID vaccines, using coded language in which she likens them to poison apples and urging her followers to think twice before “eating the pie.”

“They have tried to tell Magenta that this occurred because she is unvaccinated,” Daniel Catzmagick, Pixie’s husband, wrote on her Telegram channel, referring to her hospitalization. He signaled skepticism, however, adding, “She is on a ward of seven covid positive ladies who are all double and triple vaccinated. Most have only recently had their booster.” Catzmagick wrote on Tuesday that her team “cannot give any further prognosis” about Pixie’s health, and temporarily shut down comments on her Telegram channel.  (An assistant for Pixie did not respond to an email from Motherboard.)  

Pixie, who also refers to herself as an “intuitive consultant,” has been a well-known figure in New Age “Lightworker” communities since the early 1990s, a red-haired, motherly-looking woman with a cozy, direct way of speaking and videos rife with references to angels, fairies, and forest spirits. (“Lightworker” is a term that in New Age circles usually denotes someone who is believed to be a spiritually advanced human being working for the advancement of the human race, often possessed of special powers or otherworldly intuition; in Pixie’s case, she says that she channels wisdom from a variety of spiritual beings). She has 137,000 YouTube followers and 22,000 on Telegram, where she’s frequently answered questions about COVID-19 and COVID vaccines in recent months. Unlike many New Age or spiritual figures, Pixie has never claimed COVID isn’t real, but has said repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that she believes getting vaccinated will harm her followers’ spiritual ascension. 

“There are those who say ‘I had a gunne [sic] to my head so I had no choice (regarding the juice or job),” Pixie wrote in early October, apparently referring to people who say they had to get vaccinated in order not to lose their jobs. “But the thing is there was no gunne and yes you do have a choice. You always have a choice.” Spiritual advancement, she wrote, would come at the last possible moment: “This is how New Earth will be seeded and formed… from finding the other option. When all seems lost AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR then the catalyst to New Earth will be there before you. You have to be sovereign to ascend. Let me repeat YOU HAVE TO BE SOVEREIGN TO ASCEND!” 

The idea that vaccinations, but particularly COVID vaccines, could harm one’s bodily “sovereignty,” as well as their spiritual or metaphysical advancement, is a common one in New Age circles, and often intermingled with the false idea that vaccines will alter your DNA. Dr. Christiane Northrup, a former OB-GYN turned influential alt-health figure and vaccine conspiracy theorist, has claimed that COVID vaccines will disrupt spiritual enlightenment and do something negative to the spiritual “vibrations” of the person who takes it. Alt-health figures like David Avocado Wolfe have posted nonstop streams of misinformation about COVID vaccines, and well-known New Age figures like Laura Eisenhower (the great-granddaughter of Dwight Eisenhower) are promoting ivermectin as a COVID treatment. This kind of spiritual anxiety over COVID vaccines has spread far and fast: In August 2021, an anxious follower wrote to the famed musician Nick Cave (who writes a column called the Red Hand Files) asking him, of all people, if the letter-writer should be vaccinated, due to soul-level anxieties.  

“Are you going to take the Covid vaccine?” the letter-writer asked. “I've heard horror stories about spiritualists taking it and saying their soul feels dead. I don't know what to believe anymore.” (Cave gently responded that he’d been fully vaccinated, adding, wryly, “As for the soul, last time I checked mine seemed to be doing fine. I suspect the soul is robust enough to stand its ground against a remedy that will save so many lives. But who really knows about matters of the soul?”) 

All of this is a natural extension of New Age communities’ “fascination with purity,” as Matthew Remski puts it. Remski is a former yoga teacher, cult researcher and author, and a co-host of the podcast Conspirituality, which examines conspiracy theories, far right viewpoints and extremist beliefs in New Age and spiritual communities. 

“It’s all about purity,” he said. “Vaccination, in this landscape, also gets combined with the language of sovereignty, bodily autonomy and consent. It moves into this MeToo rape culture territory where the body of the New Age practitioner should remain ever unpolluted by a kind of nefarious outside or debauched or impure influence. The vaccine symbolizes all of that too. That’s where there’s this very common language of violation or even rape.” 

Remski points out that in New Age circles, the very notion of vaccines altering your DNA has become a shorthand for what a vaccine supposedly will do to your soul.  

“In New Age and pseudo-Eastern wisdom environments, there is a belief that the chemistry can interface with your soul in some way,” he said. “DNA is symbolic of your essence. For the last 30 or 40 years people with alt health have been talking about the soul or a person's karma or intergenerational trauma by using DNA as a kind of metaphor. So the phrase comes up all the time ‘This gets into your DNA,’ or ‘The guru is going to awaken a dormant strand of DNA within you.’  It’s this way in which New Age and quasi-Eastern discourse have used science to make the way they describe human evolution sound a little more scientific.”  

In Pixie’s case, she has declined to describe herself as “anti-vaccine,” writing on Telegram, “Being ‘anti’ anything is against that thing and therefore resistance. This is not something I would feel personally, experience or share/teach.” In a message soon after, she responded to a follower who asked if it would be wrong to “have a fake pie card,” clearly referring to a fake vaccination card. 

“Fake apple pie card is far superior to real apple pie,” Pixie replied. “However it is not standing in integrity when there are other choices, yet we should not judge those who choose this route. Not all are able to hold sovereignty.” In other messages, she criticized spiritual figures who did choose to get vaccinated: “Those that say they were ‘guided’ to eat pie. Now this may well be true, but it begs the question, who or what is guiding them? Certainly not the higher light.” 

On October 23, Pixie wrote on Telegram, “I am in hospital please please send healing. I love you all,” followed by a twin heart emoji. In a followup video, a clearly distressed Daniel Catzmagick told her followers, “We’ve been researching all the fantastic protocols and ideas everybody’s been suggesting… but I just—I think the problems got too much yesterday and we had to seek medical advice.” 

A few moments later, he broke down in tears. “Please pray that she will get the right people, the right, good people, and the right treatment that will help her and not harm her. And if you can make anything in your house like a little altar, and please just send your best wishes and your prayers and your spells and your magic.” 

In a follow-up message, Catzmagick shared that Pixie had been experiencing “13 days of covid symptoms,” including breathlessness, and that her left leg swelled up to “five times the circumference” of the right before going into the hospital. He said she is being given oxygen, morphine, steroids, and blood thinners, and that her doctors are considering giving her monoclonal antibodies. Pixie has refused PCR testing, Catzmagick wrote, and “remains firm in exercising her boundaries about what she will and will not do.” He also said that Pixie has said she has various visions: “She has seen colours, seen lightworkers step forward in her visualizations with offerings of healing and love. She has also at times seen an occasional high vibrational healer come into her space.” 

In the same message, Catzmagick asked followers not to tell them to take her out of the hospital. “Let us not be under any illusions here however. Magenta at this time is following the full recommended protocol from the hospital, with plenty of questions for the medical team. Whist holistic treatments and supplements are wonderful, those can come later. Please do not try to suggest that Magenta should leave the hospital or discontinue treatments. The physical level is just as important as the subtle realms at this time.”

While expressing compassion for Pixie’s condition and her family’s distress, Matthew Remski of Conspirituality also noted that her severe illness is also something they will have to weave into their existing claims about COVID and vaccinations. He wouldn't be surprised, he said, “If there’s a storyline about how she converted her doctors and nurses to understanding that COVID is a spiritual disease and has nothing to do with the virus at all, and that she shouldn’t get vaccinated because she has access to divine light.” The implication of Catzmagick’s messages so far, Remski said, is that “either way”—whether Pixie recovers or takes a turn for the worse—“the story will be positive: ‘Actually she’s powerful on the other side and can inspire us even more profoundly with her wisdom.’” 

Pixie’s followers who experience an “intense parasocial love” for her, Remski said, offer a bit of an object lesson for those concerned with disinformation in New Age communities: What, he asks, would they have to be offered “in order for them to say ‘She really inspired me but she didn’t know what she was talking about when it came to COVID’?How do you talk to people in that comment thread and not say, or even imply, that they were duped?”

In the same message in which she urged her followers not to take “the juice,” Pixie also acknowledged the realities of what she was asking of her followers—and, ultimately, herself.

“No one said the choicepoint would be easy,” she wrote. “We will all be touched by this.”