The Lion’s Gate Portal: Origins of a New Age Myth
If you engage even casually with the more spiritual side of the internet, chances are you’ve heard of the Lion’s Gate Portal. Occurring today, 8/8, this celestial event has been splashed across the front pages of pop-astrology blogs, women’s magazines, and AI-generated Facebook slop farms for a solid week. But what actually is it, where did it come from, and (most importantly) what does it mean?
It behooves us to be cautious when taking what we learn from social media at face value. Whenever I start hearing a catchy phrase repeated (”blood moon eclipse,” “master manifestor,” “shadow work is self care!”) I tend to approach the subject with a healthy amount of skepticism. While these magical buzzwords on spiritual social media sometimes have a grain of truth to them, like chain letters they tend to get passed around and diluted to the point of meaninglessness. Rarely is there a deeper analysis or an attempt to tease out the complex concepts that underpin such sweeping statements. For the serious scholars and intellectually curious amongst us, this is very frustrating--and it also contributes to misinformation and reductive, milquetoast spiritual practice that is better expressed as a bumper sticker than through serious sorcery.
And so it is with the Lion’s Gate Portal, a “major astrological event,” that is said to “open a rare window between the spiritual and physical worlds,“ “birth...a new and undeniably heightened level of dedication to our ascension process,“ and help you “manifest your dreams [and attain] you innermost visions.“
All of that sounds awesome, but prior to the late 90’s, nobody appears to have heard of the Lion’s Gate (besides as one of the seven gates into Old Jerusalem). A search of peer-reviewed articles returns no results with that search term, indicating a lack of academic or folkloric interest in the subject. Searching by date, there are only three results for “lion’s gate portal” between 1980 and 1999. Between 1999 and 2010, we have four pages of Google results. Today, Google returns over 524,000 results for the term (up by an order of magnitude since I first wrote about it—there were 87,000 results in 2021).
The first hit is from the website of a woman name Patricia Cori, who claims to be in contact with an interdimensional race of “light beings” known as the Sirian High Council. Which is cool, I guess.
While practices and observances don’t need to have historical basis to be valid, I do think it’s important to understand the origins and evolution of our spirituality. That way, we can choose to engage with the events and currents that have meaning and resonance for us, rather than getting swept up in mass hysteria and watered-down hype. Now more than ever, I truly believe it’s important to interrogate the things we believe and the ideas we incorporate into our practice. If you believe magic is real, that these currents have objective power and can produce measurable outcomes, then you should care about the history of the ideas being parroted on apps like TikTok and Instagram. Otherwise, magic, astrology, and spirituality of all kinds becomes nothing but an echo-chamber of pithy one-liners that promise gnosis and abundance but yields nothing but memetic repetition of the same empty, feel-good nonsense.
That being said, sometimes empty, feel-good nonsense works. This is a concept I was very resistant to in 2021, when I first wrote my searing takedown of the Lion’s Gate. What is magic if not unverified personal gnosis becoming, over time, well…verified. The sheer uptick in attention and energy funneled toward this concept of portal magic, and to the Lion’s Gate specifically, may indeed be generating results for people who choose to use 8/8 to #manifest. Belief is a powerful engine. Perhaps the most powerful. But that doesn’t change the fact that, historically speaking, the myths perpetuated about this magical portal day are largely rootless.
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