In one of the extension packs of the Witcher 3 game, the “Blood and wine”, the authors managed to make an excellent and accurate illustration of an actual “astral” process; they called it the “magical entropy”. Spoilers ahead, because I’ll have to provide a description.

Basically, a court mage created an illusory fairy-tale reality where the two princesses could play with the fairy-tale characters when they were children. However, the girls grew up, everybody forgot about the place for decades but it continued existing, and decomposing, to the point where the characters became crazy, malevolent and dangerous. The three little piggies became the three huge aggressive pigs, the big bad wolf killed the red riding hood and the hunter and threw them into the well, and now drinks with the pirates, the pixies are attacking everyone indiscriminately, the girl with the matches is a drug dealer, the Longlocks hanged herself by her own hair because the Prince Charming never came to her rescue because he broke his neck falling down the broken stairs of her tower, and so on.

This behavior of “magical structures” is in fact real and well known in the literature; Alexandra David-Neel, for instance, described behavioral degradation of a tulpa she created, where it became more and more nasty and malevolent with time. This happens as the energy invested in the entity by its creator is depleted, and it loses ability to access higher spiritual states, because this requires more energy. Basically, it loses the highest things it could originally access first, and then progressively degrades to the point of being able to access only the lowest demonic states, after which it completely loses coherence. You can call it astral entropy, tulpa degradation, or structural decomposition; doesn’t really matter, because none of the terms describe the phenomenon completely, and completely new terminology should be devised. What matters is that astral structures have a very distinct and recognizeable pattern of degradation, and they are by design net energy negative, meaning they would require a constant influx of energy in order to maintain a stable state, and if they are not externally powered, they degrade along the arrow of time. The way you need to design astral structures if you don’t want them to degrade is to provide them with either a power reserve, in form of a spiritual “crystal”, which is basically very condense and coherent form of localized spiritual energy, which then acts as some sort of a “soul” that drives the astral structure you designed, or you need to provide it with a link to God, that will keep it permanently powered, but this won’t work if the structure is in any way incompatible with God’s will and nature, but there are ways around this (for instance, when God delegates a duty to grant or deny access to another spiritual being, and this being makes a mistake due to negligence or outright stupidity). There is a third way, that is the darkest black magic by definition, and it consists of tricking souls into forming some sort of a symbiotic relationship with the entity, where they are tricked into powering it, and deluded into believing that they will somehow benefit from the process.

Why is any of this relevant? Well, it is in fact most relevant, because that’s where we are. This world is the “Land of a Thousand Fables”, and it’s powered in several ways: by our own energy captured through deception, by stolen spiritual crystals, and partially, probably, by the will of God, because Satan obtained permission to run his experiment unopposed, for a time. The reason magical entropy, as described in the game, crossed my mind, is because it is an excellent explanation of the phenomenon we are faced with. The structure we are locked within is going to hell because it lost power, which means it is progressively losing access to higher spiritual states, and acting exactly like you would expect from a tulpa that is depleted of energy.

The very specific aspect of this process, that is taking place as we speak, is America losing its “mystique” and attractiveness, like a wicked witch that magically presented herself as a beautiful and good lady, and the magical makeup is starting to show holes, revealing evil and rot underneath.