Princess of Norway gets engaged to shaman, renounces royal duties

In recent decades, royals around the world have abdicated their official roles because of scandals and family feuds or to marry commoners or divorcees. This week, a Norwegian princess left her royal duties because of her love for a modern-day shaman.

Princess Martha Louise, 51, the daughter of King Harold and Queen Sonja of Norway, was engaged in June to American Durek Verrett, a celebrity shaman and inventor of the “Spirit Optimizer” – a supposedly healing amulet he sells on its website for US$ 222 (about R$ 1,200).

Since their engagement, the Norwegian media and public have focused attention on Verrett, criticizing him for saying he used the amulet to fight the coronavirus, for suggesting that cancer was an option and that he was a “reptilian hybrid species”. .

“Whenever a member of the royal family gets engaged, it creates media storms…just like this time,” Martha Louise said in an Instagram video this week. After recent “discussions in the media”, she added, Verrett and the royal family have made “adjustments”, including her stepping down from official duties.

From now on, the princess and Verrett “seek to distinguish more clearly between their activities and the Royal House of Norway”, said the royal family in a statement, in which they thanked her for having performed her duties “with affection, care and profound commitment”. Martha Louise will retain her title, but the couple “will not indicate an association with the Royal House of Norway on social media.”

Martha Louise said the decision was amicable, and King Harald stated in a televised interview that he and Verrett “agree to disagree”.

Martha Louise’s interest in alternative treatments and her claims of clairvoyance long predate her relationship with Verrett. Since she was a child, the princess said on the website of a spiritual center she co-founded, she has “seen” people’s feelings, and through her communication with horses and other animals she has also started talking to angels, she said.

Her heavenly interactions led her 15 years ago to co-found the center, whose students are encouraged to find their “inner source of truth” and make contact “with angels and the divine universe.” In a televised workshop, she instructed participants, “Ask the guardian angel if there is anything he wants to tell you.”

The princess’ affinity for the supernatural has caused disbelief in Norway for more than a decade. According to a 2012 survey, while 15% of the Norwegian population believed that Martha Louise communicated with angels and the dead, 47% thought her practices had a negative effect on the royal family.

Her least popular skill, according to polls, was contacting the dead, which she claimed she could do in media interviews around 2010.

One of Norway’s most famous clairvoyants at the time, “the man from Snasa”, told the Norwegian VG that it was not possible to speak with the dead, and the bishop of the diocese of Bjorgvin, in the west of the country, called some of his mediumistic activities ” highly objectionable”. Another bishop said there was a dividing line between talking to angels and talking to the dead, and warned the princess not to cross it.

But with the fascination with ghosts and spirits that arose in the country, she had supporters among healers and coaches. Even her mother, the queen, has publicly defended her abilities, comparing her to witches who were burned at the stake because they thought the earth was round. But the criticism that followed Martha Louise’s engagement to Verrett was apparently too much for the couple and the royal family.

The couple met in Los Angeles in 2018, where Verrett lived, Martha Louise’s manager Carina Scheele said in a text message. In the US, the shaman had a conspicuous following and famous clients and friends, including actress Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he called “my family”. In 2019, the princess invited Verrett to come to Norway to accompany her on a tour called “The Princess and the Shaman”.

But in Norway the shaman was convicted of spreading unscientific beliefs, charges the couple have largely dismissed as a form of racism against Verrett, who is black. A pre-engagement Instagram post, in which Verrett defined himself as a “hybrid species of reptile and Andromeda” who came to “shatter the system”, was deleted, but the main Norwegian newspaper published screenshots.

Verrett said he believes in conventional medicine because he was saved by it. But he also preaches the benefits of alternative medicine. In his 2019 book, “Spirit Hacking” [Modificando o espírito], Verrett wrote that he toured hospitals and asked cancer patients, including children, “Why do you want this cancer?” and cited relationship problems as potential causes.

He added that doctors might prescribe chemotherapy because they get a “big check” from drug manufacturers.

When he caught Covid, as he said in an Instagram video, he looked for a reason and found he was a “workaholic”, “constantly available to people” and “giving, giving, giving”. He said he realized he needed time to do his breath work and listen to the ancestors, and that he had used his white “Light Bringer” amulet to “pull the poisons out of my system”.

The Norwegian newspaper Nettavisen hired scientists in Oslo to examine Verrett’s amulets, and Sverre M. Selbach, a professor who analyzed the results, said they consisted mostly of plastic, with only one dye differentiating the “Light Bringer” from the “Old Truth.” “.

Norwegian journalist Ingeborg Senneset called the amulets “beautiful fakes” in a Facebook post and said the princess’s name should not be used in commercial collaboration with someone promoting unscientific ideas.

In the Instagram video where Martha Louise officially announced her resignation, she said she would stop sponsoring various organizations and clarified that she believes in scientifically proven health treatments. But “acupuncture, yoga, meditation, crystals” can also help, she said.