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 Cults
and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious
Vision in the American 1960s* CAMILLE
PAGLIA Click
Here to View .pdf Version (Recommended)
Commentary on the 1960s has been massive.
Law and politics in that turbulent decade are well documented but
remain controversial, and the same thing can be said of contemporary
innovations in mass media and the arts. One major area remains ambiguous
or poorly assimilated, however-the new religious vision, which for
a tantalizing moment in the American sixties brought East and West
together in a progressive cultural synthesis. Its promise was never
completely fulfilled, for reasons I will try to sketch here. But
the depth and authenticity of that spiritual shift need to be more
widely acknowledged. A political model currently governs
interpretations of the sixties because of the enduring reform movements
born in that period, including environmentalism, feminism, and gay
liberation. Their mobilizing energy, as well as the organizational
style that would also be adopted by antiwar protests, initially
came from the civil rights movement sparked by the Political expression on the Left in
the American sixties was split. Radical activists such as Students
for a Democratic Society (1960-68) drew their ideology from Marxism,
with its explicit atheism. But demonstrations with a large hippie
contingent often mixed politics with occultism-magic and witchcraft
along with costumes and symbolism drawn from Native American religion,
Hinduism, and Buddhism. For example, at the mammoth antiwar protest
near Members of the sixties counterculture
were passionately committed to political reform, yet they were also
seeking the truth about life outside religious and social institutions.
Despite their ambivalence toward authority, however, they often
sought gurus-mentors or guides, who sometimes proved fallible. One
problem was that the more the mind was opened to what was commonly
called "cosmic consciousness" (a hippie rubric of the sixties),
the less meaningful politics or social structure became, melting
into the Void. Civil rights and political reform are in fact Western
ideals: Hinduism and Buddhism, by extinguishing the ego and urging
acceptance of ultimate reality, see suffering and injustice as essential
conditions of life that cannot be changed but only endured. Alteration
of consciousness-"blowing your mind"-became an end or value in itself
in the sixties. Drugs remade the Western world-view by shattering
conventions of time, space, and personal identity. Unfortunately,
revelation was sometimes indistinguishable from delusion. The neurological
risks of long-term drug use were denied or underestimated: the most
daring sixties questers lost the ability to articulate and transmit
their spiritual legacy to posterity. The source material in this area is
voluminous but uneven in quality, partly because sixties chronicles
at their most colorful often rely on anecdote and hearsay. Hence,
much of the present essay is provisional. My aim is to trace lines
of influence and to suggest historical parallels-an overview that
might aid teachers in the Tens of thousands of young people in
the American sixties drifted or broke away from parents to explore
alternative world-views and lifestyles. A minority actually joined
communes or cults. These varied in philosophy and regime from the
mild to the extreme. The true cults that proliferated in the American
sixties and early seventies resemble those of the Hellenistic and
imperial Roman eras. Such phenomena are symptoms of cultural fracturing
in cosmopolitan periods of rapid expansion and mobility. Consisting
of small groups of the disaffected or rootless, cults are sects
that may or may not evolve into full religions. Hence, the cult
phenomenon even at its most bizarre demonstrates the sociological
dynamic of the birth of religions, as they flare up, coalesce, and
strengthen or sputter out and vanish. A cult is a foster family
that requires complete severance from past connections-kin, spouses,
friends. Membership in cults may begin with a sudden conversion
experience where an individual feels that ultimate truth has been
glimpsed. This may lead to zealotry, the conviction that the cult
view is the only possible view, which therefore must be promulgated
to the benighted or is too refined to be understood by others. A
persecution complex and siege mentality may result: cult members
feel that the world is the enemy and that only martyrdom will vindicate
their faith. During the Hellenistic and imperial
Roman periods, transnational mystery religions competed with the
established state religions of the Olympian or civic gods, whose
official worship was public and often located in city centers. The
mammoth dissemination of Olympian images in sculptures and artifacts
has resulted in Greco-Roman religion, from the excavation of The major Mediterranean mystery religions-of
Dionysus, Demeter, Isis, and Mithras-anticipated, influenced, or
vied with Christianity. Compared to the sometimes dryly contractual
veneration of the Olympians, mystery religion was characterized
by a worshipper's powerful identification with and emotional connection
to the god. Christianity, based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth,
one of many itinerant preachers in Yet a major source of cultic energies
in twentieth-century Cultism of this demonstrative kind
is persistently associated with androgynous young men, half sweet,
half surly, who like Adonis are sometimes linked with mother figures.
Presley, for example, sank into depression and never fully recovered
from his mother's unexpected death at age forty-six in 1958; after
long substance abuse, he died prematurely at age forty-two in 1977.
Rock music, even at its most macho, has repeatedly produced pretty,
long-haired boys who mesmerize both sexes and who hauntingly resemble
ancient sculptures of Antinous, the beautiful, ill-fated youth beloved
by the Roman emperor Hadrian. It's no coincidence that it was Paul
McCartney, the "cutest" and most girlish of the Beatles, who inspired
a false rumor that swept the world in 1969
that he was dead. Beatles songs and album covers were feverishly
scrutinized for clues and coded messages: I myself contributed to
this pandemonium by calling a The evangelical fervor felt by many
heretical young people in the 1960s was powered by rock music, which
at that moment was becoming an art form. The big beat came from
late-forties and fifties African-American rhythm and blues. But
the titanic, all-enveloping sound of rock was produced by powerful,
new amplification technology that subordinated the mind and activated
the body in a way more extreme than anything seen in Western culture
since the ancient Roman Bacchanalia. Through the sensory assault
of that thunderous music, a whole generation tapped into natural
energies, tangible proof of humanity's link to the cosmos. "Flower power," the pacifist sixties
credo, was a sentimentalized, neo-Romantic version of earth cult,
which underlay the ancient worship of Dionysus. In the Bacchae, Euripides saw nature's frightful, destructive side, but that
perception was gradually lost over time. Bacchanalia is the Latin term for the Dionysian ritual orgia (root of the English word "orgy"),
where celebrants maddened by drink, drugs, and wildly rhythmic music
went into ecstasy (ecstasis,
"standing outside of"), abandoning or transcending their ordinary
selves. Hence the association of Dionysus (called
Lusios, the "Liberator")
with theater. The Bacchanalia arrived in 3.
New Messiahs and Cultural Polarization What we think of as the 1960s was really
concentrated into the half-dozen years after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy in 1963. Cultural changes exploded and burnt themselves
out with tremendous speed. The religious impulse of the sixties
has been obscured by a series of scandals that began mid-decade
and spilled into the seventies-communes that failed, charismatic
leaders who turned psychotic, cults that ended in crime and murder.
The sensational chain of events began with the dismissal in 1963
of Timothy Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert from psychology
lectureships at Harvard for experimenting with LSD on student volunteers. This episode
first brought LSD
to public attention. An Irish Catholic turned self-described prophet,
Leary envisioned a world network of "psychedelic churches" whose
Vatican would be his League for Spiritual Discovery (acronym: LSD),
headquartered in Millbrook, New York, until it was closed after
a 1966 police raid led by Dutchess County assistant prosecutor G.
Gordon Liddy. Though registered as a religious institution, the
League was noted for its sex parties-reportedly a frequent attraction
of Leary's Harvard offices as well. The optimistic sixties saga degenerated
into horrifying incidents of group psychology gone wrong. Most notorious
is the case of Charles Manson, a drifter who became a fixture of
By the seventies, cults seemed increasingly
psychopathic. Radical political cells like the bomb-making Weathermen
or the Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnapped Patty Hearst in
1974 and whose emblem was a talismanic seven-headed cobra, began
to merge in popular perception with nominally religious groups like
Jim Jones' People's Temple, whose mostly black congregation was
drawn from San Francisco at the height of the hippie era. Jones
was a social worker and political activist who claimed to be the
reincarnation of Jesus, Buddha, Ikhnaten, and Lenin and who eventually
emigrated with his followers to a commune called Jonestown in the
In the nineties, interest in the swinging
sixties revived among curious young people at the same time as an
acrimonious debate about the sixties legacy intensified with the
election of the first baby-boom president, Bill Clinton. Thus, a
coincidental upsurge of cult incidents also triggered memories of
the Manson era. In 1993, a Christian commune of Branch Davidians
near These sensational cases further distorted
and distanced the religious dimension of the sixties. Though there
are cults abroad-the Armageddon-style Solar Temple that resulted
in fifty-three suicides in Switzerland in 1994 or the Aum Shinrykyo
group who released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing
twelve and injuring five thousand-it is primarily in American culture
that the sixties drama of idealism and disillusion has been played
out. The sixties lost credibility through their own manifest excesses,
which produced the counterreaction of Christian fundamentalism.
The American evangelical and pentecostal
movements, already stirring again in the early sixties, gained great
momentum. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House on a law-and-order
platform; by 1976, a "born-again" Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter,
was elected president. The sixties were the breeding ground
for the depressingly formulaic political and cultural pattern of
the last thirty-five years-a rigid polarization of liberals and
conservatives, with each group striking predictable postures and
mouthing sanctimonious platitudes. Gradations of political thought
have been lost. One reason is that liberals have shown continual
disrespect for religion, thereby allowing conservatives to take
the high road and claim to be God's agents in defending traditional
values. Liberals have forgotten the religious ferment on the Left
in the sixties, so that progressive politics has too often become
a sterile instrument of government manipulation, as if social-welfare
agencies and federal programs could bring salvation. Memories of
the sixties have been censored out of embarrassment, since the flakiest
of sixties happenings seemed to delegitimize the period's political
ideals. On the other hand, it could be argued
that there are traces of sixties religiosity in the liberalism of
recent decades. An obvious example is the Arcadian matriarchal myth
of "the Goddess" that emerged in feminism and lesbian separatism
in the seventies and still flourishes in innumerable books still
in print. A second example is the puritanical feminist ideology
typified in the eighties by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin,
who allied with far-right Christians in an anti-pornography crusade
that threatened First Amendment liberties. With its ironclad dogma
and inquisitional style, the "political correctness" of the eighties
should be regarded as a cult that brainwashed even sophisticated
journalists until their deprogramming in the pro-sex nineties. A
third example is poststructuralism, which infested American humanities
departments from the late seventies through the mid-nineties: the
uncritical academic adulation of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan,
and Michel Foucault was an insular and self-referential cult that
treated pointlessly cryptic texts as Holy Writ. Religion has always been central to
American identity: affiliation with or flight from family faith
remains a primary term of our self-description. The 1960s' combination of spirituality
with progressive politics was prefigured by the reformist world-view
of the Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends), who emigrated to The Mennonites, another sect in search
of religious freedom, were Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists who fled
to Hence the religious dissidence and
secessionist tendencies of the 1960s were simply a new version of
a long American tradition. The decade's politics loom large partly
because demonstrations, unlike inner journeys, were photographable
and indeed often staged for the camera. Today's young people learn
about the sixties through a welter of video clips of JFK's
limousine in The absence of those sixties seekers
from the arena of general cultural criticism can be seen in the
series of unresolved controversies in the last two decades over
the issue of blasphemy in art. With the triumph of avant-garde modernism
by the mid-twentieth century, few ambitious young artists would
dare to show religious work. Though museum collections are rich
with religious masterpieces from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth
century, major American museums and urban art galleries ignore contemporary
religious art-thus ensuring, thanks to the absence of strong practitioners,
that it remains at the level of kitsch. And the art world itself
has suffered: with deeper themes excised, it slid into a shallow,
jokey postmodernism that reduced art to ideology and treated art
works as vehicles of approved social messages. By the 1980s, during the conservative
administrations of Ronald Reagan, an artist's path to instant success
was to satirize or profane Christian iconography. Warfare erupted
in 1989 over "Piss Christ," a misty photograph by the American Andres
Serrano of a wood and plastic crucifix submerged in a Plexiglas
tank of his own urine, and then a decade later over a 1996 collage
of the Virgin Mary by the British-Nigerian Chris Ofili, who adorned
the Madonna with breasts of elephant dung and ringed her with pasted-on
photos of female genitalia clipped from pornographic magazines.
The Ofili painting made hardly a ripple in This cultural stalemate was aggravated,
I contend, by the disappearance of voices from the sixties religious
revolution. Even counterculture agnostics had respected the cosmic
expansiveness of religious vision. There was also widespread ecumenical
interest at the time in harmonizing world religions. The primary
guide in this new syncretism was Carl Jung, who was the son of a
Protestant minister and who began to study Asian thought in depth
after his break with Freud in 1913. Jung's theory of the collective
unconscious was partly derived from the Hindu concept of samskaras,
the residue of past lifetimes. His interdisciplinary interpretation
of culture was also influenced by Sir James George Frazer's multi-volumed
work of classical anthropology, The
Golden Bough (1890-1915). Jung revealed the poetry and philosophy
in the rituals and iconography of world religions. But Jungian thought
had little impact on post-sixties American academe, thanks to the
invasion of European theory. French poststructuralism, the 4.
Transcendentalism and Asian Religion That the spiritual awakening of the
1960s belonged to a long series of religious revivals in America
was argued by William G. McLoughlin in his splendid 1978 book, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. McLoughlin's point was taken up
again by Robert S. Ellwood in The Sixties Spiritual Awakening
(1994), but general discussion of the sixties remains unchanged.
The resistance of received opinion is too strong: the Right refuses
to acknowledge anything positive in the sixties legacy, while the
Left rejects religion wholesale. In the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth
century, the Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards lit up the
Emerson was reserved and austere, not
unlike the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who had a similar
reverence for nature. Emerson transferred his family's religious
vocation to the Romantic cult of nature, a pagan pantheism. His
holistic vision of nature, like that of his friend Henry David Thoreau,
prefigures 1960s ecology: indeed, Thoreau's Walden (1854), a journal of his experiment
in monastic living in the woods near The most intriguing of the parallels
between New England Transcendentalism and 1960s thought is Emerson's
interest in Asian literature-mainly Hindu sacred texts (the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads)
and Confucius' maxims. The titles Emerson gave to his poems
"Brahma" and "Maya" were inexplicable to most readers at the time.
(Brahma is the Hindu creator god; Maya is the veil of illusion.)
"Brahma," first published in 1857, was the butt of so many satirical
lampoons that Emerson's publisher begged him, to no avail, to drop
it from the 1876 edition of his selected poems. In his seminal essays
(1836-41), Emerson refers to God as the "Over-Soul," a translation
of the Sanskrit word, atman, meaning "supreme and universal soul." Emerson's "Over-Soul"
would be reinterpreted by Friedrich Nietzsche as the Übermensch, which translators often misleadingly render in English
as "Superman." Emerson's study of Hindu literature,
which intensified after his first wife's death, was documented by
Arthur Christy, a professor at Emerson the sage was the main draw
in the Transcendentalist circle. Harvard students and other young
people flocked to hear him speak or made pilgrimages to his home
in In Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman absorbed British Romantic poetry
as well as Emerson's poems and essays, with their disparate Asian
influences. Whitman's sprawling, pagan epic (expanded over succeeding
decades) openly challenged Judeo-Christianity. After William Blake's
allegorical long poems, Leaves
of Grass is Western literature's closest approximation to the
dynamic form and visionary style of Hindu sacred literature, with
its cosmic scale. Whitman's poem would have tremendous influence
on the 1960s via fifties Beat poetry, in
particular Allen Ginsberg's prophetic protest poem, Howl (1956), which imitates Whitman's long,
incantatory lines. Ginsberg regularly paid homage to Whitman, as
in his amusing 1955 poem, "A Supermarket in The limitations in Emersonian Transcendentalism
are suggested by the reservations expressed by both Emerson and
Thoreau to the sexual material in Leaves
of Grass, which, despite their great admiration for the poem,
they felt to be crude flaws. Emerson, who had always disliked the
bawdiness in Shakespeare's plays, actually advised Whitman to purge
sexual references from later editions of Leaves
of Grass. In this respect, the Romantic nature cult of Emerson
and Thoreau betrays their Puritan lineage. They see nature in clean,
rigorous terms but cannot tolerate or encompass nature's stormier
energies-the theme of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). Significantly, though he enjoyed choosing hymns
for Sunday services, Emerson did not much care for music. Despite
the call for ecstasy in his poem "Bacchus," he was evidently made
uncomfortable by music's heady rhythms and emotional stimulation.
It was the American 1960s that would complete Transcendentalism-through
the new, barbaric medium of rock. 5.
American Strains of Asian Religion in the Twentieth Century The pervasive presence of Asian religion
in the bohemian underground in the The defiant rejection of organized
religion by Beat poets and artists was a substantial part of their
legacy to the 1960s counterculture. Their hip appropriation of Asian
thought is illustrated by the title of Jack Kerouac's 1958 autobiographical
novel, The Dharma Bums (dharma is a Hindu and Buddhist term for natural truth or right living).
Though most of the Beats merely dabbled in Asian religion, they
borrowed enough to help their second-generation fans critique Western
intellectual assumptions. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the other Beats
who drifted to A Zen Institute was established in
It was The Hinduism of the American 1960s
had several sources. Allen Ginsberg modeled his prophetic persona
on Blake as well as on visionary rabbis in his own Jewish tradition.
Though introduced to Buddhism by Gary Snyder, the gay, bookish Ginsberg
had none of Snyder's athletic asceticism. Chatty and omnivorous,
Ginsberg celebrated appetite and excess in food and sex. By the
sixties, he had transformed himself into a genial Hindu guru. Playfully
brandishing finger-cymbals and a squeezebox and sometimes dressed
in Hindu robes, the bearded Ginsberg was a constant, mantra-chanting
presence at major demonstrations. He turned political theater into
vaudeville-much like the Yippies, who nominated a pig for president
in 1968. Hinduism had had an organized basis
in the The groundwork for the Asian trend
of the American sixties was probably laid by Paramhansa Yogananda
(1893-1952), the first yoga master to teach full-time in the West.
Born in A singular figure of lesser influence
was "Avatar" Meher Baba (1894-1969), who arrived in the The major Asian cult of the sixties
was Transcendental Meditation, founded in Several cults caused much public concern
in the sixties and seventies because of their hold on young people.
The Hare Krishna movement-the International Society of Krishna Consciousness,
which claims to have been founded in the sixteenth century-is still
in operation, with headquarters in The Divine Light Mission was brought
to the As the Hindu boom subsided in the seventies,
neo-Christian sects like Jim Jones' People's The most important neo-Christian sect
of the seventies was the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification
of World Christianity, founded by the Reverend Sun Myong Moon in
Though massive advertisements for the
A main aperture through which Hinduism
flowed into the sixties was popular music, which adapted the non-Western
harmonics of raga and experimented with the sitar, the long-necked
Indian lute. George Harrison, the Beatles' lead guitarist, was not
the first British musician to experiment with the sitar, but he
deserves principal credit for popularizing it in Anglo-American
rock music. Jangling sitar riffs were a ubiquitous lyrical motif
in late-sixties music. At the opening of songs, the sitar was equivalent
in meaning and effect to the European church bell, summoning the
faithful to worship. The first Western album of Indian music,
a collaboration between Yehudi Menuhin
and tabla master Ali Akbar Khan, was released in 1955. In the late
fifties, Khan's brother-in-law, Ravi Shankar, gave sitar concerts
in In 1967, Patti Boyd Harrison, George's
wife, took the Beatles to a lecture in In addition to the sitar, or an electric
guitar strung and played to sound like one, the style of "acid rock"
that originated in the Because it consists of transient instrumental
effects, psychedelic music has received far less attention than
folk and folk-rock with overtly political lyrics, whose manifest
content is easier to analyze. This is yet another factor impeding
general recognition of the sixties' religious legacy. Though the
Beats left their mark in novels and poems, the counterculture was
less interested in constructing self-contained artifacts. The enduring
achievements of the sixties generation were in music, modern dance,
experimental film and video, Pop and Conceptual Art, and performance
art, which swallowed up poetry. Literature is strikingly underrepresented.
Literary surveys of the sixties overrely on the work of figures
like Norman Mailer, whose brilliant career began in the late forties.
The major critics and theorists of the sixties-Marshall McLuhan,
Leslie Fiedler, Norman O. Brown-also belong to an earlier generation.
Hermann Hesse, whose novels Siddhartha
(1922), about the early life of Buddha, and Steppenwolf
(1927) were sixties cult classics, was born in 1877. Except for
Tom Wolfe's New Journalism, most sixties culture crystallized outside
the book. The gap in the sixties' artistic and
intellectual legacy partly occurred because too many young people
followed their elementary understanding of Asian religion by making
sensory experience primary. Shunning schedules and routine, they
sought the "eternal Now," dramatized by the otherworldliness of psychedelic rock.
Furthermore, the sexual revolution, which began in 1960 with the
commercial release of Enovid, the first reliable oral contraceptive
in history, finally overwhelmed the sixties' spiritual quest. Beat
interpretations of Asian thought tended to exaggerate its sexual
component. In 1958, Alan Watts criticized "Beat Zen" for its "anything
goes" attitude toward sex. Similarly, hipsters often carelessly
reduced Hinduism to the erotic acrobatics of Tantric yoga or Vatsyayana's
Kama Sutra (c. 250 AD).
But sexual codes have been very strict throughout "Make love, not war" was a sixties
rubric. Free love had been endorsed by radical Romantics like Percy
Bysshe Shelley who sought to shatter the bonds of bourgeois marriage.
A cheeky promiscuity was also affected by urban flappers in the
1920s, which was energized by the hyperactive dance rhythms of the
Jazz Age as well as the seditious mood of underground speakeasies.
But free love was never achieved on a massive scale until the 1960s,
when random sexual connection was blithely assigned a spiritual
and redemptive meaning. "Getting it on" meant freeing mind and body
to strike a blow against residual American puritanism. By the hedonistic
seventies, spirituality had been abandoned, a change marked by the
shift in drugs from communal, "mellow" marijuana and visionary LSD to edgy, expensive, hoarded cocaine, which sharpened competition
and enhanced the ego sense of power and mastery. Sexual liberation,
as should now be obvious, had its high costs, which we are still
sorting out: sexual diseases, a soaring divorce rate, and a pandemic
sexualization of media images with uncertain consequences for children.
Self-presentation by early teens, for example, has become strikingly
eroticized, leading to premature sexual pressures and demands. Feeling trapped by a corporate and
technological society, sixties rebels tried to empower sex as a
quick route to reconnection with nature. The sixties dreamed of
limitless sex without consequence-a bouncy, open-ended, Technicolor
film with a rock soundtrack. Many genuine hippies dropped out of
college to join communes, bake bread, and have babies. Others of
the sixties generation who entered the professions often defied
or delayed the procreative principle that was at the heart of ancient
mystery cult. Two new models of sexual liberation who emerged in
the seventies were the liberated woman, who put career before marriage
and family, and the post-Stonewall gay man, in whose paradise of pleasures
even lesbians were no longer welcome. Reproductive rights, establishing
women's control over their own bodies, was always a major issue
in feminism but over the next quarter century would become an obsessive
preoccupation, determining campaign politics and judicial appointments.
Feminism inextricably identified itself with abortion-with termination
of life rather than fertility. (I am speaking as a militantly pro-choice
feminist.) Feminism's foregrounding of abortion, which caused national
turmoil and limited its outreach as a populist movement, was one
consequence of the loss of sixties cosmic consciousness by the seventies. For gay men, free love detached from
all reference to nature meant that, by the eighties, their ruling
theorist would be social constructionist Michel Foucault rather
than the nature-revering Whitman or Ginsberg. Despite a seventies
fad for the virile lumberjack look, the erotic ideal in the gay
male world has reverted over time to the ruthless master type of
the Greek beautiful boy, Antinous reborn: the shaved, sculpted,
callipygian ephebe whose perfection is heartbreakingly transient.
"Sex, drugs, and rock and roll" was
the fast-track reality for a significant segment, working-class
as well as middle-class, of the sixties generation. Drugs melted
defenses and broke barriers, creating a momentary sense of unity
with mankind and the world. They functioned as magic elixirs for
the missing initiatory rituals in an increasingly transient society.
In the matter of drugs, I must stress, I was merely an observer:
as an Italian-American, I am a product of Mediterranean wine culture,
where intoxicants are integrated with cuisine. As a libertarian,
I favor legalization of drugs, not because I approve of their use
but because in my view government should have no power to dictate
what individuals do with their bodies. On the other hand, I am painfully
aware of the tragic toll that drugs took on my generation. This
was one of the great cultural disasters of American history. I warn
my students that recreational drugs-now a toxic cocktail of black-market
tranquilizers-may give short-term gains but impair long-term achievement. Nevertheless, it was drugs, abused
until they turned on their takers, that
helped trigger the spiritual explosion of the sixties. Getting high-as
in the magnificent, rumbling Byrds song "Eight Miles High"-was to
elevate perspective. Aspiring beyond materialism and conformity,
young people manufactured their own martyrdom. They pushed their
nervous systems to the limit, until social forms seemed to dissolve.
What they saw was sublime-the High Romantic vision of creative nature,
its vast energies twisting and turning along a continuum from the
brain to the stars. That cosmic consciousness is precisely what
is lacking in too many of today's writers and academics, especially
followers of poststructuralism and postmodernism, cynical systems
that are blind to nature. The association of drugs with the avant-garde
began with British High Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's great
"mystery" poems of the 1790s ("Kubla Khan," "Christabel," and "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner") were partly inspired by his experiences
with opium, present in laudanum, a common pain medication to which
he had been addicted since childhood. In Artificial
Paradises (1860), his response to Thomas De Quincey's Confessions
of an English Opium Eater (1821), Baudelaire described the hallucinations
of his experiments with hashish mixed with opium. In late-nineteenth-century
William James first studied the connection
between drugs and mystic vision that would become so basic a tenet
of the 1960s. In his 1901-02 Havelock Ellis was more sympathetic:
in an 1898 article, "Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise," he described
ritual use among Southwestern American Indians of mescal, obtained
from the button of a cactus plant. He himself had experimented with
mescal in The Beats used peyote, derived from
mescal buttons. Snyder first tried peyote while studying American
Indian culture at The sixties' premiere drugs, however,
were marijuana and LSD.
Marijuana entered the LSD-25
(lysergic acid diethylamide; hence the term "acid") was synthesized
from rye fungus in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann, a biochemist at Sandoz
Pharmaceuticals in LSD
was being used in Hyperbolic claims were made for LSD in the sixties. For example, Walter
Houston Clark, a friend of Leary, predicted in a 1969 book, Chemical Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs and Religion,
that LSD's intellectual
effect on civilization would equal that of "the Copernican revolution."
In his 1970 bestseller, The
Greening of America, The psychedelic "trip" into inner space
replicated the shaman's magic journey, from which he returned with
secret knowledge for his tribe. This myth of a spiritual journey
was a motif of premodern societies from Many ritual practices, such as fasting
and marathon drumming, have been used throughout history to induce
trance and facilitate divination. In some cases, techniques of flagellation
or mutilation resemble those of the modern S&M scene, whose
devotees claim to attain a beatific state. Mushrooms eaten by Siberian
shamans caused convulsions. Hallucinogens, perhaps mushrooms, were
used by worshippers in the Eleusinian mysteries. Possessed by Apollo,
the Delphic oracle went into paroxysms after intoxication by fumes
from a cleft in the earth. Fault lines have recently been identified
in the bedrock at The massive drug taking in the sixties,
promoted by arts leaders and pop stars,
redefined the culture and set the stage for the decade's religious
vision. But shamanistic drug taking in tribal societies took place
within small communities unified by a coherent belief system. Hippies
and college students casually sampling hallucinogens were relative
strangers and brought with them a mélange of private turmoils and
family psychodramas. What they shared was a yearning humanitarianism-and
rock music, which urged the liberation of sexual desire. Sex was
portrayed as a revolutionary agent: the establishment, like the
walls of 8.
Mysticism and Social Change Social regroupings dramatized the generational
change of the sixties-the mass gatherings of demonstrations, rock
festivals, happenings, and love-ins, which began in temperate While the political sentiments of young
people at such events were progressive, there was often little understanding
of the slow process and banal practicalities of legislation, administration,
and financial accounting. Repelled by the expanding bureaucracies
of the fifties, the sixties counterculture was suspicious of hierarchy
and embraced a simplistic egalitarianism predicated on quick fixes.
The basic principle of the counterculture began as communality but
ended as the horde, the most primitive entity in social history.
The horde is prey to superstition and panic. It looks for leaders
but ruthlessly slays them, then reveres them as ancestral spirits.
As a survival response to its own flood of anarchic energies, the
horde automatically generates cults and cultic belief. The sixties horde that was a benign
extended family of music-loving stargazers at the Woodstock Music
Festival in August 1969 turned into a restless, bickering mob four
months later at the Altamont Festival, where a murder was committed
in front of the stage. The sixties never completed its search for
new structures of social affiliation. Fifties liberalism was integrationist,
but sixties Leftism, despite its claims of inclusiveness, disintegrated
into the separatism of identity politics, with ghettoizing reclassifications
and hypersensitive divisions by race, gender, and sexual orientation.
The sixties code of "do your own thing" encouraged individualism
but produced fragmentation. Similarly, the sixties' global religious
vision, inspired by fleeting contact with Hinduism and Buddhism,
would broaden yet dissipate into the thousand cults of the present
New Age movement. Cults multiply when institutional religion
has lost fervor and become distracted by empty ritual. Early Christianity,
for example, began as a rural rebellion against the fossilized The social changes from the fifties
to the sixties resemble, in compressed and accelerated form, those
of the Hellenistic era following the conquests of Alexander the
Great. In the three centuries of the Alexandrian age, the old city-states
declined, and mercantile metropolises flourished. Hellenism-that
is, Athenian high culture-spread throughout the Mediterranean world
via a bustling commercial network that marketed Greek art works
(often in shoddy knockoffs) as status symbols for the nouveau riche.
The Romans had always clothed their provincial Italian mythology
in borrowed Greek glory. As it transformed itself from republic
to empire, No sooner did the What commercialized Hellenism was for
the Greco-Roman era, popular culture was for the American fifties
and sixties. Hellenism was an artistic and philosophic system embedded
with pagan mythology. The unifying language of youth culture from
the mid-1950s on was new media-TV,
teen movies, and rock 'n' roll, broadcast by a vast number of privately
owned AM radio stations (then unparalleled in Mass media inflamed the mind, while
the institutional framework was being rigidified. A major social
shift of the postwar period in Despite their material comforts and
privileges, therefore, middle-class students of the American sixties
were also captives, hostages confined at their hormonal height in
institutional frames without the venerable history or in-group identification
of tony British schools. Classes became like warehouses, with students
stacked in primary-school rows-unlike European universities, where
student-teacher contact is either in tutorial or in unmonitored
public lectures. Supervision of student behavior on American campuses
was intrusive and authoritarian-another feature without parallel
in The paternalistic regimentation of
American colleges was nearly military and thus can be viewed as
a vestige of the national mobilization of World War II.
Students were conscripts who often dressed in army-navy surplus,
and the new brick dormitories of residential campuses resembled
factories or army barracks-all the more ironic since college matriculation
brought exemption from the draft. There have been town-gown problems
since the goliardic carousing of the Middle
Ages, but the frictions of the sixties were highly politicized.
As the sixties counterculture spread, campuses became tense garrison
towns, like the frontier outposts of the Roman legions, who occupied
well-appointed camps of precise, geometrical design. Roman soldiers were drawn not simply
from Cults arise when the official gods
seem weak or fickle or subject to fate themselves. The cult phenomenon
in the US escalated after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy in 1963-the president who vowed to surpass the Soviet
Union's 1957 Sputnik satellite by putting a man on the moon by the
end of the sixties. The baby-boom generation was the first to grow
up in the shadow of nuclear war. In elementary school, we were shepherded
into dim hallways for civil defense drills requiring us to crouch
down and cover our eyes. We were taught to fear not a rain of bombs
from manned warplanes but rather a single, slim, strangely omnipotent
object that could find its way over thousands of miles to unleash
a monstrous fire cloud that would melt the nation in a split second. The sixties generation, in other words,
had been injected with a mystical sense of awe and doom about the
sky. This is one possible reason for the sudden popularity and ubiquity
of astrology, which for most of the twentieth century had been a
fringe practice associated with eccentrics in Astrology, for better or worse, was
emblematic of the religious vision of the sixties. It countered
the fifties' paranoia about nuclear apocalypse with the promise
of a humanitarian Aquarian age. Astrology is intertwined with the
West's pagan heritage. Despite unstinting efforts from antiquity,
Judeo-Christianity has never succeeded in wiping astrology out.
First refined by the Chaldean magi of This is yet another area where sixties
drugs took their toll. Those most attracted to astrology lost their
ability to defend it. Scientists rightly dismissive of superstition
refuse to acknowledge that astrology anticipated modern theories
about circadian biorhythms or cycles of solar flares whose electromagnetic
storms disrupt telecommunications. The science community's customary
approach of derision and debunking has been futile and counterproductive:
an immense alternative culture survived the collapse of the sixties
and has steadily spread to this day under the name New Age-which
discreetly elides its astrological reference to the Age of Aquarius. The New Age movement began to form
in the late seventies, gained visibility in the eighties, and became
an international commercial success in the nineties. Because it
is unstructured and decentralized, New Age has been underestimated
as a force competing with mainline religions. It is a constellation
of beliefs loosely drawn from Asian religion, European paganism,
and Native American nature-cult. Its ethics can be described as
non-judgmental humanism. The one common theme in New Age is cosmic
consciousness, which it inherited from the sixties. New Age is a marvel of Alexandrian
syncretism. It is often impressionistic and soft-focus, seeking
"spirituality" rather than the discipline of orthodox religion.
Its followers run the gamut from harried office workers seeking
stress relief through yoga and meditation to "neo-pagan" white witches
rendezvousing on the moors to celebrate the summer solstice. Specialty
shops and mail-order catalogs supply the ritual paraphernalia of
New Age-amulets and talismans, healing crystals, angel icons, incense,
candles, aromatherapy bath salts, massage rollers, table fountains,
wind chimes, and recordings of trance music in Asian or Celtic moods. A principal distinction between sixties
and early seventies cults and their New Age successors is that the
sixties sought the release of primal energy through the shattering
of social conventions. Paradise
Now, the title of the Living Theater's infamous 1968 performance
piece, where nude actors infiltrated the audience, says it all.
The sixties wanted to embrace and reclaim the senses, to plunge
fully into matter, like the festival goers wallowing in the mud
at New Age sees a spiritual universe permeating
or transcending the visible, material one. This idea descends from
nineteenth-century spiritualism, a late Romantic stream that has
flowed like an undercurrent through Anglo-American culture beneath
the official history of literary and artistic modernism. Harold
Bloom has argued, in his 1992 book of the same name, that "the American
religion" (typified today by what he tartly calls "California Orphism")
has always been a version of gnosticism,
which defines matter as evil and urges the soul's emancipation from
earthly limitation. The gnostic cults of second-century Christianity
and Jewish mysticism were influenced by Hellenistic mystery religions
as well as Plato's dualism of mind versus matter. In gnosticism,
as in New Age, it is matter itself, rather than society, that chains
the soul. The 1960s, in contrast, hammered by the concrete power
of rock music, grandiosely valorized sex and redefined heaven as
present sensual ecstasy. The sixties at their most radical collapsed spirit into matter.
Psychedelic voyagers claimed to corroborate the Zen insight, "I
am that," when feeling themselves flowing into and "becoming" the
chair or wall-a perception commonly reported by schizophrenics.
In sixties Pop Art, even mundane or commercial objects like soup
cans or sponges become luminously animate. The American ancestry of New Age began
in the nineteenth century with two women who did their central work
at virtually the same moment-Mary Baker Eddy, a New Englander, and
Helena Blavatsky, who was born in Russia and moved to the US in 1873. Eddy (1821-1910) believed she had recovered from
chronic invalidism through New Thought, the mental-health philosophy
of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, with whom she studied in The line from Eddy to New Age can clearly
be seen in the Alternative Medicine movement of the 1980s and 1990s,
which restored the Asian concepts that Eddy had erased from Quimby.
Andrew Weil, a graduate of the Other leading figures of this movement
are Marianne Williamson, a bestselling author and inspirational
speaker who first won a following in Los Angeles in the early eighties;
Bernie Siegel, a surgeon trained at Yale-New Haven Hospital who
claims that "creative visualization" can cure disease; and Caroline
Myss, a lapsed Catholic and "medical intuitive" who divines illness
by reading a patient's "energy field" and who advocates healing
through accupressure, reflexology, and "therapeutic touch." Both
of Williamson's parents were liberal Jewish lawyers in The three volumes of A Course in Miracles were allegedly dictated
by Jesus over seven years to Helen Cohn Schucman (1909-81), a psychologist
at The second of the nineteenth-century
women progenitors of New Age was the occultist Helena Blavatsky
(1831-91), who won an enormous international following. Her fame
recalled but exceeded that of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century
Swedish philosopher censured by Blake for his spiritualistic readings
of the Bible. Madame Blavatsky claimed to have acquired secret knowledge
through seven years of study in In her two major works, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), Madame Blavatsky
tried to unify world religions by their shared mysticism. Her work
also belongs to the nineteenth-century Egyptian Revival (spurred
by Napoleon's invasion of Though she rejected the spookhouse
spiritualism of mediums and séances, Madame Blavatsky lost credibility
in the West because of her histrionic poses as a high priestess
with healing powers. But her Theosophical Society would influence
Gandhi, Nehru, and the movement for Indian nationalism. Blavatsky's
anointed successor, Annie Besant, was a lapsed Catholic and former
Fabian socialist. Despite having written The Gospel of Atheism (1877), she converted
to Theosophy in 1889. In 1909, Besant declared that a fourteen-year-old
Indian boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti (spotted at a beach by her pedophiliac
colleague, Charles Webster Leadbeater), was the messianic Buddha.
In 1929, Krishnamurti denied he was the messiah and dissolved the
Order of the Star of the East, the cult that had been built around
him. But he continued to teach his theosophical system of "self-awareness."
In 1969, Krishnamurti moved to Another figure directly influenced
by Madame Blavatsky was Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), a clairvoyant born
in The nineteenth-century fin de siècle
in A member of the Golden Dawn would have
great impact on the 1960s: the Satanist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947),
who joined the order in 1898. Sixties Satanism was nurtured in A startling and little-known example
of After Madame Blavatsky, the most important
architect of sixties-to-New Age thought was George Gurdjieff (1866-1949).
Gurdjieff was a half-Greek Armenian who arrived in Gurdjieff's influence can be seen in
the Esalen Institute, established in 1962 at Traces of the Gurdjieff encounter session
can be found in EST
(Erhard Seminar Training), founded in In its focus on public meetings, EST resembled Alcoholics Anonymous, the
model for today's twelve-step programs for recovery from drug or
sex addiction, with their glossary of pat terms like "enabling,"
"co-dependency," and "interventions." AA
has religious undertones: partly inspired by the Oxford Group, a
Christian fellowship of British origins, it was founded in 1935
by "Bill W," a New Englander saved from alcoholism by visions of
divine white light. AA
members still profess faith in a "Higher Power" and practice public
confession as well as missionary outreach. In the sixties, the Oxford
Group, under a new name, sponsored the saccharine "Up with People"
to foster wholesome behavior among increasingly rebellious American
teens. There was a confluence in the sixties
of revisionist trends in psychology with "body work"-exercises or
manipulations to release "blocked" energy, a concept directly or
indirectly borrowed from kundalini yoga, with its symbolic spinal
chakras. (The latter word entered the American vocabulary in the
eighties through the New Age proselytizing of actress Shirley Maclaine.)
In the early fifties, Abraham Maslow, an American influenced by
the German Like Maslow, psychotherapist Carl Rogers
sought "wholeness" of the person. Intriguingly, The sixties trend to look to the body
for salvation was anticipated in the writings of Wilhelm Reich (1892-1957),
an Austrian psychiatrist of the Gestalt school who worked and quarreled
with Freud, then moved to New York in 1939 to escape the Nazis.
Rejecting Freud's theory of the social origin of neurosis, Reich
envisioned "orgone energy" surging through the universe and the
human body. In The Function of the Orgasm (1927), a sober
book with a titillating title that was widely available as a paperback
in the sixties, he argued for the biological necessity of sexual
"discharge" of that energy-thus providing a rationale for pagan
pansexuality. Reich's work recalls passages about Romantic nature
in Emerson and Whitman, and his energy principle resembles that
of kundalini yoga as well as the power of the Christian Holy Spirit.
Reich founded an Orgone Institute in 1942. However, when he marketed
a coffin-like "orgone box" to capture orgone energy at home, he
was charged with fraud and sentenced to two years in prison, where
he died. While still in The principle of self-actualization
in most methods of body work is closer to sixties Dionysianism than
to New Age gnosticism. That is, body work assumes not that the aspiring
soul must be freed from the opaquely material body but that spiritual
maladies can collect and calcify in the body, clogging its vital
connection to the macrocosm. Body work, like rock and its forebear,
rhythm and blues, wants to "kick out the jams," so that we can freely
vibrate to nature's music. The New Age movement deserves respect
for its attunement to nature and its search for meaning at a time
when neither nature nor meaning is valued in discourse in the humanities.
New Age has a core of perennial wisdom. It exalts the brotherhood
of man, encourages contemplation, and finds beauty in the moment.
But too much cultural energy has been absorbed by New Age over the
past twenty years to the detriment of the fine arts, which frittered
away their authority in their dalliance with trendy political tag
lines. Despite its appeals to the archaic, New Age is fuzzily ahistorical.
It lacks an analytic edge: with its soothing promises and feel-good
therapies, New Age induces a benevolent relaxation that may be disabling
in the face of aggression. In a world of terrorism, New Agers can
only take to the hills and leave their scriptures in jars at Esalen. There was a massive failure by American
universities to address the spiritual cravings of the post-sixties
period. The present cultural landscape is bleak: mainline religions
torn between their liberal and conservative wings; a snobbishly
secular intelligentsia; an alternately cynical or naively credulous
media; and a mass of neo-pagan cults and superstitions seething
beneath the surface. All-night radio features call-ins about crop-circles,
UFO's, and abduction
by aliens, science-fiction themes popularized by Swiss writer Erich
Von Däniken's 1968 international bestseller, Chariot of the Gods (which attributes archaeological monuments to
extraterrestrials). Prime-time TV
programs are regularly devoted to seers like Rosemary Altea, James
Van Praagh, and John Edward, who claim to hear messages from dead
relatives hovering around audience members. These developments are alarming. Science-its
objectivity impugned by poststructuralism and postmodernism-is desperately
needed to sort out the mystical muddle of New Age, but it cannot
do so without understanding. J. B. Rhine's inconclusive 1936 experiments
in parapsychology at What is to be done? Higher education
needs to be worthy of its name. My proposal is the same that I have
made since co-creating the course "East and West" with artist and
community activist Lily Yeh at the University of the Arts in 1990.
The core curriculum for global education should be comparative religion.
Study of the major world religions (including Islam) is the key
to politics as well as art. As an atheist who worships only nature,
I view religions as vast symbol-systems far more challenging and
complex than poststructuralism, with its myopic focus on social
structures. Poststructuralism has no metaphysics and is therefore
incapable of spirituality or sublimity. There has been wave after
wave of influences from Asian religion over the century and a half
since Emerson and Madame Blavatsky, but the resultant New Age movement
is choked with debris-with trivia, silliness, mumbo-jumbo, flimflam,
and outright falsehoods. The first step in any solution is a return
to origins-to the primary texts of sacred literature, supported
by art history and archaeology. The religious impulse of the sixties
must be rescued from the wreckage and redeemed. The exposure to
Hinduism and Buddhism that my generation had to get haphazardly
from contemporary literature and music should be formalized and
standardized for basic education. What students need to negotiate
their way through the New Age fog is scholarly knowledge of ancient
and medieval history, from early pagan nature cults through the
embattled consolidation of Christian theology. Teaching religion
as culture rather than as morality also gives students the intellectual
freedom to find the ethical principles at the heart of every religion. *An
expanded version of a lecture delivered on
Bibliographical
Note Ancient
Mediterranean Religions Cumont,
Franz, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism,
tr. Grant Showerman (1905; tr., 1956); Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (1951); Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype,
tr. Ralph Manheim (1955); Turcan, Robert, The Cults of the Roman Empire, tr. Antonia Nevill (1989; tr., 1996). Transcendentalism
Allen,
Gay Wilson, Waldo Emerson:
A Biography (1981); Ando, Shoei, Zen
and American Transcendentalism (1970); Boller, Paul F., American Transcendentalism 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (1974);
Christy, Arthur, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study
of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (1932). American
Religious History Bellah,
Robert N., Beyond Belief:
Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (1970); Bloom,
Harold, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
(1992); Ellwood, Robert S., The
Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern
to Postmodern (1994); Heelas, Paul, The
New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization
of Modernity (1996); McLoughlin, William G., Revivals,
Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in
America, 1607-1977 (1978). Twentieth-Century
Cultural History Bugliosi,
Vincent, Helter Skelter: The
True Story of the Manson Murders (1974); Howard, Gerald, ed.,
The Sixties (1982); Musgrove, Frank, Ecstasy and Holiness: Counterculture and the Open Society (1974);
Reich, Charles A., The Greening
of America (1970); Roszak, Theodore, The
Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society
and Its Youthful Opposition (1969); Teodori, Massimo, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History (1969). Modern
Cults Galanter,
Mark, Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion (1989;
rev. ed. 1999); Patrick, Ted, Let
Our Children Go! (1976); Pavlos, Andrew J., The Cult Experience (1982). Drugs Braden,
William, The Miscellaneous Brent,
Peter, Godmen of India (1972); Bucke, Richard
Maurice, Cosmic Consciousness:
A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901); Eliade, Mircea,
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,
tr. Willard R. Trask (1964); Isherwood, Christopher, ed. and introd.,
Vedanta for Modern Man (1951); James, William,
Varieties of Religious Experience:
A Study in Human Nature (1902).
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