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Cults
and Cosmic Consciousness:
Religious
Vision in the American 1960s*
CAMILLE
PAGLIA
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- Eclipse
by Politics
- Cults Ancient
and Modern
- New Messiahs
and Cultural Polarization
- Transcendentalism
and Asian Religion
- American
Strains of Asian Religion in the Twentieth Century
- Hinduism
and 1960s Music
- Psychedelic
Drugs
- Mysticism
and Social Change
- The Rise
of New Age
- Conclusion
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1.
Eclipse by Politics
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 US Supreme Court's 1954 decision declaring
segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In that crusade,
it must be remembered, ordained Protestant ministers such as Martin
Luther King, Jr., played a leading role, as they also had in nineteenth-century
abolitionism. The civil rights movement, with its hymns and anthems,
appealed not just to secular standards of social justice but to a higher moral
code.
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 Washington, dc, in October 1967, Yippies performed a mock-exorcism
to levitate the Pentagon and cast out its demons. Not since early
nineteenth-century Romanticism had there been such a strange mix
of revolutionary politics with ecstatic nature-worship and sex-charged
self-transformation. It is precisely this phantasmagoric religious
vision that distinguishes the New Left of the American 1960s from
the Old Left of the American 1930s and from France's failed leftist insurgency of 1968, both
of which were conventionally Marxist in
their indifference or antagonism to religion.
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 US and abroad who are interested in developing
interdisciplinary courses about the sixties.
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