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9.
The Rise of New Age
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 Woodstock. New Age, however, has smoothly adjusted
to the stubborn persistence of the social structures that the sixties
failed to budge. An analogy might be the introspective period just
before and after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD,
when the Roman
empire
seemed insuperable. New Age is much more concerned with the afterlife-past
lives, reincarnation, astral projection.
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 Maine. In the 1840s, Quimby had fused Hindu and
Buddhist concepts from Transcendentalism with hypnotherapy, based
on Anton Mesmer's eighteenth-century theory of "animal magnetism."
For Quimby and Eddy, the material world is an illusion, and illness
has no real existence. However, Quimby rejected Christianity, as
Eddy did not. Her seminal book, Science and Health (1875), was shortly
followed by her founding of the Church of Christ, Scientist, which
focuses on the parables and miracles of Jesus. For Christian Science,
only divine power, not physicians or medicine, can heal.
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 Harvard Medical School who had studied the effects of marijuana,
claimed in his 1972 book, The
Natural Mind, that altered consciousness is necessary for healing.
From his clinic at the University of Arizona, he criticizes commercial pharmaceuticals
as toxic and calls for "integrative medicine," a sixties-style holistic
approach combining the best of East and West. After his split from
the Maharishi, Deepak Chopra also became identified with Alternative
Medicine. From the Chopra Center, his headquarters at the La Costa Resort
near San
Diego,
he promulgates ayureveda, a traditional Hindu medicine that claims
disease can be cured by opening the organism to cosmic energy. Chopra
also alleges that his mind technique can stem aging and bring success
and wealth.
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 Houston. Her books are Jungian in orientation but
feature secular, multicultural prayers. Her major influence remains
A Course in Miracles (1976), which she
read after having a breakdown in her twenties.
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 Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. A colleague, William Thetford, did the
typing from her notebooks. Schucman's father was Jewish and Lutheran,
while her mother had had contact with Theosophy and Christian Science.
At twelve, Schucman visited Lourdes with her family; at thirteen, influenced
by their devout black maid, she was baptized a Baptist. A Course in Miracles was published by the Foundation for Inner Peace
in Mill
Valley,
California. Its orginal name in New York was the Foundation for Para-Sensory Investigation,
reflecting the longstanding interest of its director, Judith Skutch
Whitson, in parapsychology. The
Course asserts that the universe is pure love and that sin does
not exist. Though non-sectarian, it descends from Eddy in its Christian
vestiges: our sole guide should be an internal "Voice" identified
as our "inner Jesus."
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 Tibet. In New York in 1875, she and Henry Steele Olcott founded
the Theosophical Society, which combined Hindu and Buddhist concepts
with the Western esoteric tradition. (Theosophy, meaning "divine
wisdom," was associated with the seventeenth-century German mystic,
Jacob Boehme, who taught that God is immanent in nature.) A Blavatsky
ally, G. R. S. Mead, translated the Corpus
Hermeticum, a densely symbolic work of Greco-Egyptian gnosticism
from the third century AD.
When its manuscript was rediscovered at the Italian Renaissance,
the Corpus Hermeticum was incorrectly identified
with Neoplatonism and boosted the fashion for magic, alchemy, and
astrology.
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 Egypt), with its romanticized views of Egypt's magic arts. In 1878, Madame Blavatsky
went to India and later made Madras the international headquarters of her Theosophical
Society. A substantive result of her presence in India would be the renewal of interest in ancient
Sanskrit religious texts, which were translated and disseminated
around the world, providing the raw material for the twentieth century's
spiritual healing movements as well as the Western practice of yoga.
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 Ojai, California, to establish the Krishnamurti Foundation;
he died there in 1986.
Another figure directly influenced
by Madame Blavatsky was Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), a clairvoyant born
in Kentucky who toured the US for 40 years doing "life readings" and
promoting his belief in reincarnation. Dismissed as a charlatan
by mainstream journalists, Cayce prepared the way for sixties occultists
and seventies and eighties channelers like Jane Roberts ("Seth")
and J. Z. Knight ("Ramtha"), as well as for today's New Age psychics
and mind-readers.
The nineteenth-century fin de siècle
in Europe and the
US was teeming with spiritualistic sodalities,
publications, and art images, part of the Romantic legacy of demonic
archetypes from a glorified Satan to spellbinding femmes
fatales. The most prominent British organization was the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn, founded by three Freemasons interested
in Rosicrucian thought. The Order's Isis Urania Temple opened in London in 1888. One member was William Butler
Yeats, who believed that his wife was a medium and who used Rosicrucian
and astrological symbolism in his poetry. The Rosicrucians, called
Illuminati, claimed their esoteric order was founded in ancient
Egypt and was brought to Europe by knightly crusaders; however, it probably
dates from the seventeenth century. Its cabalistic and Hermetic
imagery includes the rose, cross, swastika, and pyramid. (The Nazis
borrowed the swastika from the Rosicrucians because of its association
with medieval chivalry.) There had been interchanges in eighteenth-century
England between the Rosicrucians and Freemasonry,
a secret, ceremonial order with roots in medieval guilds-though
it too claimed descent from Egypt, Babylon, and Jerusalem. Leading figures of the American Revolution,
such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, were Masons, whose
anti-clerical creed was a coolly intellectual Deism.
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. Crowley rebelled against his affluent British family,
who were Plymouth Brethren, a puritanical, originally Irish Protestant
sect. Throughout his flamboyant career, Crowley combined Asian mysticism with Western occultism
and black magic. After the Golden Dawn self-destructed in quarrels
in 1900, he began traveling the world-Mexico, India, Burma, and Ceylon, where he learned yoga. He took mescaline
in 1910. He wrote many books, among them Diary of a Dope Fiend (1922) and Magick in Theory and Practice (1929). Crowley advocated total sexual freedom, including
orgies and bestiality. He called himself "The Great Beast" and took
the Anti-Christ's apocalyptic 666 as his personal number. From 1912,
Crowley led a German cult, the Ordo Templis Orientis, that opened branches in the US. His politics were pro-Nazi-a dismaying
detail usually lost in his legend.
Crowley's influence fell heavily on the late sixties
and seventies. Biographies of Crowley had been published in England in 1958 and 1959; his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929-30),
was re-released in 1969. The Beatles inserted Crowley's face (back row, second from left) in
the cartoon cover collage of their landmark Sergeant
Pepper album (1967). It is rumored that the title song's first
line ("It was twenty years ago today") alludes to Crowley's death in 1947. Because of its descent
from blues-called the "devil's music" in the American South-rock
already had a voodoo element lingering from Afro-Caribbean cults.
But the Satanism in classic Rolling Stones songs and the magic pentagrams
on Led Zeppelin's album covers and stage costumes came from Crowley. Jimmy Page, Zeppelin's virtuoso lead guitarist,
collected Crowley memorabilia and bought his mansion, Boleskine
House, on Scotland's Loch Ness. The fad for backwards messages
in rock songs, which the Beatles popularized, is said (on what authority
I cannot confirm) to have been inspired by Crowley, who lauded the practice of reverse reading
of scripture in medieval Satanic rituals. Crowley admirers in seventies
rock included David Bowie and heavy-metal musicians like Ozzy Osbourne,
whose song, "Mr. Crowley" ("You waited on Satan's call"), appeared
on his first solo album after leaving Black Sabbath.
Sixties Satanism was nurtured in California by Anton Szandor La Vey (born Howard Levey
in Illinois). The author of The Satanic Bible (1970), La Vey had been practicing Crowley-style
Black Arts since the fifties. An advocate of Crowley's creed of radical sexual liberation, he
proclaimed "indulgence" to be the master Satanic
principle. In 1966, La Vey founded the Church of Satan at his home in San Francisco, an all-black Victorian house where he
conducted black masses with perkily nude women in lavish, tribal
animal masks (photos survive). Contrary to rumor, La Vey did not,
according to his daughter, appear as Satan in Roman Polanski's occult
hit film, Rosemary's Baby (1968), nor did he have any connection with it whatsoever.
Celebrities and libertines (Mick Jagger reportedly among them) did
visit La Vey's "Black House," which may have once been a hotel.
One of the most brilliant songs of the seventies, the Eagles' "Hotel
California," is said to have been inspired by rites at La Vey's
house, whose address was 6114 California Street.
A startling and little-known example
of Crowley's enduring influence is the Church of Scientology, founded in 1954 by science-fiction writer
L. Ron Hubbard, one of the main shapers of New Age thought. Hubbard
had met Crowley at the latter's Los Angeles temple in 1945. Hubbard's son has revealed
that his father claimed to be Crowley's successor: Hubbard told him that Scientology
was born on the day that Crowley died. The drills used by Scientologists
to cleanse and clarify the mind are evidently a reinterpretation
of Crowley's singular fusion of Asian meditation with
Satanic ritualism, which sharpens the all-conquering
will. The guiding premise of Hubbard's mega-bestseller, Dianetics: The Modern
Science of Mental Health (1950), is that morality and spirituality
can be scientifically analyzed and managed-as if guilt and remorse,
in the Crowley way, are mere baggage to be jettisoned.
Scientology, which attracts celebrities like John Travolta and Tom
Cruise, has been pursued by the IRS
for its tax-exempt status as a religion. Scientology's religiosity
can be detected in its theory of reincarnation: the "process" allegedly
eradicates negative thoughts and experiences predating our life
in the womb.
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 Moscow in 1913 and claimed to have spent twenty
years gathering esoteric spiritualist knowledge from Mecca to Tibet. As a refugee in France after the Russian Revolution, Gurdjieff
created his "Fourth
Way,"
a mixture of Tantric Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufi mysticism. Based
on a method called "the Work," it uses free movement and sacred
dances along with intense group sessions where masks are stripped
off to achieve a higher awareness. Gurdjieff's Institute for the
Harmonious Development of Man, relocated in 1922 to Paris, originated
the "transformational" technique of encounter sessions that would
be widely adopted in the
US and serve in the vanguard of the sexual revolution. Gurdjieff
demonstrated his dances in the US in 1924 but spent most of his life in France. Branches of the Gurdjieff Foundation opened
in New
York
in 1953 and in San
Francisco
in 1958.
Gurdjieff's influence can be seen in
the Esalen Institute, established in 1962 at Big Sur, California, by two psychology graduates of Stanford University. Eventually, 100 Esalen Centers (named
after an Indian tribe) opened around the US. Its headquarters, nestled in the mountains
at natural hot
springs
overlooking the sea, remains the symbol of the enterprise, which
combines Asian religious concepts with Western humanistic psychology.
Esalen is a pure example of the sixties spirit in its explicit mission
to fuse comparative religion with art and ecology. Its workshops,
based on the Gurdjieff group session, drew a long list of writers
and thinkers in the sixties, including Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley.
Esalen's continued exploration of mystical issues is shown by recent
conferences at its Big
Sur
site-"Survival of Bodily Death" (2001) and "Subtle Energies and
Uncharted Realms of the Mind" (2000).
Traces of the Gurdjieff encounter session
can be found in EST
(Erhard Seminar Training), founded in San Francisco in 1971 by Werner Erhard, a used-car salesman
from Philadelphia. Erhard was Jewish but had been raised
as an Episcopalian; he oddly gave himself a German name in adulthood.
In the late sixties, Erhard investigated Scientology and studied
Zen with Alan Watts in Sausalito. He claimed to have gone to India to consult gurus like Swami Muktananda
and Satya Sai Baba. In EST,
Erhard gave the workshop format the fervor of a Protestant revival
meeting and framed it with the language of Asian meditation and
spiritual discovery. Participants in EST's
Large Group Awareness Training were supposed to get "It"-Watts' term for the moment of revelation. Marathon,
eight-hour sessions, in which they were confined and harassed, supposedly
led to the breakdown of conventional ego, after which they were
in effect born again. Erhard said he wanted "to blow the Mind" in
the sixties way. Explicitly anti-Christian in philosophy, EST
was generally regarded as a cult, but it was a private, for-profit
organization. Its students were not runaways or hippies but prosperous
professionals. In 1991, amid tax problems and unsavory family rumors,
Erhard left the country.
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 school of Gestalt psychology (which focuses on present adjustment rather
than past conflicts), developed his theory of "self-actualization,"
from which the contemporary obsession with "self-esteem" evolved.
The term seems to echo Yogananda's "self-realization." Maslow was
an early associate of Esalen but criticized it for its lack of a
library, which he felt limited its definition of enhanced consciousness.
He described his system as the "Third Force," following the first
two of Freud and behaviorism. He later advocated a "Fourth Force,"
a sixties synthesis of transpersonal psychology with Asian mysticism.
Like Maslow, psychotherapist Carl Rogers
sought "wholeness" of the person. Intriguingly, Rogers began his career as a theology student
and Vermont pastor but afterward turned to clinical
psychology. An admirer of John Dewey's progressive education theories,
he pioneered "client-centered" or "non-directive" therapy, which
suspended and even questionably reversed the hierarchical relationship
of doctor to patient. Among Rogers' books was Encounter Groups (1970), with its obvious
Gurdjieff lineage. Christian conservatives regularly, and probably
with some justice, attack the self-actualization or human potential
school of psychology for its "pagan" stress on personal needs and
desires at the expense of moral reasoning and responsibility. For
many people, humanistic psychology has indeed become a substitute
for religion.
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 Europe in the 1930s, Reich had become interested
in the physical-culture work of Elsa Gindler in Berlin. Around 1910, Gindler (1885-1961) developed
a psychotherapy based on dance movements and correction of breathing:
it resembled Chinese tai chi as well as the Alexander technique,
used by actors and singers to free the voice from tension and fear.
Gindler's ideas were brought to the
US by her student, Charlotte Selver, who began
teaching at Esalen in 1963. The Sensory Awareness Foundation, dedicated
to Gindler and Selver's work, was established at Mill Valley, California, in 1971. Another important teacher at
Esalen was Ida Rolf (1896-1979), who earned a doctorate in biological
chemistry from Columbia University in 1920 and began exploring the body's
internalization of stress in the 1940s. Rolf combined aspects of
yoga with the Alexander technique to create "rolfing," a sometimes
brutal reshaping of the muscles to release painful memories and
resentments. The Guild for Structural Integration, based in Boulder,
Colorado, is still dedicated to Rolf's mission.
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.
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