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 U.S. 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 ayurveda, 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 1980s; 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 acupressure, 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 original 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 A.D. 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), Besant converted to Theosophy in 1889. In 1909, she 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 U.S. for 40 years doing “life readings” and promoting his belief in reincarnation. Dismissed as a charlatan by mainstream journalists, Cayce prepared the way for 1960s occultists and ’70s and ’80s 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 U.S. 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, also 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 Templi Orientis, that opened branches in the U.S. His politics were pro-Nazi—a dismaying detail usually lost in his legend.
Crowley’s influence fell heavily on the late 1960s and ’70s. 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 Sgt. 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 1970s 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 LaVey (born Howard Levey in Illinois). The author of The Satanic Bible (1970), LaVey had been practicing Crowley-style Black Arts since the 1950s. An advocate of Crowley’s creed of radical sexual liberation, he proclaimed “indulgence” to be the master Satanic principle. In 1966, LaVey 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, LaVey 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 whatever. Celebrities and libertines (Mick Jagger reportedly among them) did visit LaVey’s “Black House,” which may have once been a hotel. One of the most brilliant songs of the 1970s, the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” is said to have been inspired by rites at LaVey’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 U.S. and serve in the vanguard of the sexual revolution. Gurdjieff demonstrated his dances in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 1960s, 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 1960s, 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 1980s through the New Age proselytizing of
actress Shirley MacLaine.) In the early 1950s, 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 1960s, 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.
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