by Jeff Sharlet
“What’s happening?” the reporters asked. The dragon tamer disappeared. The steam filled our noses, hot and sharp. But it wasn’t steam, it was smoke: The dragon was burning. A hole opened up in the middle of a crowd that stretched at least one hundred thousand strong in either direction. The police did not know what do; best-laid plans had not included giant fire-breathing Trojan salamanders. Suddenly flames leaped out of the dragon’s skull. In minutes the head was consumed entirely, a bonfire thirty feet tall in the middle of Seventh Avenue, “Fashion Avenue,” spewing awful-smelling black smoke and spitting ash and shuddering memory flashes of other, greater towers of smoke and ash. The police stood dumbstruck, hands on the butts of their guns, their jaws hanging open.
Then the police began to move, and the crowd began to run. Around the corner a cop made a flying tackle. Protesters surrounded him and his prisoner, shouting, “Let him go!” Cops piled on; anarchists ambled away from the heap, shedding black to reveal sports jerseys, blouses, friendly clothing. The police penned us all—anarchists and press and ordinary protesters—at Herald Square and scanned the crowd for the enemy. The enemy stared back, laughing and chanting: “Give the cops a raise!”
An older man trapped in the crowd, who had the misfortune of having worn a beige fishing vest—popular with government bodyguards—asked who’d set the fire. A dragon burner beside him, a tall young man with beautiful cheekbones and a red polo shirt, collar raised high, said he could not imagine. Nor could the old man. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he muttered, shaking his head. “This won’t help Senator Kerry.”
The anarchist turned to a friend made over in Betty Crocker fashion. “As if we did it for him.”
CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT, on my way home, I stopped at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery, a two-hundred-year-old church made into a temporary haven for any protesters who cared to rest—or sleep—there. It was packed for the duration of the demonstrations, Episcopal hymnody giving way to “Radical Faerie” rituals and good-natured hard-core hoe-downs, with parts for tuba and trombone.
Marching bands are, naturally, de rigueur in any march for freedom, peace, war, or whatever, and when I passed by St. Mark’s, a fine one was stomping up dust in the graveyard. Two tubas, in fact (or maybe one was a sousaphone), and trumpets, clarinets, dueling flautists, a giant drum, some pots and pans at the margins: the Rude Mechanical Orchestra and friends. They were playing what I at first mistook for klezmer. “Gypsy music,” a saxophonist explained. They were also fond of Italian fight songs, “and some originals.” The latter tended toward faux-football-stadium anthems and flamenco, or something like it—good enough, anyway, for the men and women standing around us to break into a barefoot flamenco emulation. Anarchist ninja suits gave way to funny striped leggings and tattered school-team T-shirts and bare bellies, bare backs, shaved heads, dreads, close-cropped buzz cuts and well-trimmed page boys, shaking in the cemetery dust of Gypsy-klezmer-Italian-fight-song flamenco.
Several signs pegged to the trees surrounding the outdoor kitchen warned against cameras. A bulletin board told Ashley that her Arkansas friends worried about her: “Don’t be in jail!” Another sign requested the return of some heisted incense. “NEEDED for POC spiritual spaces.” POC? People of Color.
The music was a gumbo and the crowd ragtag in all the best and worst senses, but the specter of purity laced the air like pollen, a belief in its possibility, its desirability. By the door of the church someone had painted poster board with a giant green fish bubbling a command: “Don’t Vote!” Like the holy rollers of old and the Radical Faeries of now, the midnight brass-band congregation was made up of “come outers,” as fundamentalists used to describe themselves: come out from the wicked world, come out from big media, come out from the mainstream into the wild waters of uncharted channels. Put away your notebooks, they told us, and dance. Don’t report, join. We didn’t do this for him; we’re not doing it for you: There’s no story but right now.
Later there would be evaluations and meetings and strategy sessions, the trombone would turn against the tuba, one anarchist would call another “narc,” or “cop,” or “tool.” The burning dragon would be denounced from within and without, the dancing derided as narcissistic noodling, documentaries would be made, “history” replayed and reprinted.
That would come later. Now was not a time for media, it was, rather, not-time, kairos to the dreary chronos of political fever. For as long as it lasted, the grave dust and the three-days’-sleeping-in-a-church stink, the big boom-boom of the bass drum, the flamenco steps, and the gift of ululating tongues granted a girl perched high in a tree—all seemed to believers like signs and wonders, the entirety of protest, or revolution, or radical Ludditism, or anarchosyndicalism, or neopaganism, or whatever anyone cared to call what they were doing. Better still: Don’t call it anything. They scorned sound bites, and for the moment they desperately did not want mediation of any kind.
What they wanted was revelation. “Religion”—as broadly defined as the mouth of the Hudson—not political digression. They wanted, believed they needed, and maybe even achieved—before the music stopped and the kitchen closed and the big-booted anarchist boys, and the rosy-cheeked girls, and the half-broken, half-wild men with freight-car leather skin all fell asleep among and on the gravestones—some kind of liberation. It had been won, or would be won, through sweat and the smoke of burnt offerings: stolen incense, free food cooked too long, a big fire in front of Madison Square Garden. We did it for ourselves.
11The Rapture
I FIRST MET BHAKTI Sondra Shaye, née Shaivitz, B.A., M.A., J.D., guide, teacher, and adept member of the Great White Universal Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Light, ritual master in the High Council of Gor, universal kabbalist, Reiki master, and metaphysician, at the New Life Expo at the Hotel New Yorker. The gathering billed itself as “America’s Largest Mind, Body, Spirit Expo,” four floors of alternative spiritual options. Vendors barked discount rates; “consumers” haggled over the tools of their salvation. In New York the hidden economy of New Age mysticism is laid bare with pride. I was interested in the transactions.
A session titled “Spiritual Capitalism: What the FDNY Taught Wall Street About Money” promised to reveal New York’s version of New Age on the make, but the teachers failed to show. So I spent a few hours inspecting spirit sticks, dodging feng shui–ers, and having various intangible parts of my aura balanced, stacked, and aligned. Bhakti Sondra Shaye was the least-assuming person in the room. Three middle-aged women who’d fit right in at a Betty Crocker bake-off, purveyors of “SoulTalk”™, pointed her out. “She’s the one you want to talk to,” one of the women said, regarding the antiagers, crystal forkers, and aromatic transformers with just the slightest eye roll.
Sondra sat in a corner, wearing a purple tunic. She wasn’t hawking anything. If you asked, she’d give you, for free, a picture of her teacher, a ruggedly handsome Irishman named Derek O’Neill, who in turn would name the famed Indian guru Sai Baba as his master. But since I told her I was investigating the spirituality of money—she liked that word, “investigating”—she did me one better. She drew a Prema Agni on my back, and nearly made me fall down.
The Prema Agni is a cross with two legs, one of them serrated, a heart above the arms, and a triangle below. It was supposed to open my heart, “for love to flow in and out.” It came with a flier that instructed: “On receiving this symbol, you pledge to donate $7 to a good cause, but not to the person who draws it for you.” Her, you pay. Not for the Prema Agni—that’s a free sample—but for a menu of services which you will, presumably, be moved by unseen forces to purchase as part of your spiritual journey.
That’s how it had been for Sondra. Derek O’Neill drew the Prema Agni on her back not long after he met her, at the 2001 New Life Expo, a month after the attacks of September 11. A friend of hers had invited her to tag along. Sondra, already working successfully as a healer, wasn’t looking for
new business. She thought then—and, truth be told, thinks now—that much of what’s on offer at the expo is snake oil at best, or worse, “dark energy.” And America’s Largest Mind, Body, Spirit Expo was experiencing serious doubts that crisp autumn in 2001. Detoxification was big that year; alchemy, with its focus on instant wealth, not so much. Sondra went with low expectations and was disappointed.
Then, Derek. A helmet of prematurely silver hair, ocean blue eyes, a jaw like an anvil, a bemused half smile.
He and his wife, Linda, came up to Sondra at her table. They’d been looking for Sai Baba. Although Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, a jolly, ever-smiling Indian man with a giant Afro and a penchant for conjuring jewels, claims at least 10 million devotees, Sondra recalls that she alone brought his picture to the expo.
Sondra also remembers that Derek smelled smoky, because, she’d later learn, he’d been down at Ground Zero, healing people. But that’s not what slayed her. She talked to him for what felt like only ten minutes, ordinary chat; but when she looked up, in midconversation, two hours had passed. Her friend was staring at her, and Derek was gone.
At that moment, she says, she was opened to yet another new healing, of which she is the primary channeler. “Way more powerful” than her old routine. “Way.” Her friends, her Jewish mother who didn’t really believe in any of this meshugas, could all feel it sparking off her.
Maybe I could, too. When Sondra drew the Prema Agni on me I felt a surge of vertigo, a spiral of twitches running down my spine. Weeks later Sondra told me that when Derek draws the Prema Agni, people shudder, weep, and fall down—not unlike Christians who are “slain in the spirit,” an experience known to strike even nonbelievers.
Derek is no mystic. Ex–Irish army, ex-Catholic, working class in spirit if no longer in income (he can earn $45,000 with a single workshop), he lives in Dublin like an ordinary guy, with an ordinary family. On the phone he makes jokes, asks me about my background, talks about pop music. But he is “so fucking evolved,” Sondra says—she and Derek both love the word “fucking,” because “it grounds you”—that while he teaches a workshop “his consciousness can be off having a Guinness somewhere.” One of her ambitions is to join Derek—a married man with whom she is deeply, chastely in love—for a pint on the astral plane. But she’s not that powerful.
Actually, though (Sondra also likes that word, “actually,” its marriage of skepticism and belief), actually, she will be that powerful soon. Things are happening in other dimensions. Channels are opening. It’s no coincidence, her friends tell me, that I’m writing about Sondra. The power is growing. Someday soon she’ll join the metaphysical Derek. Sai Baba, too, and Jesus, Krishna, Merlin, all the ascended masters, like a great big dinner party. Sondra doesn’t normally drink, but when that happens, she’ll raise a glass. It’s going to be fucking amazing.
BEFORE I COULD INTERVIEW Sondra further, I needed to be healed. “It will clear you,” Sondra told me. Later both she and Derek would declare that God had sent me to be their gospel writer, but at the beginning, Sondra was wary. “I don’t want to come off sounding crazy,” she said. So she decided to let me experience the energy for myself. And I did, after a fashion.
Sondra began my healing with an “Emotional Cord Cutting.” This entailed my standing very still while she swiped a foot-long blade up and down, very fast, inches from my body. She paid special attention to my crotch, which is only natural—it’s there, she pointed out, that we form many of our unhealthiest attachments, emotional and otherwise. Sondra invented this healing herself. Or rather, it was “opened” to her alone by the spirit of Saint Paul (known as Hilarion ever since he died, met Jesus, and, according to Sondra, realized he’d been kind of a jerk while on earth), and she came up with the name Emotional Cord Cutting. It costs $95.
Once my emotional cords had been cut, I lay, lightly clothed, for two hours on a cold table in a cement-floor studio above a Park Slope coffeehouse, which Sondra rented from a yoga center by the hour. She worked me over with a battery of energy services—the Rising Star, divine energy healing, etheric surgery—“ancient healing modalities” revealed to her or other teachers she admires. But as far as I could tell she wasn’t even there. Occasionally I heard the rustle of her silk jacket, a special garment she wore to perform healings. Once a finger traced a hard line from my right shoulder to my collarbone, but Sondra later said she hadn’t touched me anywhere but my knees and abdomen. I shivered through most of the session. Sondra said it’d been so hot in the room she’d been sweating.
The next day I got the flu. I was down like a sedated hippo for a week. Sondra called. She said it was a healing crisis. I was lucky, she said; a lot of people experience such crises emotionally, but it’s quicker and easier to get the negative energy out through the body. Price tag for the whole affair: $395. Sondra comped me.
I mention these sums not to cast doubt on the authenticity of the services rendered. You don’t have to be a moral relativist to recognize that “true” and “false” are empty categories when you’re trying to understand other people’s mysteries. The light flashing off the blade, the bead of orange at the tip of a stick of incense slashing along with the knife, the sweetness of its smoke, the look of concentration that made Sondra’s giant brown eyes flutter and drew her pretty face into a scary look of loose-jawed concentration—it all made for sensual accoutrements to what could, for some, be a persuasive metaphor. Viewed from another perspective Sondra’s healing services were no sillier or more profound than the idea that by dunking yourself in water, you experience death and resurrection, or that by beating yourself on the chest every Yom Kippur, you really take responsibility for a whole community’s sins—or even your own.
If Sondra’s Cord Cutting lacked the historical pedigree of better-known rituals, it was no less “real.” In fact it may be Sondra’s steep rates that are proof of her spirit guides’ full arrival in the pantheon of American gods; money is the means by which Sondra and other New Age healers show themselves to be a religious movement that’s within the economy of belief. “Some people have this misconception that spiritual work is real only if it’s free of charge,” Sondra told me early on in what she’d come to call “our work” together. “Great. Cardinal Law”—then in the midst of a cover-up of the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse crisis—“will help you for free.” She didn’t have to add the tacit disclaimer: With him there were all sorts of long-term hidden costs.
It’s no heresy to say that most religions come with a price tag. The grammatical truth of the world’s scriptures as usually read is not, as atheists sometimes insist, imperative, a command, but rather conditional: the cosmic “if.” If you obey these rules, rewards will follow. It’s all about the deal. Money always changes hands. From client to Sondra, from churchgoer to collection plate, from a corporation back to its institutional investors.
Sondra thinks New York is a New Age spiritual center—maybe the spiritual center—because it’s unabashed in fusing the worlds of spirituality and money. It’s a city built on the kind of beliefs embraced by stingy bluebloods on the Upper East Side, grouchy old Jews in Brooklyn, and, of course, the spiritually evolved: You get what you pay for. There’s no free lunch. Brainwork should be well compensated. If that sounds like a conservative line, it is: the New Age movement has shed the anticapitalist trappings of its 1960s revival to align itself with the dogmas of the globalizing market, embracing the ancient teachings of Adam Smith, the economic patron saint of the Enlightenment, if not enlightenment.
This new New Age takes as its mediator, meanwhile, its high priest or priestess, the hero of the story, you: the recipient of Esalen strokes and Prema Agnis and aromatic transformations. It has become the fulfillment of Martin Luther’s dream of divine access—“the priesthood of all believers”—to say nothing of the prognosis made by Max Weber in his 1904 classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Everyone who buys a stick of incense o
r takes a yoga class or listens to Tibetan monks chanting is experiencing the cosmopolitan godhead just as Luther and Weber might have wanted: unfiltered, billable by the hour.
AND YET THE new New Age is the result of more than commerce. Its catalyst was September 11, 2001. “Spirituality” was big in the days right after the disaster. At first church attendance soared, 60, 70, 90 percent, depending on which pastor, which rabbi, which culture warrior you asked. But after a while it returned to normal. The new traditionalism did not endure.
Practices such as Sondra’s—religious experiences one could engage at a time of one’s own choosing—did. The rhetoric of “spiritual war,” popular among conservative evangelicals, found a parallel among New Age adherents, who spoke of “wounds” and “scars” and allies in their “personal battles.” And then there was the sensual appeal of it all. The scents and the poses and two dozen ways to get your back rubbed, chopped, and prodded. Down at Ground Zero, firemen lined up for massages. Across the city cheap Chinese tui na became more common than shoeshines, its vague “spirituality” implied by the masseurs’ inability to speak much English.
And practitioners such as Sondra found their client base expanded by real-estate agents who wanted properties “healed” of the “bad energy” lingering from those who fled the city, working-class stiffs who decided that in “a time of war” it’s okay to be emotional about one’s “inner pain,” former fundamentalists who believe they can’t live without some kind of spiritual practice, not any more.
Sondra made more money as a healer than she did in the early nineties as a young litigator for Davis Polk & Wardwell, a corporate law firm. How much is that? Two or three clients a day, from $150 to $300 an hour, plus the occasional workshop that brought in thousands of dollars for a day’s work. Do the math. Ask her accountant. Enough that she buys what she wants (not much) and gives as much as she wants—sufficient to empty her bank account twice in the past few years—to an orphanage in India.
