Cults

Trustees of Boston University
Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s Author(s): Camille Paglia Source: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Winter, 2003), pp. 57-111 Published by: Trustees of Boston University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163901 . Accessed: 17/11/2013 11:56
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 181.15.183.213 on Sun, 17 Nov 2013 11:56:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American

CAMILLE PAGLIA
1960s
I.
ECLIPSE
BY
POLITICS
V^jommentary umented
sive. Law and politics and the same thing can but remain controversial, in mass media and the innovations be said of contemporary
1960s has been mas in that turbulent decade are well doc on the
or poorly assimi arts. One major area remains ambiguous new religious vision, which for a tanta lated, however?the moment in sixties brought East and American the lizing a West together in progressive cultural synthesis. Its promise was here. But need never completely the depth fulfilled, for reasons Iwill try to sketch and authenticity of that spiritual shift
to be more widely acknowledged. A political model of the currently governs interpretations born in sixties because of the enduring reform movements
that period, including environmentalism, feminism, and gay liberation. Their mobilizing energy, as well as the organiza also be adopted by antiwar protests, tional style that would sparked by the initially came from the civil rights movement us Supreme Court's in 1954 decision declaring segregation In that crusade, it must be public schools unconstitutional. as Protestant ministers Martin ordained such remembered, Jr., played a leading role, as they also had in abolitionism. The civil rights movement, nineteenth-century its hymns and anthems, with appealed not just to secular Luther King, standards of social justice but to a higher moral code.
An expanded version of a lecture delivered on 26 March 2002 at Yale University, sponsored by the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale.
ARION IO.3 WINTER 2OO3
58 CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
sixties was expression on the Left in the American So split. Radical activists such as Students for a Democratic from its with drew their Marxism, ciety (1960-68) ideology Political explicit atheism. But demonstrations with a large hippie con and tingent often mixed occultism?magic politics with costumes with and from witchcraft drawn along symbolism Native American and Buddhism. For ex religion, Hinduism, antiwar protest near Washington, ample, at the mammoth a mock-exorcism in October DC, 1967, Yippies performed cast out to levitate the Pentagon since its demons. Not and Romanticism had there been such a early nineteenth-century mix ecstatic nature of with strange revolutionary politics It is precisely self-transformation. and sex-charged worship New the this phantasmagoric religious vision that distinguishes from the Old Left of the Left of the American 1960s
American
1930s and from France's failed leftist insurgency in their Marxist of 1968, both of which were conventionally to religion. indifference or antagonism were passionately of the sixties counterculture Members to political reform, yet they were also seeking the committed truth about
ten
life outside
spite their ambivalence

sought gurus?mentors
religious and social institutions. De toward authority, however, they of

or guides, who sometimes
proved was opened sciousness"
fallible.
One
to what
problem was commonly
was
that the more called
the mind con
"cosmic
ful politics Civil rights and political and Buddhism, Hinduism
(a hippie rubric of the sixties), the less meaning or social structure became, melting into the Void. reform are in fact Western ideals:
the ego and urg by extinguishing see of ultimate acceptance suffering and injustice reality, ing as essential conditions of life that cannot be changed but of consciousness?"blowing your only endured. Alteration an end or value world-view remade theWestern in itself in the sixties. Drugs of by shattering conventions
mind" ?became
revelation time, space, and personal identity. Unfortunately, was sometimes from delusion. The neuro indistinguishable were denied or underesti use risks of long-term drug logical
Camille
Paglia
59
mated:
daring sixties questers lost the ability to ar ticulate and transmit their spiritual legacy to posterity. in this area is voluminous The source material but uneven the most
in quality, partly because sixties chronicles at their most col orful often rely on anecdote and hearsay. Hence, much of the present essay is provisional. My aim is to trace lines of influ ence might and to suggest historical parallels?an aid teachers in the us and abroad who interdisciplinary
2. CULTS
overview are interested the sixties.
that in
developing
courses
about
ANCIENT
AND
MODERN
of young people in the American sixties to from alternative away parents explore and lifestyles. A minority world-views actually joined com munes or cults. These varied in philosophy and regime from Tens of thousands or broke drifted the mild to the extreme. sixties the American the Hellenistic in The true cults that proliferated and early seventies resemble those of eras. Such phenomena and imperial Roman of cultural fracturing in cosmopolitan periods
and mobility. of small groups Consisting 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 dy as namic of the birth of religions, they flare up, coalesce, and strengthen or sputter out and vanish. A cult is a foster fam ily that requires complete severance from past connections? in cults may begin with a kin, spouses, friends. Membership ultimate which experience where an individual feels that truth has been glimpsed. This may lead to zealotry, the conviction that the cult view is the only possible view, sudden conversion too refined plex the world to the benighted or is be promulgated to be understood com A persecution others. by and siege mentality may result: cult members feel that therefore must is the enemy the Hellenistic and that only martyrdom and imperial Roman will vindi
are symptoms of rapid expansion
cate their faith. During periods,
6o
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
the estab mystery religions competed with or civic gods, whose state religions of the Olympian official worship was public and often located in city centers. lished The mammoth tures and dissemination has of Rome artifacts resulted religion, at the Renaissance, being por as stabler or more uniform than it of Olympian images in Greco-Roman in sculp
transnational
from the excavation
trayed by neoclassicism was. Mystery fewer and religions, which generally produced or stone less monumental idols, offered chryselephantine personal salvation bound
initiation into an enlightened through some the group by special secret, often involving an a for of miseries. recompense afterlife, present promise Hence mystery had great religions appeal to the powerless mystery Dionysus, religions?of Isis, and Mithras?anticipated, Demeter, influenced, or vied to the sometimes with Christianity. dryly con Compared mystery religion was characterized identification with by a worshipper's powerful to the god. Christianity, connection and emotional based on tractual veneration of the Olympians, one of many itinerant the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a in Palestine, emerged from of splin preachers proliferation ter sects in Judaism, among which were the Essenes, who left War Sea Scrolls in jars found just after World ii in caves near Qumran in Israel. The Essenes, ascetic and celibate hermits with an apocalyptic theology, were a cult by any modern definition. The American sixties, I sub the famous Dead of spiritual crisis and political unrest sim ancient then under Roman Palestine, of modern media. religions faltered under Few prophets or mes eye of the invasive TV and dispossessed. The major Mediterranean
mit, had a climate ilar to that of occupation. the pitiless siahs could
camera.
But this time the nascent scrutiny survive the deglamourizing
Yet a major source of cultic America was the entertainment
in twentieth-century stu industry: the Hollywood dio system, cohering during and just after World War i, pro stars as simulacra of the pagan jected its manufactured energies
Camille
Paglia
61
Frenzied fans (aword derived from the Latin fa pantheon. for maddened of Cybele) had already natici, worshippers been generated by grand opera in the late-seventeenth and castrati sang female roles and centuries, when eighteenth were the dizzy object of coterie speculation and intrigue. mass media Modern extended and broadened immensely that phenomenon. Outbursts of quasi-religious emotion of be seen in the hysterical female fans to response Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Valentino, Rudolph could Beatles. there Eroticism were mixed riots with death nearly by death from a perforated ulcer at age thirty-one in 1926. The rumor that Elvis lives is still stubbornly planted in the culture, as if he were a demigod who could conquer nat as the ural law. Tabloids have touted Presley's canonization saint. The same myth of surviving death is at to rock star Jim Morrison, whose Paris grave has be come a magnet for hippies of many nations. first Protestant tached is persistently associ half young men, sweet, androgynous surly, are sometimes who like Adonis linked with mother figures. and never fully re Presley, for example, sank into depression ated with half covered in 1958; from his mother's after death at age forty-six unexpected at substance he died prematurely abuse, long even in 1977. Rock music, at its most macho, Cultism of this demonstrative kind is archetypally mourners distraught potent: after
Valentino's
age forty-two has repeatedly produced pretty, long-haired boys who mes merize both sexes and who hauntingly resemble ancient
the beautiful, ill-fated youth beloved sculptures of Antinous, It's no coincidence that it emperor Hadrian. by the Roman was Paul McCartney, the "cutest" and most girlish of the in Beatles, who inspired a false rumor that swept the world 1969 that he was dead. Beatles songs and album covers were Imyself feverishly scrutinized for clues and coded messages: to this pandemonium a contributed New Haven by calling radio station to identify mortuary lines from King hear sub in the climactic cacophony of "I am the Walrus." In merged cultic experience, death is sexy. The hapless McCartney had
62
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
the dying god of fertility myth who was the for the deified Antinous: after Antinous epicene prototype in the Nile in 130 ad, the grief-stricken drowned Hadrian over in him had memorialized shrines all the Mediterranean, become Adonis, where crowned ravishing cult statues often showed the pensive youth with the grapes and vines of Dionysus. The evangelical fervor felt by many heretical young people in the 1960s was powered by rock music, which at that mo was an art form. The becoming and fifties African-American all-enveloping sound big beat came from rhythm and blues. of rock was produced that subordi technology in a way culture more since assault ex the of
ment
late-forties
But the titanic,
new amplification by powerful, nated the mind and activated the body seen in Western treme than anything ancient Roman that thunderous ural energies,
mos. "Flower power," the pacifist sixties
Bacchanalia. music, tangible
Through a whole generation proof of humanity's
the sensory
tapped into nat link to the cos

was a
credo,
senti
un neo-Romantic version of earth cult, which mentalized, In ancient of the the Bacchae, Dionysus. derlay worship saw nature's side, but that frightful, destructive Euripides is the lost over time. Bacchanalia perception was gradually Latin word term for the Dionysian ritual orgia (root of the English where celebrants maddened by drink, drugs, "orgy"), went into ecstasy and wildly (ecstasis, rhythmic music or transcending their or of Dionysus (called Lu The theater. Bacchanalia arrived Celebrants
"standing outside of"), abandoning the association dinary selves. Hence sios, the "Liberator") with in Southern Italy from Greece to Rome.
eventually spread and ivy danced to flutes in festivities that became woods and opportunistic promiscuity the Second breaks following
in the fifth century bc and decked with myrtle and cymbals through city parks and notorious crime. After for open sexual
repeated out the Bacchanalia Punic War, a threat to public order and officially were declared sup bc in 186 But Senate their influence Roman the pressed by
Camille
Paglia
63
as attested by Dionysian designs on sarcophagi persisted, the and the walls of private villas. In the ruins of Pompeii, resort destroyed by a volcanic eruption in j^ ad, hedonistic is evidence that the Bacchanalia had evolved into pri sex clubs. This process of secularization, sex di where vorced from cosmology becomes permissively recreational, can also be seen in the transition from the hippie sixties to there vate the manic Romantic houses, seventies nature and early cult withdrew eighties: sex detached to glitzy urban discos, like Plato's Retreat.
AND CULTURAL POLARIZATION
from bath
and sex clubs

NEW MESSIAHS
3.
What
we
the half-dozen
think of as the 1960s was really concentrated into of John F. years after the assassination
in 1963. Cultural and burnt Kennedy changes exploded out with themselves im tremendous The speed. religious a of the sixties has been obscured by series of scandals pulse munes that began mid-decade and spilled into the seventies?com that failed, charismatic leaders who turned psychotic, in crime and murder. The sensational chain in 1963 of Timothy Leary from psychology lecture
cults that ended
of events began with the dismissal and his colleague Richard Alpert
for experimenting with LSDon student vol ships at Harvard unteers. This episode first brought lsd to public attention. An Irish Catholic turned self-described prophet, Leary envi sioned a world of "psychedelic network churches" whose Vatican would nym: lsd), was closed assistant a religious be his League for Spiritual Discovery inMillbrook, New York, headquartered raid led by Dutchess (acro until it
after a 1966 police prosecutor G. Gordon
institution, a frequent ties?reportedly
County Liddy. Though registered as the League was noted for its sex par attraction of Leary's Harvard of
fices as well. cidents The optimistic sixties saga degenerated into horrifying in of group psychology is notorious gone wrong. Most a drifter who became a fixture the case of Charles Manson,
64
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
of San Francisco's 1967 natical Christ "Summer
devotees, and the devil. Though only as a He cult leader. hypnotic powers
district during its famous Haight-Ashbury of Love" and who gathered a group of fa hippie girls who thought he was both Jesus had 5*2" tall, Manson became patriarch of the
on a ranch near Los Angeles where "Family," a commune of drugs was promoted and ritu heavy use of a cornucopia alistic group sex practiced. A student of the Bible, Manson the Beatles: believed that the Book of Revelations prophesied modern re pop culture, in other words, had an apocalyptic a In Manson hit 1969, August ligious meaning. dispatched squad to slaughter seven people in two nights, including the
in the Holly Sharon T?te, living in a rented house wood Hills. The details still shock: in jailhouse confessions, Manson's girls boasted of the "sexual release" they felt in their Maenadic frenzy as they plunged their knives into their actress victims. fifty-one By the seventies, cults seemed increasingly psychopathic. or Radical political cells like the bomb-making Weathermen Liberation who the Symbionese Patty Army, kidnapped Hearst headed in 1974 cobra, and whose began emblem was a talismanic seven to merge in popular perception with like Jim Jones' People's Temple, nominally religious groups whose mostly black congregation was drawn from San Fran at the height worker and political cisco nation tually of the hippie era. Jones was a social activist who claimed to be the reincar T?te, eight months times and a male companion pregnant, was times. stabbed sixteen
of Jesus, Buddha, Ikhnaten, and Lenin and who even to a commune called emigrated with his followers
in the Guyana Jonestown jungle. After a shootout that killed a visiting us Congressman in 1978, Jones ordered mass sui cide by cyanide-laced punch: 914 people were found dead, including 280 children. In the nineties, interest
among curious young people
in the
at the
swinging
same time
sixties
as an
revived
acrimo
nious debate
about
the sixties
tion of the first baby-boom
legacy intensified with president, Bill Clinton.
the elec Thus, a
Camille
Paglia
6$
upsurge of cult incidents also triggered memories era. In 1993, a Christian commune of Branch of the Manson coincidental Davidians near Waco, loss of eighty-one the federal government. The Davidians were a branch of Sev enth-Day Adventists with roots in the 1930s. Their leader, David Koresh, called himself "Yahweh" and kept a harem. In thirty-nine draped in purple Diego, California. white, suicide 1997, Nike all wearing sneakers and a near San were in found house shrouds, An obscure cult led by Marshall Apple the son of a Presbyterian minister, had committed mass bodies, Texas, was destroyed by fire, with the lives, after a four-month siege by agencies of
in the expectation of ascent to heaven, signaled by the comet. The cult followed a strict code of celibacy: Hale-Bopp and seven other men had been surgically castrated Applewhite to avoid homosexual temptation. the These sensational cases further distorted and distanced of the sixties. Though there are cults religious dimension Solar that resulted abroad?the Armageddon-style Temple in fifty-three way Shinrykyo in 1995, suicides in Switzerland released group who sarin gas in 1994 or the Aum in the Tokyo sub
primarily alism and disillusion
is killing twelve and injuring five thousand?it in American culture that the sixties drama of ide has been played their own manifest of Christian out. The sixties which lost pro The excesses, fundamentalism.
credibility through duced the counterreaction American
and pentecostal movements, evangelical already momentum. In in the early sixties, gained great stirring again won a on House Nixon White Richard the law-and 1968,
Southern Baptist, by 1976, a "born-again" was elected Carter, Jimmy president. The sixties were the breeding ground for the depressingly order platform; pattern of the last thirty-five liberals and conservatives, years?a rigid polarization with each group striking predictable postures and mouthing Gradations sanctimonious of political platitudes. thought formulaic political of have been lost. One reason is that liberals have thereby allowing shown con tinual disrespect for religion, conservatives and cultural
to take the high road and claim to be God's agents in de values. Liberals have forgotten the reli fending traditional gious ferment on the Left politics ment manipulation, could bring salvation. Memories of the sixties programs since the flakiest have been censored out of embarrassment, of sixties happenings seemed to delegitimize the period's po litical ideals. On obvious the other hand, of sixties has too often become in the sixties, so that progressive a sterile instrument of govern as if social-welfare agencies and federal
religiosity is the Arcadian matriarchal myth of "the example that emerged in feminism and lesbian separatism Goddess" in the seventies and still flourishes in innumerable books still ideol and in print. A second example ogy typified in the eighties Andrea who is the puritanical feminist by Catharine MacKinnon
it could be argued that there are traces in the liberalism of recent decades. An
Dworkin, crusade anti-pornography its ironclad dogma and inquisitional liberties. With style, the be correctness" the of should regarded as eighties "political even sophisticated a cult that brainwashed journalists until in the pro-sex nineties. A third exam which infested American humanities
allied with
in an far-right Christians that threatened First Amendment
their deprogramming ple is poststructuralism,
from the late seventies the mid through departments academic adulation nineties: of Jacques Der the uncritical Foucault was an insular rida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel cult that treated pointlessly and self-referential cryptic texts as Holy Writ. identity: af Religion has always been central to American filiation with or flight from family faith remains a primary term of our self-description. of course, began in re America, such colonists, ligious dissidence: many early Northeastern had as the Pilgrims, were Separatists who seventeenth-century seceded from the Church of England. Psychic repres rationalism and intol sions perhaps produced by Protestant erance of dissent among in the Salem witch-trials the Massachusetts (1692), whose Puritans erupted lurid imagery of sex
Camille
Paglia
6y
and demonism ture. The backlash The politics
oddly
resembles of
that of modern sexual pattern license
cycle compulsive remains a deep-seated of 1960s' combination was prefigured
popular cul and puritan culture.
in American
(the Religious Quakers to America in the seventeenth
spirituality with progressive the reformist world-view of the by of who Friends), Society emigrated
in century after persecution The and England. Quakers rejected materialism, authority, and espoused social activism, sexual hierarchy pacifism, The Shakers and liberty of conscience. (a egalitarianism, slang term that described their ecstatic transports) were to America lish Quakers who emigrated for religious dom Shaker in the late communities Eng free
century. Nineteenth-century eighteenth were known for their code of celibacy
and communal ture and crafts

sign.
property as well as their plain style of furni influence minimalist that would modern de
The Mennonites, another sect in search of religious freedom, were Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists who fled to Germany and in the late seventeenth century. Their most then to America conservative branch, the Amish, still live in rural central Penn and contemporary sylvania and reject electricity, automobiles, successful of America's nonconformist clothing. The most Church of Christ of Latter-Day sects, Mormonism (the Jesus was a founded Saints), by self-proclaimed prophet, Joseph found Smith, in upstate New York in 1830 and eventually clashed with the federal gov (The Mormons refuge in Utah. ernment in 1852 when they adopted the Old Testament prac tice of polygamy, later renounced.) There were many, short-lived in the nineteenth-century, Utopian communities such as Brook Farm (1841-47) and the "new Eden" of Fruit lands (1843-44), both established in by Transcendentalists In Central New Christian were York, the Oneida Community Perfectionists who advocated com tendencies
Massachusetts.
(1848-81) munal property and open marriage. Hence the religious dissidence and secessionist of the 1960s were simply a new version
of a long American
tradition.
The
decade's
unlike demonstrations, and indeed often staged for the camera. Today's young peo ple learn about the sixties through a welter of video clips of JFK's limousine in Dallas, Vietnamese and love beads. draped in buckskin fervent of the decade's and hippies the most Furthermore, followed questers Timothy firefights,
loom large partly because politics inner journeys, were photographable
spiritual Leary's advice to "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" and re moved themselves from career tracks and institutions, which were too felt corrupt to reform. The testimony of those they radical ruined explorers of inner space has largely been lost: they on drugs as a their minds and bodies by overrelying shortcut to religious illumination. The absence eral cultural controversies of those criticism sixties seekers from the arena of gen can be seen in the series of unresolved over the issue of blas
in the last two decades
the triumph of avant-garde modernism phemy in art. With mid-twentieth the young artists century, few ambitious by would dare to show religious work. Though museum collec are tions rich with religious masterpieces from the Middle century, major American muse Ages through the nineteenth ums and urban art galleries ignore contemporary religious thanks to the absence of strong practi art?thus ensuring, tioners, that it remains at the level of kitsch. And the art it slid itself has suffered: with deeper themes excised, world into a shallow, jokey postmodernism that reduced art to ide as social vehicles of approved ology and treated art works
messages.
of administrations By the 1980s, during the conservative was success to sat Ronald Reagan, an artist's path to instant Warfare irize or profane Christian erupted in iconography. 1989 over can Andres "Piss Christ," a misty photograph by the Ameri a Serrano of 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-Niger with breasts of ian Chris Ofili, who adorned the Madonna elephant dung and ringed her with pasted-on photos of fe
Camille
Paglia
69
male
The clipped from pornographic magazines. Ofili painting made hardly a ripple in London but caused an in the us in 1999 when itwas exhibited, with a de explosion genitalia lack of basic The uproar politicians curatorial in all with support, by the Brooklyn such cases was fomented by agendas of their own: New for example, outrageously
plorable Museum.
Rudy Giuliani, to cut off the Brooklyn Museum's public funding. the ultimate responsibility for this continuing Nevertheless, rancor rests with the arts community, who are fixed in an moved elitist mind-set that automatically defines religion as reac and Federal tionary unenlightened. funding of the arts, al even in the us, has been further diminished ready minuscule treated This of the needlessly offensive in such incidents. cultural stalemate was of voices way that religion has been
grandstanding York mayor
because
disappearance Even counterculture pansiveness ecumenical
I contend, by the aggravated, from the sixties religious revolution.
agnostics had respected the cosmic ex of religious vision. There was also widespread interest at the time
in harmonizing world reli new in was this Carl gions. primary guide syncretism and who be Jung, who was the son of a Protestant minister in depth after his break with gan to study Asian thought The
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 Bough phy work of classical (1890-1915). Jung in the rituals and iconography anthropology, revealed the poetry of world The Golden and philoso religions. But
American thought had little impact on post-sixties to the invasion of European academe, thanks theory. French the Frankfurt and British cultural poststructuralism, School, Jungian studies all follow of the masses." claim that great the Marxist The line that religion is "the opiate end result was that, by the eighties, the was no to anyone longer seek
taken seriously?and
art has a spiritual meaning was positively perilous
or promotion in the humanities ing employment ments of major American universities. 4. TRANSCENDENTALISM That
depart
AND ASIAN RELIGION
to a the spiritual awakening of the 1960s belonged was long series of religious revivals in America argued by in his splendid G. McLoughlin William 1978 book, Re and Reform. McLoughlin's vivals, Awakenings, point was in The Sixties Spiritual taken up again by Robert S. Ellwood but discussion of the sixties re (1994), general Awakening mains is too The resistance of received opinion unchanged. strong: the Right refuses to acknowledge anything positive in the sixties legacy, while the Left rejects religion wholesale. of the mid-eighteenth century, the lit up the Con Jonathan Edwards his call for a renewal of Calvinist belief.
In the Great Awakening minister Congregational Edwards
necticut Valley with re viewed the ease and slackness of contemporary a as falling off from the disciplined vigor of ligious practice New Puritan His forefathers. 1741 terrifying England's "Fire Sermon" stressed man's tual awakening, more resembled influenced leading minister ("Sinners in the Hands weakness. contemptible as a program of rebellious Transcendentalism But of an Angry God") the 1960s spiri
by British Romanticism Emerson, figure, Ralph Waldo
liberalization, which was (1835-60), and German idealism. Its had been a Unitarian
from a line of clerics) but resigned his (descended not accept the doctrine of transub he could because post in the Eucharist. More stantiation generally, Emerson was and rote formulas of genteel repelled by the passionlessness His churchgoing. the social success Emerson was spurned. reserved and austere, not unlike the Romantic who had a similar reverence for Wordsworth, transferred father, that Emerson suave a Boston minister, had had
poet, William nature. Emerson
to his family's religious vocation cult of nature, a pagan pantheism. His holistic the Romantic vision of nature, like that of his friend Henry David Thoreau,
Camille
Paglia
71
1960s ecology: indeed, Thoreau's Waiden (1854), prefigures a journal of his experiment in in monastic woods the living near Boston, became a canonical text for the sixties counter
culture.
The most intriguing of the parallels between New England interest and 1960s thought is Emerson's Transcendentalism Hindu sacred texts (the Bha literature?mainly In and Confucius' maxims. gavad Gita and the Upanishads) to theWest until dia's religious literature had been unknown in Asian the first European translation in when Sanskrit 1785, peared The "Maya" (Brahma sion.) titles were Emerson gave inexplicable creator is the Hindu of the Bhagavad Gita studies had just begun. to his poems "Brahma" to most readers at the ap and time.
god; Maya in 1857, was the butt of so "Brahma," first published satirical lampoons that Emerson's many publisher begged no to to it from the edition of his se him, avail, 1876 drop In his seminal essays Emerson lected poems. (1836-41), refers to God skrit word, Emerson's Nietzsche as the "Over-Soul," a translation of the San soul." atman, meaning "supreme and universal "Over-Soul" would be reinterpreted by Friedrich as the ?bermensch, which translators often mis
is the veil of illu
leadingly render in English as "Superman." Emerson's intensified af literature, which study of Hindu ter his first wife's death, was documented Arthur by Christy, a professor at Columbia University, in his 1932 book, The in American Orient Transcendentalism. Christy inspected records at the Boston Athenaeum and Harvard borrowing College Library, as well as Emerson's journals and margina lia, to trace his considerable reading history of Asian texts. Harvard By contrast, Library records showed no sign that Thoreau the undergraduate His religion. transforming from his casual through which ever withdrew books on Eastern of it came entirely knowledge in Emerson's reading personal library, he was guided by Emerson's second wife. Bronson which Alcott was he had explored
the other Transcendentalists, Among most interested inHindu philosophy,
72
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
while
as a Philadelphia in the 1830s. schoolteacher working Emerson the sage was the main draw in the Transcenden students and other young talist circle. Harvard people to hear him
to his home speak or made pilgrimages in Concord. His warm of rapport with and encouragement the young came from his own conflicts with authority, from which evolved his doctrine of American individualism and flocked charismatic appeal as an anti-estab could be compared to that of the early Tim "Don't trust anyone over thirty." othy Leary, who warned, scene the mob (As a college student in 1966, I witnessed I traveled with other students around Leary when from self-reliance. Emerson's lishment mentor to hear him speak about to Cornell University Binghamton lsd and his new League for Spiritual Discovery.) In Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman absorbed British Romantic with pagan poetry as well Asian over as Emerson's their disparate epic (expanded sprawling, succeeding decades) openly chal After William Blake's allegorical isWestern literature's closest form and visionary style of its cosmic scale. Whitman's influence on the 1960s via poems influences. Whitman's and essays,
lenged Judeo-Christianity. long poems, Leaves of Grass approximation sacred Hindu
to the dynamic literature, with tremendous
have poem would fifties Beat poetry, protest poem, Howl
in particular Allen Ginsberg's prophetic imitates Whitman's which (1956), long,
to Whit lines. Ginsberg incantatory regularly paid homage in Cali man, as in his amusing 1955 poem, "A Supermarket name. which addresses Whitman fornia," by are sug and expressed by both Emerson gested by the reservations to the sexual material in Leaves of Grass, which, de Thoreau The limitations in Emersonian Transcendentalism for the poem, they felt to be spite their great admiration crude flaws. Emerson, who had always disliked the bawdi to ness in Shakespeare's plays, actually advised Whitman Leaves of later editions sexual from references purge of Grass. In this respect, betrays the Romantic their Puritan nature cult of Emerson see nature in and Thoreau lineage. They
Camille
Paglia
73
clean,
rigorous
terms
but
cannot
tolerate
or
encompass
na
ture's
stormier Dick
energies?the
theme
of Herman
Melville's
(1851). Significantly, though he enjoyed choosing Moby Emerson did not much care for hymns for Sunday services, music. Despite the call for ecstasy in his poem "Bacchus," he was evidently made uncomfortable It was stimulation. and emotional by music's heady rhythms the American 1960s that the new, bar
would
complete Transcendentalism?through baric medium of rock.

5. AMERICAN STRAINS OF ASIAN
RELIGION
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The
in the bohemian presence of Asian religion us 11 was in War the after World underground unparalleled in avant-garde Paris during the same pe and existentialist to priests and church hierar riod. Anti-clericalism?hostility pervasive
been entrenched among the European chy?has intelligentsia since the Enlightenment, partly because the Roman Catholic Church was once an active force in politics and economics in its and, in the period of the Papal States, was a nation own right. 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 autobiograph ical novel, The Dharma Bums (dharma is a Hindu and Bud dhist term for natural truth or right living). Though most of in Asian religion, they borrowed the Beats merely dabbled fans critique Western enough to help their second-generation intellectual and the other Kerouac, assumptions. Ginsberg, to Beats who San Francisco in the fifties learned drifted about Zen Buddhism naturalist from the poet Gary Snyder, from Oregon who would a rugged, later live
Thoreau-style in a monastery Dharma colated Bums from
in Japan. in The (A leading character is based on Snyder.) Buddhist references per the Beats into anti-academic poetry of other
schools A Zen
from the fifties Institute was Zen Center
Francisco's
in 1930; San in But American inter 1959. began est in Zen was primarily stimulated by two non-fiction writ a Japanese Buddhist T. Suzuki ers, Daisetz (1870-1966), was born in Eng Watts and Alan who scholar, (1915-73), land. In the
to the early seventies. inNew York established
on Ma Suzuki lectured extensively 1950s, in the us, including as a visiting professor hayana Buddhism at Columbia University. Watts was an Anglican priest with a master's degree in theology who had had an interest in Asian thought and culture since adolescence. His first book on in 1936 after he Buddhism, The Spirit of Zen, was published met in London earlier that year. Watts was Epis had Suzuki near Chicago at Northwestern University copal chaplain 11 and then moved to the West Coast, during World War where he taught at the School of Asian Studies in San Fran cisco and joined the Los Angeles Vedanta Society, devoted to Vedanta Hinduism. Watts' many books, such as The Way of East and West (1957) and Psychotherapy (1961), were in the sixties. available as vividly bound paperbacks widely as a popular Watts sometimes has been dismissed Though Zen studies of Asian and izer, I can attest that his comparative on me as a student. In a Western culture had great impact 1966, he spent several days at my college, where he lectured on "Narcotics Views and Hallucinogenic of the Self and Its Relation reference and Drugs" to Nature." "Differing in his
It was Watts'
to "cosmic
consciousness"
that put it into the cul 1962 book, The Joyous Cosmology, term time. The had been coined by a of the tural atmosphere in a very Richard Maurice Canadian Bucke, psychiatrist, A Study in book, Cosmic Consciousness: odd, spiritualistic Human Mind the Evolution (1901). While superin of the tendent of an asylum for the clinically insane, Bucke had be gun to question the standard categories of Western logic and a "Cosmic Conscious In called he read science. paper 1894, ness" to a meeting of the American Medico-Psychological Association in Philadelphia. In his book, Bucke attempted to
Camille
Paglia
75
somewhat religion by juxtaposing like of Buddha, Jesus, Dante, William figures quirky profiles Such individuals, extraordinary Blake, and Walt Whitman. aura because they Bucke felt, exuded a palpable magnetic fuse Asian and Western spiritual illumination. of the American The Hinduism 1960s had several sources. his prophetic persona on Blake as Allen Ginsberg modeled rabbis in his own Jewish tradition. well as on visionary had attained Though bookish Chatty excess himself introduced to Buddhism had none Ginsberg and omnivorous, celebrated Ginsberg appetite and in food and sex. By the sixties, he had transformed by Gary Snyder, the gay, of Snyder's athletic asceticism.
fin into a genial Hindu guru. Playfully brandishing a in and and sometimes dressed squeezebox ger-cymbals was a mantra Hindu constant, robes, the bearded Ginsberg He turned polit chanting presence at major demonstrations. like the Yippies, who ical theater into vaudeville?much a pig for president in 1968. nominated had had an organized basis in the us since the a disciple of 1890s, following the visit of Swami Vivekenanda, to the Par Indian the legendary spiritual leader, Ramakrishna, Hinduism at the World's of Religions Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Vivekenanda founded (1863-1902) the American Vedanta Society inNew York City, from which numerous branches opened around the country. Until after liament held World War mainly 11, however, American to urban centers confined interest and was in Hinduism connected was in the
actors. popular mind with kooks, charlatans, and Hollywood to California, Aldous Huxley, who had moved studied Ve in the 1940s with Swami Prabhavananda danta Hinduism and was other book The a member of the Los Angeles Vedanta British about Society. An edited a Isherwood, (1951). Berlin
expatriate, the Society,
openly gay Stories about decadent
Christopher Vedanta for Modern Man Isherwood, whose autobiographical
era and Cabaret, Los Angeles.
1930s Germany inspired I Am a Cam to had converted to Hinduism after moving
The groundwork for the Asian trend of the American sixties was probably laid by Paramhansa Yogananda (1893-1952), to teach full-time in the West. Born in the first yoga master established the international headquarters Bengal, Yogananda in Los Angeles in 1925. He of his Self-Realization Fellowship at lectured to packed audiences, Carnegie Hall, and including met President at theWhite House. His Auto Calvin Coolidge impact, not least biography of a Yogi (1946) had an enormous for the numinous, Christlike cover photo of the white-robed, guru with long hair flowing over his shoul of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where Yo an in stated affidavit that there was "no buried, days after death, "Avatar" Meher
boyishly beardless ders. The Director gananda was
in his body twenty physical disintegration" state of immutability." "a phenomenal A singular figure of lesser influence was Baba who
in 1952 and arrived (1894-1969), Baba was an author and opened a center in South Carolina. from the teacher born to a Zoroastrian family in India. Mute on, perhaps as the result of being struck on the head and an years earlier, he communicated by smiles, gestures, in In He the insane worked with and board. poor alphabet 1920s
in the us
dia
in the forties. Baba's value" and world New
sometimes
nebulous
"spiritual
gananda, prefigured condemned the use of lsd lightenment. The major Meditation, Movement North Asian founded cult of
harmony, In the sixties, he strongly Age. and other drugs as a route to en the sixties was Transcendental
of philosophy of Yo that resembling
in India as the Spiritual Regeneration Mahesh Maharishi Yogi in 1957. The Mahar by
in 1959, from which it spread to ishi brought tm to Hawaii America and Europe. His practice of deep relaxation, aim is "bliss," was based on ancient Vedic literature whose that he claimed Deva. such At to have learned the start, tm had more as a personal secret mantra was from his master, Shri Guru cult-like characteristics,
to imparted by master at times accused of claiming student. The Maharishi tm was more profes the mid-seventies, godlike powers. By
Camille
Paglia
77
sionally
teaching us. In 1974, tm bought the campus in Iowa and opened the Maharishi ment, Deepak tm
as a business, organized the system at stress-relief
with
certified
trainers
centers throughout the of a Presbyterian college of Manage University
followers worldwide. currently claims five million New the motivational Age speaker and best Chopra,
selling author who became a media star through his visibility TV show, was a disciple of theMaharishi on Oprah Winfrey's but broke with him and tm in 1993. Several cults caused much public concern in the sixties and seventies Krishna because of their hold movement?the on young people. The Hare International Society of Krishna claims to have been founded in the
which Consciousness, in sixteenth century?is still in operation, with headquarters Its India. followers became notorious for their Mayapur, havior be heads, saffron robes and beads, and aggressive on street corners as they sang, shook rattles and tam and pushed Their ascetic bourines, founder, pamphlets. Swami shaved
in had begun preaching (1896-1977), Prabhupada to New York in 1965. There India in the 1950s and moved mass he wrote books and conducted of Hindu chanting in Square Park?provocative activity at Tompkins phrases the time. magazine disciples marital where among In 1966, he began publishing Back to Godhead and incorporated his organization, which required to renounce meat, and extra alcohol, gambling, sex. He it drew those then took the Society to San Francisco, particularly carried the there an enormous addicted hippie following, to drugs. His disciples and Berlin; at the Society's The movement
to London message were 108 centers worldwide.
pub song, "My licity at the 1970 release of George Harrison's Sweet Lord," with its "Hare Krishna" refrain. The Hare Krishnas were pursued with huge fanfare by Ted Patrick, a who "d?programmer" forcibly rescued young people from cults and returned them to worried Ronald warned parents. A former staff for then-Governor inaccurately Reagan that the Krishnas in California, were a cult as
peak, won much
member Patrick
78
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
brought to the us in 1971 whose father had founded Ji, Maharaj by thirteen-year-old in in the organization India the 1920s. Its Sikh and Hindu philosophy required vegetarianism, celibacy, and meditation. American hippies searching for gurus in India in the sixties had appealed toMaharaj Ji, who claimed to be the successor
as Charles Manson's. dangerous was The Divine Light Mission
of Jesus and Buddha, to visit America. The Divine Mission's commune would its world headquarters: Denver become it centers in claimed 480 thirty-eight countries. By 1973, there were The thirty-eight ashrams in the us with to unravel later organization began was when Maharaj Ji's taste for luxury cars and mansions he incurred the wrath of the Di he married, exposed. When vine Mission's behind the throne?his power mother, who to India and tried to supplant him with his brother. boom subsided in the seventies, neo-Christ ian sects like Jim Jones' People's Temple rose to prominence. The Children of God, founded in 1968 as Teens for Christ by returned As the Hindu Beach, California, were Berg in Huntington came to in number but public attention when they negligible us that the be destroyed by Comet would loudly prophesied "Moses" David Kohoutek name in January 1974. The group continues under the "The Family" and is regularly excoriated by conserva tive Christian watchdog groups for its practice of free love as well as its heretical beliefs that Je (called "Flirty Fishing") sus was followers. 40,000 in the seventies
sexually active and that God is a woman. sect of the seventies The most important neo-Christian was the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World in Sun Myong Moon founded by the Reverend Christianity, of the Unification Seoul in 1954. Missionaries church were at work in the us from arrived in North ity until Moon 1959 on, but there was little public in 1971. Moon was born into a farm
in 1920. He was Korea raised by ing family his became until Confucian parents Presbyterians principles in a vision in 1930. In 1935, Moon claimed, Jesus appeared to summon him to ministry. Because of his staunch anti
Camille
Paglia
79
(he had been imprisoned was he welcomed nists), by Republican was and hosted by President Richard communism House.
by Korean
Commu
legislators in the us in the White Nixon
In 1981, however, Moon was charged with tax eva in prison. sion and would eventually spend thirteen months for the Unification Church Though massive advertisements still appear inmajor world newspapers, the zenith of Moon's was 1982, when he sponsored a mass wedding in Madison Square Garden. The grooms "World Peace Through Ideal Family," sexual anar values the family against
organization of 2,075 couples wore
badges declaring upholding conservative
sixties and disco seventies. However, chy of the psychedelic as evidenced by the slang term "Moonies" most Americans, continue to regard the Unification for its members, Church as just another Asian cult. Moon's Christian theology is un he preaches, for example, that Jesus was illegiti an the of affair between mate, Mary and her cousin's product husband, Zachariah. orthodox: 6. HINDUISM A main AND 1960S MUSIC
into the flowed aperture through which Hinduism the sixties was popular music, which non-Western adapted harmonics of raga and experimented with the sitar, the long the Beatles' necked Indian lute. George Harrison, lead gui to experiment with tarist, was not the first British musician it the sitar, but he deserves principal credit for popularizing a were in Anglo-American sitar rock music. riffs Jangling ubiquitous lyrical motif of songs, the sitar was the European ship. The between church in late-sixties equivalent bell, album music. At in meaning the opening and effect to to wor
summoning
the faithful
first Western released
Yehudi Menuhin in 1955.
was
a collaboration of Indian music, and tabla master Ali Akbar Khan, ^n tne late fifties, Khan's brother-in in Europe and the us. by jazz compositions
law, Ravi By
Shankar, gave sitar concerts 1959-> Shankar had influenced
8o
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
Miles sound
Davis had
and John Coltrane. far afield traveled
By the mid-sixties, into folk circles
the sitar in Great
Britain, New Harrison's the Beatles' Hindu dian were
York, and San Francisco. interest in India began during production of its slapstick second movie, Help! (1965), with
subplot. He was intrigued by the sitar used in an In restaurant scene filmed in London. While beach scenes being filmed
in the Bahamas, the Beatles were ap a man a in robes who handed them orange proached by on was It Swami Vishnu-De yoga. signed copy of his book the founder of Sivananda Yoga. Intrigued, Harri vananda,
son began to study Hinduism. He then traveled to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar, who gave him a copy of of a Yogi. It was Harrison who Yogananda's Autobiography invited Shankar Pop Music demonstrated. kinship to the electric guitar was dramatically sitar's cul The the (See 1969 documentary, Monterey Pop.) that of the Javanese tural impact on the late sixties paralleled music. Debussy was fas gamelan on late-nineteenth-century instrument with gong (a percussive by the gamelan and bells) when he heard it played at the Paris Universal Ex in 1889. Through him, the gamelan's Asian har position monics for transformed French and British classical music cinated the next half century. In 1967, Patti Boyd Harrison, George's wife, took the Bea Mahesh tles to a lecture in London by the Maharishi Yogi. The Beatles fell under the Maharishi's and began to spell dress paisley world. in quasi-Hindu fabrics, at the In 1968, the Beatles flew to India to meditate in Rishikesh. But their flirtation with Maharishi's ashram Hinduism ruined his advances Farrows ended abruptly in bitter disillusion: the Maharishi sexual saintly reputation by reportedly making to another celebrity pilgrim, Mia Farrow, who was there with her studious sister Prudence. The Beatles and the decamped in high dudgeon. A record of that adven jackets and mod style, with chic Nehru which revolutionized fashion around the to perform at the seminal 1967 Monterey in California, Festival where the sitar's artistic
Camille
Paglia
81
ture is contained bum:
"Dear Prudence"
of everyone"), tive charms. Farrow Maharishi's
songs on the 1968 White Al and "Sexy Sadie" ("You made a fool a transsexual tribute to theMaharishi's seduc in two Beatles confirmed the rumored details about the in her 1998 autobiography, What Falls it was thanks to the Beatles' cross-fertiliza with rock that the Swami Satchidananda, give the prayer in Music Festival.
blunder
Away. However, tion of Hinduism seated vocation in white
robes on the stage, would that opened the 1969 Woodstock
to the sitar, or an electric guitar strung and like one, the style of "acid rock" that origi played in Francisco the San nated hippie scene can arguably be con In addition to sound sidered to have promulgate Even those intonations. rock helped Acid religious sixties concept of cosmic consciousness. (like me) who did not take drugs were radicalized the
of that shimmering music, by the power and expansiveness sonic with ominous its unfixed distortions, drone, keys, melodic and twangy, floating, evaporating lines, wandering notes. The leading San Francisco acid-rock bands were Jef the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger ferson Airplane, Service, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Psyche effects were and used in England in Los Angeles by the Byrds and the the Yardbirds, by Jeff Beck, the Jimi the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dono
delic Doors
Hendrix
Experience, van, the Kinks, and early Pink Floyd. The drugged mood of this "trippy" style was revived in British trance music (called as a rave in nineties the of the early "trip-hop") development
scene.
Because folk-rock
it consists with
of transient
instrumental
chedelic music
has received overtly
far less attention
effects, psy than folk and
con lyrics, whose manifest political tent is easier to analyze. This is yet another factor impeding of the sixties' religious general recognition legacy. Though in novels and poems, the counter the Beats left their mark culture was were tifacts. The ar in constructing self-contained of the sixties achievements enduring generation in music, modern film and video, dance, experimental less interested
swal art, which Art, and performance Pop and Conceptual is strikingly underrepresented. lowed up poetry. Literature Literary surveys of the sixties overrely on the work of figures like Norman Mailer, whose forties. The major critics Leslie Fiedler, Norman shall McLuhan, career began in the late and theorists of the sixties?Mar brilliant O. Brown?also be
long to an earlier generation. Hermann Hesse, whose novels Siddhartha (1922), about the early life of Buddha, and Step (19x7) were sixties cult classics, was born in 1877. penwolf for Tom Wolfe's Except ture crystallized outside Journalism, the book. New most sixties cul
The gap in the sixties' artistic and intellectual legacy partly occurred because too many young people followed their ele of Asian religion by making sensory mentary understanding schedules and routine, they experience primary. Shunning dramatized by the otherworldli sought the "eternal Now," ness of psychedelic the sexual revolution, rock. Furthermore, which release of Enovid, began in i960 with the commercial in history, finally over the first reliable oral contraceptive of the sixties' spiritual quest. Beat interpretations whelmed Asian 1958, goes" attitude toward sex. Similarly, hipsters often carelessly to the erotic acrobatics of Tantric yoga or reduced Hinduism Kama Sutra (c. 250 ad). But sexual codes have Vatsyayana's been very strict throughout India's history: at no time was endorsed. The yoni and lingam (monumental promiscuity stone genitalia inHindu shrines) or the voluptuous copulat on to a the facades of Hindu temples belonged ing couples the natural fertility cult where sexual intercourse symbolized cycle of birth and death. "Make love, not war" was been endorsed a sixties rubric. Free love had In its sexual component. thought tended to exaggerate "Beat Zen" for its "anything Alan Watts criticized
like Percy Bysshe Shel by radical Romantics to of bonds who shatter the bourgeois marriage. ley sought A cheeky promiscuity was also affected by urban flappers in dance the 1920s, which was energized by the hyperactive rhythms of the Jazz Age as well as the seditious mood of un
Camille
Paglia
83
But free love was never achieved on speakeasies. random sexual con scale until the 1960s, when a nection was blithely assigned spiritual and redemptive it on" meant "Getting freeing mind and body to meaning. strike a blow against residual American puritanism. By the derground a massive hedonistic a had been abandoned, seventies, spirituality "mel change marked by the shift in drugs from communal, lsd to edgy, expensive, and visionary low" marijuana
and en cocaine, which competition sharpened Sexual libera hanced the ego sense of power and mastery. as now its should be had which we costs, tion, obvious, high are still sorting out: sexual diseases, a soaring divorce rate, hoarded and a pandemic of media sexualization images with uncer tain 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, sex as a quick route to re sixties rebels tried to empower with nature. The sixties dreamed open-ended, of limitless sex consequence?a bouncy, a rock soundtrack. Many Technicolor
connection without film with
genuine hippies dropped out of college to join communes, bake bread, and have ba bies. Others of the sixties generation who entered the pro fessions 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 lib
erated woman, who put career before marriage and family, in and the post-Stonewall whose gay man, paradise of pleas ures even lesbians were no longer welcome. Reproductive over own bodies, women's control their rights, establishing was always quarter a major century would issue in feminism and but over the next become an obsessive preoccupation,
determining campaign politics judicial appointments. Feminism identified itself with abortion?with inextricably termination of life rather than fertility. (I am speaking as a militantly abortion, of feminist.) Feminism's pro-choice foregrounding which caused national turmoil and limited its out
reach
as
populist
movement,
was
one
consequence
of
the
loss of sixties
cosmic
consciousness
to na For gay men, free love detached ture meant that, by the eighties, their ruling theorist would Foucault rather than the na be social constructionist Michel or Ginsberg. Despite a seventies fad ture-revering Whitman 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 sculpted, beautiful boy, ephebe Antinous whose reborn: perfection the is
by the seventies. from all reference
shaved,
heartbreakingly
callipygian transient.
7.
PSYCHEDELIC
DRUGS
the fast-track reality for as well as middle-class, segment, working-class melted defenses and broke of the sixties generation. Drugs "Sex, drugs, a significant barriers, creating a momentary and the world. They functioned sense of unity with mankind as magic elixirs for the miss
and rock and roll" was
transient society. In ing initiatory rituals in an increasingly the matter of drugs, Imust stress, Iwas merely an observer: as an Italian-American, I am a product of Mediterranean are integrated with cuisine. intoxicants wine culture, where As a libertarian, I favor legalization of drugs, not because I in my view government approve of their use but because individuals do with should have no power to dictate what On the other hand, I am painfully aware of the that drugs took on my generation. This was one of tragic toll the great cultural disasters of American history. I warn my their bodies. students that recreational drugs?now give a toxic short-term cocktail gains of but black-market impair tranquilizers?may achievement.
long-term
it was drugs, abused until they turned on Nevertheless, their takers, that helped trigger the spiritual explosion of the in the magnificent, sixties. Getting high?as rumbling Byrds to elevate Miles song "Eight perspective. Aspir High"?was ing beyond materialism and conformity, young people manu
Camille
Paglia
85
their own martyrdom. They pushed their nervous to social the until forms seemed to dissolve. systems limit, saw was What sublime?the vision of they High Romantic factured nature, its vast energies twisting and turning along a continuum from the brain to the stars. That cosmic con creative sciousness writers is precisely what and academics, ism and postmodernism, The association is lacking in too many of today's especially followers of poststructural cynical systems that are blind to na
ture.
British High
"mystery" and "The Rime
of drugs with the avant-garde began with Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's great poems of the 1790s ("Kubla Khan," "Christabel,"
were partly in of the Ancient Mariner") his with spired by experiences opium, present in laudanum, a common to which he had been addicted pain medication since childhood. to Thomas Eater In Artificial Paradises (i860), his response De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium the hallucinations of his (1821), Baudelaire described with hashish mixed white In late-nine with opium. women middle-class took
experiments
America, teenth-century "patent medicines" containing opium, period, communities
a derivative of morphine, for their "nerves" or "female ailments." In the same common in Chinese opium dens were immigrant around San Francisco.
extracted from Opium, the seedpod of the opium poppy, had arrived in China from India via Burma in the seventeenth century; by the next cen the center of a flourishing international tury, China was
of opium and co opium trade. Non-prescription possession caine was banned in the us by the Harrison Narcotics Act of create which crime. like alco 1914, helped Drugs, organized hol during derground William Prohibition, would be eagerly supplied by an un economy. James first studied
the connection
and mystic vision that would become 1960s. In his 1901-02 lectures, published as The Edinburgh Varieties of Religious Experience, James described his exper iments with nitrous oxide, which he believed duplicated the
between drugs so basic a tenet of the
altered perception reported by saints in their visions of God or angels. James skeptically viewed foundational religious as "nervous obsessives afflicted with figures instability." Havelock Ellis was more Artificial "Mescal: A New among from the button mented in an 1898 article, sympathetic: Paradise," he described ritual use Indians plant. He Aldous Huxley of mescal, obtained himself had experi cited Ellis' es
Southwestern
American in London.
of a cactus
with mescal
say in The Doors of Perception (1954), where he described own his (a synthetic version of the experiment with mescaline chemical agent in mescal) the prior year at his Hollywood (Huxley's title, based on a Blake maxim, inspired the name of the Los Angeles art-rock band, the Doors.) Huxley's was Humphrey a in taking mescaline partner Osmond, home. British American mond who research a convention psychiatrist attending in Los Angeles. Association Psychological invented of the It is Os
hallucinogens chedelia," venturism
for the effect of the term "psychedelic" on the brain. Later transmogrified into "psy the best word for the garish mental ad of the sixties.
it remains
and extremism
The Beats used peyote, derived from mescal buttons. Snyder first tried peyote while Indian culture at studying American in 1948. It had been used since the Aztecs, who Reed College chewed the buttons or steeped them in a bitter tea. Ginsberg took peyote in New York in 1951 and Kerouac use was the following year. Peyote California, arrived there hemian Greenwich Village by 1957; mescaline the next year. In i960, the Native American Church of North America won common at Big Sur, in bo
the legal right (revoked in 1990) to use peyote in its religious rituals. "Magic" mushrooms for ("'shrooms" were also used short) containing psychotropic by psylocibin and Neil Cassady had been the Beats: Ginsberg, Kerouac,
given them by Timothy Leary in i960 after his return from summer vacation inMexico, where he had first tried them. Before The he began investigating Project. drugs, however, were marijuana and lsd, Leary called his program the Harvard Psylocibin sixties' premiere
Camille
Paglia
87
lsd. Marijuana entered with migrant Mexican
the us
in the early twentieth century in Texas. The hemp farm workers
it comes was introduced to North America plant from which in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, who used it for fiber for rope and ship rigging. Before World War 1,New Orleans was and port for marijuana shipments from Mexico to Cuba. Marijuana the working use, then confined class, was to rural the South and blacks spread through brought by and Northeastern tion for factory jobs during the urban centers that marijuana became associated with mu sic and the underground?a last that would hip marriage through the sixties and beyond. The Beats who made a cult of be-bop jazz (a style evolving from the late thirties through the mid-fifties) imitated black musicians' habit of smoking then used by white folk musicians the country via leftist circles. It was Bob folk music (cf. line, "Everybody must through Dylan's that marijuana was get stoned," from "Rainy Day Woman") transmitted to college students in the sixties?the first time it had entered sixties, the middle class. For white had users in the fifties and and therefore, marijuana the aura of creativity "reefer." Marijuana and spread across was cities during the Great Migra and after World War 1. Itwas in a major
Midwestern
politics. hence the term "acid") LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide; was synthesized from rye fungus in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hof a biochemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, mann, Switzerland. Hofmann discovered the chemical's hallucino progressive genic effects when he inhaled it by accident in 1943. Because sense of space and time in it seemed to mimic the warped lsd was first viewed as a promising mental-re psychosis, as search drug. Humphrey Osmond tested it in Saskatchewan a potential lsd also seemed to re treatment for alcoholism, ritu produce the effects of peyote in ancient Mesoamerican als. In 1949, Dr. Max Rinkel brought lsd from Sandoz to in Boston. the us, where he began experiments ("Sandoz" as a lsd as term in in code for the the Animals' uk, lingered 1965 song, "A Girl Named Sandoz.") The cia conducted its
own
tests on lsd
lsd was available
from 1951 through the decade. being used in Greenwich Village by 1961 and was on the East and West Coasts the next year. By the
summer of 1964, itwas widespread in the San Francisco Bay it confused the political climate on the Left. (See area, where Mark Kitchell's first-rate 1990 documentary, in the Berkeley a year, lsd had become a major street drug Sixties.) Within in cities nationally. It was popularized by a 1964 book by and Richard The Timothy Leary Alpert, Psychedelic Experi ence. The book's Based on the Tibetan subtitle, A Manual Book was showed the religious cast that drug-taking of the Dead, a As student volunteer at a California veterans acquiring.
hospital, novelist Ken Kesey first took lsd in 1959 (the same "Acid Test" par year that Ginsberg did) and later conducted ties at his home in the hills near San Francisco. Neil Cassady was evolved part of these carnivalesque gatherings, which a free-form hippie group that the Merry Pranksters, toured the us in a Day-Glo-painted 1939 school bus. By the into
late sixties, Kesey for mari (who was jailed for five months lsd. His recantation resem juana offenses) was denouncing bled that of Alpert, who went to India in 1967 and became Baba Ram Dass, a drug-free Hindu guru. claims were made for lsd in the sixties. For ex Hyperbolic ample, Walter Houston a 1969 book, Chemical a friend of Leary, predicted in and Reli Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs intellectual effect on civilization would equal Clark, In his 1970 bestseller, Yale Law School professor Charles as an indispensable celebrated marijuana revolution."
gion, that lsd's that of "the Copernican The Greening of America, Reich
similarly "truth-serum" that exposed society as "unreal." Drug taking was also a gesture of rebellion against Western commercial ism: marijuana?called "weed" or "mother nature" the intoxicant light its organic character?was martinis or scotch those who rejected the businessman's sodas. On the West Coast associations psychedelics' shamans. In The Teachings to high of choice for and
in particular, drug takers savored with the "vision quest" of tribal of Don Juan (1968), the first of
Camille
Paglia
89
sub several best-sellers, Carlos Casta?eda claimed, without in instruction he had received that pey stantiation, spiritual ote from a Yaqui Indian shaman inMexico. By establishing continuity Columbian culturalism or solidarity with Native American and societies, drugs as well as a vehicle became an affirmation pre of multi
the The psychedelic "trip" secret he from which returned with shaman's magic journey, for his tribe. This myth of a spiritual journey was knowledge a motif of premodern societies from Central Asia to the Ama zon River basin. It is possible that hallucinatory shamanism was widespread in Native American cultures because it was brought from Siberia by the Indians' North Asian ancestors when they emigrated across the Bering Strait. ("Shaman" is a in contrast Ural-Altaic word.) Furthermore, North America, to Africa, for example, is especially fertile in hallucinogenic Even the of strong tobacco (nicotiana rustica) species plants. rituals had hallucinogenic used in Native American proper
ties.
of religious revelation. into inner space replicated
ritual practices, such as fasting and marathon drum to been used throughout induce trance ming, have history In some cases, techniques of flagel and facilitate divination. resemble those of the modern lation or mutilation S&M Many scene, whose devotees claim to attain a beatific state. Mush rooms eaten by Siberian shamans caused convulsions. Hallu were used by worshippers in cinogens, perhaps mushrooms, oracle went Possessed the Delphic mysteries. by Apollo, into paroxysms after intoxication by fumes from a cleft in the earth. Fault lines have recently been identified in the bedrock the Eleusinian
at Delphi by an archaeologist and geologist, who was the that maddened priestess speculate by oozing petro like ethylene chemical vapors (prized by modern glue-snif were in also used medieval witchcraft. fers). Drugs European The stick ritual iconic Halloween is another staffs were image of the witch version of the shaman's smeared with flying on a broom visionary journey: a greenish hallucinogenic to autoerotic effect.
ointment
and "ridden,"
90
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
The massive
drug
leaders and pop for the decade's religious vision. But shamanistic drug taking in tribal societies took place within uni small communities fied by a coherent belief casually sampling of private turmoils and family brought with them a m?lange was a yearning humanitar What shared psychodramas. they ianism?and rock music, which urged the liberation of sexual desire. agent: the estab portrayed as a revolutionary like of the walls would fall before eros un lishment, Jericho, of sex?the faith that sexual bound. This overestimation energy reason Sex was
taking in the sixties, promoted by arts stars, redefined the culture and set the stage
and college students system. Hippies were relative strangers and hallucinogens
one is inherently benign?was for the dissipation of the authentic spiritual discover ies made by the sixties generation. A philosophy of random freed of social controls
built little that could be and "good vibrations" on to next At its mildest, the the sixties generation. passed cult of sex and drugs led to a frivolous dilettantism, youthful high jinks like the Florida spring flings of the fifties. At its worst, however, there was permanent damage that has never been it is clear, for ex assessed. In retrospect, systematically careers meteoric of that the Allen Ginsberg ample, literary and Ken Kesey were sadly truncated
AND
contacts
by drug abuse.
CHANGE
8. MYSTICISM
SOCIAL
the generational dramatized change of regroupings mass gatherings of demonstrations, the sixties?the rock fes in and love-ins, which temperate tivals, happenings, began For example, the "Human Be-In," subtitled "A California. Social Gathering Francisco's the Tribes," which was held in 1967 in San It Golden Gate Park, attracted 25,000 people. fused politics with pop music and Asian religiosity: the lead of ing San Francisco speakers (many acid-rock in Hindu bands garb) were the among performed; Alan Watts, Timothy and Snyder, Allen Ginsberg,
Leary, and Beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Gary
Camille
Paglia
91
at such sentiments of young people the political events were progressive, there was often little understanding While of legislation, ad of the slow process and banal practicalities and financial accounting. ministration, by the ex Repelled of the fifties, the sixties counterculture panding bureaucracies was suspicious of hierarchy and embraced a simplistic egali on quick fixes. The basic principle of tarianism predicated as communality but ended as the in social horde, primitive entity history. The horde is prey to superstition and panic. It looks for leaders but ruth lessly slays them, then reveres them as ancestral spirits. As a the counterculture the most began survival horde The response to its own flood of anarchic generates automatically sixties horde that was energies, cults and cultic belief. extended Music family Festival the of
in stargazers a four 1969 turned into restless, bickering mob August months later at the Altamont Festival, where a murder was in front of the stage. The sixties never completed committed music-loving its search eralism claims for new structures of social but sixties affiliation. Fifties lib its Leftism, integrationist, despite of inclusiveness, into of the disintegrated separatism reclassifications and hyper identity politics, with ghettoizing sensitive divisions and orientation. sexual race, by gender, sixties code of "do your but produced own thing" indi encouraged the sixties' Similarly, was
a benign at the Woodstock
The
fragmentation. vision, global inspired by fleeting contact with religious 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 for example, distracted began in Jerusalem. In 1950s America, the po Temple bureaucracy litical and professional elite were still heavily wasp. Pros were with social concerned perous congregations overly or at its annex, the country club. Roman for social credibility, was Catholicism, searching steadily of itself immigrant working-class purging ethnicity, a process at church status by empty ritual. Early Christianity, as a rural rebellion against the fossilized
vidualism
of genteel self-Protestantization decor that inmiddle-class parishes
in music, and ceremony, is now virtually complete.
of those attracted to cults in the sixties and early sev Many enties were escaping mainline denominations where bland It is a striking propriety was coupled with sexual repression. fact that few young African-Americans joined cults: surely the reason was that the gospel tradition, rooted in the South, invited emotional and physical expressiveness, stimulated by in music. universal Dance, pagan cults, strongly rhythmic had been banned in Christian churches presence in Southern church tradition West African tribal religion. The social changes from the fifties to the sixties in compressed era following three centuries and accelerated the conquests of the Alexandrian in late antiquity. is a priceless vestige Its of
resemble, form, those of the Hellenistic In the the Great. of Alexander age, the old
city-states flourished. Hel and mercantile declined, metropolises Athenian lenism?that is, throughout high culture?spread 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 al in borrowed Italian mythology ways clothed their provincial itself from republic to empire, Greek glory. As it transformed Rome changes Northern created a massive zone of cultural East extending from the Near and religious ex and North Africa to is usually
produced might. But when
buttressed by military is a loss there have overexpanded, politics rein rise of which hence the of psychological cults, security; force the borders of individual identity. No attain
Europe. Cosmopolitanism by vibrant commercialism
of this kind
sooner did the us displace Great Britain and France to status after World War 11 than a surge of superpower the next American overtook generation. The chil mysticism in the postwar baby boom, who would reach col a jolt of conceived in had with been the sixties, lege age con a were in national climate reared of energy and military fidence. But they intuitively absorbed the hidden conflicts of dren born
Camille
Paglia
93
its surface tranquility masking the anxieties the fifties, with life experiences had been eco of an older generation whose fifties values pro and war. Mainstream depression as to recover if the reassurance moted duty and uniformity, of known limits. Trade always opens up travel and tourism. nomic The international network of Roman roads structed interstate that some are still in use) resembles system, launched in the fifties highway (so well-con that of the us as a na
tional defense
proved too. Multiculturalism got Ravi Shankar India and back. What man
plan for emergency evacuation. Ironically, im and nationalism transportation weakens regionalism was so quickly spurred by the jet plane, which or the Beatles to to Monterey was for the Greco-Ro fifties and system em language of
commercialized
Hellenism
era, popular sixties. Hellenism was with
culture was
for the American
bedded
pagan on was new media?TV, youth culture from the mid-1950s teen movies, and rock 'n' roll, broadcast by a vast number of
an artistic and philosophic The unifying mythology.
in Eu privately owned am radio stations (then unparalleled on and received transistors. America's pop rope) portable in the fifties and bounced back Hellenism spread to England in the sixties mains a major via the British invasion. export, it has rightly been called cultural imperialism. Television has as McLuhan indeed turned the world, into a prophesied, American Popular culture re so vital and dominant that
the general style of American mass village. However, in rooted tabloids and early Hol media, nineteenth-century lywood, has always been luridly Hellenistic?extravagant, global and sensationalistic, emotional, and violence. Mass media was inflamed framework with a predilection the social for sex
postwar period leges and universities.
the mind, while being rigidified. A major in America was the massive
institutional shift of the of col
expansion
In the two decades following the Gi subsidized higher education for veterans, college Bill, which not the case in other nations. By became an entitlement?still
in the grip of an overpriced, self is whose education industry perpetuating principal product culti brand names and social status rather than humanistic the eighties, America vation. Americans school, meant that middle-class young prosperity did not have to go to work immediately after high as their parents had done. The down side was that Fifties
was
including marriage, was indefinitely postponed. their material comforts and privileges, therefore, Despite sixties were also cap students of the American middle-class adulthood, confined tives, hostages tional frames without identification of at their hormonal the venerable height in institu or in-group history Classes like became rows? contact was Super intru
with warehouses, unlike European universities, where is either in tutorial or in unmonitored vision of student behavior sive and authoritarian?another Iwas a freshman Europe. When
tony British schools. students stacked in primary-school public
student-teacher lectures.
on American
campuses feature without
in 1964,
in loco parentis (in place of the parent). at my public university, women students enforced: strictly had to sign in at 11:00 pm, while men could roam free. Hence the late fifties and sixties were a period of high exci
tation yet repressive containment.
in parallel still acted colleges Parietal rules were
of American regimentation colleges was paternalistic as a can thus be viewed and vestige of the na nearly military con 11. Students were of World War tional mobilization The surplus, and the new scripts who often dressed in army-navy facto resembled brick dormitories of residential campuses more or ironic since college ma the ries army barracks?all from the draft. There have exemption since the goliardic of town-gown carousing problems were the Middle Ages, but the frictions of the sixties highly sixties counterculture As the campuses spread, politicized. triculation brought been became tense garrison like the frontier towns, the Roman legions, who occupied well-appointed outposts camps of of
design. precise, geometrical Roman soldiers were drawn not simply from Italy but from
Camille
Paglia
95
the empire. They were stationed far from home for or forts in the Sahara, on the Danube, years and decades?in at Hadrian's Wall in northern Britain. They were notorious all over devotees with of cults, above all that of Mithras, the bull-slayer, his androgynous face, lanky hair, Phrygian beret, and with their international blousy Persian trousers. Merchants, ist orientation, were another
a group who venerated Mithras, Zoroastrian the principle of light and representing demigod truth. Mithraists, like early Christians, gathered in secrecy in small, cave-like rooms to memorialize bloodshed. Amid the ruins of Roman a great act of ritual camps in England and
cult objects and idols from Egypt, Syria, and Ana Germany, are tolia still being found. Cultic practice on the Roman fron in the that on American tier, I submit, paralleled campuses was a re when there mix of Asian sixties, syncretistic drugs, gods seem weak or fickle or to in the us es themselves. The cult fate subject phenomenon of John F. Kennedy in 1963 ? calated after the assassination 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 into dim hallways for civil defense drills re shepherded us to crouch down and cover our eyes. We were quiring 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 mon in a split second. in other words, had been injected The sixties generation, sense of awe and doom about the sky. This with a mystical reason for the sudden popularity is one possible and ubiq that would melt the nation for most of the twentieth century uity of astrology, which had been a fringe practice eccentrics in associated with Greenwich Zodiac and Tarot Village and West Hollywood. the from and album sixties, symbolism permeated jewelry covers to wall posters. "Aquarius," the signature song of strous fire cloud ligion, and pop idolatry. the official Cults arise when
Hair
("An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," 1967) and a hit single for the Fifth Dimension in 1969, assumed public
lore in its imagery of the moon of astrological in knowledge the seventh house and Jupiter's alignment with Mars: "Then peace will guide the planets / And love will steer the stars. / This And is the dawning of the Age poetry, the song also invoked the mind's true liberation." of Aquarius!" "Mystic With crystal genuine / revelation
Astrology, gious vision about nuclear ian Aquarian pagan
for better or worse, was emblematic of the reli It sixties. of the countered the fifties' paranoia apocalypse with age. Astrology the promise is intertwined of a humanitar with the West's antiquity,
heritage.
Judeo-Christianity astrology out. First refined by the Chaldean magi of Babylonia, astrol was in the Hellenistic and imperial Ro ogy widely practiced man periods, when elusive fortune was personified as female or Lady Luck. Different branches of astrol Tyche?chance in still flourish India and China. Like the / Ching, a Chi ogy nese book of divination widely used in the sixties, astrology man to nature?the link that Judeo sever. to has tried is not the fa Christianity always Astrology to talistic determinism which its opponents reduce it; on the it is a study of nature's contrary, rhythms and cycles, to reverently connects which like the tides is subject. humanity is yet another area where sixties drugs took their toll. lost their ability to defend Those most attracted to astrology This of superstition refuse to ac rightly dismissive modern theories about that astrology anticipated knowledge or cycles of solar flares whose electro circadian biorhythms it. Scientists magnetic storms disrupt telecommunications. The science customary community's approach of derision and debunk an immense alter has been futile and ing counterproductive: native culture survived the collapse of the sixties and has spread to this day under its astrological elides discreetly steadily
Aquarius.
efforts from Despite unstinting in wiping has never succeeded
the name New reference to
Age?which the Age of
Camille
Paglia
97
9.
THE
RISE
OF
NEW
AGE
The New
Age movement began to form in the late seventies, in the eighties, and became an international gained visibility success in the nineties. Because it is unstructured commercial as a New Age has been underestimated and decentralized, a It is constellation force competing with mainline religions. of beliefs loosely drawn from Asian religion, European pa Its ethics can be nature-cult. ganism, and Native American as non-judgmental humanism. The one common described it inher theme in New Age is cosmic consciousness, which ited from the sixties. New Age is a marvel of Alexandrian syncretism. It is often and soft-focus, rather impressionistic seeking "spirituality" than the discipline of orthodox religion. Its followers run the stress relief from harried office workers gamut seeking to "neo-pagan" white witches through yoga and meditation rendezvousing stice. Specialty ual on the moors to celebrate the summer sol shops and mail-order catalogs supply the rit of New and talismans, paraphernalia Age?amulets incense, candles, table fountains, aromatherapy wind chimes, or Celtic moods.
healing crystals, angel icons, bath salts, massage rollers,
in Asian and recordings of trance music A principal distinction sixties between cults and their New Age the release of primal energy conventions. Paradise Now, infamous 1968 performance successors
and early seventies is that the sixties sought
through the shattering of social the title of the Living Theater's piece, where nude actors infil
to em trated the audience, says it all. The sixties wanted brace and reclaim the senses, to plunge fully into matter, like in the mud atWoodstock. the festival goers wallowing New adjusted to the stubborn per Age, however, has smoothly sistence of the social structures that the sixties failed to budge. An analogy might be the introspective period just be in 70 ad, when fore and after the destruction of Jerusalem New the Roman seemed empire Age is much insuperable.
98
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
more
concerned
with
the afterlife?past universe
lives, reincarnation,
astral projection. New Age sees a spiritual scending the visible, material
one. This
nineteenth-century spiritualism, like an undercurrent has flowed culture beneath the official Bloom modernism. Harold
or tran permeating from idea descends a late Romantic stream that
through Anglo-American history of literary and artistic has argued, in his 1992 book of (typified today has always Orphism") as evil which defines matter religion"
the same name, that "the American by what he tartly calls "California been
a version of gnosticism, from earthly limitation. and urges the soul's emancipation The gnostic cults of second-century and Jewish Christianity were influenced by Hellenistic mystery mysticism religions as well as Plato's as in New dualism of mind versus matter. cism, that chains Age, the soul. The it is matter 1960s, itself, rather in contrast, hammered
In gnosti than society,
by sex valorized power of rock music, grandiosely and redefined heaven as present sensual ecstasy. The sixties at their most radical collapsed spirit into matter. Psychedelic the concrete to corroborate "I am claimed the Zen voyagers insight, into when themselves and that," "becoming" feeling flowing the chair or wall?a perception commonly reported by schiz ophrenics. objects
mate.
like soup
In sixties Pop Art, even mundane cans or sponges become
or commercial luminously ani
The American ancestry of New Age began in the nine teenth century with two women who did their central work at virtually Baker Eddy, a New the same moment?Mary and Helena Blavatsky, who was born in Russia Englander, and moved she had Thought, Quimby, to the us recovered with whom with from in 1873. Eddy (1821-1910) believed chronic invalidism through New
Quimby scendentalism mer's
of Phineas Parkhurst philosophy In the 1840s, she studied in Maine. had fused Hindu and Buddhist concepts from Tran the mental-health
based on Anton Mes hypnotherapy, For theory of "animal magnetism." eighteenth-century
Camille
Paglia
99
is an illusion, and ill and Eddy, the material world Quimby ness has no real existence. However, Quimby rejected Chris as not. Her seminal did book, Science and tianity, Eddy Health (1875), was shortly followed by her founding of the focuses on the parables Church of Christ, Scientist, which of Jesus. For Christian and miracles Science, only divine can or not heal. power, medicine, physicians The which Medical line from Eddy to New Age can clearly be seen in the movement of the 1980s and 1990s, Medicine Asian that Eddy had erased the restored concepts
Alternative
a graduate of the Harvard Andrew Weil, from Quimby. School who had studied the effects of marijuana, in his 1972 book, The Natural Mind, claimed that altered consciousness
is necessary for healing. From his clinic at the of Arizona, he criticizes commercial pharmaceuti University " a sixties as toxic and calls for cals integrad ve medicine," the best of East and West. style holistic approach combining After his split from the Maharishi, Deepak Chopra also be came identified with Alternative Medicine. From the Chopra at the La Costa Resort near San his headquarters a traditional Hindu med he Diego, ayureveda, promulgates can icine that claims disease be cured by opening the organ ism to cosmic energy. Chopra also alleges that his mind Center, technique can stem aging and bring success and wealth. are Marianne Other leading figures of this movement a author and inspirational Williamson, bestselling speaker a following in Los Angeles in the early eighties; a at Haven Hospital trained Yale-New surgeon Siegel, can cure disease; and who claims that "creative visualization" a lapsed Catholic Caroline Myss, and "medical intuitive" who Bernie who who divines advocates illness by reading a patient's "energy field" and healing through accupressure, reflexology, and touch." Both of Williamson's parents were lib "therapeutic eral Jewish lawyers inHouston. Her books are Jungian in ori entation but feature secular, multicultural prayers. Her major influence remains A Course a breakdown in Miracles read after having (1976), which in her twenties. she first won
ioo
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
dictated
of A Course inMiracles were allegedly over seven years to Helen Cohn Schucman by Jesus a at Columbia-Presbyterian Med (1909-81), psychologist did ical Center inNew York. A colleague, William Thetford, The three volumes
Schucman's father was Jew the typing from her notebooks. ish and Lutheran, while her mother had had contact with Science. At twelve, Schucman vis and Christian Theosophy ited Lourdes with her family; at thirteen, influenced by their in black maid, she was baptized a Baptist. A Course for Inner Peace in Miracles was published by the Foundation Its orginal name in New York was Mill Valley, California. devout the Foundation for Para-Sensory Investigation, reflecting the of its interest Skutch director, Whitson, Judith longstanding in parapsychology. is The Course asserts that the universe
pure love and that sin does not exist. Though non-sectarian, our sole in its Christian it descends from Eddy vestiges: an as our "inner be should internal "Voice" identified guide
Jesus."
women of the nineteenth-century progenitors was the Helena occultist (1831-91), Age Blavatsky who won an enormous international following. Her fame re an eigh that of Emanuel called but exceeded Swedenborg, The second of New censured by Blake for Swedish philosopher teenth-century the Bible. Madame his spiritualistic of Blavatsky readings to have acquired secret knowledge claimed through seven years of study in Tibet. InNew York in 1875, sne an<l Henry com founded the Theosophical Steele Olcott Society, which eso Western the and Buddhist with bined Hindu concepts teric tradition. associated with cob Boehme, Blavatsky (Theosophy, meaning the seventeenth-century was "divine wisdom," German mystic, Ja is immanent in nature.) A Her gnos was Her and
meticum, ticism from the third century ad. When at the Italian Renaissance, rediscovered meticum boosted incorrectly the fashion for magic, was alchemy,
taught that God the Corpus translated ally, G. R. S. Mead, a densely symbolic work of Greco-Egyptian who its manuscript the Corpus Neoplatonism and astrology.
identified with
Camille
Paglia
ioi
In her two major works, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Se Madame tried to unify (1888), Blavatsky world religions by their shared mysticism. Her work also be cret Doctrine longs to the nineteenth-century Egyptian Revival (spurred by invasion its of with views romanticized Napoleon's Egypt), of Egypt's magic arts. In 1878, Madame Blavatsky went to India and later made Madras the international headquarters of her Theosophical ence in India would Society. A substantive result of her pres be the renewal of interest in ancient San
skrit religious texts, which were translated and disseminated around the world, providing the raw material for the twen as movements tieth century's well as the spiritual healing Western practice of yoga. she rejected the spookhouse Though ums and s?ances, Madame Blavatsky because of her histrionic spiritualism of medi in the lost credibility
West
poses as a high priestess with But her influ healing powers. Theosophical Society would ence Gandhi, Nehru, movement and the for Indian national ism. Blavatsky's lapsed Catholic anointed successor, Annie and former Fabian socialist. Besant, was a
written
The
Theosophy
Gospel in 1889.
teen-year-old beach by her pedophiliac beater), was the messianic denied he he was
Despite having to of Atheism (1877), sne converted In 1909, Besant declared that a four Indian boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti (spotted at a colleague, Buddha. Charles Webster Lead In 1929, Krishnamurti the Order of the
the messiah
and dissolved
Star of the East, the cult that had been built around him. But to teach his theosophical continued system of "self In 1969, Krishnamurti to Ojai, Califor awareness." moved the Krishnamurti Foundation; he died there
nia, to establish in 1986. Another was
by Madame Blavatsky a born in Ken Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), clairvoyant tucky who toured the us for 40 years doing "life readings" and promoting as a his belief in reincarnation. Dismissed figure directly charlatan by mainstream for sixties occultists journalists, and seventies the Cayce prepared and eighties channel
influenced
way
I02
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
ers like Jane Roberts ("Seth") and J. Z. Knight ("Ramtha"), as well as for today's New Age psychics and mind-readers. was The nineteenth-century fin de si?cle in Europe and the us with and sodalities, publications, teeming spiritualistic art images, part of the Romantic of demonic arche legacy
femmes fatales. types from a glorified Satan to spellbinding was The most prominent British organization the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded by three Freemasons interested Temple William in Rosicrucian opened a believed Butler Yeats, who that his wife was and who used Rosicrucian and astrological medium symbol ism in his poetry. The Rosicrucians, called Illuminati, in ancient Egypt order was founded to Europe by knightly crusaders; however, brought it probably dates from the seventeenth century. Its cabalistic includes the and Hermetic cross, swastika, and rose, imagery claimed their esoteric and was pyramid. crucians There
between
Isis Urania thought. The Order's was in London in 1888. One member
(The Nazis because of
borrowed
the swastika with
from the Rosi chivalry.) England

secret, cere
its association
medieval
a
had been
the
interchanges
and
in eighteenth-century
Freemasonry,
Rosicrucians
monial claimed
order with descent
roots
in medieval Babylon,
such as Benjamin Revolution, ing figures were Masons, Franklin and George Washington, whose anti was a clerical creed coolly intellectual Deism. of the Golden Dawn would have great impact the 1960s: the Satanist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), rebelled against his who joined the order in 1898. Crowley A member on family, who were Plymouth Brethren, a puri sect. Throughout Irish Protestant his flam tanical, originally combined Asian mysticism with career, Crowley boyant affluent British Western occultism self-destructed in quarrels and black magic. After the Golden Dawn in 1900, he began traveling the India, Burma, and Ceylon, where he learned of a Dope in 1910. He wrote many books, in Fiend (1922) and Magick
from Egypt, of the American
guilds?though and Jerusalem.
it too Lead
world?Mexico, yoga. He took mescaline among them Diary
Camille
Paglia
103
Theory
and Practice
apocalyptic 666 as his personal number. From 1912, Crowley led a Ger man cult, the Ordo Templis Orientis, that opened branches in the us. His politics were pro-Nazi?a dismaying detail usu ally lost in his legend. influence Crowley's enties. fell heavily on the late sixties and sev
freedom, including "The Great Beast"
total sexual (1929). Crowley advocated He and called himself orgies bestiality. and took the Anti-Christ's
in Eng of Crowley had been published Biographies land in 1958 and 1959; his autobiography, The Confessions was in 1969. The re-released Aleister (1929-30), of Crowley Beatles inserted Crowley's face (back row, second from left) in the cartoon cover collage of their landmark Sergeant Pep per album (1967). It is rumored that the title song's first line to Crowley's alludes ("It was twenty years ago today") death in 1947. Because of its descent from blues?called the a in the American "devil's music" South?rock had already cults. But lingering from Afro-Caribbean in classic Rolling Stones songs and the magic the Satanism on Led Zeppelin's album covers and stage cos pentagrams tumes came from Crowley. Jimmy Page, Zeppelin's virtuoso voodoo element lead guitarist, collected Crowley memorabilia and bought on Scotland's Loch Ness. The his mansion, Boleskine House, in rock songs, which the Beatles fad for backwards messages I cannot confirm) to is said what (on authority popularized, have been reverse lauded the practice of inspired by Crowley, who in of medieval Satanic rituals. reading scripture in seventies rock included David Bowie admirers
Crowley and heavy-metal song,
musicians like Ozzy Osbourne, whose on Satan's call"), ap "Mr. Crowley" ("You waited peared on his first solo album after leaving Black Sabbath. in California Sixties Satanism was nurtured by Anton of The
Szandor La Vey (born Howard Levey in Illinois). The author La Satanic Bible (1970), Vey had been practicing Black Arts since the fifties. An advocate of Crowley-style Crowley's creed of radical sexual "indulgence" to be the master liberation, he proclaimed Satanic principle. In 1966, La
i04 CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Vey
founded
the Church with
of Satan at his home house where he nude women
in San Fran conducted tribal ani
cisco, black masses mal masks
an all-black
Victorian perkily
in lavish,
to rumor, La Vey did (photos survive). Contrary to his daughter, appear as Satan in Roman not, according Polanski's occult hit film, Rosemary's Baby (1968), nor did he have any connection with itwhatever. Celebrities and lib ertines (Mick Jagger "Black House," among reportedly which may have them) did visit La once been a hotel. Eagles' rites at Street. endur
Vey's One of the most
brilliant songs of the seventies, the is said to have been inspired by "Hotel California," La Vey's house, whose address was 6114 California A startling and little-known example of Crowley's
founded in 1954 ing influence is the Church of Scientology, one of the main L. writer Ron Hubbard, by science-fiction at had met Crowley shapers of New Age thought. Hubbard son in the latter's Los Angeles Hubbard's has 1945. temple revealed Hubbard that his father successor: to be Crowley's on was born told him that Scientology the day that to cleanse died. The drills used by Scientologists claimed the mind are fusion a reinterpretation of evidently of Asian meditation with Satanic will. Dianetics: The guid The
Crowley and clarify Crowley's ritualism,
singular which sharpens the all-conquering of Hubbard's ing premise mega-bestseller, Science of Mental Health Modern (1950), and can
be scientifically spirituality in the Crowley way, are mere and if remorse, aged?as guilt to be jettisoned. Scientology, which attracts celebri baggage ties like John Travolta and Tom Cruise, has been pursued by status as a religion. Scientology's the 1RS for its tax-exempt can in its theory of reincarnation: be detected the religiosity "process" allegedly eradicates negative thoughts and experi ences predating our life in the womb. After Madame Blavatsky, the most important architect of six ties-to-New Gurdjieff cow in 1913 and claimed (1866-1949). Age thought was George Gurdjieff was a half-Greek Armenian who arrived inMos to have spent twenty years gather
is that morality and man analyzed
Camille
Paglia
105
to Tibet. As from Mecca ing esoteric spiritualist knowledge a refugee in France after the Russian Revolution, Gurdjieff a mixture of Tantric Buddhism, created his "Fourth Way," Based on a method called and Sufi mysticism. Hinduism, it uses free movement and sacred dances along are stripped off to intense sessions where masks with group Institute for the Har achieve a higher awareness. Gurdjieff's in 1922 to Paris, of monious relocated Man, Development "the Work," the "transformational" of encounter technique originated sessions that would be widely adopted in the us and serve in of the sexual the vanguard his strated dances in the us life in France. inNew York Branches demon Gurdjieff in 1924 but spent most of his of the Gurdjieff Foundation opened revolution.
in 1953 and m San Francisco in 1958. can seen in influence be the Esalen Institute, es Gurdjieff's tablished in 1962 at Big Sur, California, by two psychology 100 Esalen of Stanford University. Eventually, graduates an Centers Indian tribe) opened around the us. (named after at natural hot in the mountains Its headquarters, nestled the sea, remains the symbol of the en overlooking Asian combines concepts with terprise, which religious a Western is humanistic Esalen pure example of psychology. to fuse comparative the sixties spirit in its explicit mission springs religion with Gurdjieff thinkers art and ecology. Its workshops, based on the a and group session, drew long list of writers in the sixties, Alan Watts and Aldous including
of mystical issues is Esalen's continued exploration Huxley. at its Big Sur site?"Survival shown by recent conferences of (2001) and "Subtle Energies and Uncharted Bodily Death" Realms of the Mind" (2000). Traces est encounter of the Gurdjieff session can be found founded in San Francisco (Erhard Seminar Training), by Werner a used-car salesman from Philadel in in
1971 Erhard, phia. Erhard was Jewish but had been raised as an Episco palian; he oddly gave himself a German name in adulthood. In the late sixties, Erhard investigated Scientology and stud ied Zen with Alan Watts in Sausalito. He claimed to have
io6
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
gone
to India to consult Sai Baba.
In est, Satya the fervor of a Protestant the language of Asian in est's
and gurus like Swami Muktananda Erhard gave the workshop format and framed itwith revival meeting meditation and
Participants
spiritual discovery. Large Group Awareness Training were moment term to "It"?Watts' for the of revela get supposed in tion. Marathon, which sessions, eight-hour they were of and harassed, led to the breakdown supposedly were in born after which effect ego, again. they "to blow the Mind" in the sixties est was gener anti-Christian in philosophy, a private,
confined Erhard way.
conventional
said he wanted
Explicitly
ally regarded as a cult, but itwas not ization. Its students were prosperous
professionals. unsavory family rumors, est resembled Alcoholics In its focus on public meetings, for the model for today's twelve-step programs Anonymous, sex or with their from addiction, recovery glossary of drug
pat terms like "enabling," "co-dependency," and "interven
for-profit organ or hippies but runaways In 1991, amid tax problems and Erhard left the country.
tions." Oxford was
partly inspired by the religious undertones: a it of British origins, Christian fellowship Group, in 1935 by "Bill W," a New Englander saved founded
AA has
light, aa mem by visions of divine white and practice faith in a "Higher Power" bers still profess as as In the six outreach. well confession missionary public a new the under the Oxford name, sponsored ties, Group, behavior saccharine "Up with People" to foster wholesome from alcoholism among increasingly rebellious American in the sixties There was a confluence teens. of revisionist trends
or manipula in psychology with "body work"?exercises tions to release "blocked" energy, a concept directly or indi its symbolic from kundalini yoga, with rectly borrowed vo entered the American (The latter word New the in the Age proselytizing cabulary eighties through In the early fifties, Abraham of actress Shirley Maclaine.) an American school of influenced by the German Maslow, spinal chakras. Gestalt psychology (which focuses on present adjustment
Camille
Paglia
107
his theory of "self-ac rather than past conflicts), developed from which the obsession with contemporary tualization," "self-esteem" evolved. The term seems to echo Yogananda's
"self-realization." Maslow was an early associate of Esalen
but criticized its definition
it for its lack of a library, which he felt limited He described his of enhanced consciousness. the first two of Freud a "Fourth Force," a with Asian
system as the "Third Force," following He later advocated and behaviorism. sixties synthesis of transpersonal
psychology
mysticism. Like Maslow,
Carl Rogers sought "whole psychotherapist ness" 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 progres or he pioneered "client-centered" even "non-directive" and ques therapy, which suspended to reversed the hierarchical of doctor tionably relationship sive education theories,
patient.
books was Encounter Among Rogers' Groups (1970), with its obvious Gurdjieff lineage. Christian conser vatives regularly, and probably with some justice, attack the self-actualization
or human potential school of psychology on stress for its "pagan" personal needs and desires at the For many and responsibility. expense of moral reasoning a substi humanistic has indeed become psychology people, tute for religion. The sixties trend to look to the body for salvation was an an of Wilhelm Reich ticipated in the writings (1892-1957), Austrian psychiatrist of the Gestalt school who worked and to New York in 1939 to quarreled with Freud, then moved Freud's theory of the social ori escape the Nazis. Rejecting Reich of envisioned neurosis, gin "orgone energy" surging through the universe and the human body. In The Function of the Orgasm that was widely (1927), a sober book with a titillating title in the sixties, he ar available as a paperback for the biological of sexual of necessity "discharge"
gued a rationale for pagan pansexu that energy?thus providing work nature Reich's recalls about Romantic passages ality.
io8
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
resem and Whitman, and his energy principle bles that of kundalini yoga as well as the power of the Chris in Emerson tian Holy However, Spirit. Reich founded an Orgone a coffin-like when he marketed Institute in 1942. box" to
"orgone capture orgone energy at home, he was charged with fraud and sentenced to two years in prison, where he died. in the 1930s, Reich had become in While still in Europe terested
Berlin. Around
in the physical-culture in work of Elsa Gindler a Gindler 1910, psy (1885-1961) developed and correction of based on dance movements chotherapy
it resembled Chinese tai chi as well as the Alexan breathing: der technique, used by actors and singers to free the voice ideas were brought to the us from tension and fear. Gindler's by her student, in 1963. Esalen cated to Gindler Charlotte The Selver, who Sensory Awareness began at teaching dedi Foundation,
at Mill and Selver's work, was established in 1971. Another teacher at important Valley, California, a who earned doctorate Esalen was Ida Rolf (1896-1979), in 1920 in biological from Columbia University chemistry stress in of internalization and began exploring the body's the 1940s. Rolf combined aspects of yoga with the Alexan der to create technique of the muscles shaping The Guild "rolfing," to release a sometimes painful brutal re and in of memories
resentments.
for Structural
is still dedicated Boulder, Colorado, of self-actualization The principle body work Age is closer That
based Integration, to Rolf's mission. in most methods than to New
Body to like rock and its forebear, rhythm and blues, wants work, we can so to out nature's that "kick the jams," freely vibrate
music.
gnosticism. piring soul must be freed from the opaquely material can collect and calcify but that spiritual maladies to the macrocosm. its vital connection body, clogging
to sixties Dionysianism is, body work assumes
not that the as body in the
Camille
Paglia
109
IO.
CONCLUSION
The New nature New
deserves respect for its attunement Age movement at a time when neither to nature and its search for meaning
nor meaning in the humanities. is valued in discourse a core It wisdom. exalts the broth of has Age perennial and finds beauty erhood of man, encourages contemplation, But too much cultural energy has been ab in the moment. sorbed by New Age over the past twenty years to the detri in of the fine arts, which frittered away their authority its ap their dalliance with trendy political tag lines. Despite
ment
It lacks peals to the archaic, New Age is fuzzily ahistorical. an analytic edge: with its soothing promises and feel-good a New benevolent that induces relaxation Age therapies, may In a world of ter in the face of aggression. be disabling can to the hills and leave their rorism, New Agers only take at in Esalen. jars scriptures There was address present between to universities by American the spiritual cravings of the post-sixties period. The is bleak: mainline cultural landscape religions torn failure their liberal and conservative a massive
a snobbishly wings; or an secular intelligentsia; alternately cynical naively credu a lous media; and mass of neo-pagan cults and superstitions
radio features call-ins seething beneath the surface. All-night and abduction about crop-circles, ufo's, by aliens, science fiction themes popularized by Swiss writer Erich Von D?ni ken's Chariot 1968 international bestseller, of the Gods monuments to extraterres attributes (which archaeological TV are to Prime-time programs trials). regularly devoted and John Ed relatives hov
seers like Rosemary Altea, James Van Praagh, from dead ward, who claim to hear messages
ering around audience members. are alarming. Science?its These developments objectivity and des postmodernism?is impugned by poststructuralism to sort out New the of needed muddle Age, perately mystical but it cannot conclusive do so without 1936 in J. B. Rhine's understanding. at in Duke experiments parapsychology
no
CULTS
AND
COSMIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
University, up. Claims
for example, of telepathy
pared to known tions linked to the earth's magnetism. These matters have been left to tabloids and talk shows, which have no appara tus of testing. There is nothing supernatural or occult?only natural phenomena that science has yet to chart or explain. is to be done? Higher What education needs to be worthy of its name. My proposal is the same that I have made since the course "East and West" with artist and com co-creating munity 1990. activist The of the Arts Lily Yeh at the University core curriculum for global education should in be
have been only erratically followed com have yet to be systematically or to bird migra animal communication
(in comparative religion. Study of the major world religions as as an to art. is well As the athe key politics cluding Islam) as vast I view religions ist who worships only nature, symbol-systems poststructuralism, Poststructuralism far more with and complex than challenging its myopic focus on social structures. inca
pable wave of influences a half ant New
has no metaphysics and is therefore of spirituality or sublimity. There has been wave from Asian since Emerson
after over the century and religion and Madame the result but Blavatsky, 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 and archaeology. literature, supported by art history from and from and to ne
Age movement
The religious impulse of the sixties must be rescued and redeemed. The exposure to Hinduism the wreckage Buddhism that my generation had to get haphazardly contemporary standardized gotiate literature for basic and music should be formalized need education. What students
their way the New Age fog is scholarly through of ancient and medieval knowledge history, from early pa nature cults the embattled consolidation of gan through Christian religion as culture rather than theology. Teaching as morality to also gives students the intellectual freedom find the ethical principles at the heart of every religion.
Camille
Paglia
111
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN RELIGIONS
in Roman tr. Grant Cumont, Franz, The Oriental Religions Paganism, E. R., The Greeks Showerman and the Irrational (1905; tr., 1956); Dodds, An Analysis (19 51); Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: of the Archetype, tr. Ralph Manheim The Cults of the Roman Em (1955); Turcan, Robert, pire, tr. Antonia Nevill (1989; tr., 1996). TRANSCENDENTALISM Waldo Emerson: Allen, Gay Wilson, and American Transcendentalism scendentalism The Orient and Alcott A Biography Boiler, Shoei, Zen (1981); Ando, Paul E, American Tran
An 1830-1860: in American Transcendentalism:
(1970); Intellectual
(1974); Christy, Arthur, Inquiry A Study of Emerson, Thoreau,
(1932). AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY Robert
Bellah, World
on Religion in a Post-Traditional N., Beyond Belief: Essays The American The Emergence (1970); Bloom, Harold, Religion: of the Post-Christian Nation Robert S., The Sixties Spiritual (1992); Ell wood, American to Postmodern Awakening: Religion Moving from Modern The Celebration Paul, The New Age Movement: (1994); Heelas, of the Self and the Sacralization William (1996); McLoughlin, of Modernity G., Re and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change vivals, Awakenings, in America, 160J-19JJ (1978). TWENTIETH-CENTURY CULTURAL HISTORY
Heiter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders Vincent, (1974); Howard, ed., The Sixties Gerald, (1982); Musgrove, Frank, Ecstasy and Holiness: Counterculture and the Open (1974); Reich, Charles Society The Making A., The Greening (1970); Roszak, Theodore, of America of a Bugliosi, Counter Opposition Culture: Reflections Teodori, on the Technocratic (1969); Massimo, Society and Its Youthful ed., The New Left: A Documentary
(1969). History MODERN CULTS Galanter, Patrick, Experience DRUGS The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God Braden, William, (1967); Clark, Walter Houston, Chemical and Religion Ecstasy: (1969); Psychedelic Drugs to Heaven: in American Fuller, Robert C, Stairways Drugs Religious History and Shamanism (2000); Harner, Michael J., ed., Hallucinogens (1973). MISCELLANEOUS Brent, Peter, Consciousness: ade, Mircea, (1964); Godmen A Study Shamanism: of India (1972); in the Evolution Archaic Bucke, Richard of the Human Cosmic Maurice, Mind (1901); Eli tr.Willard R. Trask for Modern A Study Man in Hu Cults: Mark, Let Our (1982). Faith, Healing Go! Children and Coercion (1976); Pavlos, (1989; rev. ed. 1999); Andrew J., The Cult
Ted,
Christopher, Varieties (19 51); James, William, man Nature (1902).
Isherwood,
Techniques of Ecstasy, ed. and introd., Vedanta of Religious Experience:

Cults

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Исходное описание:

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Cults

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Trustees of Boston University

Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American

58 CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

spite their ambivalence

religious and social institutions. De toward authority, however, they of

proved was opened sciousness"

problem was commonly

that the more called

the mind con

ful politics Civil rights and political and Buddhism, Hinduism

overview are interested the sixties.

are symptoms of rapid expansion

cate their faith. During periods,

from the excavation

But this time the nascent scrutiny survive the deglamourizing

Yet a major source of cultic America was the entertainment

But the titanic,

Bacchanalia. music, tangible

Through a whole generation proof of humanity's

tapped into nat link to the cos

and sex clubs

cults that ended

after a 1966 police prosecutor G. Gordon

institution, a frequent ties?reportedly

of San Francisco's 1967 natical Christ "Summer

tion of the first baby-boom

legacy intensified with president, Bill Clinton.

the elec Thus, a

primarily alism and disillusion

credibility through duced the counterreaction American

66 CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

in an far-right Christians that threatened First Amendment

their deprogramming ple is poststructuralism,

and demonism ture. The backlash The politics

that of modern sexual pattern license

cycle compulsive remains a deep-seated of 1960s' combination was prefigured

popular cul and puritan culture.

(the Religious Quakers to America in the seventeenth

century. Nineteenth-century eighteenth were known for their code of celibacy

and communal ture and crafts

68 CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

loom large partly because politics inner journeys, were photographable

in the last two decades

grandstanding York mayor

disappearance Even counterculture pansiveness ecumenical

I contend, by the aggravated, from the sixties religious revolution.

art has a spiritual meaning was positively perilous

70 CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

AND ASIAN RELIGION

In the Great Awakening minister Congregational Edwards

by British Romanticism Emerson, figure, Ralph Waldo

poet, William nature. Emerson

is the veil of illu

the other Transcendentalists, Among most interested inHindu philosophy,

lenged Judeo-Christianity. long poems, Leaves of Grass approximation sacred Hindu

to the dynamic literature, with tremendous

have poem would fifties Beat poetry, protest poem, Howl

in particular Allen Ginsberg's prophetic imitates Whitman's which (1956), long,

complete Transcendentalism?through baric medium of rock.

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Thoreau-style in a monastery Dharma colated Bums from

74 CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS