Epilogue
The New Age Dawns
It is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.
—H. P. BLAVATSKY, THE SECRET DOCTRINE, 1888
As the 1950s ushered in the development of jet propulsion and space flight, Americans became less interested in other-dimensional worlds than in those that lay beyond the stars. For spiritual journeyers, however, the stars and the inner realms could seem intimately related. Space was thought to hold mysteries and possibly unknown intelligences as fantastic as any Masters of Wisdom.
Tantalizing possibilities emerged during the final months of World War II, when Allied fighter pilots—people whose clear-headedness and abilities no one could question—brought home strange reports of flying objects they called “foo fighters.” Foo fighters were silvery or fiery spheres that appeared from out of nowhere and flew alongside the pilots’ planes. The balls or disks had no obvious means of propulsion but seemed under some kind of intelligent command. “If it was not a hoax or an optical illusion,” Timemagazine wrote on January 15, 1945, “it was certainly the most puzzling secret weapon that Allied fighters have yet encountered.” But Allied scientists could detect no last-ditch “superweapon” or anything that explained the weird flying objects.
As returning Crusaders had brought home tales of myth and wonder, so American warriors returned with a new riddle. One can only guess how an idea or observation becomes viral, but starting in 1947, American civilians—most notably a Washington state pilot named Kenneth Arnold—began to report a spate of “flying saucer” sightings. The flying objects appeared over Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and, most famously, at the Air Force base near Roswell, New Mexico. The U.S. military and the militaries of other nations took the matter seriously enough to launch official investigations, and a new term entered the American lexicon: Unidentified Flying Object. But the military investigations, rather than reaching conclusive explanations or framing meaningful questions, became a round-robin of contradictory statements and fodder for theories of a government cover-up.
For pulp fans, a similarly infectious but more sinister narrative was unfolding. In the 1940s, a bounding subculture of readers grew enthralled with reports of “inner earth” and its alien inhabitants. Hollow-earth theories had a long and tangled history, and the legend resurfaced in a series of “true” stories that began running in January 1944 in the pulp monthly Amazing Stories. Richard Sharpe Shaver, a Pennsylvanian writer–artist, philosopher, factory worker, and sometime mental patient, promulgated the mythology of an underground race that most definitely did not wish humanity well. His tales were defended and embellished by the magazine’s energetic editor, Ray Palmer. Many thrilled to the stories and—as with William Dudley Pelley’s “Seven Minutes in Eternity”—wrote in to report their own encounters with evil figures “in the caves.”
The larger body of science-fiction fans revolted. Pulp readers wanted tales of rocket ships, laser guns, and Buck Rogers–type heroes, not “strange-but-true” paranormal dramas. In New York, the Queens Science Fiction League (a group you apparently didn’t want to get on the wrong side of) passed a resolution condemning Shaver’s “inner-earth” tales as a danger to readers’ mental health. In 1948, Ziff–Davis, the corporate owner of Amazing Stories, got tired of the complaints and cut off the mike: The Shaver mystery was thereafter banned from its pages.
The disappointed editor, Palmer, resigned in protest. Part true-believer and part opportunist, Palmer took a maverick stand to continue on with the Shaver narrative and a range of other occult tales in a series of poorly edited, digest-size monthlies, includingMystic and Search. The Palmer magazines committed the most oft-repeated sin among occult journals: Their sloppily written pieces actually made the bizarre and unknown seem boring. The only endearing factor was Palmer’s brand of unfathomable logic: “When you read this story,” he told readers of Mystic in 1953, “you will tell yourself that it is fiction; the editors assure you that it is. But what if it isn’t?” And only Palmer, in the history of American letters, could seriously run this Notice to Contributors: “It is not the policy of MYSTIC Magazine to pay for the material it publishes. Its purpose is to present the truth, and the truth cannot be bought.” But apparently it could be sold, as the magazine’s liveliest content came from its bazaar of advertisements from occult schools proffering Rosicrucian, Mayan, and Yogic mysteries or de Laurence–style pitches for talking boards, magic crystals, and Tarot cards. In what must have been the only UFO-celebrity endorsement for a dandruff shampoo, flying-saucer witness Kenneth Arnold lent his name to the masculine TURN-ER’S: “Because Ken’s no sissy, and he doesn’t put perfume on his hair.”
Readers abandoned Mystic and its spin-offs to limp into obscurity through the ’60s. The sole occult digest to survive the Palmer era was a magazine that he cofounded and then quickly left in the hands of his partner, Curtis Fuller: Fate, a monthly that endures to the present day. With its “true reports” of UFOs, magical powers, monsters, and strange worlds (and a standard of writing that aimed a little higher than what appeared in the Palmer journals), Fate ignited the childhood imagination of many sci-fi writers, filmmakers, and special-effects maestros of the next generation.
In the Cards
As the 1950s wore on, the occult could seem like something of a spent force in American life. Foes of Spiritualism had exposed one mediumistic fraud after another; Theosophy, with an aging membership and no more communiqués from the Masters, had begun to seem like a frumpy lecture society; the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had retooled the Mesmeric and New Thought–based practices of “positive thinking” into mild motivational fare; and the most vibrant personalities of the American occult, from Baird T. Spalding to Edgar Cayce, had passed on to Summer Land. By the end of the decade, the occult could appear to be little more than an amalgam of eccentrics and loners who sat “vain, nervous, inept, neurotic, and fearful in their chintz-curtained apartments,” philosopher Jacob Needleman wrote, “complacently treasuring The Hidden Knowledge.”
A new voice was needed. And it arrived just as the cusp of the 1960s—or what some considered the opening of the Aquarian Age foreseen in astrology—came into sight. The voice belonged to a New York–based actress, bookshop owner, and student of metaphysical ideas named Eden Gray. As thought movements tend to blend one into the other, so did American occultism give way to the New Age in Gray’s immensely readable, sprightly guides to Tarot cards. In her work, one can see the American occult evolving into the larger New Age culture of the second half of the twentieth century.
Born in Chicago in 1901, Gray changed her name from Priscilla Pardridge for the stage. As an aspiring actress in the 1920s, she moved to New York. Gray was cast in a variety of stage roles, playing opposite Edward G. Robinson and Helen Hayes. Over the course of marriage and divorce, travel, and World War II—in which she served stateside as an Army lab technician—her acting career got waylaid. In the 1950s, she attempted to reignite her career using the visualization principles of Religious Science, the mind-power philosophy espoused by Ernest Holmes. Almost immediately, Gray landed an unlikely role in a London stage play.
Gray later returned to New York and became active with the First Church of Religious Science on Manhattan’s East 48th Street (another Midtown anomaly, just a few blocks from Blavatsky and Olcott’s old Lamasery). Deeply affected by her spiritual experiences, and with encouragement from her Religious Science minister, Gray decided to pursue a new career in the occult—but from her own fresh, energetic perspective. In 1954 she opened a metaphysical bookstore, Inspiration House, on Manhattan’s East Side and began giving Tarot readings. Patrons complained to her that no really practical Tarot guide existed. The actress-turned-occultist responded with a book of her own.
Gray’s 1960 volume, The Tarot Revealed—a beautiful oblong hardcover designed by her artist son, Peter Gray Cohen—arrived like a ray of sunshine to a generation of readers. Occult acolytes of the postwar era had grown wearily accustomed to colorless works like Englishman Arthur E. Waite’s 1911 Pictorial Key to the Tarot, one of the few “popular” guides available. Waite’s manner was hesitant and withholding, as though writing under duress for a general readership. While Paul Foster Case’s The Tarot had been available since 1947, he committed little space to divination, the area that most interested Tarot enthusiasts. With Gray’s work, readers no longer had to pine for a useful “how-to.” She combined simple instructions, enticing (if sometimes fanciful) occult history, and a New Thought–inspired tone: “Give those for whom you read encouragement to strive for their highest ideals. The seeds you plant can blossom into lovely flowers of accomplishment.”
Gray’s writing was friendly, informal, and practical. It would not please everyone. Manly P. Hall, born the same year as Gray, believed the New Age generation cheapened esoteric ideas, proffering quick fixes rather than demanding a lifetime of study. Regardless, the new era belonged to Gray. And, in her own shorthand style, she offered many of the same ideas as Hall and the more “serious” esotericists. New York publishers began to reprint her work and look for more. By the early 1970s, Tarot and occult how-to guides numbered in the hundreds.
The Spiritual Invasion
The dawn of the ’60s also opened American society to a new range of foreign religious movements and innovations. Largely through the work of iconic writer Gerald Gardner, a revival, or reinvention, of witchcraft emerged in England in the years following World War II. Only in 1951 did Britain lift its last law against witches. The Witchcraft Act, dating to the mid-sixteenth century, was finally repealed due to the efforts of English Spiritualists who occasionally found themselves harassed under its strictures. Without fear of legal reprisals, Gardner stepped through the opening.
An adventurous and well-to-do customs agent who had spent most of his life in Borneo, British Malaya, Singapore, and other faraway trading posts of the Empire, Gardner retired to the southern English coast in the late 1930s. He used retirement to further his study of folklore and the tribal rites he had encountered in the Far East. Back home, he was touched by the work of Egyptologist Margaret A. Murray, who postulated the survival of an ancient “witch cult” in England and Western Europe. American folklorist Charles G. Leland had promoted a similar idea at the turn of the century, describing the enduring nature cults as “the old religion.” Gardner later claimed he was initiated into one of these covens during World War II, which met secretly in the woods to cast spells against Hitler.
In a move that would reverberate through America, Gardner in 1954 published his slender volume, Witchcraft Today. It laid out the surviving beliefs and seasonal rituals of the nature-based cults he was said to discover (though others questioned their existence). Gardner called their members “Wica,” an Old English term for “wise or clever folk.” Throughout America the faith became known as Wicca. As with the ideas of Noble Drew Ali and his Circle 7 Koran, Gardner’s new/old theology was borrowed and invented, half dreamed up and half grounded in a mélange of folklore and traditional practices. It was, above all, a new religion that met the needs of the times. Wicca was nature-based, sexually free, and female-affirming. By the late ’60s, its message of do-it-yourself spirituality spoke to hundreds of thousands of young people. Wicca, or neo-paganism, became one of America’s fastest-growing spiritual movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, even gaining recognition as an official religion within the U.S. Armed Forces. Wicca also became a surprisingly popular spiritual choice among teenage girls, for whom its dark imagery and ritual (often a tantalizing taboo amid the landscape of mainstream Christendom) proved an empowering—and fashionable—statement.
In other developments from abroad, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—better known as the Maharishi—journeyed from India to California in 1959 and began teaching his technique of Transcendental Meditation. He gained worldwide fame after hosting the Beatles and other youth icons, including members of the Beach Boys and Donovan, at his India ashram. In the process, many Americans witnessed their first mass-media images of an Eastern guru on network news shows and the cover of Time magazine. The Maharishi’s ability to attract the Beatles to his headquarters at Rishikesh helped usher in a turning point in youth culture. Some of the band’s most memorable songs, including the raga-influenced melodies and lyrics of The White Album and Let It Be, grew from the visit. (While John Lennon famously split with the Maharishi, band members Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison maintained lifelong ties to his teachings.) Countless young Americans learned the mantra-based method of Transcendental Meditation, while medical authorities and educators began to seriously study its stress-reducing effects.
From a cultural perspective, perhaps no tradition of the East made deeper inroads than Zen Buddhism. Studied by American scholars in Japan and brought to America in large measure by the brilliant teacher D. T. Suzuki in the 1950s and ’60s, Zen became an American religion in its own right. Attracted by its message of nonattachment and “just be” spirituality, the Woodstock generation made Zen one of the most widespread of the nation’s new religious movements. Zen attracted hundreds of thousands of adherents or loose hangers-on and wielded broad influence on the religious ideals and language of the youth culture. The concept of “mindfulness” joined the American idiom. Almost a century earlier, Theosophy had helped introduce Buddhism to the West when Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky made formal Buddhist vows in Sri Lanka in 1880, probably the first Westerners ever to do so. But it was in the ’60s and ’70s that Buddhism found its true footing on American soil.
The 1960s also exposed Americans to Native American shamanism, or a certain version of it. A stocky Latin UCLA graduate student named Carlos Castaneda ignited mass interest in the wisdom of a mysterious (and many said invented) Yaqui Indian medicine man in his 1968 best seller, The Teachings of Don Juan. In the following decade, critics and some disappointed readers heaped scorn upon the elusive Castaneda when the logistics and circumstances of his Don Juan books failed to hold up under scrutiny. Even Castaneda’s own background as a globe-trotting Brazilian was exposed as invention. He was the Peruvian son of a jeweler. As some readers discovered, however, the books’ true value did not appear by dissecting the realness of Don Juan or by heading off to the Southwest in search of magic mushrooms or a Native American teacher. Rather, Castaneda’s writings made the most sense to those readers who already had a commitment to a religious or wisdom tradition and understood his books as allegories on that path. The resonances, some found, could be remarkable.
The Revolution Will Be Published
If publishers needed any further encouragement about the potential of the new spiritual literature, in 1969 a New York astrologer and former Miss America contestant named Linda Goodman placed the first astrology book on The New York Times best-seller list. The popularity of Sun Signs made “What’s your sign?” into the nation’s favorite (and most parodied) pickup line. Observers could hardly believe how far astrology had traveled from the temples of the primeval world and how appealing it could seem in the present. “I’m a nonbeliever,” wrote Marcia Sel ig son in a charming assessment of modern astrology in 1969 in The New York Times. “But in the last few weeks, since I paid a call on Linda Goodman, I’ve found it impossible to remain unseduced by astrology.” Goodman, she continued,
has an empathic quality that makes you want to tell her everything that’s unsettling you, and let her fix it up. Which I did. And she did. Far be it from me to pooh-pooh a science that tells me not to worry about the problems I’m having with my Sagittarius boyfriend because, as Linda so aptly put it: “You have a deep rich Taurus sense of humor and great sensuality and you cook well and are great fun and attractive to men and keep a lovely home.” Obviously she’s right about astrology being the universal truth and the mother of all law. And that’s that.
Like Seligson, almost every American by the late ’60s could identify his or her mythological birth sign (and often that of intimates) and note something about its traits. Most daily newspapers ran sun-sign columns, and even The Washington Post eventually gave in, at the behest of its chairman, Katharine Graham. “I got tired of Mrs. Graham telling me we should have an astrology column, so I got one,” said executive editor Ben Bradlee. Publishers began noticing that women were the most reliable audience for the new spiritual literature.
A 1967 best seller on Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet by tabloid journalist Jess Stearn, brought a rebound of attention to the medical clairvoyant. Cayce’s new vogue was followed by a wide array of “channeled” literature—channel was a term Cayce had used—under the names of such other-dimensional entities as Seth, Ramtha, and even the figure of Christ in the hugely popular series of lessons called A Course in Miracles. Channeled by Helen Schucman, a Columbia University research psychologist, A Course in Miracles turned out to be far more substantive and complex than most casual readers were expecting. Hence, many looked to friendlier metaphysical works, such as the popularized Course-in-Miracles psychology of Gerald G. Jampolsky and Marianne Williamson or the explorations of channeling and past lives in the memoirs of actress Shirley MacLaine.
This isn’t to say that more-demanding books did not find an audience. American readers discovered the ancient Chinese oracle book I Ching in its groundbreaking translation by the German Sinologist Richard Wilhelm. Once a sleepy staple on the backlist of Princeton University Press, it was newly embraced in the late ’60s by students and seekers. Likewise, the Chinese philosophy of the Tao Te Ching, one of the world’s oldest spiritual works, underwent a new range of serious translations. And new editions of the Sufi mystical verse of Jalaluddin Rumi made the thirteenth-century Persian into one of the most widely read poets in American history.
Occult America
In the mid-’70s, the monthly New Age Journal had solidified the name for this new spiritual movement. There was no longer any easily discerned “occult” or “Eastern” or “yogic” subculture; rather, America experienced the rise of a vast metaphysical culture that appeared ever-expanding, ever-accommodating, and perpetually ready to adapt to any foreign or homegrown influence that met the needs of those who yearned for self-discovery or personal fulfillment.
Some of its psycho-spiritual offerings rode the winds of trend, like primal scream therapy, the confrontational psychology of encounter groups, or the me-first philosophy of EST. Others were substantive and historically rooted, such as the practice of yoga and the advent of transpersonal, or meaning-based, psychology, which began to bridge the rupture declared by Freud between the psychological and the religious.* Psychology could no longer limit the aims of life to love and work; rather, the questions of purposeful existence had entered the therapist’s office—and were apparently there to stay.
A core tenet of the New Age was a belief in the fateful convergence of all religious and therapeutic systems, resulting in an era of boundless human potential. Ivy League–educated researchers at residential learning facilities such as California’s Esalen Institute—the first in a wave of growth centers that would dot both American coasts—began studying “supernormal” athletic and mental performance, seeing it as a harbinger of humanity’s next “quantum leap” in evolution. Indeed, years before the theory of an “end of history” electrified post–Cold War intellectuals, New Age intellects, such as physicist Fritjof Capra and transpersonal pioneer and Esalen cofounder Michael Murphy, articulated their own visions of an apex in social–ideological–individual development.
There also existed serious esoteric teachers who stood aloof from the New Age, carefully absorbing some of the searchers who had sampled and grown dissatisfied with its plethora of offerings. Spiritual movements that did not lend themselves to popular adaptation—from Islamic Sufism to esoteric Christianity—benefited from the interest aroused by the New Age’s reach and took in some of its most thoughtful participants.
Meanwhile, the more traditional religious movements—evangelism in particular—heaped scorn upon the New Age, even while lifting some of its most popular therapeutic premises. Late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century megachurches and media ministries rapidly took to counseling congregants, readers, and television audiences on everything from the spiritual laws of debt relief and weight loss to the mental secrets of success. Even tough-skinned skeptics who dismissed the New Age as flimflam turned to “woo-woo” methods, often unknowingly. When faced with chronic illness, addiction, or stress, rationalists from every reach of life used alternative approaches in medicine and relaxation—ranging from meditation (Edgar Cayce), to hypnotherapy (Mesmer), to positive thinking (Ernest Holmes, et al.), to practices in yoga, herbs, and acupuncture that had entered America through the channel created by arcane subcultures.
The United States Army itself adopted a slogan—“Be All You Can Be”—that some believed echoed the ethos of the humanpotential movement. The New York Times cited a report that in the early 1980s a group of officers at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, headed up a study aimed at creating a “New Age Army,” whose recruits would receive training in potential-building techniques, such as meditation, extrasensory perception, and self-hypnosis. The program was abandoned, but one researcher claimed that the Army’s ever-popular slogan grew directly from it.
For all of its inroads into mainstream life, New Age became a term (and sometimes an epithet) that for many serious people connoted nothing more than a softheaded jumble of spiritual–therapeutic remedies or bromides. But the New Age did, in fact, have a core set of beliefs and a definable point of view. Most people, thought schools, or movements identified as New Age from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century shared these traits:
1. Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas.
2. Belief in a mind–body connection in health.
3. Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages.
4. Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality.
5. Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine.
Most twenty-first-century Americans, whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements. To a very great degree, occult movements and personalities had introduced those ideas, in some of their most popular variants, into American life. Whether the occult changed America, or the other way around, certainly this much is clear: The encounter between America and occultism resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture. This new culture extolled religious egalitarianism and responded, perhaps more than any other movement in history, to the inner needs and search of the individual. At work and at church, on television and in bookstores, there was no avoiding it: Occult America had prevailed.
* Freud could also reveal a greater openness to the metaphysical than is commonly assumed. In his 1922 paper “Dreams and Telepathy,” he noted: “… psychoanalysis may do something to advance the study of telepathy, in so far as, by the help of its interpretations, many of the puzzling characteristics of telepathic phenomena may be rendered more intelligible to us; or other, still doubtful phenomena be for the first time definitely ascertained to be of a telepathic nature.”