Coda
The New New Age
From one point of view, the New Age movement began when enough people
who thought about a dawning ‘‘new age’’ began to use upper instead of lower case
letters to refer to the time. Put another way, the New Age movement happened
when participants and observers who had identified a certain kind of emergent
community began to reify it. This occurred sometime in the early-to-mid 1970s,
and, arguably, it occurred because the media had noticed and sought to name
the apparent whirlwind. It is instructive to browse through ‘‘old’’ books from the
years before designations and attitudes became fixed. Doug Boyd’s 1974 account
of the celebrated Cherokee and adopted Shoshone shaman Rolling Thunder,
for example, contains this casual reference: ‘‘Many Indians were returning to
the tradition. Many new-age young people were developing awareness of the Indian
way. These people could help the Indian to reverse the present pattern of
polluting, exploiting and destroying nature.’’ Boyd himself, who first heard Rolling
Thunder address a small white professional audience in 1971, located him for
readers in a continuum that told them how to think Rolling Thunder and how
to think spirit. ‘‘Rolling Thunder expressed ideas and concepts that I had heard
from spokesmen from India, Japan and Tibet. He said there was a law of nature
that causes all things to be balanced, a law that says that nothing comes free, that
all things must be paid for, that all wrongs must be righted. Teachers from all over
the world have spoken of this law of karma. Rolling Thunder told how medicine
men and others of similar practices communicate without words. Practitioners
of all times and places from witch doctors to shamans to yogis, swamis and sages,
have had this ability.’’1
As Boyd made clear, whatever else this lower-case ‘‘new age’’ was, it had been
marked by a grand ecumenicity, a combinativeness that made the old-style ‘‘perennial
philosophy’’ look effete and elitist beside it. A similar comprehensiveness
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marked Marilyn Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), which by the time of
its second edition in 1987 had sold one-half million copies and which has often
been cited as a basic statement of New Age views. Ferguson’s original edition,
though, contains no index entry for the term, and—so far as I can tell—it appears
nowhere in her text. Instead, Ferguson was ebullient over an exploding interest
in ‘‘consciousness’’ since the 1970s and over the phenomenon of networking
(her ‘‘conspiracy’’) that she found seemingly everywhere. Her text gave no index
entry to Alice Bailey either. But in its introduction Ferguson confessed that she
was ‘‘drawn to the symbolic power of the pervasive dream in our popular culture:
that after a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love
and light—in the words of the popular song [from the Broadway musical Hair],
‘The Age of Aquarius,’ the time of ‘the mind’s true liberation.’’’2
Seven years later, when the second edition appeared, however, its paperback
cover excerpted American Bookseller’s review of the book as the ‘‘New Age watershed
classic.’’ Ferguson herself, in an afterword for the new edition, noted a series
of ‘‘breaking stories.’’ Among them was ‘‘increasing media coverage of metaphysical/spiritual
news.’’ Then, citing a New York Times front-page feature in September
1986 on the ‘‘growing number of adherents to spiritual views,’’ Ferguson—
one time only—used the much-repeated term: ‘‘Over the next few months other
major features on the ‘New Age,’ some positive, appeared in publications like
Time, U.S. News and World Report, The Los Angeles Times, and on television
(‘20–20,’ ‘Sixty Minutes,’ network morning shows). Soon virtually all the popular
magazines, major newspapers, and television networks were providing ongoing
coverage. Since then, the emerging views and values have become the topic of
TV dramas, even situation comedies.’’3
Ferguson had noticed that the New Age movement was, in large part, constructed
as a media event. When numbers of metaphysically inclined spiritual
seekers who were calling themselves ‘‘new-age’’ discovered themselves in print
to be part of the New Age movement, they found that their ranks, seemingly
overnight, swelled and augmented. Named by an independent and authoritative
arbiter (the media), they grew surer of their own identity and the attitudes
out of which it was formed. And if any one media ‘‘moment’’ shifted perception
to this upper-case New Age, it was probably the publication of film star and political
activist Shirley MacLaine’s autobiographical Out on a Limb in 1983, with
its video version by 1986.4 Out on a Limb was translated into Spanish, Italian,
German, and Polish as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Meanwhile, in
its video format, its made-for-television friendliness captured a huge American
audience that, in many cases, may not have had significant prior exposure to her
new-age concerns. MacLaine’s story, with herself as star, invited the same kind
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of study of important texts that American Daoism would promote. It also thrust
the actress and many of her readers into novel (for them) practices such as channeling.
Most startling of all for most, it pushed MacLaine into a secondhand encounter,
in a different hemisphere, with a reported space visitor—who seemed
a reconstituted theosophical master and who was, like MacLaine, a woman.
This is not, of course, to ignore perceptions of a coming new age (we began
there) before Shirley MacLaine discovered the New Age and the media cooperatively
evangelized for her. More precisely, by the 1960s a major shift in the metaphysical
discourse community was taking place regarding a new age, and it was
probably easiest to locate among Theosophists. J. Gordon Melton has pointed to
the role played by the several hundred organizations that can be traced to the parent
Theosophical Society. Continuing revelation kept continuing; and ascended
masters apparently kept finding new people with whom to converse. Moreover,
as Melton notes, the beginnings of what became the New Age movement could
be tracked to Britain. There a confluence of spiritualists and Bailey-style Theosophists
(Bailey had predicted the new age would come late in the twentieth
century) flourished in a context made still more metaphysically congenial by the
arrival of Eastern teachers after World War II. Concepts of ‘‘spiritual energy’’ to
come at the dawn of the Aquarian age fed into a mood of general millennial expectation.
At Findhorn near Inverness in Scotland, Peter and Eileen Caddy and
Dorothy Maclean from 1965 built an experimental community, claiming that
the aid of nature spirits was enabling them to grow spectacularly large and lush
produce on ground that could hardly be expected to yield at all. As they reported
their communings with the land and its spirits, they taught a theology of immanence.
At the same time, others of a metaphysical bent began to talk of spiritual
‘‘light’’ as they recalled theosophical teachings on the coming of a new age. In
the process, they came to see their own gatherings as points of light. Linked to
one another, they believed—as in the old Alice Bailey vision—that they could
bring new and greater light, channeling it to the world and engaging in a work
of global transformation. Supported by small organizations such as, from 1971,
Sir George Trevelyan’s Wrekin Trust for exploring metaphysical themes, study
groups networked with one another and spread the mood of expectation. ‘‘The
message of the New Age swept through the ranks of the psychically attuned in
much the same way that the charismatic movement did at the same time through
ranks of evangelical Christians,’’ Melton observes.5
The British new age hardly stayed home, and by the close of the 1960s it had
spread internationally and linked itself to metaphysical discourse communities
in North America. ‘‘Light’’ groups were in, and so were crystals. In a world in
which vernacular readings of the new quantum science had taught people how
Coda: The New New Age 499
to think light, mystical and scientific light mingled and fused in crystals: Crystals
were crucial in technological applications in the dawning computer age and
crucial as well, for believers, in focusing and transmitting spiritual intention and
energy. Worn as a pendant around the neck, a crystal became a new and Western
lingam, a source of ever-available energy to infuse life into life. Placed at strategic
locations to mark boundaries and enhance the flow of spirit, crystals protected
and augmented the life force of believers and, in their view, all to which
they extended. Even before the light groups, however, theosophical influence
encouraged other stateside believers to expect an imminent new age in a context
of expanding light. The new age, they thought, would be ushered in by space
brothers or space-age ascended masters.
As early as June 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have sighted
nine silvery disks near Mount Rainier in Washington state, disks that he estimated
to be flying at 1,200 miles per hour. Arnold made sure to tell a news reporter, describing
the objects as moving like saucers that skipped across water. So began
the era of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), spotted by a series of observers and
provoking continued speculation. In one notably metaphysical explanation, for
example, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung argued that the sightings were the result
of displaced psychic contents—the ‘‘self’’ in space. Some, however, were not so
sure, and they were not content to gaze at the unexplained and speculate on origins.
They felt that they were making contact with space vehicles and whoever
was flying them. The claim of contact with extraterrestrials, as we saw, had already
been made in the eighteenth century by Emanuel Swedenborg, and spiritualists
like Andrew Jackson Davis had felt no apparent qualms about describing
life on other planets. Now, however, in an age of heightened technology and
sophisticated flying objects of human construction, claims of contact with space
beings gained new immediacy and plausibility. Tellingly, many of those who reported
contacts with extraterrestrials (‘‘contactees’’) displayed, as a group, backgrounds
of immersion in theosophical and/or spiritualist lore.6
When in 1952 Polish-born George Adamski claimed conversations with a Venusian
named Orthon, he had already, since the 1930s, been working as a metaphysical
teacher, issuing publications from the ‘‘Royal Order of Tibet,’’ for whom,
he said, he was lecturing. Adamski hastened to produce books on his contactee
experiences in 1953 and 1955 (as well as later ones), and he attracted a following.
Plagued by allegations of fraud, he still had contributed an important word to a
conversation that continued. Unlike ufologists, who saw the ‘‘saucers’’ as scientific
mysteries to be clarified, contactees like Adamski and their devotees thought
that they were dealing in mysteries that were metaphysical. The outlines of the
message of the space brothers were clear: Humans were being warned to reform
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their evil ways, to ‘‘fly right,’’ in so many words. As Jerome Clark summarizes,
‘‘What the contactees created was a space-age version of an occult visionary religion,
with roots in theosophy, the i am movement, and other supernatural belief
systems in which wise extraterrestrials played a role.’’7
Examples of the theosophical and spiritualist pasts of contactees abound.
George King, for instance, who founded the Aetherius Society in London in 1954
and then settled himself and his center in Los Angeles, had been a medium, a
yogi, and a student of theosophical lore before his space-age experiences. After
the beginning of his reported revelations from Master Aetherius of Venus in 1955,
who—according to King—named him the ‘‘primary terrestrial mental channel,’’
King delivered trance lectures from ‘‘masters.’’ Robert Ellwood thought them to
be ‘‘identical to the ‘Great White Lodge’ of Theosophy.’’ In the late 1950s, with
their project Operation Starlight fully unfolding, members of the society traveled
to Holdstone Down in England—to behold Master Jesus in cosmic light
—and then to nine English mountains called by the Cosmic Masters through
King ‘‘New Age Power Centers.’’ Later, in the 1960s, they conducted Operation
Karmalight, suggesting once again the prevalence of theosophical discourse and
the continuing significance of light. In still another case, George Hunt Williamson,
an archaeologist and also a student of Theosophy, published his account of
contact with Martians through automatic writing from as early as 1952. But Williamson
also claimed contact with ascended masters, and he later became associated
with the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, the name of the organization
alluding to the full spectrum of light rays associated with ascended masters. According
to Williamson, the brotherhood had first been established when the lost
continent of Lemuria was destroyed between 10,000 and 12,000 b.c.[e.], and
now, in 1956, it was being resuscitated as a monastic system in the Andes Mountains
of Peru.8
The new high-tech ascended masters—now no longer earthlings but still functionally
persons and profoundly wise ones at that—provided what Robert Ellwood
has called ‘‘symbols of mediation.’’ Like the multiplied forms and beings
guaranteeing complexity to old Gnostic and Kabbalistic myths, these new answers
for the Hermetic imagination announced that the universe was hardly vacant
and that humans were not at all alone in it. Those who received their messages
did so through a reconstructed form of mediumship that came to be called
channeling. ‘‘Channels’’—as on radios, television sets, and advanced technological
gadgetry considered to be communication devices on spaceships—brought
information and wisdom to believers. Now, though, the communicators—Ellwood’s
‘‘symbols of mediation’’—were no longer only or mostly the spirits of the
intimate departed, or of historic scientific and political professionals, or of Ameri-
Coda: The New New Age 501
can Indians or African Americans or even Russian Cossacks. Instead, they were
space brothers or extraterrestrial masters, and—as time passed—they became
‘‘entities,’’ beings who had never been human or—as in the case of later wellknown
channel JZ Knight’s Ramtha—came from lost civilizations (like Ramtha’s
Atlantis). Alternatively, they were collective beings representing ‘‘group souls.’’9
Contactees, however, soon had public company. In 1970, when writer Jane
Roberts published The Seth Material, she launched an era of nationwide
awareness. Communication with other-than-human entities had now left the
boundaries of the contactee community and its followers to spread in the larger
culture. Roberts was Jane Roberts Butts, a former Skidmore College student and
now housewife who had taken different jobs during her married life and even
published a novel in 1963. ‘‘Seth,’’ the being with whom she claimed contact, had
emerged when, experimenting alongside her husband with a Ouija board, they
both received messages from the mysterious communicator. Thereafter Roberts
found that she could become entranced and that Seth came channeling through
while she was in trance states. He apparently had very much to tell, and Roberts
produced book after book, some sixteen in all. The Seth writings became enormously
popular in metaphysical circles, contributing to the self-identity of an
emergent New Age movement and also augmenting its ranks.10
Roberts herself, despite all the fanfare, led a quiet life even as she questioned
the source of the phenomenon, calling Seth a ‘‘dramatization of the unconscious’’
but implying that the unconscious in question was different from her
own. In the second of the Seth books, for example, Seth announced concerning
his mysterious identity: ‘‘I can quite literally be called a ghost writer, though I do
not approve of the term ‘ghost.’ It is true that I am usually not seen in physical
terms. I do not like the word ‘spirit,’ either; and yet if your definition of that word
implies the idea of a personality without a physical body, then I would have to
agree that the description fits me.’’ Seth also boasted that he had ‘‘donned and
discarded’’ more bodies than he cared to tell. ‘‘Consciousness,’’ he declared sententiously,
‘‘creates form. It is not the other way around.’’11
Channeling and contact with space visitors—probably the two most flamboyant
themes that marked this early New Age—had functioned as metaphysical
harbor lights for MacLaine’s 1983 Out on a Limb. She had dutifully, at the behest
of a friend, visited the huge and well-stocked Bodhi Tree, the fabled metaphysical
bookstore on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and had begun to read the books
recommended to her. They provided a short course on the metaphysical tradition,
with special attention to reincarnation, and soon she was supplementing
them with contacts with a series of trance channels, including the well-known
Kevin Ryerson. She knew about Alice Bailey and Jane Roberts, and she was well
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aware of Roberts’s doubts about and resistance to the channeling phenomenon.
When MacLaine met Ryerson, he was adamant about not being religious. ‘‘What
church would have me?’’ he answered in reply to MacLaine’s question. He explained,
though, that ‘‘two, three, or maybe four spiritual entities’’ used him ‘‘to
channel information.’’ Then, in trance as the entity ‘‘John,’’ Ryerson told the
actress that he had information both about her and about the cosmos based on
‘‘that which ye would term the Akashic Records.’’ ‘‘Akasha,’’ he continued, ‘‘is that
which ye might term the collective unconscious of mankind, stored in ethereal
energy. This energy could be termed as the mind of God.’’12
MacLaine’s spiritual journey reached a new point when David, her California
metaphysical friend, invited her to Peru and the Andes Mountains (Peru and the
Andes, as we have seen, were already favored by devotees of ascended masters
and space contacts). Up in the Andes, ‘‘in the sulphur baths and along the banks
of the bubbling Mantaro,’’ David told MacLaine about ‘‘a girl called Mayan.’’
Mysterious and beautiful, she transmitted vast reservoirs of knowledge and insisted
that ‘‘the most important relationship was between each soul and God.’’
But he had trouble telling MacLaine about her origins. ‘‘Where could she be
from that’s so hard to say? Another planet.’’ ‘‘You got it!’’ David said. ‘‘You guessed
it. You’re right.’’ Later, MacLaine learned that the locals routinely spotted UFOs.
‘‘‘Shirley,’ said David, ‘everyone I’ve talked to up here has a flying-disc story.
Every single one.’’’ He also told her that Mayan had come from the Pleiades (a
theme that the Swiss farmer Edouard [‘‘Billy’’] Meier had introduced into the
contactee literature in the 1970s, although Meier himself was trailed by numerous
allegations of hoax). From what Mayan had told David, he confided, extraterrestrials
were ‘‘superior because they understand the process of the spiritual
domain of life.’’ The mysterious woman from the Pleiades was reaching out to
MacLaine through David because the actress was meant to be a ‘‘teacher’’ on a
‘‘much wider scale’’ than her mentor and friend. She was appointed to write the
‘‘simple truth’’ that was the ‘‘Big Truth.’’ ‘‘‘The simple truth,’ he said, ‘of knowing
yourself. And to know yourself is to know God.’’’13
It was an odd message, given the twin bookends of the MacLaine account.
Trance channels and space visitors came from outside. They got consulted for
guidance and direction, and they assumed the authority, for seekers, that institutions
had for many who were perhaps less questioning and certainly more conventional.
It was as if the Hermetic legacy had been turned inside out in this
new New Age—as if the tensions and contradictions that had plagued American
metaphysical religion since its nineteenth-century appearances had been
ratcheted to new heights in the continuing quest for spiritual energy. The people
who would be ‘‘as gods’’ found it necessary to consult. Americans who sought
Coda: The New New Age 503
to create their own reality had discovered that they needed to get directions—
both on the reality and on the programmatic strategies for obtaining it—from
somebody else. Moreover, when they consulted and got directions, they did so
on a cosmic scale. That was perhaps appropriate, for there was nothing secret,
or esoteric, in what Americans were pursuing. The nonsecrecy had been a fact
since the mid-nineteenth century, when mass spiritualism—with its collection
of trance-produced books seemingly a dime a dozen—had opened Hermetic secrets
to American takers. Now the media had made even surer of the exotericism
of what was transpiring, and New Age people cooperated enthusiastically. MacLaine
was not alone in her instinct for grand announcement when she wrote a
book that built to its Peruvian denouement with a woman from the Pleiades.
Still, for all that, Shirley MacLaine’s outland gospel could not withstand the
domesticating onslaught of the barrage of media coverage that rendered the secret
public and exoteric. Americans grew more comfortable with extraordinary
visitors and their messages, even as those who considered themselves New Age in
the later 1980s and after often skirted past preoccupation with channeling and
visits with space people. Increasingly, in the combinative habit intrinsic to metaphysical
religion New Age Americans moved on to amplify numerous themes
that were already woven into the texture of their synthesis. If they were ‘‘Star
People,’’ descended from benevolent space beings, as contactee Brad Steiger had
declared, they were also heirs to a panoply of metaphysical and related themes
bequeathed them by their American experience. The post-1983 MacLaine provides
an instructive example. If she had been enthralled by channeling and space
contact in 1983, a check-in six years later shows her teaching the gospel of the
God-self as Mayan, through David, had desired her to do, but complexifying
it in noticeable ways and also reading it largely as therapy. Several books after
Out on a Limb, in her new autobiographical advice manual Going Within, the
reconstructed MacLaine still acknowledged UFOs and space contacts, but her
strongest interests lay elsewhere. The inside front and end papers of the book are
telling. Both portray a stylized woman in yoga attire seated in lotus posture with
seven appropriately colored circles—the chakras—illuminating the figure. On
the opposite page a full-colored circle for each chakra sits centered between text
describing its nature and function. In the book itself, MacLaine announced to
readers that there was ‘‘nothing new about the New Age,’’ told them that the New
Age was ‘‘about self-responsibility,’’ and displayed concern about personal and social
healing. She instructed them in meditating and chanting and explained how
she herself used meditation to allow her ‘‘Higher Self’’ to ‘‘reveal itself.’’ ‘‘Directions
coming from the Higher Self,’’ she testified, were ‘‘by their very definition
attuned to harmonious love and light energy.’’14
504 Coda: The New New Age
This ‘‘Higher Self’’ was the ‘‘personalized reflection of the Divine spark.’’ Still
further, with the end papers of her book telling the story already, MacLaine
learned about ‘‘a specific power of aligning with certain energies.’’ The physical
body was ‘‘but the reflection of a series of more subtle bodies of energy within.’’
These reflected ‘‘the vibration of the God Source’’—at the disposal of humans
if they but knew ‘‘how to access it.’’ Everybody seemingly agreed. ‘‘The Egyptians,
the Chinese, the Greeks, the North American Indian and African tribes,
the Incas, the early Christians, the Hindus of India, the Buddhists of Asia, and today’s
metaphysicists and mystics everywhere in the world share, to some degree, a
common belief.’’ What was it? They all thought that the body was ‘‘only a physical
manifestation of energies that together create an entity beyond that which can
be seen.’’ They believed that ‘‘those levels of existence, those energies, that entity,
reflect the nature of God and the universe.’’ MacLaine had discovered chakras,
and she had found auras. She meditated on the proverbial ‘‘wheels,’’ visualized
them, and used sound to free up emotions and heal. Confident in her enlightened
body-self, she explored other means of healing as well—experiencing psychic
surgery from Filipino Alex Orbito and pondering how it could be. ‘‘There
was no doubt in my mind that his hands had entered my body. I had felt it and
seen it, not only in myself but in others as I stood over them and observed.’’ She invoked
‘‘all the spiritual masters,’’ who testified that the ‘‘physical’’ was ‘‘fundamentally
a coagulation of molecules’’ that were ‘‘a product of our consciousness.’’15
MacLaine explained for readers: ‘‘If my body is made up of molecules determined
by my consciousness to take the human form and all of it is actually
composed of immortal God-like energy, I can accept the concept that psychic
surgery is performed through a spiritual connection with the Divine.’’ The connection,
she thought, separated ‘‘living atoms one from another with an energy
that doesn’t violate, but simply and gently slips through the physical, much as
a hand slips gently, without violation, through liquid.’’ Humans were all ‘‘part
of God,’’ and within the ‘‘profound realization’’ of the ‘‘God within,’’ they could
‘‘trust the loving and well-ordered magic’’ of who they were ‘‘meant to be.’’16 So
the New Age, for MacLaine and many other believer-practitioners, was about
healing false beliefs and getting out of their own way to allow changes in consciousness
to change the physical order. If the message seemed distinctly similar
to New Thought (even Christian Science) and to a more diffused rendition in
positive thinking, it was: The metaphysical ballast supplied by older metaphysicians
shaped the New Age pragmatically. Alternative healing became the order
of the New Age day, even as the psychology of Carl Jung and the human potential
movement being celebrated at Esalen Institute helped to shape it. So there
Coda: The New New Age 505
was energy and there was healing; there was the power of mind and the correspondence
between body-self, Higher Self, nature, universe, and God.
All the pieces of American metaphysical history came together in the New
Age—Transcendentalism and spiritualism, mesmerism and Swedenborgianism,
Christian Science and New Thought, Theosophy and its ubiquitous spin-offs,
and especially metaphysical Asia. Quantum physics provided a horizon of discourse
that could enable MacLaine and others to engage in mystical-scientific
speculation about spiritual healing and psychic surgery. Parapsychology pushed
the scientific argot toward the paranormal. Astrology—with its millennial expectation
of the dawning age of Aquarius—charted quasi-scientific star maps to
explain, according to principles of correspondence, the relationships between
personality, destiny, and an individual’s place in the universal scheme. Astrological
dispensationalism, paralleling the Protestant fundamentalist version, told of
coming ages, or dispensations, and their character and consequences.17
Meanwhile, as the example of Rolling Thunder already suggests, Native American
shamans and teachers were hardly shy about sharing spiritual goods with
white takers. The Chippewa Sun Bear, to the consternation of more traditionalist
Indians as well as (later) Native American academics, gave the store away when
he founded the (white) Bear Tribe Medicine Society and regularly sponsored
Medicine Wheel gatherings from 1966. New Age people appropriated Native
American rituals with enthusiasm, holding sweats, using rattles and drums, wearing
feathers, beads, and gemstones in ceremonial ways, and adopting sacred-pipe
ceremonies as well. From Indians they learned to make pilgrimages to sacred
sites, often native ones, and they also learned to engage in mental journeying on
a shamanic model. Imitating the Native America (and the Asia) of their imagining,
they revered nature and exalted ecology. Earth became a living being, and
environmental concerns—alongside other concerns for peace and a harmonious
and holistic feminism—began to shape a social ethic.
The term ‘‘New Age’’—now loosened from its ties to Theosophy, UFOs, contactees,
and even channels and crystals—became a catch-all designation for an
alternative collection of beliefs and behaviors. No one participant in the movement
necessarily endorsed and supported all of them—or even knew about them
all. Andrew Jackson Davis’s mid-nineteenth-century distinction between a philosophical,
or speculative, form of spiritualism (his own harmonial philosophy) and
a phenomenal one (séances and their enthusiasts) became strikingly appropriate
for this mature New Age. A new generation of metaphysical thinkers emerged
with pragmatic agendas for everything from mystical practice to environmental
needs, from pursuit of the divine feminine to international peace, and from
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promoting true science and holistic health to spiritual and psychological transformation.
To take a leading example, New Age teacher-prophet Ken Wilber,
with strong interests in the relationship between science and spirituality, rose to
prominence when he placed transpersonal psychology on a New Age intellectual
map in his 1977 Spectrum of Consciousness. Working in a field that came
to be called ‘‘noetic studies’’ (that is, studies of consciousness), Wilber produced
book after book—which all seemed one book. From one point of view, he was
teaching, for a new time, mid-twentieth-century perennialism. From another,
he was supplying it with a distinctive psycho-physical tilt in an advance portrait
of the enlightened body-self. In Spectrum of Consciousness, for instance, he invoked
dualistic and nondualistic modes of thinking with the expected conclusion.
It was ‘‘of the utmost significance,’’ Wilbur wrote, ‘‘that, of the vast number
of scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians that have fully and
deeply understood these two modes of knowing, their unmistakable and unanimous
conclusion is that the non-dual mode alone is capable of giving . . . ‘knowledge
of Reality.’’’ He had already discovered Asian sources, and he blended them
facilely with Western ones to teach the supreme virtue of the ‘‘Now-moment.’’
For Wilber, it was ‘‘in this moment, right now, we are . . . always arriving at Mind,
we are always arriving at what is now, whether that be suffering, seeking, pain,
joy, or simple confusion.’’ The journey did not ‘‘start Now,’’ but instead it ended
‘‘Now, with whatever state of consciousness is present at this moment.’’ ‘‘That,’’
Wilber flatly declared, was ‘‘the mystical state, and that we are.’’ He preached (for
it was such) a ‘‘future-less Present,’’ in which what came was ‘‘mortification, this
Great Death, this total dying to the future by seeing Now-only.’’ Paradoxically,
with no future in sight what was missing, too, was the past; and with the absence
of both came ‘‘no beginning in time’’ and ‘‘no end in time.’’ Instead, traveling
from the mystical horizon came an ‘‘awakening’’ to ‘‘that which is Unborn, and
therefore to that which is Undying.’’18
The problem, as Wilber saw it, was that humans erected for themselves a
‘‘boundary,’’ and so they could not reach the unitive state that represented the
truest expansion into personal growth. Once ‘‘primal resistance’’ began to ‘‘dissolve,’’
a person’s ‘‘separate self’’ dissolved with it. In teachings that drew copiously
on an approved short list of Asian metaphysical teachers—Ramana Maharshi,
Chögyam Trungpa, Tarthang Tulku, Suzuki Roshi, and Jiddu Krishnamurti, for
example—Wilber pushed for the ‘‘no-boundary’’ state. ‘‘As you begin to see that
everything you do is a resistance, you start to see that even your feeling of being
a separate self ‘in here’ is also nothing but a resistance. . . . But as this becomes
obvious, there are no longer two different feelings here, no longer an experiencer
on the one hand having an experience on the other hand, but only one, single,
Coda: The New New Age 507
all-pervasive feeling—the feeling of resistance. . . . The feeling of self condenses
into the feeling of resistance, and both dissolve.’’19
This New Age mysticism, to be sure, seems like classic teaching, rewritten
(and often not elegantly) with the discourse community of contemporary alternative
science in mind, and rewritten as well with the body-self and its transpersonal
psychology in mind. Apparently, too, some contemporary religious
professionals did not object. Jesuit David Toolan’s ‘‘journey into New Age consciousness,’’
for instance, opened with the baths at Esalen (the enlightened
body-self, with clothing an anomaly) and progressed to India. It returned west to
a rediscovered account of Genesis, in which new physics—with its ‘‘tantric
thermodynamics’’—brought order through fluctuation, and it traveled the path
of meditation in ways that climaxed in Jean Houston’s ritual theater. To prime
the ‘‘neural system’’ and the ‘‘kinesthetic body’’ became keys to transpersonal
reality and a new natural theology. ‘‘You have to travel far and hear the meaning
of the journey from a stranger,’’ Toolan wrote, ‘‘perhaps from a[n] Israeli physiotherapist,
a clairvoyant Californian, a Sufi clown, or a reincarnate Tibetan wise
man. Spirit is like the wind; you never know where it’s coming from or when.’’
Toolan, as a Jesuit, freely acknowledged the tension with Catholicism that his
pilgrimage brought. He was ‘‘grateful for the internal resistance’’ that his Catholicism
gave to ‘‘Neoplatonism,’’ grateful that it saved him from ‘‘quick-fix transcendence
and gnostic escapes.’’ Still, he had made the journey, and using the
language of theoretical physicist David Bohm on the implicate order and the
hologram for support, Toolan found the whole in the part and the part in his
body. ‘‘If this is true, the body is silent metaphor, habitation of soul, a reservoir
of prophetic dreams, our depth probe into the abyss of God’s will.’’20
From a more academic perspective, process theologian and ethicist David Ray
Griffin’s explorations of religion, science, and postmodernity have invoked New
Age teaching without attaching a New Age label. Griffin sought a reenchanted
science and a reenchantment of the world—a return to a sense of subjectivity,
experience, and feeling within nature—and he argued that reenchanted science
was different from ‘‘sacred’’ science, immune to criticism. He found the ingredients
for the reenchantment in a certain reading of quantum physics, one that
was not its ‘‘dominant interpretation . . . limited to rules of calculation to predict
the content of observations.’’ Nor was Griffin happy with the usual New Age
glide from quantum physics to mysticism. Perhaps surprisingly, though, to support
his more nuanced account, Griffin turned to Ken Wilber, citing Wilber’s
argument that quantum physics promoted mysticism but did so indirectly. ‘‘As
these physicists became aware that physical theory gave them only shadows and
symbols of reality, rather than reality itself, they became freed from the material-
508 Coda: The New New Age
istic worldview and hence open to taking their own conscious experience as real
and revelatory.’’ Griffin likewise cited J. E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis for their
‘‘Gaia hypothesis’’ of the earth as a living organism, carefully separating himself
from overreadings of the same. He went on to point to David Bohm and his view
that ‘‘every natural unit, as an act of enfoldment, in some sense enfolds the activity
of the universe as a whole within it,’’ with the universe ‘‘as an active whole’’
that could be seen as ‘‘divine.’’ Bohm, Griffin thought, was ‘‘suggesting that postmodern
science, in speaking of the implicate order, would include reference to
divine activity.’’21
These kinds of issues, raised by elites and intellectuals, seem a far cry from
ordinary practice among those who, in one way or another, thought of themselves
as New Age. Phenomenal practice in the New Age was always—as we have
seen for metaphysical religion in general—practice grounded in ordinary procedures
and sacred technologies that, in the large sense, could be called magical.
As this narrative has elsewhere suggested, magic means a noncausative transformation
of a practitioner’s self and environment in the direction of a good desired.
It is accomplished either through material means (the cultivation of active
imagination through symbolism, ritual, and alternative forms of energy work) or
purely mentalist operations (meditation and directed mental processes, such as
New Thought affirmations and denials). In the pursuit of such magic, New Age
metaphysicians combined freely from many sources to find the techniques and
practices that worked for them. With healing so prominent, for example, energy
healing practices such as Reiki flourished. Here, in a Japanese initiatory form of
palm healing, a practitioner through a series of ‘‘attunements’’ felt himself or herself
to be a conduit for universal life-force energy directed to a client. Or there
was Therapeutic Touch, publicized by Dolores Krieger from ideas and practices
supplied by Theosophist Dora Kunz. Tellingly, Kunz—who claimed perception
of subtle energies from childhood—would become president of the Theosophical
Society in America (the Blavatsky-Olcott society) from 1975 to 1987, and she
traced her lineage to British Theosophist Charles W. Leadbeater, with whom
she studied in Australia. By contrast, Krieger, the publicist, was a registered nurse
with a Ph.D. She began to teach Kunz’s method at New York University, meanwhile
also lecturing widely at other American and Canadian universities and professional
organizations. Almost missionary in her effort, she systematized what
she had learned for general consumption, using radio and television to effect,
giving workshops, publishing essays, and, especially, publishing her book The
Therapeutic Touch. Here she wrote familiarly of South Asian prana, teaching that
people in good health had an excess of the same and that they could transfer it
to another less blessed. The process of transfer, she declared, did not usually de-
Coda: The New New Age 509
plete the giver because the healer was ‘‘in constant energy flux,’’ in a ‘‘continued
constant flow.’’ It was clear, too, that the ‘‘touch’’ was a touch of energy and that
no physical contact was involved. The healer’s hands stood several inches away
from the client; auras and chakras—carefully disguised for in-hospital use and
consumption—were the covert order of the day.22
Various forms of New Age shamanism cultivated active imagination in other
venues, and so did an array of related practices, such as the appropriation by
some of the Chinese art of placement—furniture, accoutrements, and similar
objects—in a person’s local environment. Feng shui practices changed energy,
practitioners and their clients said, and rendered a disagreeable environment
into a harmonious one. Everywhere, seemingly, the enlightened body-self found
new niches that required transformation; everywhere the New Age world got upended
and reconstructed. Still, the time for relative quiet came in the work of
meditation. Even here, though, the preference for agency encouraged meditative
techniques that promoted energy shifts and augmentations. Kundalini and
microcosmic orbits were congenial; so was visualization in extensive formats that
made real a desired good. Nor were practices so disorganized as at first they might
seem. The combinative leanings of those who pursued the New Age, their valorization
of change, and their fear of the lackluster imprisonment of institutions
—none of these would lend themselves to the creation of strong organizations.
Instead, as this narrative has already noticed, more fluid forms of community
available through networks and networking predominated. Here, as sociologist
Paul Heelas has observed, it is best to notice different levels of commitment.
Individuals could express strong affiliation, working on the inside as New Age
service providers; or they could be strong followers—people who showed up at
a series of workshops, participated regularly in one or another small group, or
the like. Or, finally—in a variation of the now-proverbial ‘‘nightstand Buddhists,’’
they could be ‘‘nightstand’’ New Age people, reading occasional books, attending
infrequent lectures or even conferences.23
Who were these New Age people? Sociological and demographic clues have
been sketchy and general, but there is enough, for the late twentieth century, to
suggest a pattern. Those who have identified with the movement are often unaware
of their connections to a metaphysical path but sometimes not. Either way,
they share a series of characteristics with earlier American metaphysical religionists
from the Anglo-American mainstream. They have been mostly white, more
female than male, often middle-aged, sometimes young, and frequently urban
dwellers. Although media have often overstressed their wealth by focusing on
expensive weekend workshops and seminars and the entrepreneurial goods and
services that movement people provide, the New Age population has seemed
510 Coda: The New New Age
to be middle class and upwardly mobile, better educated than average, and not
especially alienated from society. Still, a strong working-class component of the
New Age cannot be written off, even if it is quieter and less noticeable. In terms
of the formal religious backgrounds from which New Age people have come,
evidence again is less than totally persuasive, but it does suggest representative
participation by mainstream American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Sometimes
the protestations of Jewish rabbis seem to point to a New Age overinhabited
by Jews, but the protests can be read as more a function of Jewish fears of disappearance
than of demographic realities. Similarly, sometimes the mystically
oriented practices of the New Age seem to attract more than an even share of
Catholics—perhaps caught between their sacramentalism, which honors materiality,
and their sexual ethic, which fears and reproves it. (Jesuit David Toolan’s
narrative hints at this, and a generation of Catholic New Age nuns also suggests
the same.) But again, there are no real demographics to support the characterization.24
Still more, with the fine line that can be drawn between entrepreneurship
and evangelization—and with the self-help enthusiasm evident in many evangelical
circles—it can be argued that Protestant evangelicals provide a backbone
to the New Age. Again, the evidence is largely impressionistic, and the contrary
arguments for Jews and Catholics point to the presence of sizable representation
from all three traditions.
Given the fluid profile of ‘‘members’’ in a changing network of believers and
practitioners, can anything at all be said about numbers? Criteria for ‘‘membership’’
have been clearly disputable, and data to support any given set of criteria
seem often as dubious. In 1993, for example, Barry Kosmin and Seymour Lachman
announced confidently that twenty thousand Americans could be counted
in the New Age. On the basis of impressionistic evidence alone, that estimate
seems untenably low. At the other end of the spectrum, literary critic Harold
Bloom—on the basis of his decidedly nonsociological survey of the field—has argued
that ‘‘Gnosticism’’ (that is, metaphysics) has been the real religion of Americans.
And, in fact, even if survey data seriously delimit the all-expansiveness of a
Bloom, it can still yield very large numbers of New Age sympathizers. Consider,
for example, data suggesting that perhaps 25 percent of Americans accepted reincarnation
beliefs in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, if we want to return to the camp
of the narrow, we can limit membership to people who have subscribed to major
New Age periodicals, listed themselves in movement directories, or signed up as
participants in New Age–identified events such as the Whole Life Expos held
in a series of cities as annual gatherings and emporia. Or, as another strategy,
we can sweep most of the unchurched into a catch-all New Age designation—
with roughly 7 percent of the populace in the category by the mid-1980s, and
Coda: The New New Age 511
among baby boomers and those younger noticeably more. To be safe, we could
add some crossover members from traditional religions.25
None of these strategies has seemed entirely persuasive, and sociological estimates
themselves have moved from the Kosmin-Lachman twenty thousand to
a high of sixty million believer-practitioners for the United States alone. In this
context, the most sophisticated guess for the American situation may have come
from British sociologist Paul Heelas, with his tripartite reading of levels of New
Age involvement—‘‘fully-engaged,’’ ‘‘serious part-timer,’’ and ‘‘casual part-timer.’’
On the basis of all three, Heelas was willing to offer his view in the mid-1990s.
‘‘Thinking of the USA,’’ he wrote, it was ‘‘safe to say that well in excess of 10 million
people currently have some contact with what is on supply. But we neither
know the total figure, nor the numbers—over the 10 million figure—for whom
the contact is, to varying degrees, significant.’’26
Still, with the thorough combinativeness of New Age aficionados—with the
readiness with which all universalist metaphysical beliefs expand and incorporate
others—the attempt to segregate a New Age community can never fully
persuade. New Age beliefs, by definition, merge into general American beliefs
and values, and the generalization is especially cogent for the philosophical side
of the movement. More than that, signs of the decline of an ebullient New Age
movement, by the early twenty-first century, are marked. The millennium happened,
and it had not happened. The new world of the New Age was still clearly
encased in the old. New Age people themselves declared the movement to be
over, and so did some scholars. On the basis of media coverage alone, it is clear
that the story has not been so compelling as it had been two decades earlier.
Decline, however, is hardly the end. From the first bursts of upper-case enthusiasm
for the New Age, some in the metaphysical community—with all the
requisite beliefs and practices—resisted the designation. Indeed, sometimes it
seemed that those who accepted the New Age label functioned as counterparts
to self-styled fundamentalists among conservative Protestant evangelicals: Not
everybody whom scholars would call fundamentalists called themselves that,
and those who did had their reasons. From a far different perspective, the distinct
repertoire of beliefs and practices that acquired the New Age label tumbled over
boundaries—as had the beliefs and practices of an earlier New Thought—to become
more or less public property. In the early twenty-first century, arguably, a
renewed and far more encompassing metaphysical spirituality was abroad in the
land.
For an example of resistance to New Age characterization, consider the neopagan
community of the late twentieth century. In his huge and literature-based
study of New Age religion, Dutch scholar Wouter J. Hanegraaff sets aside an
512 Coda: The New New Age
entire chapter to discuss the phenomenon of neopaganism and its status as a
form of magic. He sees neopaganism as one of the major trends in New Age religion—channeling,
healing, and New Age science being others—and he clearly
has grounds for the argument. In his reading, neopagan magic is ‘‘different from
traditional magic’’ because the magical worldview is ‘‘purposely adopted as a reaction
to the ‘disenchanted’ world of modern western society.’’ Hanegraaff cites
major historical markers for any discussion of American and English neopaganism—the
presence of Wicca, its foundation in 1939 by Britisher Gerald Gardner,
evocations of medieval witch persecutions by Margaret Murray in her WitchCult
in Western Europe, the ritual magic of another Britisher, Aleister Crowley,
‘‘spiritually-oriented feminism’’ resulting in the Goddess movement, and the
like.27
This might all seem unexceptional, save that American neopagans have themselves
resisted New Age categorization. With comments on neopagans’ rather extensive
cultural borrowing, for instance, religious studies scholar Sarah M. Pike
has alluded to the general neopagan disdain for New Age people as ‘‘inauthentic.’’
Admitting that neopagans find it hard to distinguish themselves from the
New Age community, she observes that clearly, for neopagans, the boundary is
‘‘very significant’’ because people persist in ‘‘making the attempt’’ to separate the
two. One neopagan whom Pike quotes writes that the New Age is ‘‘a very shallow
approach to everything, taken without any real context or understanding
of anything. It also seems to have been stripped of anything that might really
challenge people or make them uncomfortable—yes, you too can achieve Total
Enlightenment in about an Hour!’’ New Agers are ‘‘superficial’’ and pursue
‘‘worry-free knowledge.’’ Unlike pagans who attend festivals to draw closer to the
natural world, New Age people ‘‘hypocritically’’ avoid ‘‘any real contact.’’ Neopagans
feel that those who identify as New Age do not like the community of
witches any better than the witches like New Agers. Moreover, neopagans complain
of New Age financial exploitation. All of this, of course, hardly adds up to a
clear and analytically cogent set of distinctions, and it is not material that is easily
falsifiable. Even more, a set of shared beliefs and practices can be identified, as
Pike notes. Both pagans and New Age people, she observes, share ‘‘beliefs and
practices that many conservative Christians find dangerous: visualization, sacralization
of nature, ‘occult’ techniques such as divination and astrology, and interest
in American Indian and other non-European religions.’’28 Still, the refusal to
connect with the New Age agenda continues to point to an abiding sense of separation
and distance in the self-perception of pagans. The simple fact that one can
distinguish semantically—the New Age, the neopagan—itself speaks volumes.
Yet if neopagans were issuing a call to separation from New Age metaphysi-
Coda: The New New Age 513
cians, even as they read their manifestos a counter-process was occurring. Against
the backdrop of the new millennium, the old millennialism of the late-twentiethcentury
New Age was coming apart. The early and lower-case new age had come
largely out of theosophical splinter groups of Baileyite and i am provenance and
later. It had transformed ascended masters into space-age extraterrestrial visitors
of superior wisdom and had reinvented spirit communication as entity channeling
in a technological new-science milieu with the energy of light and crystals
carrying multiple significations. The mature New Age, with its upper-case
authority and media blitzes, had folded space commander-teachers, channels,
and crystals under a larger, looser canopy of holistic healing. It had included
among its blessings not only physical, emotional, and spiritual health but also
pleasure and prosperity, magic and metaphysics. And it was fed more evenhandedly
by New Thought and Theosophy, and also by Transcendentalism, quantum
physics, human-potential discourses that opened to transpersonal psychology
and parapsychology, environmentalism and Native Americana, astrology, and
very much more. Its habit of combination only grew stronger as, like a vast cultural
sponge, it absorbed whatever spiritual moisture was available. The postmillennial
New Age, however, found the moisture disintegrating the medium. New
Age became old age, the relic of a slightly unfashionable past—still around to be
sure but beginning to seem a little too musty and precious. Like Ken Wilber’s
‘‘now,’’ the media-promoted New Age was dying to its own past and to a future.
The slow and continuing death of the New Age, however, was the beginning
of its rise and future. Just as Theosophy and New Thought, in the early twentieth
century, had dissolved into more and more diffuse renderings, just as their
spin-offs and ideational contents spread outside their cultural containers into
America at large, the New Age began to do the same. Now it was ‘‘new spirituality’’—a
new spirituality that went its way innocuously and underlabeled. Meditation
became a property that even mainstream churches promoted. Environmentalism
brought sacred sensibilities into the offices of lobbyists. Alternative
healing, to the consternation of mainstream medical professionals, became a majority
practice alongside the work of credentialed physicians. Psychics found their
niches as service professionals, helping police, for example, to identify criminals.
Hypnotherapists helped people to lose weight, curb their smoking, cut their
alcoholism or their drug habit, and succeed in testing situations in which previously
they had been frozen. Testimonies to the creative power of thought were
everywhere, and motivational speakers made them their paycheck. Life coaches
became fashionable. Indian-style jewelry and crystals seemed mostly unremarkable.
Even past lives could provide the stuff of accepted party conversations, while
references to a person’s karma did not raise eyebrows. Chakras functioned as part
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of a new spiritual vocabulary. The New Age was stepping aside for a new and
exoteric spiritual America.
In this new spiritual America, metaphysical religiosity—found already in its
proto form among the mix of peoples in North America in the early seventeenth
century—was showing itself the resilient, chameleonlike, and pervasive reality
that it was. By refusing to be separated out into a set of organizations or discrete
identities, by disengaging its own discourse community in favor of generalization,
metaphysical religion made itself a lingua franca that could be shared, even
for those who self-consciously identified with one or another organized religious
body. Metaphysicians could exist both in and outside Christianity, or Judaism,
or other inherited traditions. Still further, the lingua franca did promote certain
semantic choices, and it did provide a vocabulary of engagement that marked its
late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century time. Metaphysical religiosity—in the
declining New Age and in the new spirituality that was succeeding it—was different
from the metaphysical religion of a century previous. The old teaching of correspondence
was there, and so was the discourse of the power of mind—whether
God’s or a person’s own. A disguised Hermeticism still prevailed. But the mind
had manifestly acquired a body, and the body refused to stay out of metaphysical
discourse. It was the enlightened body-self that twenty-first-century metaphysicians
and their immediate forebears hailed. More than that, it was an enlightened
body-self in seemingly perpetual need of energy. Was the world racing too
fast? Were there too many tasks to be done? Was there not enough time or space
for contemplation? Whatever the spiritual and practical dilemmas, the sense of
exhaustion and the need to be charged with a divinizing energy were ubiquitous.
New spirituality in America meant energy spirituality, and the energies of mesmerists
and ether vibrations were only preparation for what had transpired.
In its exotericism the new spirituality had also taken the mid-nineteenthcentury
spiritualist impulse for mass marketing and run with it in new and more
sophisticated ways. As the media grew in a computer-age technological universe,
so did the mystical capacity for exotericism keep pace. Metaphysicians had come
out of their closets to make headline news, and clearly they were loving it. Secrets
had gone public by a mile or a beer keg, and nobody seemed to mind. In this
atmosphere of public scrutiny and public property, too, the old social agendas of
metaphysicians assumed new cogency. Alice Bailey’s Triangles could function
under the shadow of the United Nations in quiet ways, but—more noticeably—
new-spirituality advocates learned their politics in order to work concretely for
environmentalism, peace, and feminism. They could side with political candidates—Greens,
Natural Law, and even old-fashioned Democrats and Republicans—as
issues and values warranted. Out of the closet meant entry into history,
Coda: The New New Age 515
and metaphysicians—who had always known that there was a social order—by
the twenty-first century knew it more. Their religious history had been a history
of combinative belief and practice, and they unabashedly continued their combinative
ways as they preached behavioral sermons, unawares, on the exchange
meaning of community. Indeed, what befell the New Age was also befalling the
new spirituality. Both combined themselves so habitually and unremarkably that,
as regular fare, they tended to lose themselves and find themselves reinvented.
For the American religious historian, though, the metaphysical habit of combination
provides a large historiographical clue about how to make sense of the
spiritual life of the nation. Seen from the perspective of early-twenty-first-century
metaphysical religion, combinative practices supply an important insight about
what everybody had been doing all along. If consensus historiography needed to
be long gone in the face of the ongoing demise of a central Protestant consensus,
the historiography of pluralism seems also to limp. Americans were neither
purely and simply tolerating one another nor contesting one another for limited
goods, as the standard interpretive tropes of the pluralist historiographical model
suggest.29 Rather, from a religious perspective, they were begging, borrowing,
and stealing from one another, and they were doing it in broad historiographical
daylight with little or no apology. Catholics and Protestants did it, and so did
Jews. When Muslims became new neighbors on the block, they did it as well,
and so did South and East Asians. Native Americans and African Americans had
long since made their appropriations, and the public secret that was now emerging
was that whites had all along borrowed from Indians and from blacks as well.
Americans, in short, were—and had long been—reinventing their spiritual selves
and communities to produce transformed religious worlds. Hence they require a
historiography of connection, one noticing that contact is much of what there is
to tell and that contact demands a new emplotment as a comprehensive American
religious narrative. Religion in the United States, in general, needs to be
noticed for its overlapping between and among cultural worlds.
For metaphysical religiosity itself and its contemporary presence as new spirituality,
its embrace of mental and material magic has pointed one way toward a
reenchantment of the world. If as Jonathan Z. Smith has argued, religion is a process
of human labor—and labor that, in ritual terms, goes on in the struggle with
incongruity—the religious work of magical presence needs to be recognized for
its access to the powers of human imagination and, so, for its theological power.30
Metaphysicians, through the course of American religious history, struggled with
human incongruity—intellectual, emotional, environmental, practical, spiritual.
They felt the pain that others felt and—in their vernacular community—
took a hands-on approach to finding solutions. So they created—stories, more
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sophisticated narratives, theologies. It was labor, indeed—often hard work; and
its results were likewise often uneven. When creations did not function smoothly,
metaphysicians sometimes hyperinvented them, and thus they perpetrated hoax
and fraud. When the creations needed novelty to arrest and attract, metaphysicians
sometimes also hyperinvented those, and the results were absurdities. Even
when they exalted themselves as gods in the making or already made, metaphysicians
still found that they needed to consult and that often the consultations
came as revelations from beings who were higher than their godly selves.
But metaphysicians had gifts for persuasion, and they found ready niches in the
imaginations of their friends and neighbors. Sometimes their work turned out
well, and sometimes it became mightily persuasive. Whether they produced art
or kitsch, however, they did labor at religion outside the box. In their openness
and vulnerability, their failures and successes, a magic still dwells.