Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [123]
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 The Witchcraft Act, dating to the mid-sixteenth century, was finally repealed due to the efforts of English Spiritualists who occasionally found themselves harassed under its strictures.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