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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