Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [126]
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:
Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas.
Belief in a mind–body connection in health.
Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages.
Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality.
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.”
NOTES ON SOURCES
These notes are intended to supplement attributions that appear in individual chapters. When a source is already cited within a chapter, it is not generally repeated here.
Introduction: What Is the Occult?