Cultism of this demonstrative kind is persistently associated with androgynous young men, half sweet, half surly, who like Adonis are sometimes linked with mother figures. Presley, for example, sank into depression and never fully recovered from his mother’s unexpected death at age forty-six in 1958; after long substance abuse, he died prematurely at age forty-two in 1977. Rock music, even at its most macho, has repeatedly produced pretty, long-haired boys who mesmerize both sexes and who hauntingly resemble ancient sculptures of Antinous, the beautiful, ill-fated youth beloved by the Roman emperor Hadrian. It’s no coincidence that it was Paul McCartney, the “cutest” and most girlish of the Beatles, who inspired a false rumor that swept the world in 1969 that he was dead. Beatles songs and album covers were feverishly scrutinized for clues and coded messages: I myself contributed to this pandemonium by calling a New Haven radio station to identify mortuary lines from King Lear submerged in the climactic cacophony of “I Am the Walrus.” In cultic experience, death is sexy. The hapless McCartney had become Adonis, the dying god of fertility myth who was the epicene prototype for the deified Antinous: after Antinous drowned in the Nile in 130 A.D., the grief-stricken Hadrian had him memorialized in shrines all over the Mediterranean, where ravishing cult statues often showed the pensive youth crowned with the grapes and vines of Dionysus.
The evangelical fervor felt by many heretical young people in the 1960s was powered by rock music, which at that moment was becoming an art form. The big beat came from late-’40s and ’50s African-American rhythm and blues. But the titanic, all-enveloping sound of rock was produced by powerful, new amplification technology that subordinated the mind and activated the body in a way more extreme than anything seen in Western culture since the ancient Roman Bacchanalia. Through the sensory assault of that thunderous music, a whole generation tapped into natural energies, tangible proof of humanity’s link to the cosmos.
“Flower power,” the pacifist Sixties credo, was a sentimentalized, neo-Romantic version of earth cult, which underlay the ancient worship of Dionysus. In the Bacchae, Euripides saw nature’s frightful, destructive side, but that perception was gradually lost over time. Bacchanalia is the Latin term for the Dionysian ritual orgia (root of the English word “orgy”), where celebrants maddened by drink, drugs, and wildly rhythmic music went into ecstasy (ecstasis, “standing outside of”), abandoning or transcending their ordinary selves. Hence the association of Dionysus (called Lusios, the “Liberator”) with theater. The Bacchanalia arrived in southern Italy from Greece in the fifth century B.C. and eventually spread to Rome. Celebrants decked with myrtle and ivy danced to flutes and cymbals through city parks and woods in festivities that became notorious for open sexual promiscuity and opportunistic crime. After repeated outbreaks following the Second Punic War, the Bacchanalia were declared a threat to public order and officially suppressed by the Roman Senate in 186 B.C. But their influence persisted, as attested by Dionysian designs on sarcophagi and the walls of private villas. In the ruins of Pompeii, the hedonistic resort destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D., there is evidence that the Bacchanalia had evolved into private sex clubs. This process of secularization, where sex divorced from cosmology becomes permissively recreational, can also be seen in the transition from the hippie Sixties to the manic Seventies and early Eighties: sex detached from Romantic nature cult withdrew to glitzy urban discos, bathhouses, and sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat.
3. NEW MESSIAHS AND CULTURAL POLARIZATION
What we think of as the 1960s was really concentrated into the half-dozen years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Cultural changes exploded and burnt themselves out with tremendous speed. The religious impulse of the Sixties has been obscured by a series of scandals that began mid-decade and spilled into the 1970s—communes that failed, charismatic leaders who turned psychotic, cults that ended in crime and murder. The sensational chain of events began with the dismissal in 1963 of Timothy Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert from psychology lectureships at Harvard for experimenting with LSD on student volunteers. This episode first brought LSD to public attention. An Irish Catholic turned self-described prophet, Leary envisioned a world network of “psychedelic churches” whose Vatican would be his League for Spiritual Discovery (acronym: LSD), headquartered in Millbrook, New York, until it was closed after a 1966 police raid led by Dutchess County assistant prosecutor G. Gordon Liddy. Though registered as a religious institution, the League was noted for its sex parties—reportedly a frequent attraction of Leary’s Harvard offices as well.
The optimistic Sixties saga degenerated into horrifying incidents of group psychology gone wrong. Most notorious is the case of Charles Manson, a drifter who became a fixture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district during its famous 1967 “Summer of Love” and who gathered a group of fanatical devotees, hippie girls who thought he was both Jesus Christ and the devil. Though barely 5'2" tall, Manson had hypnotic powers as a cult leader. He became patriarch of the “Family,” a commune on a ranch near Los Angeles where heavy use of a cornucopia of drugs was promoted and ritualistic group sex practiced. A student of the Bible, Manson believed that the Book of Revelation prophesied the Beatles: modern pop culture, in other words, had an apocalyptic religious meaning. In August 1969, Manson dispatched a hit squad to slaughter seven people in two nights, including the actress Sharon Tate, living in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills. The details still shock: in jailhouse confessions, Manson’s girls boasted of the “sexual release” they felt in their Maenadic frenzy as they plunged their knives into their victims. Tate, eight months pregnant, was stabbed sixteen times and a male companion fifty-one times.
By the 1970s, cults seemed increasingly psychopathic. Radical political cells like the bomb-making Weathermen or the Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974 and whose emblem was a talismanic seven-headed cobra, began to merge in popular perception with nominally religious groups like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, whose mostly black congregation was drawn from San Francisco at the height of the hippie era. Jones was a social worker and political activist who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus, Buddha, Akhenaten, and Lenin and who eventually emigrated with his followers to a commune called Jonestown in the Guyana jungle. After a shootout that killed a visiting U.S. congressman in 1978, Jones ordered mass suicide by cyanide-laced punch: 914 people were found dead, including 280 children.
In the 1990s, interest in the swinging Sixties revived among curious young people at the same time as an acrimonious debate about the Sixties legacy intensified with the election of the first baby-boom president, Bill Clinton. Thus, a coincidental upsurge of cult incidents also triggered memories of the Manson era. In 1993, a Christian commune of Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, was destroyed by fire, with the loss of eighty-one lives, after a four-month siege by agencies of the federal government. The Davidians were a branch of Seventh-Day Adventists with roots in the 1930s. Their leader, David Koresh, called himself “Yahweh” and kept a harem. In 1997, thirty-nine bodies, all wearing Nike sneakers and draped in purple shrouds, were found in a house near San Diego, California. An obscure cult led by Marshall Applewhite, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had committed mass suicide in the expectation of ascent to heaven, signaled by the Hale-Bopp comet. The cult followed a strict code of celibacy: Applewhite and seven other men had been surgically castrated to avoid homosexual temptation.
These sensational cases further distorted and distanced the religious dimension of the Sixties. Though there are cults abroad—the Armageddon-style Solar Temple that resulted in fifty-three suicides in Switzerland in 1994 or the Aum Shinrikyo group who released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing twelve and injuring 5,000—it is primarily in American culture that the Sixties drama of idealism and disillusion has been played out. The Sixties lost credibility through their own manifest excesses, which produced the counterreaction of Christian fundament
alism. The American evangelical and pentecostal movements, already stirring again in the early 1960s, gained great momentum. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House on a law-and-order platform; by 1976, a “born-again” Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter, was elected president.
The Sixties were the breeding ground for the depressingly formulaic political and cultural pattern of the last thirty-five years—a rigid polarization of liberals and conservatives, with each group striking predictable postures and mouthing sanctimonious platitudes. Gradations of political thought have been lost. One reason is that liberals have shown continual disrespect for religion, thereby allowing conservatives to take the high road and claim to be God’s agents in defending traditional values. Liberals have forgotten the religious ferment on the Left in the Sixties, so that progressive politics has too often become a sterile instrument of government manipulation, as if social-welfare agencies and federal programs could bring salvation. Memories of the Sixties have been censored out of embarrassment, since the flakiest of Sixties happenings seemed to delegitimize the period’s political ideals.
On the other hand, it could be argued that there are traces of Sixties religiosity in the liberalism of recent decades. An obvious example is the Arcadian matriarchal myth of “the Goddess” that emerged in feminism and lesbian separatism in the 1970s and still flourishes in innumerable books still in print. A second example is the puritanical feminist ideology typified in the 1980s by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who allied with far Right Christians in an anti-pornography crusade that threatened First Amendment liberties. With its ironclad dogma and inquisitional style, the “political correctness” of the 1980s should be regarded as a cult that brainwashed even sophisticated journalists until their deprogramming in the pro-sex 1990s. A third example is post-structuralism, which has infested American humanities departments since the late 1970s: the uncritical academic adulation of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault is an insular and self-referential cult that treats pointlessly cryptic texts as Holy Writ.
Religion has always been central to American identity: affiliation with or flight from family faith remains a primary term of our self-description. America, of course, began in religious dissidence: many early Northeastern colonists, such as the Pilgrims, were seventeenth-century Separatists who had seceded from the Church of England. Psychic repressions perhaps produced by Protestant rationalism and intolerance of dissent among the Massachusetts Puritans erupted in the Salem witch-trials (1692), whose lurid imagery of sex and demonism oddly resembles that of modern popular culture. The compulsive cycle of sexual license and puritan backlash remains a deep-seated pattern in American culture.
The 1960s’ combination of spirituality with progressive politics was prefigured by the reformist world-view of the Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends), who emigrated to America in the seventeenth century after persecution in England. The Quakers rejected materialism, authority, and hierarchy and espoused pacifism, social activism, sexual egalitarianism, and liberty of conscience. The Shakers (a slang term that described their ecstatic transports) were English Quakers who emigrated to America for religious freedom in the late eighteenth century. Nineteenth-century Shaker communities were known for their code of celibacy and communal property as well as their plain style of furniture and crafts that would influence minimalist modern design.
The Mennonites, another sect in search of religious freedom, were Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists who fled to Germany and then to America in the late seventeenth century. Their most conservative branch, the Amish, still live in rural central Pennsylvania and reject electricity, automobiles, and contemporary clothing. The most successful of America’s nonconformist sects, Mormonism (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), was founded by a self-proclaimed prophet, Joseph Smith, in upstate New York in 1830 and eventually found refuge in Utah. (The Mormons clashed with the federal government in 1852 when they adopted the Old Testament practice of polygamy, later renounced.) There were many, short-lived utopian communities in the nineteenth century, such as Brook Farm (1841–47) and the “new Eden” of Fruitlands (1843–44), both established by Transcendentalists in Massachusetts. In Central New York, the Oneida Community (1848–81) were Christian Perfectionists who advocated communal property and open marriage.
Hence the religious dissidence and secessionist tendencies of the 1960s were simply a new version of a long American tradition. The decade’s politics loom large partly because demonstrations, unlike inner journeys, were photographable and indeed often staged for the camera. Today’s young people learn about the Sixties through a welter of video clips of JFK’s limousine in Dallas, Vietnamese firefights, and hippies draped in buckskin and love beads. Furthermore, the most fervent of the decade’s spiritual questers followed Timothy Leary’s advice to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and removed themselves from career tracks and institutions, which they felt were too corrupt to reform. The testimony of those radical explorers of inner space has largely been lost: they ruined their minds and bodies by overrelying on drugs as a shortcut to religious illumination.
The absence of those Sixties seekers from the arena of general cultural criticism can be seen in the series of unresolved controversies in the last two decades over the issue of blasphemy in art. With the triumph of avant-garde modernism by the mid-twentieth century, few ambitious young artists would dare to show religious work. Though museum collections are rich with religious masterpieces from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, major American museums and urban art galleries ignore contemporary religious art—thus ensuring, thanks to the absence of strong practitioners, that it remains at the level of kitsch. And the art world itself has suffered: with deeper themes excised, it slid into a shallow, jokey postmodernism that reduced art to ideology and treated art works as vehicles of approved social messages.
By the 1980s, during the conservative administrations of Ronald Reagan, an artist’s path to instant success was to satirize or profane Christian iconography. Warfare erupted in 1989 over Piss Christ, a misty photograph by the American Andres Serrano of a wood and plastic crucifix submerged in a Plexiglas tank of his own urine, and then a decade later over a 1996 collage of the Virgin Mary by the British-Nigerian Chris Ofili, who adorned the Madonna with a breast of elephant dung and ringed her with pasted-on photos of female genitalia clipped from pornographic magazines. The Ofili painting made hardly a ripple in London but caused an explosion in the U.S. in 1999 when it was exhibited, with a deplorable lack of basic curatorial support, by the Brooklyn Museum. The uproar in all such cases was fomented by grandstanding politicians with agendas of their own: New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, outrageously moved to cut off the Brooklyn Museum’s public funding. Nevertheless, the ultimate responsibility for this continuing rancor rests with the arts community, who are fixed in an elitist mind-set that automatically defines religion as reactionary and unenlightened. Federal funding of the arts, already minuscule in the U.S., has been even further diminished because of the needlessly offensive way that religion has been treated in such incidents.
This cultural stalemate was aggravated, I contend, by the disappearance of voices from the Sixties religious revolution. Even counterculture agnostics had respected the cosmic expansiveness of religious vision. There was also widespread ecumenical interest at the time in harmonizing world religions. The primary guide in this new syncretism was Carl Jung, who was the son of a Protestant minister and who began to study Asian thought in depth after his break with Freud in 1913. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious was partly derived from the Hindu concept of samskaras, the residue of past lifetimes. His interdisciplinary interpretation of culture was also influenced by Sir James George Frazer’s multi-volumed work of classical anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890–1915). Jung revealed the poetry and philosophy in the rituals and iconography of world religions. But Jungian thought had little impact on post-Sixties Ame
rican academe, thanks to the invasion of European theory. French post-structuralism, the Frankfurt School, and British cultural studies all follow the Marxist line that religion is “the opiate of the masses.” The end result was that, by the Eighties, the claim that great art has a spiritual meaning was no longer taken seriously—and was positively perilous to anyone seeking employment or promotion in the humanities departments of major American universities.
4. TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ASIAN RELIGION
That the spiritual awakening of the 1960s belonged to a long series of religious revivals in America was argued by William G. McLoughlin in his splendid 1978 book, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. McLoughlin’s point was taken up again by Robert S. Ellwood in The Sixties Spiritual Awakening (1994), but general discussion of the Sixties remains unchanged. The resistance of received opinion is too strong: the Right refuses to acknowledge anything positive in the Sixties legacy, while the Left rejects religion wholesale.
In the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, the Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards lit up the Connecticut Valley with his call for a renewal of Calvinist belief. Edwards viewed the ease and slackness of contemporary religious practice as a falling off from the disciplined vigor of New England’s Puritan forefathers. His terrifying 1741 “Fire Sermon” (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) stressed man’s contemptible weakness. But the 1960s’ spiritual awakening, as a program of rebellious liberalization, more resembled Transcendentalism (1835–60), which was influenced by British Romanticism and German idealism. Its leading figure, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had been a Unitarian minister (descended from a line of clerics) but resigned his post because he could not accept the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Eucharist. More generally, Emerson was repelled by the passionlessness and rote formulas of genteel churchgoing. His suave father, a Boston minister, had had the social success that Emerson spurned.
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