Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Many ritual practices, such as fasting and marathon drumming, have been used throughout history to induce trance and facilitate divination. In some cases, techniques of flagellation or mutilation resemble those of the modern s&m scene, whose devotees claim to attain a beatific state. Mushrooms eaten by Siberian shamans caused convulsions. Hallucinogens, perhaps mushrooms, were used by worshippers in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Possessed by Apollo, the Delphic oracle went into paroxysms after intoxication by fumes from a cleft in the earth. Fault lines have recently been identified in the bedrock at Delphi by an archaeologist and geologist, who speculate that the priestess was maddened by oozing petrochemical vapors like ethylene (prized by modern glue-sniffers). Drugs were also used in medieval European witchcraft. The iconic Halloween image of the witch flying on a broomstick is another version of the shaman’s visionary journey: ritual staffs were smeared with a greenish hallucinogenic ointment and “ridden,” to autoerotic effect.

  The massive drug taking in the Sixties, promoted by arts leaders and pop stars, redefined the culture and set the stage for the decade’s religious vision. But shamanistic drug taking in tribal societies took place within small communities unified by a coherent belief system. Hippies and college students casually sampling hallucinogens were relative strangers and brought with them a mélange of private turmoils and family psychodramas. What they shared was a yearning humanitarianism—and rock music, which urged the liberation of sexual desire. Sex was portrayed as a revolutionary agent: the establishment, like the walls of Jericho, would fall before eros unbound. This overestimation of sex—the faith that sexual energy freed of social controls is inherently benign—was one reason for the dissipation of the authentic spiritual discoveries made by the Sixties generation. A philosophy of random contacts and “good vibrations” built little that could be passed on to the next generation. At its mildest, the Sixties cult of sex and drugs led to a frivolous dilettantism, youthful high jinks like the Florida spring flings of the Fifties. At its worst, however, there was permanent damage that has never been systematically assessed. In retrospect, it is clear, for example, that the meteoric literary careers of Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey were sadly truncated by drug abuse.

  8. MYSTICISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE

  Social regroupings dramatized the generational change of the Sixties—the mass gatherings of demonstrations, rock festivals, happenings, and love-ins, which began in temperate California. For example, the “Human Be-In,” subtitled “A Gathering of the Tribes,” which was held in 1967 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, attracted 25,000 people. It fused politics with pop music and Asian religiosity: the leading San Francisco acid-rock bands performed; among the speakers (many in Hindu garb) were Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Beat poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  While the political sentiments of young people at such events were progressive, there was often little understanding of the slow process and banal practicalities of legislation, administration, and financial accounting. Repelled by the expanding bureaucracies of the 1950s, the Sixties counterculture was suspicious of hierarchy and embraced a simplistic egalitarianism predicated on quick fixes. The basic principle of the counterculture began as communality but ended as the horde, the most primitive entity in social history. The horde is prey to superstition and panic. It looks for leaders but ruthlessly slays them, then reveres them as ancestral spirits. As a survival response to its own flood of anarchic energies, the horde automatically generates cults and cultic belief.

  The Sixties horde that was a benign extended family of music-loving stargazers at the Woodstock Music Festival in August 1969 turned into a restless, bickering mob four months later at the Altamont Festival, where a murder was committed in front of the stage. The Sixties never completed its search for new structures of social affiliation. Fifties liberalism was integrationist, but Sixties leftism, despite its claims of inclusiveness, disintegrated into the separatism of identity politics, with ghettoizing reclassifications and hypersensitive divisions by race, gender, and sexual orientation. The Sixties code of “do your own thing” encouraged individualism but produced fragmentation. Similarly, the Sixties global religious vision, inspired by fleeting contact with Hinduism and Buddhism, would broaden yet dissipate into the thousand cults of the present New Age movement.

  Cults multiply when institutional religion has lost fervor and become distracted by empty ritual. Early Christianity, for example, began as a rural rebellion against the fossilized Temple bureaucracy in Jerusalem. In 1950s America, the political and professional elite were still heavily WASP. Prosperous congregations were overly concerned with social status at church or at its annex, the country club. Roman Catholicism, searching for social credibility, was steadily purging itself of immigrant working-class ethnicity, a process of genteel self-Protestantization in music, ceremony, and decor that in middle-class parishes is now virtually complete. Many of those attracted to cults in the Sixties and early Seventies were escaping mainline denominations where bland propriety was coupled with sexual repression. It is a striking fact that few young African-Americans joined cults: surely the reason was that the gospel tradition, rooted in the South, invited emotional and physical expressiveness, stimulated by strongly rhythmic music. Dance, universal in pagan cults, had been banned in Christian churches in late antiquity. Its presence in Southern church tradition is a priceless vestige of West African tribal religion.

  The social changes from the Fifties to the Sixties resemble, in compressed and accelerated form, those of the Hellenistic era following the conquests of Alexander the Great. In the three centuries of the Alexandrian age, the old city-states declined, and mercantile metropolises flourished. Hellenism—that is, Athenian high culture—spread throughout the Mediterranean world via a bustling commercial network that marketed Greek art works (often in shoddy knockoffs) as status symbols for the nouveau riche. The Romans had always clothed their provincial Italian mythology in borrowed Greek glory. As it transformed itself from republic to empire, Rome created a massive zone of cultural and religious exchanges extending from the Near East and North Africa to Northern Europe. Cosmopolitanism of this kind is usually produced by vibrant commercialism buttressed by military might. But when politics have overexpanded, there is a loss of psychological security; hence the rise of cults, which reinforce the borders of individual identity.

  No sooner did the U.S. displace Great Britain and France to attain superpower status after World War Two than a surge of mysticism overtook the next American generation. The children born in the postwar baby boom, who would reach college age in the Sixties, had been conceived with a jolt of military energy and were reared in a climate of national confidence. But they intuitively absorbed the hidden conflicts of the Fifties, with its surface tranquility masking the anxieties of an older generation whose life experiences had been economic depression and war. Mainstream Fifties values promoted duty and uniformity, as if to recover the reassurance of known limits. Trade always opens up travel and tourism. The international network of Roman roads (so well-constructed that some are still in use) resembles that of the U.S. interstate highway system, launched in the 1950s as a national defense plan for emergency evacuation. Ironically, improved transportation weakens regionalism and nationalism too. Multiculturalism was spurred by the jet plane, which got Ravi Shankar so quickly to Monterey or the Beatles to India and back.

  What commercialized Hellenism was for the Greco-Roman era, popular culture was for the American Fifties and Sixties. Hellenism was an artistic and philosophic system embedded with pagan mythology. The unifying language of youth culture from the mid-1950s on was new media—TV, teen movies, and rock ’n’ roll, broadcast by a vast number of privately owned AM radio stations (then unparalleled in Europe) and received on portable transistors. America’s pop Hellenism spread to England in the 1950s and bounced back in the Sixties via the British invasion. Popular culture remains a major Americ
an export, so vital and dominant that it has rightly been called cultural imperialism. Television has indeed turned the world, as Marshall McLuhan prophesied, into a global village. However, the general style of American mass media, rooted in nineteenth-century tabloids and early Hollywood, has always been luridly Hellenistic—extravagant, emotional, and sensationalistic, with a predilection for sex and violence.

  Mass media inflamed the mind, while the institutional framework was being rigidified. A major social shift of the postwar period in America was the massive expansion of colleges and universities. In the two decades following the G.I. Bill, which subsidized higher education for veterans, college became an entitlement—still not the case in other nations. By the 1980s, America was in the grip of an overpriced, self-perpetuating education industry whose principal product is brand names and social status rather than humanistic cultivation. Fifties prosperity meant that middle-class young Americans did not have to go to work immediately after high school, as their parents had done. The down side was that adulthood, including marriage, was indefinitely postponed.

  Despite their material comforts and privileges, therefore, middle-class students of the American Sixties were also captives, hostages confined at their hormonal height in institutional frames without the venerable history or in-group identification of tony British schools. Classes became like warehouses, with students stacked in primary-school rows—unlike European universities, where student-teacher contact is either in tutorial or in unmonitored public lectures. Supervision of student behavior on American campuses was intrusive and authoritarian—another feature without parallel in Europe. When I was a freshman in 1964, colleges still acted in loco parentis (in place of the parent). Parietal rules were strictly enforced: at my public university, women students had to sign in at 11:00 PM, while men could roam free. Hence the late Fifties and Sixties were a period of high excitation yet repressive containment.

  The paternalistic regimentation of American colleges was nearly military and thus can be viewed as a vestige of the national mobilization of World War Two. Students were conscripts who often dressed in army-navy surplus, and the new brick dormitories of residential campuses resembled factories or army barracks—all the more ironic since college matriculation brought exemption from the draft. There have been town-gown problems since the goliardic carousing of the Middle Ages, but the frictions of the Sixties were highly politicized. As the Sixties counterculture spread, campuses became tense garrison towns, like the frontier outposts of the Roman legions, who occupied well-appointed camps of precise, geometrical design.

  Roman soldiers were drawn not simply from Italy but from all over the empire. They were stationed far from home for years and decades—in forts in the Sahara, on the Danube, or at Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain. They were notorious devotees of cults, above all that of Mithras, the bull-slayer, with his androgynous face, lanky hair, Phrygian beret, and blousy Persian trousers. Merchants, with their internationalist orientation, were another group who venerated Mithras, a Zoroastrian demigod representing the principle of light and truth. Mithraists, like early Christians, gathered in secrecy in small, cave-like rooms to memorialize a great act of ritual bloodshed. Amid the ruins of Roman camps in England and Germany, cult objects and idols from Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia are still being found. Cultic practice on the Roman frontier, I submit, paralleled that on American campuses in the Sixties, when there was a syncretistic mix of drugs, Asian religion, and pop idolatry.

  Cults arise when the official gods seem weak or fickle or subject to fate themselves. The cult phenomenon in the U.S. escalated after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963—the president who vowed to surpass the Soviet Union’s 1957 Sputnik satellite by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. The baby-boom generation was the first to grow up in the shadow of nuclear war. In elementary school, we were shepherded into dim hallways for civil defense drills requiring us to crouch down and cover our eyes. We were taught to fear not a rain of bombs from manned warplanes but rather a single, slim, strangely omnipotent object that could find its way over thousands of miles to unleash a monstrous fire cloud that would melt the nation in a split second.

  The Sixties generation, in other words, had been injected with a mystical sense of awe and doom about the sky. This is one possible reason for the sudden popularity and ubiquity of astrology, which for most of the twentieth century had been a fringe practice associated with eccentrics in Greenwich Village and West Hollywood. Zodiac and Tarot symbolism permeated the Sixties, from jewelry and album covers to wall posters. “Aquarius,” the signature song of Hair (“An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” 1967) and a hit single for the Fifth Dimension in 1969, assumed public knowledge of astrological lore in its imagery of the moon in the seventh house and Jupiter’s alignment with Mars. With genuine poetry, the song also invoked “Mystic crystal revelation / And the mind’s true liberation.”

  Astrology, for better or worse, was emblematic of the religious vision of the Sixties. It countered the Fifties’ paranoia about nuclear apocalypse with the promise of a humanitarian Aquarian age. Astrology is intertwined with the West’s pagan heritage. Despite unstinting efforts from antiquity, Judeo-Christianity has never succeeded in wiping astrology out. First refined by the Chaldean magi of Babylonia, astrology was widely practiced in the Hellenistic and imperial Roman periods, when elusive fortune was personified as female Tyche—chance or Lady Luck. Different branches of astrology still flourish in India and China. Like the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination widely used in the Sixties, astrology reverently connects man to nature—the link that Judeo-Christianity has always tried to sever. Astrology is not the fatalistic determinism to which its opponents reduce it; on the contrary, it is a study of nature’s rhythms and cycles, to which humanity like the tides is subject.

  This is yet another area where Sixties drugs took their toll. Those most attracted to astrology lost their ability to defend it. Scientists rightly dismissive of superstition refuse to acknowledge that astrology anticipated modern theories about circadian biorhythms or cycles of solar flares whose electromagnetic storms disrupt telecommunications. The science community’s customary approach of derision and debunking has been futile and counterproductive: an immense alternative culture survived the collapse of the Sixties and has steadily spread to this day under the name “New Age”—which discreetly elides its astrological reference to the Age of Aquarius.

  9. THE RISE OF NEW AGE

  The New Age movement began to form in the late 1970s, gained visibility in the 1980s, and became an international commercial success in the 1990s. Because it is unstructured and decentralized, New Age has been underestimated as a force competing with mainline religions. It is a constellation of beliefs loosely drawn from Asian religion, European paganism, and Native American nature-cult. Its ethics can be described as non-judgmental humanism. The one common theme in New Age is cosmic consciousness, which it inherited from the Sixties.

  New Age is a marvel of Alexandrian syncretism. It is often impressionistic and soft-focus, seeking “spirituality” rather than the discipline of orthodox religion. Its followers run the gamut from harried office workers seeking stress relief through yoga and meditation to “neo-pagan” white witches rendezvousing on the moors to celebrate the summer solstice. Specialty shops and mail-order catalogs supply the ritual paraphernalia of New Age—amulets and talismans, healing crystals, angel icons, incense, candles, aromatherapy bath salts, massage rollers, table fountains, wind chimes, and recordings of trance music in Asian or Celtic moods.

  A principal distinction between Sixties and early-Seventies cults and their New Age successors is that the Sixties sought the release of primal energy through the shattering of social conventions. Paradise Now, the title of the Living Theater’s infamous 1968 performance piece, where nude actors infiltrated the audience, says it all. The Sixties wanted to embrace and reclaim the senses, to plunge fully
into matter, like the festival-goers wallowing in the mud at Woodstock. New Age, however, has smoothly adjusted to the stubborn persistence of the social structures that the Sixties failed to budge. An analogy might be the introspective period just before and after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., when the Roman Empire seemed insuperable. New Age is much more concerned with the afterlife—past lives, reincarnation, astral projection.

  New Age sees a spiritual universe permeating or transcending the visible, material one. This idea descends from nineteenth-century spiritualism, a late Romantic stream that has flowed like an undercurrent through Anglo-American culture beneath the official history of literary and artistic modernism. Harold Bloom has argued, in his 1992 book of the same name, that “the American religion” (typified today by what he tartly calls “California Orphism”) has always been a version of gnosticism, which defines matter as evil and urges the soul’s emancipation from earthly limitation. The gnostic cults of second-century Christianity and Jewish mysticism were influenced by Hellenistic mystery religions as well as Plato’s dualism of mind versus matter. In gnosticism, as in New Age, it is matter itself, rather than society, that chains the soul. The 1960s, in contrast, hammered by the concrete power of rock music, grandiosely valorized sex and redefined heaven as present sensual ecstasy. The Sixties at their most radical collapsed spirit into matter. Psychedelic voyagers claimed to corroborate the Zen insight, “I am that,” when feeling themselves flowing into and “becoming” the chair or wall—a perception commonly reported by schizophrenics. In Sixties Pop Art, even mundane or commercial objects like soup cans or sponges become luminously animate.