by James A. Herrick-
We are only at the threshold of a new spiritual epoch.¹ ~ Carl Jung
Marilyn Ferguson claimed in her bestselling book, The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), that scientific breakthroughs would soon “thrust us into a new, higher order” of spiritual awareness.² The prevailing Western “paradigm” founded on the Judeo-Christian worldview had, she claimed, run its course and a new spiritual outlook had arrived.³ Ferguson celebrated a growing “conspiracy” of spiritually informed people, a religious grass-roots movement that would usher in a New Age of peace, harmony and justice.
Ferguson’s book skillfully blended spiritualized science, Eastern religious thought, and esoteric lore for spiritually seeking Americans, and thus helped to launch the vast spiritual revolution that came to be known as the New Age Movement. Estimates vary widely as to how many people are actively involved in some aspect of the New Age – certainly tens of millions in America alone, perhaps hundreds of millions worldwide. But, even more consequential is the subtle, culture-wide shift in spiritual attitudes and assumptions that has resulted from the prolonged and highly successful advocacy of a New Spirituality that rivals Christian thinking on every important point.
The effect of this spiritual paradigm shift has been felt so powerfully across the board sweep of Western culture – not just in North America, but in Europe Australia, and Latin America- that new spiritual presuppositions have perhaps already eclipsed foundational Christian beliefs as the basic worldview of the West. The diverse manifestations of this emerging spiritual view “obscure its size and its impact on the larger society,” writes journalist Michael D’Antonio. That impact is felt, not just on the spiritual front, but “in public schools, hospitals, corporate offices, and the popular media.” 4 Indeed, leading sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow has written of a “transformation of American spirituality.” 5
But, don’t most Americans attend church or at least claim to be Christians? Aren’t we in a period of Christian resurgence? Statistics revealing a high level of church attendance can be misleading as a measure of actual spiritual commitment. Wuthnow maintains that “a majority of the public has retained some loyalty to their churches and synagogues, yet their practice of spirituality from Monday to Friday often bears little resemblance to the preachments of religious leaders.”6 Religion scholar Philip Jenkins has written that “the vast majority of people holding New Age beliefs do not identify themselves as representing a distinct denomination, but describe themselves as Unitarians or Jews, Methodists or Catholics.” 7
How did this revolution in religious thought come about? The West’s quick embrace of New Age thinking in the 1970s and 80s has been attributed to the win some presentation of its basic tenets by high profile celebrities such as Shirley MacLaine, the persuasive writing of talented advocates such as Ferguson, and the appearance of charismatic proponents on popular television programs such as the Oprah Winfrey Show. The impact of MacLaine’s accounts of her spiritual journeying in books such as Going Within and Dancing in the Light was nothing short of stunning. 8 It is estimated that fifty million viewers watched her television special based on the book, Out on a Limb. “MacLaine’s books,” writes journalist D’Antonio, “introduced millions to psychics and channelers, healers and spirit guides.” 9 And, we might add, reincarnation, for MacLaine claimed to have knowledge of her experiences during a number of previous lives. Winfrey, with a viewership in excess of 23 million during the early 90s, introduced a broad American audience to New Age stars such as the Harvard educated science writer Gary Zukav.
The umbrella term “New Age Movement” has now been with us for thirty years. The widespread spiritual phenomenon it described has at this point in time morphed into dozens of smaller organizations and movements invariably built around compelling personalities such as Neale Donald Walsch, JZ Knight, Jean Houston, James Redfield, Zukav and many others. Nevertheless, the defining characteristics of what I term the New Religious Synthesis have remained relatively constant from the time authors (including Ferguson, MacLaine and physicist Fritj of Capra) began describing a sea-change in Western spiritual attitudes in the late 1970s. Pantheism, reincarnation, spiritual evolution, monism, spirit contact, and the spiritualizing of science still mark the various movements that have spun out of the original New Age Movement.
Contrary to popular opinion, New Age thinking did not emerge out of the hippie movement of the 1960s, with its dedication to psychedelic drugs and transcendental meditation. The ideas that N ew Age writers draw upon have been present on the world scene for millennia in practices such as astrology, paganism, magic, witchcraft, and shamanism, as well as in religions such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Gnosticism, and Theosophy.
A sustained public campaign to propagate a New Spirituality to rival Christianity in the West began around 1700 with the religious radicalism of the English Deists, French philosophes, and the first modern biblical critics. Dramatic developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries such as the World Parliament of Churches in Chicago (1893), the reemergence of the occult in England and America, and the enormous popularity of New Thought movement revealed that the colonization of the Western mind by religious ideas directly contradicting Christianity had grown into a phenomenon of great cultural force.
Clearly, some historical background on the New Age Movement would be helpful to understanding its popularity, the origin of its central ideas, and how Christians can respond. In what follows I will highlight several of the important historical predecessors and proponents of New Age thinking, ideas and people that prepared the ground for a spiritual revolution in the twentieth century that continues to this day. I will also offer some suggestions about responding to the New Age.
GNOSTICISM
New Age thought draws heavily on an ancient spiritual system known as Gnosticism, a term that may conjure up images of second and third century Christian heretics practicing secret rites and challenging the stability of Christian theology. The Gnostic tradition has recently received tremendous international press cover age as a result of the public announcement of the Gospel of Judas.
Gnosticism has existed in Europe in an unbroken tradition dating back to the earliest Christian times.
Gnosticism venerates secret spiritual knowledge, elevates an elite group in possession of such knowledge, and views the physical realm-including the body-as evil and only the spiritual realm as good. Gnosticism is often traced back to Simon Magus whom Peter opposed in Acts chapter 8, and his student, Menander. Valentinus, a second century teacher condemned as a heretic, was also a major figure in the establishment of Gnosticism in Europe, as was Marcion of Fontus, who actually established a series of Gnostic churches in the Roman Empire.
Gnosticism seeks escape from the confines of history and physical embodiment through secret knowledge or gnosis. 10 Time, history, and the physical realm are the Gnostic’s enemies, combining to prevent the recognition of the individual’s divinity. Religions that give history legitimacy, that make the physical world significant, and that teach a single, external divinity Christianity being the singular example-must be opposed and ultimately destroyed since they con tribute to spiritual enslavement. Gnostic spirituality’s deep suspicion of history extends also to attendant notions such as God’s redemptive work in history. Sin-a historical category associated with the Fall and with individual human actions in time-is not humanity’s captor. Rather, spiritual ignorance is-in particular, ignorance of liberating secrets of gnosis.
New Age thought often embraces secret spiritual knowledge available to a few gifted individuals. Importantly, gnosis has never been understood as attainable by ordinary people. The Gnostic master’s hidden knowledge was too valuable to be made available to a public that might corrupt it. Gnosticism-including the New Age variety-always depends upon “esoteric wisdom accessible only to the privileged or initiated few.”11 Spiritual elitism is thus an essential aspect of the gnostic impulse that is reasserting itself today as a few masters and gurus reveal spiritual secrets at seminars and retreats. The contrast of Gnostic thought with the open proclamations of a teacher who stated, “I have said nothing in secret” (John 18:20) could not be greater.
THE HERMETIC TRADITION
Another important tributary to the stream of New Age thought was a movement known as Hermeticism, an intricate magical tradition based on fourteen books known collectively as the Corpus Hermeticum. The Hermetic teachings that made their way into Western Europe were based on the systems of various philosophers in Greece and Egypt between AD 150 and 300. Tireless promotion of this magical tradition by Renaissance scholars such as Marsilio Ficino (1433- 1499) and Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) ensured the prominence of Hermetic teachings throughout Europe.
Hermeticism was marked by a pantheistic and monistic outlook that finds god to be in everything, and all things to be one thing. 12 Hermetic teachers also embraced the idea that daemons or spirit beings grant ed knowledge and control of human affairs, a theme still alive in New Age thought. Through knowledge of Hermetic magic, the enlightened individual or magus “throws himself upward toward the spheres” of a high er spiritual realm. The magical practitioner “at length can become a Power and enter into God.” 13
Thus, the ultimate goal of Hermetic spirituality is individual divinity, with the transition to divine status occurring during one’s earthly life. The Christian dis tinction between creature and creator, emphasized by Paul in the first chapter of Romans as a key to cultural stability, is lost in such magical thinking.
Implied in Hermeticism is spiritual evolution from lower to higher states of existence. Human beings are the product of a long spiritual evolutionary process that moves from “creeping things” to fish, mammals, birds and then people. Humans can-through secret knowledge and extraordinary effort-continue this evolutionary process and become daemons, then gods, and finally planets or stars. Hermeticism shaped popular thinking about the supernatural in Renaissance Europe, and its remnants are evident in the New Age.
KABALA
Closely related to Hermeticism was interest in the Kabala , a collection of Jewish mystical writings built around the Hebrew alphabet and numerical system. Two Hebrew books, the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation) and the Zahar (Brightness) provide the foundation of the Kabala. According to some contemporary advocates of the Kabala , these mystical teachings were derived from ancient Jewish sages who had traveled to India. As support, they cite Genesis 25:6, which states that “Abraham sent his sons to the east.”
Kabalistic teaching sought the magical messages locked in the numerical codes of the Hebrew Bible. As such, Kabala revealed a Gnostic acceptance of secret and spiritual wisdom over historical facts. This preference for the secret or coded meaning of a text over the historical or literal is evident in recent works such as Michael Drosnin’s inter national best seller, The Bible Code. In kabalistic thought human beings may actually gain control over God, using divine power for . , human purposes. Once the province of hand-picked rabbis Kabala today enjoys broad celebrity endorsement and cultural acceptance.
ASTROLOGY
Astrology has also played a major role in the development of the alternative stream of Western spiritual thought that has recently reasserted itself in the New Age. Indeed, the foundational idea of a coming New Age is derived from astrological lore about the human race passing through various zodiacal eras every 2, 100 years, each marking a stage of spiritual development. Having left the Piscean Age of strife and conflict, we are entering the Age of Aquarius-an era “harmony and understanding,” to quote the famous song from the l 960’s rock musical, Hair.
New Age books often take scientific advances as providing important spiritual insights. But, this linking is not new to esoteric spirituality. For example, astrology and science were closely linked in European history; the attention of Renaissance scientists was often directed to the night skies in a desperate search for the clues that unlocked vast spiritual secrets. Astrological studies were also rooted in the Hermetic books discussed earlier, thus fusing science and magic.14 The universe’s structure, once understood through magic and mathematical calculations, could be manipulated to become a source of virtually divine power. Because such power was sought for personal ends, the scientist’s discoveries were carefully guarded secrets. Giordano Bruno is a representative example of the Renaissance scientist in search of the cosmos’ secret codes, his study of the stars intended to “preserve . .. him from any fear of death.” 15 When science becomes a source of otherwise hidden spiritual insight, scientists may assume the role of ascended masters.
RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
European scholars in the Renaissance also searched for a common human religion; they “sought to discover the same set of truths beneath the symbols of many systems: in the lore of Zoroaster, the mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus, in the alluring number speculations of the Jewish cabala.” 16 The search was on for the irreducible, primitive core of all religions, for “a system of pristine and universally harmonious theology.” 17 Thus it was assumed, for example, that “all of Eastern religion must have been reducible to a single pattern, which no doubt would have proved to be a gentile approximation of Christianity.”18
Skepticism regarding Christianity’s exclusive claim to truth was especially powerful at Italian universities, but gradually spread to northern Europe as well. Scholars studied the skeptical works of writers such as the Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, and the Greek physician and philosopher Sextus Empiricus. The recovery of ancient philosophical and religious traditions had a corrosive effect on the Christian consensus in the West, preparing the way for the reemergence of the ancient religious ideas we associate with the New Age.
Increasingly, Christianity found itself competing with other faiths, and salvation was no longer seen as solely attending acceptance of the Christian gospel. Seventeenth-century British writers such as John Toland and Charles Blount conducted extensive research into various religions in search of an irreducible core of universal human belief. Toland, himself a Druid, argued that all religions have many doctrines in common. By reconstructing the original human belief system it would be possible to discover a true and unifying religion for the human race. This impulse to discover a common core of human spiritual belief-at the same time that the exclusive claims of Christianity are challenged-still animates New Age thought.
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG AND MODERN SHAMANISM
Moving from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, it is apparent that religious radicalism was as much a part of the Western scene as was the rationalism we typically associate with the period. Among the most influential spiritual writers of the day was the eighteenth-century Swedish engineer and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Swedenborg’s ideas have exerted important influence on later advocates of New Age ideas such as the enormously popular American essayist and speaker, Ralph Waldo Emerson . Of particular import is Swedenborg’s insistence that many of his spiritual insights came directly from spirits themselves, a mainstay of New Age teachers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Swedenborg insisted that virtually everything he wrote on spiritual matters after 1744 was revealed to him directly by spirits, angels and, surprisingly, extraterrestrial aliens. “I have been enabled to talk with spirits and angels,” he wrote, “not only those in the vicinity of our earth, but also those near other worlds.” 19 Swedenborg claimed to enter an altered mental state in order to achieve the spirit contact he alleged was a daily experience for him for more than twelve years. In this way he can also be seen as an early proponent of what would later be called “channeling,” a revival of the ancient practice known as shamanism. The idea that spirit contact is the source of authentic spiritual knowledge is a cornerstone of New Age thinking, with channelers such as JZ Knight – featured in the recent movie, What the Bleep do We Know – claiming regular contact with entities in the spirit realm.
DARWIN AND SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION
The idea that has done most to shape the New Age Movement, however, came not from a Renaissance astronomer or an Enlightenment spiritualist, but from a nineteenth-century scientist. Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) dramatically changed religious as well as scientific thought. Most educated people in the Western world came to accept Darwin’s basic paradigm of gradual change in life-forms until new species result. The application of this powerful idea to the social and spiritual realms was instantaneous, and owes much to advocacy by other popular intellectual figures such as Herbert Spencer in England, Ernst Haeckel in Germany, and Henri Bergson in France. In popular usage, “evolution” came to mean gradual progress, improvement, and thus advancement to a “higher” level of development. This way of thinking about evolution-which Darwin claimed was not part of his theory, though this may have been yet another device to cover his real sentiments-was quickly adapted to the social and spiritual planes. Spiritual evolution remains perhaps the central component in all New Age systems of thought.
Darwin’s famous book, On the Origin of the Species, first appeared in November of 1859, went rapidly through six editions, and was soon selling as many volumes in England and America as were the novels of Dickens. The Origin created enormous controversy, and is one of the few works whose publication can be said to have changed all subsequent intellectual life. The strongly implied idea that life could emerge and develop without the aid of a personal deity was immediately understood to have, in the words of a contemporary, “pitchforked God out of the universe.”
Of equal importance, Darwinism became the basis of a new religious view to rival Christian teaching. “Spiritual progress” through evolution came to substitute for the Christian idea of redemption by grace. Cultural leaders envisioned evolution as the foundation of the next great Western religious movement, the faith that would displace Christianity. Every writer of New Age works with which I am familiar-James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy being a prime example-adopts some version of the evolutionary view of individual and corporate human spiritual advancement. Without evolutionary thinking there could be no New Age Movement.
BLAVATSKY, CROWLEY AND THE OCCULT TRADITION
New Age thought, with its interest in hidden physical and spiritual powers, has another deep root in the occult revival of the Victorian era.20 The late nineteenth-century Anglo American occult movement was vast and complex; through books and especially cheap periodicals, the mysteries of the occult, witchcraft, magic and Satanism became matters of public curiosity and devotion. Wide popular acceptance helped to prepare the way for later developments in which the occult tradition presented itself to the public as simply a New Spirituality.
In the 1830s and 40s, bestselling novels by George Edward Bulwer-Lytton popularized occult practices and familiarized European and American readers with ideas such as spirit con tact, demonic powers, and ascended masters controlling people and events. Reading his bestseller Zanoni, just one of his more than seventy novels, amounted to taking an introductory course in magic.
Bulwer-Lytton’s novels helped to pre pare the way for the greatest proponent of the occult tradition in modern history, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky (1831-1891). Blavatsky made spiritual progression a · central component in Theosophy, a forerunner of the New Age Movement. Her 1877 publication, Isis Unveiled, promised spiritual insight through reviving the lost knowledge of ancient sages. Adherents included Lord Tennyson, W B. Yeats, the young Mahatma Ghandi, Rudolph Steiner, and Thomas Edison.
The most influential occultist of the early twentieth century was Aleister Crowley, who freely referred to himself as The Beast.21 Crowley popularized ritual magic for Westerners and contributed greatly to the revival of witchcraft. Seeing himself as “the prophet of a New Aeon that would supplant the Christian Era,” and the developer of a new religion in which humans would “become the gods,” Crowley “anticipated the spread of Eastern spirituality in the West.” 22
NEW THOUGHT
New Age thinking celebrates the individual’s capacity to shape reality through focused thought, an idea rooted in the ancient Hindu concept of maya-reality as self-generated illusion. This Eastern concept was popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America through the New Thought movement. The specific principles of American New Thought-that the internal mental world controls the external physical one, that positive thinking brings physical healing, that the individual controls his or her destiny through correct thinking-originated with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, were passed to his patient, Mary Baker Eddy, and from Eddy to Ralph Waldo Trine, the great popularizer of New Thought philosophy in the late nineteenth century. New Thought stressed “the adequacy of the human mind as a source of power and meaning rather than the necessity for the radical salvation of mankind through an agency outside of the self.”23
Trine’s 1897 book, In Tune with the Infinite: Fullness of Peace, Power and Plenty sold an astonishing one and a half million copies at a time. Trine taught a technique of visualization that turned ideas into material reality-the only “facts” are the ones we create with our minds. Through the exercise of mental power, the practitioner “set into operation subtle, silent, and irresistible forces that . . . actualize in material form what is today merely an idea.”24
CARL JUNG
Two European thinkers of the mid-twentieth century -one Swiss, the other French-were vitally important to the development and propagation of ideas now associated with the New Age. Few writers or thinkers have had a greater shaping influence on contemporary thought about spirituality than the Swiss born psycho analyst Carl Jung (1875-1961). Religion scholar Joseph Campbell refers to Jung as “a scholar in the grand style, whose researches, particularly in comparative mythology, alchemy and the psychology of religion, have inspired and augmented the findings of an astonishing number of the leading scholars of our time.”25
Jung was a highly successful proponent of a set of religious ideas, some of which are at the center of the New Age thinking. He retrieved for modern, educated Westerners many ancient Eastern, Gnostic, and occult ideas such as the divinity of the individual, the existence of spiritual gnosis, and the presence of a spiritual elite that would usher in a new spiritual age. He affirmed that divinities are generated from deep within the human psyche, and that individual minds are connected by a vast psychic force he termed “the collective unconscious.” Moreover, Jung found the individual to be “the maker of history,” and divinity to reside within the individual. 26 Jung disseminated these ideas in his many books and essays on psychoanalysis, religious psychology, and mythology.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
The French paleontologist and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) did more than any other single figure to gather the emerging counter-Christian spiritual threads of the preceding two centuries into a synthesis we now know as the New Age Movement. In his many popular books on spiritual themes, Teilhard advanced a clear and highly influential case for a “common philosophy on which all men of good will can agree in order that the world may continue to progress.” Teilhard is just one of many modern prophets of a new and increasingly accepted way in religion that posits “a core of universal truth” that will “slowly grow to be accepted by everyone.” He asks, “Can there be any true spiritual evolution without it?”27
At the center of Teilhard’s thought is evolution, and he argued repeatedly that the entire universe is evolving toward an end point of ultimate spiritual unity he termed the “Omega Point.” Matter has at this point in time organized itself into consciousness, and consciousness, driven forward by the force of evolution, will eventually overtake every other fact and force. The inevitable triumph of consciousness in the cosmos, the Omega Point, is reached when God and the cosmos will become one entity-pure consciousness. Monism, or the notion of the ultimate unity of all things, remains a central thesis of New Age thinking.
CONCLUSION
I hope this brief review of its antecedents reveals that New Age thinking is hardly new, and is instead a modern synthesis of ideas that have been alive in Western thought for centuries. Though powerful forces seen and unseen-have been at work to reintroduce to the West spiritual falsehoods once displaced by the Gospel, the Church also shares some of the blame for this new prolifera tion of old errors. Often we have been introspective and insular. As a result we have failed to address our culture’s spiritual longings in response to lifeless commercialism, environmental degradation, the empty universe of scientific natural ism, and horrible injustices suffered by marginalized people.
First, we as Christians need to become a culturally engaged people actively seeking to understand and respond to the powerful ideas shaping us, our families, our churches, our co workers, and our institutions. This means intentionally looking outward to a culture that we often have dismissed as fallen and thus unworthy of sustained attention. What are the people around us reading? What are they watching? What are the spiritual messages in our mass media, and why are these messages finding an audience? These questions demand our attention.
Second, we need as well to have a firm grasp of our own message so that we know what the Christian gospel has to say in response to the New Age and all of the “other gospels” at large today. Evangelism and apologetics in response to the proliferation of new religions today constitutes a call to all Christians to become again serious students of our own theology. Pastors and elders need to lead their congregations back to the ology, and introduce them to the basic principles of apologetics.
I would add, third, that Christians must cultivate the lost art of listening. What questions are our children, friends, neighbors, and co-workers asking? What con cerns are they not finding addressed by the Church? Those caught up in the New Age, whether as whole hearted devotees or as curious seekers, need to encounter informed Christians willing to listen with serious interest to the concerns that led them into this spiritual dead end. In listening we find guidance both for prayer, and for relevant response.
Finally, we must be prepared to tell our story in more engaging and effective ways. In the era of The Da Vince Code, The Celestine Prophecy, and Harry Potter, no one can doubt the power of narrative to shape spiritual out look. Christians of the twenty-first century will be required to address the challenges of the New Spirituality with a culturally attentive telling of the Christian story of creation and redemption by a holy and personal God historically revealed in Jesus Christ.
The Christian Gospel-the Church’s magnificent story-remains, as it always has been, rationally convincing, spiritually redemptive, and inescapably true. It is in every way a better story than the old one that is being told again about a powerless god embedded in evil matter, a migratory soul trapped in a meaningless body, and empty secrets for sale by self-styled ascended masters. The New Age is a spiritual house of cards built of fictional past lives, esoteric codes that reveal nothing, spiritually evolving embryonic divinities, and groundless promises of elusive personal powers. When the care and creativity with which we present the Gospel of Jesus Christ reflect the truth and majesty of Jesus Christ himself, the culture in which God has placed us as His ambassadors cannot fail to be trans formed.
James A. Herrick is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College. He is the author of the recent book, The Making of the New Spirituality (InterVarsity).
NOTES
1 Carl Jung, “The Difference between Eastern and Western Thinking,” in The Portable Jung (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 476.
2 Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980 s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1980), 25.
3 Ferguson, 28.
4 Michael D’Antonio, Heaven on Earth: Dispatches from America s Spiritual Frontier (New York: Crown, 1992), 17.
5 Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 14.
6 Wuthnow, 13.
7 Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10.
8 Shirley MacLaine, Going Within: A Guidefor Inner Transformation
(New York: Bantam Books, 1989).
9 D’Antonio, 13.
10 See: Carl Raschke, The Interruption of Eternity (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1980).
11 Raschke, 24.
12 Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 215.
13 Shumaker, 220.
14 Hugh J. Kearney, Science and Change: 1500-1700 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).
15 Robert Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy
(Cambridge,MA: Havard University Press, 1982), 200.
16 Roland Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Books, 1952), 128.
17 Shumaker, 204.
18 Shumaker, 205.
19 Emanuel Swedenborg, The Worlds in Space (1758), 1.
20 Bradford Verter, Dark Star Rising: The Emergence of Modern Occultism (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1998), 33.
21 Lawrence Sutin has recently published an extensive biography of Crowley: Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St. Martins Griffin Press, 2000).
22 Sutin, 2-4.
23 Stephen Gottschalk, “Christian Science and Haimonialism,” in
Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), 903.
24 Quoted in Dennis Voskuil, Mountains into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 122.
25Joseph Campbell, editor’s introduction to The Portable Jung, trans.
- F. C. Hull (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), vii.
26 John P. Dourley, The Illness We Are: A Jungian Critique of Christianity (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1984), 72.
27 Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man trans. Norman Denny (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 190-191.