The Underground Press and the Transformation of Metaphysical Religion, 1964-1973
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Metaphysical Underground: The Underground Press and the Transformation of Metaphysical Religion, 1964-1973 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies by Jeremy Guida December 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Amanda J. Lucia, Co-Chairperson Dr. Michael Alexander, Co-Chairperson Dr. Matthew King Copyright by Jeremy Guida 2016 The Dissertation of Jeremy Guida is approved: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson ____________________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation is the result of no small number of people who have, in various ways, contributed to its content and production. There are many to thank. Michael Alexander and Amanda Lucia have been excellent advisors. Michael’s support, advice and encouragement have been sources of motivation and confidence without which I would not have completed the dissertation. Amanda’s careful and expert attention to my work in general, and especially this dissertation, has made the work infinitely better than it otherwise would have been. Their faith in me and this project, even in the face of many difficulties, has seen this dissertation through to completion. Other faculty at the University of California Riverside have provided professional guidance and support, especially Matthew King, Pashaura Singh, Jennifer Hughes and Ivan Strenski. Faculty at the University of Redlands have also supported me long after I was a student, especially John Walsh, Fran Grace, Julius Bailey, Karen Derris and Bill Huntley. Thanks are also due to my family and friends who have tolerated the difficulty of a loved one enticed by the life of an academic. Those closest to me have suffered the most and are due the most thanks. I hope they see in this document some fruits for their labor. Special thanks are due to my partner, Jayne Bittner, for patience, dedication and confidence. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Metaphysical Underground: The Underground Press and the Transformation of Metaphysical Religion, 1964-1973 by Jeremy Guida Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Religious Studies University of California, Riverside, December 2016 Dr. Michael Alexander, Co-Chairperson Dr. Amanda J. Lucia, Co-Chairperson The following dissertation examines the effects that underground papers published between 1964 and 1973 had on metaphysical religion in the United States. Research was conducted by consulting the Underground Press Collection, a microfilm collection of underground and alternative periodicals from 1963-1985. The dissertation shows how metaphysical ads, articles, columns, and letters in underground newspapers transformed metaphysical religion and nurtured the development of New Age religion. The dissertation demonstrates three effects that underground papers had on metaphysical religions. It shows that metaphysicals used underground papers to express their political views; it shows how underground papers contributed to the democratization of metaphysical ideas, symbols and practices; and it shows how underground papers contributed to the perception that v metaphysical religions were hip. These effects facilitated the development of New Age religion in the early 1970s, and collectively make up one of the institutions by which the American counterculture transformed metaphysical religion in the United States. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Veneer of Tri-Faith America 29 Chapter 2: The Metaphysical Underground 55 Chapter 3: “The Politics of Consciousness Expansion” part 1 102 Chapter 4: “The Politics of Consciousness Expansion” part 2 149 Chapter 5: The Democratization of American Occultism 179 Chapter 6: The Hipping of Native American and Asian Traditions 235 Conclusion: Stripping the Veneer of Tri-Faith America 300 Bibliography 323 vii INTRODUCTION Interpreter and historian of the 1960s counterculture Theodore Roszak writes, But now, if one scans any of the underground weeklies, one is apt to find their pages swarming with Christ and the prophets, Zen, Sufism, Hinduism, primitive shamanism, theosophy, [and] the Left-Handed Tantra...Satanists and Neo-Gnostics, dervishes and self-proclaimed swami[s], their number grows and the counter culture makes generous place for them…An underground weekly like The Berkeley Barb gives official Washington a good left-wing slamming on page one, but devotes the center spread to a crazy mandala for the local yogis…At the level of our youth, we begin to resemble nothing so much as the cultic hothouse of the Hellenistic period, where every manner of mystery and fakery, ritual and rite, [are] intermingled with marvelous indiscrimination.1 Roszak points to the “marvelous indiscrimination” of the counterculture’s religious hybridity and to its prevalence in underground weeklies. By the time Roszak was writing, virtually every major city in the United States, many smaller cities, and college campuses contained at least one underground paper. Underground periodicals were the veritable voice of the counterculture. In them, one could find articles condemning the war in Vietnam, challenging the status quo of American race relations, exposing unhealthy chemicals in food, explicitly and visually accosting sexual norms, and supporting to varying degrees: anarchism, socialism, peaceful protests, violent protests, and utopian visions of returning to the land. The earliest periodicals of this type began in the mid-1960s and soon became a critical part of the American counterculture. In 1966, publishers of these papers fashioned a nation-wide network that five years later boasted 271 underground papers. 1 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 140-141. 1 Among the political, social and cultural opposition expressed in them, these underground papers also voiced religious dissent. That religious dissent drew from religious perspectives understood to be alternatives to what many viewed as the Christian norm. These papers included columns, articles, letters to the editor, interviews and advertisements promoting a wide swath of religious practices and ideas from America’s past: interest in mystical religious experiences, various forms of occultism, and adaptations of Asian religious traditions. What Roszak called “every manner of mystery and fakery” amounts to a collection of metaphysical religions. Eventually, the underground press came to function as a metaphysical institution, capable of exposing metaphysical practices to new people, generating metaphysical religious authority, and engaging political, social and cultural issues. As a metaphysical institution, underground papers had lasting effects on the ways metaphysical religions have been practiced and reproduced in the United States. For many metaphysical groups, underground papers facilitated political expression, democratized their ideas, and made their practices hip in ways that they had not been previously in the United States. These transformations reshaped American religion from what it had been in the first half of the twentieth century, laying the groundwork for the development of New Age religion and eventually the development of many late-twentieth and twenty-first century attitudes toward spirituality. As faith and participation in religious institutions continues to decline, religiosity in the United States looks increasingly metaphysical. Measures of religiosity like service attendance and membership in religious organizations fail to capture the complexity and 2 hybridity of religious life in the United States. Studying the ways that metaphysicals used the underground press demonstrates one of the ways that religious ideas and practices have proliferated outside of religious institutions and the effects this kind of institutional entanglement has had on religious practice. Metaphysical Religion Historian Catherine L. Albanese uses the term “metaphysical” to label a wide range of ideas and practices that have been persistent, if not always prevalent, features of religion in the United States.2 Although few Americans would self-identify as a metaphysical, Albanese demonstrates how diverse practices and ideas influenced one another and combined to form a unique kind of religious practice complete with a historical lineage and identifiable characteristics. Albanese adopts the term “metaphysical religion” from Charles S. Braden who, in the 1960s, used the word to describe a number of New Thought groups, although he intimated that the word “metaphysical” applied not only to New Thought groups, but to Asian religions, Mormonism, Christian Science, and Theosophy.3 A few years later, J. Stillson Judah expanded the use of the word “metaphysical” to include popular movements like Transcendentalism and Spiritualism.4 Writing much later, Albanese suggests that New Age religions and the broader category of “New Spirituality” ought to also be considered metaphysical.5 For Braden, Judah, and eventually Albanese, 2 Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 9. 3 Ibid., 10. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 3 the word “metaphysical” captures the ways in which these groups place