Exploring The Odd World Of New Age Literature
If we wanted to personify sections of bookstores through the guises of famous authors, Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot would be worthy representatives of the literature section.
Over in history, you might find Arnold Toynbee or Civil War guru Shelby Foote holding court.
In the psychology aisles, who else but Sigmund Freud, and in the mystery novel area, Dame Agatha Christie, of course.
But what about the New Age section - which has hit mainstream bookstores in a big way?
A fairly recent addition (along with cappuccino bars), the burgeoning New Age shelves are the result of whopping sales increases. The American Booksellers Association, a Tarrytown, N.Y.-based trade group, says that nationwide sales of New Age books rose 73 percent in just three years, from 5.6 million in 1992 to 9.7 million in 1995.
But to many people, New Age literature remains a kind of mystery, without any handy icon - except, possibly, Shirley MacLaine.
Perhaps the Sirens of mythology would be a more apt emblem, ghostly specters hovering above the bookshelves, sweetly luring anyone who will listen to their song.
We decided to go for it - to rush in where angels fear to tread, and to report what we found.
Visits to the New Age sections of three national bookstore chains - Borders Books, Music and Cafe, Barnes & Noble and Liberties - turned up some surprises. While there are some works that may read like a National Enquirer or Weekly World News for intellectuals, there are others that can make one shudder a little and think, “Hey, these people are onto something.”
What we found is a conceptual smorgasbord that defies categorization, with books on topics ranging from witchcraft and palm reading to life-after-death experiences and alternative medicine. Not to mention the massive tomes that attempt to lay bare the structure of the universe.
On these shelves, what’s sublime and what’s ridiculous are very much in the eye of the beholder.
Here’s a sampling:
For Christians who have never really known what Jesus was doing between the age of 12, when the Gospels leave off accounts of his childhood in Nazareth, and the beginning of his ministry at the age of 30, Elizabeth Clare Prophet provides an answer in “The Lost Years of Jesus.”
Citing the discovery of some lost manuscripts in the East, Prophet says Jesus headed for India in his teens, “where he prayed, meditated, practiced yoga and taught,” and where he went by the name “Issa.”
In “Haunted Places: The National Directory,” Dennis William Hauck provides state-by-state listings of “Ghostly abodes, sacred sites, UFO landings and other supernatural locations.”
In the “Encyclopedia of Healing” by Reba Ann Karp, she gathers together treatments for a wide variety of ailments. The treatments were recommended by Edgar Cayce, one of the leaders of the New Age movement.
Cayce, born in Kentucky in 1877, became aware of extraordinary psychic abilities after being hit in the spine with a baseball at the age of 15. In self-induced hypnotic states, he would render “readings” through which he communicated detailed, intricate knowledge of matters in which he had no training or education.
Among scores of Cayce remedies: the application of castor oil to moles and warts. This reporter, on a lark, tried it on a mole, which within days shrank dramatically.
Cayce was among those who viewed any illness as a matter not just of the body, but of the mind and spirit as well.
A topic of numerous books and sections of books concerns what happens to people after they die. In “Death Does Not Part Us,” Elsie R. Sechrist tells a story - reportedly documented in the Houston Chronicle - of a dream experienced by the mother of a 14-year-old murder victim named Carolyn.
In the dream, the young girl appeared to her mother as though in a vision, recounting enough details from the crime scene to lend the dream an eerie authenticity.
On the same shelves is The New York Times best seller “Embraced by the Light” by Betty J. Eadie, the story of a 31-year-old mother of six who entered the hospital for a partial hysterectomy and who wound up “dying” - at least temporarily - before being revived.
In “The Archangel Michael,” a collection of lectures and writings by Rudolf Steiner, the year 1879 - just three years after Custer’s Last Stand - is depicted as a pivotal moment in the evolution of mankind.
Another New Age thinker, Gurdjieff, sought to correct civilization’s tendency to conceive of the structure of life as an endless series of polarities - yes and no, heaven and earth, form and function, yin and yang.
Gurdjieff, instead, spoke of the “Law of Three,” which held that “every phenomenon is the result of the combination or the meeting of three different and opposing forces. … The first force may be called active or positive; the second, passive or negative; the third neutralizing.”
But then you recall Hamlet’s words: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”