Djelloul Marbrook

I’ve always thought of snobs as narrow of foot and thin of lip, given to cutlery stares and cold shoulders, none of which describes this broad-footed fellow. But now in my old age and especially when walking around Woodstock, New York, that rainbow-hued, pinwheel-kinetic redoubt of the New Age, I repent of ugly snobbery, because I turned up my nose at the New Age, thinking it shallow, exhibitionist and revisionist.

I failed in my middle-aged pretention to appreciate the New Age for the popularizing movement it was and is. The case for it being shallow and showy has been made by my betters, but why revisionist? My feeling then, back in the 60s, was that you would have thought the New Agers had discovered metaphysics by themselves. And you would have thought that only in the East or among the Native Americans could they find spirituality.

What I failed to see, refused to see, is that mediocre poetry and county fair metaphysics would inevitably lead to rediscovery of William Butler Yeats, father of modern poetry and magus, Paracelsus, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, Simon Magus, the Cathars, Arab alchemy, Gnosticism, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the works of Frances A. Yates and Evelyn Underhill, and much more.

Because the New Age stirred interest in Celtic traditions, it should have been clear to me, for example, that if the New Agers weren’t reciting Yeats in their various energy centers they soon would be. And because they themselves were so threatening to the old order they would soon rediscover Bruno and the Cathars, persecuted for their supposed heresies. And as they were interested in holistic medicine, they would inevitably see that it has had a long line of martyrs.

Indeed the New Agers’ paths might eventually wind up at Albert Camus’ doorstep (inset) where they would share his distrust of ideologues, even if they might not share his equal distrust of faith.

—DM