Houston assured readers that they were living in mythic times, and that they could communicate with those mythic beings remembered as Isis and Osiris. That vision of the future, based on ancient myths, can be clearly seen in the reconstruction of our culture. Some of the powerful people in this movement talk about a new humanism, a new cosmology, a great work that we have to produce. And many of those people find themselves in the United Nations.

We used to talk about the New Age. When I first began to think about how a worldview can shape culture, New Age was all the rage. Now noone even mentions New Age. So it must have failed, right? Actually, quite the opposite: it became normal. That phrase “spiritual but not religious” is just one indication that people have accepted the paganism which New Age tried to establish.

During the 1990s, First Lady Hillary Clinton took on an advisor by the name of Jean Houston. Jean Houston is a brilliant thinker, but she’s also a medium and very much a child of the New Age.1 Houston said in 1995, “At this time, we are living in state of both breakdown and breakthrough: a whole system transition requiring a new alignment that only myth can bring.” And the myth that she proposed was in the book that she published that very year, The Passion of Isis and Osiris.2 Houston assured readers that they were living in mythic times, and that they could communicate with those mythic beings remembered as Isis and Osiris. That vision of the future, based on ancient myths, can be clearly seen in the reconstruction of our culture. Some of the powerful people in this movement talk about a new humanism, a new cosmology, a great work that we have to produce. And many of those people find themselves in the United Nations.

There has been some serious work done on this subject, including two important books recognized by anthropologists as essential to understanding who we are. The first one is Colin Campbell’s The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era.3 Many sociologists endorse this book as a plausible case. Campbell himself says that, “Easternization is currently occurring in the West…quite unlike anything previously experienced.” He continues, “And what has been lost is faith in Christianity and the power of reason.” That’s very interesting; Christianity and secular humanism are both victims of this turn toward Eastern spirituality.

The second book was written by Phillip Goldberg, a western Jewish convert to Hinduism. His book is entitled American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation–How Indian Spirituality Changed the West.4He says “We are all Hindus now.” And also, “America is engaged in a reconfiguring of the sacred, based on Hinduism–a reconfiguration Goldberg says is “comparable in power to the Christian great awakenings of the 18th century.”

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