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The Aura of Wellness: Subtle-Energy Healing and New Age Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Catherine L. Albanese
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Extract

Producing a book as a tenured professor retired from the Department of Physiological Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, is probably not an activity to invite unusual notice. But if the book is titled Infinite Mind: Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness and if one of its chapters announces as its topic “The Human Aura: Living Vibrations Brought to Light,” perhaps there is reason to take a second look. “Too often we scientists get lost in our data,” observes Valerie V. Hunt, “forgetting that the essence of science is careful observation, deep thought, and wise deductions from both reasoning AND the exercise of mystical and dreamlike states.” With a declared background in neurophysiology and psychology as well as teaching experience at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, and UCLA, Hunt invites readers both lay and scientific: “Come with me on a journey of discovery into the research of the vibrant human aura that you can follow and understand. For scientists, my reasoning, although broad and penetrating—and sometimes mystical—is based upon scientific facts and clinical observations.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Winter 2000 , pp. 29 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2000

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References

Notes

1. Hunt, Valerie V., Infinite Mind: Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness, 2d ed. (Malibu, Calif.: Malibu Publishing, 1996), 9.Google Scholar

2. For a more extended discussion, see Albanese, Catherine L., Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 150-52Google Scholar.

3. Conventional accounts of present-day religion have, for some time, pointed to religion functioning as therapy for hosts of believers and therapy functioning as religion. See, for example, the classic jeremiad regarding the post-Freudian culture of the West, Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and, more recently—from a sociological and specifically American perspective—the work of Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Bellah, Robert N. and others, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar. This essay does not share the negative judgments regarding the religion-therapy continuum reflected in these sources.

4. See, for example, the Whole Life Times, published in various cities throughout the United States.

5. For a useful introduction to the theme, see Collinge, William, Subtle Energy: Awakening to the Unseen Forces in Our Lives (New York: Warner Books, 1998)Google Scholar.

6. Andrews, Ted, How to See and Read the Aura (St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1995), 2, 4–12, 25, 116-19Google Scholar.

7. See the account in Bruyere, Rosalyn L., Wheels of Light: Chakras, Auras, and the Healing Energy ofthe Body, ed. Farrens, Jeanne (New York: Simon and Schuster, Fireside Book, 1994), 20–22 Google Scholar; and the edited version of the Hunt report (“Project Report: A Study of Structural Integration from Neuromuscular, Energy Field, and Emotional Responses), ibid., 219-33. Hunt's doctorate is in education.

8. Tiller, William A., Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality, and Consciousness (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 1993)Google Scholar.

9. Wanda Romer Taylor, “Energy Field around the Human Body,” Compass, May/June 1996, 15. Christian R. Belardinelli, a minister of the Healing Light Center Church of Sierra Madre, California, vouched Brennan's study under Rosalyn Bruyere in a conversation on March 28, 1998.

10. Diane Goldner, “High-Energy Healer,” New Age Journal, January/February 1996, 52.

11. Material obtained from the Barbara Brennan Website, www.barbarabrennan.com. According to the Website, the school includes a faculty of at least ninety-six teachers and teacher trainees. It meets five times annually for close to a week at a hotel in Great Gorge, New Jersey.

12. Brennan, Barbara Ann, Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing through the Human Energy Field (1987; repr., New York: Bantam Books, 1988)Google Scholar; and Brennan, Barbara Ann, Light Emerging: The Journey of Personal Healing (New York: Bantam Books, 1993)Google Scholar.

13. Goldner, “High-Energy Healer,” 50; Heidi Heyman, “At Play in the Auric Field: From Science to the Sacred. An Interview with Barbara Brennan, Whole Life Times 178 (February 1997): 30.

14. Brennan, Light Emerging, 64.

15. Goldner, “High-Energy Healer,” 53; Brennan, Hands of Light, 5-7.

16. Brennan, Light Emerging, 268. Brennan's Light Emerging (1993) Claims publication in nine languages, but, by 1997, Heidi Heyman was recounting fifteen. Heyman, “At Play in the Auric Field,” 30.

17. Brennan, Hands of Light, 19, 7, 29, 32.

18. Ibid., 42, 49-54, 63, 68.

19. Ibid., 86, 89.

20. Ibid., 101-7, 109-27, esp. 109-10.

21. Ibid., 131-32.

22. Ibid., 142-43.

23. Ibid., 151 (emphasis in original), 14, 219.

24. Brennan, Light Emerging, 305, 317 (emphasis in original), 318.

25. My discussion of Reiki in what follows is based on the longer treatment in Albanese, Nature Religion in America, 186-89.

26. Arnold, Larry E. and Nevius, Sandra K., The Reiki Handbook: A Manual for Students and Therapists of the Usui Shiko Ryoho System of Healing (Harrisburg, Pa.: PSI Press, 1982), 21.Google Scholar

27. Ray, Barbara Weber, The Reiki Factor: A Guide to Natural Healing, Helping, and Wholeness (Smithtown, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1983), 39 Google Scholar. Ray's first Statement is based on that of the French physicist Jean Charon.

28. Kushi, Michio with Oredson, Olivia, Macrobiotic Palm Healing: Energy at Your Finger-Tips (New York: Japan Publications, 1988)Google Scholar.

29. At the present writing, Chiyan Wang practices this form of healing in the Santa Barbara area. The daughter of two Chinese Qi healers who practice at a Chinese Qi Gong hospital, she has studied extensively in China with a recognized Qi Gong master. She enjoys a significant local following. Qi healers also practice in the Los Angeles area.

30. Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way, trans. Mair, Victor H. (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 59 Google Scholar. The Kushi Institute teaches a three-level program, with each level consisting of a one-month-long curriculum, at Becket, Massachusetts, and, at times, at extensions in various places in the United States.

31. Krieger, Dolores, The Therapeutic Touch: How to Use Your Hands to Help or to Heal (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979)Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., 12-13.

33. Ibid., 24-26, 45; see also the photographs on 48 and 115 especially.

34. See ibid., 46-47. The work she cites is Charles W. Leadbeater, The Chakras (1927; repr., Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing, 1940).

35. Hovenkamp, Herbert, Science and Religion in America, 1800-1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 23–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (the Edward Everett material is quoted from Hovenkamp [emphasis in Hovenkamp]). See also Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

36. I borrow the term “village Enlightenment” from historian David Jaffee. For his analysis, germane to my own here, see David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760-1820,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 47, no. 3 (July 1990): esp. 327-28.

37. Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

38. See the discussion in Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritnalism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), esp. 12–15, 64-69Google Scholar.

39. Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (1881; repr., 2 vols., Mokelumne Hill, Calif.: Health Research, 1984) 1:1, 5, xxiii (emphasis in original). I quote from what was called the thirty-fourth edition of the work.

40. Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia; Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe, 13th ed., vol. 1 (18[50]); repr., Mokelumne Hill, Calif.: Health Research, 1973), 163-65.

41. Ibid., 166-67 (emphasis in original).

42. Davis, Andrew Jackson, The Great Harmonia: Being a Progressive Revelation of the Eternal Principles Which Inspire Mind and Govern Matter, 6th ed., vol. 5 (1865; repr., Mokelumne Hill, Calif.: Health Research, 1973), 384 Google Scholar.

43. Davis, Andrew Jackson, The Great Harmonia; Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe, vol. 2 (1862; repr., Mokelumne Hill, Calif.: Health Research, 1973), 266.Google Scholar

44. For the Theosophical Society as a spiritualist reform movement, see Stephen Prothero, “From Spiritualism to Theosophy: ‘Uplifting’ a Democratic Tradition,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 197-216; and Prothero, Stephen, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Oleott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 44–51 Google Scholar.

45. Blavatsky had apparently taught members of the Esoteric Section of the society—the inner core of the organization—that they could anticipate the advent of the Lord Maitreya as “world teacher” and that the society's major responsibility was to prepare for him. See Melton, J. Gordon, “Annie Besant,” in New Age Encyclopedia, ed. Melton, J. Gordon and others (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990), 53.Google Scholar

46. Blavatsky, H. P., Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, 2 vols. (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877)Google Scholar; and Blavatsky, H. P., The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Theosophical Publishing and others, 1888)Google Scholar (emphasis in subtitle mine). For a fuller discussion of Blavatsky on Atlantis and Lemuria, see Albanese, Catherine L., “Dissident History: American Religious Culture and the Emergence of the Metaphysical Tradition,” in Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Studies in Traditions and Cultures, ed. Conser, Walter H. Jr., and Twiss, Sumner B. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 170-80Google Scholar.

47. Blavatsky, , The Secret Doctrine, 1: 153, 157-58, 243Google Scholar. For the best summary by Blavatsky herseif, see Blavatsky, H. P., The Key to Theosophy: An Abridgement, ed. Mills, Joy (Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Publishing, 1972), 56, 70–71 Google Scholar (the original complete edition was published in 1889).

48. Campbell, Bruce F., Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 66.Google Scholar

49. Brennan, Hands of Light Emerging, 49-54. Brennan herseif refers to “many Systems that people have created from their observations to define the auric field” (Brennan, Hands of Light, 42). She credits “two Systems most similar to mine” (ibid.)—those elaborated in Jack Schwarz, The Human Energy Systems (New York: Dutton, 1980), and in Bruyere, Wheels of Light. Brennan cites the original edition: Bruyere, Rosalyn, Wheels of Light: A Study of the Chakras (Glendale, Calif.: Healing Light Center, 1987)Google Scholar. The Schwarz System posits more than seven auric layers, while the Bruyere version is a seven-layer System.

50. Brennan, Light Emerging, 54.

51. See Blavatsky's representation of the aura of Stainton Moses as reproduced in Henry Steel Oleott, Old Diary Leaves: The History of the Theosophical Society, 6 vols. (1895-1935; repr., Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing, 1974-75), 1:364. The six volumes cover the years from 1875 to 1898.

52. Ibid., 3:29,148.

53. See the account of Olcott's tour in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1882, which Stephen Prothero describes as “a roadshow featuring the miraculous healing hands of the instantly charismatic ‘White Buddhist’” (Prothero, White Buddhist, 107).

54. Leadbeater, C. W., The Chakras (1927; repr., Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing, 1980), 1, 4.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., x.

56. Ibid., 121.

57. Cayce, Edgar, Auras, ed. Sugrue, Thomas (1945; repr., Virginia Beach: A.R.E. Press, 1996).Google Scholar

58. J. Gordon Melton, “Edgar Cayce,” in New Age Encyclopedia, ed. Melton and others, 89. No critical biography of Cayce exists; for probably the most well-known apologetic account, see Sugrue, Thomas, There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce, rev. ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1945)Google Scholar.

59. On immigrant fears, especially for their children, in the South Asian context, see Williams, Raymond Brady, Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American Tapestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 287-88Google Scholar.

60. For a more extended argument against the concept of syncretism and for its replacement by more broad-based notions of religious combinativeness, see Albanese, Catherine L., “Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls: Contact, Combination, and American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Tweed, Thomas A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 200-26, 279-85Google Scholar.

61. See, for example, the November 11, 1998, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Sixty additional articles on alternative healing have appeared in various Journal issues. See Spectrum: The Wholistic Nezvs Magazine 64 (January-February 1999): 18.

62. For Mesmer's original teaching, see Mesmer, Franz Anton, “Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism” (1779), in George Bloch, trans. and comp., Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, 1980), 41–78 Google Scholar; see also Zweig, Stefan, Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud (1932; repr., New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1962), esp. 15–33 Google Scholar, in which Zweig points to problems in conceptual coherence regarding Mesmer's doctrine of planetary influences and his assumptions about the practical powers of an “animal” magnetist. For the relationship between mesmerism and psychology, see Füller, Robert C., “Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology,” in Pseudo-Science and Society in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Wrobel, Arthur (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 205-22Google Scholar; and Füller, Robert C., Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 48–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Murray, David J., A History of Western Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983), esp. 294 Google Scholar; Fancher, Raymond E., Pioneers of Psychology (New York: Norton, 1979), esp. 182-86Google Scholar; and Bromberg, Walter, The Mind of Man: A History of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), esp. 181 Google Scholar.

63. Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart, 235.

64. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the invitational Conference “Something New, Something Old” held by the Program in American Religious History at Harvard University with the support of the Lilly Endowment, September 5-8, 1996. I am grateful for the comments by Conference participants.