“The fascination of many Americans with Unidentified Flying Objects led some of them into the world of psychic phenomena.” Nicholas Pileggi commented. “Certainly the complete metaphysical mixed bag of Eastern concept, so famous just a few years in the past, helped create a weather for an hobby within the occult. Witch For Hire Yoga sporting events, Zen mysteries, macrobiotic diets and non secular fasts, even Karate launched many a center-elegance mystic.”6 Rollo May, a veteran psychotherapist, has sought to give an explanation for the revival of superstition in terms of human experience in times of transition, like the gift, “whilst the commonplace psychic defenses are vulnerable or broken down absolutely.” May described these intervals as “a time of real fear among humans of witchcraft, sorcerers, and others who claimed to recognize how to consort with demons.”7
Ludwig B. Lefebre, a psychotherapist, wrote in the equal mag in November 1968 that church buildings fail to reply to people in search of “to get past themselves.” “Some churches,” he said, “are aware about the modern challenge however aren’t responding appropriately.” Persons interested in LSD and other thoughts-increasing drugs seek what churches do not offer.
The fundamental aim of those folks is non secular, though erroneous, “and their closing aim is direct touch of a revelatory nature with a suprahuman employer.” The Rev. David H. C. Read, pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, gives a similar evaluation. “The rebellion in opposition to the secular and materialistic society is in complete swing amongst the young,” he said, “and the traditional symptoms of longing for the transcendent—apocalyptic imagery, ecstasy, symbolism, communes of withdrawal—are all around us.”five
In a latest interview with theologian Harvey Cox, editor T George Harris of Psychology Today mag started out by means of commenting on “the overall resurgence of superstition and magic.” Explanations for the resurgence are many and sundry. Cox, an author and professor at Harvard Divinity School, gives a view that joyful celebration and mystical celebration have disappeared from religion and that people are looking some place else for the ones stories.Four